Corinne Pleas of Queercovery, a group that is dedicated to creating a safe space for LGBTQ+ people in recovery. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer

“Being sober is not something I could do alone,” said Corinne Pleas, 39, who has been working through recovery since she recognized she was an alcoholic at 22.

Over the years, she attended hundreds of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, but she said that she felt the need to start many of her shares with the preface, “As a trans person …”

When she went to her first Queercovery meeting a year and a half ago, she was skeptical, as she often is when she tries a new group.

But she quickly realized that “having people to surround yourself with who are going to understand you right from the get-go is incredibly refreshing.”

Every week, she goes to the Equality Community Center in Portland on Wednesdays at least 30 minutes before the 6 p.m. meeting and stays at least an hour after it ends “just catching up with friends.”

“Being queer or being trans is not just a little part of my recovery,” she said. “It is very central to my life experience.”

Queercovery, a group that meets in person on Wednesdays and virtually on Thursdays, offers support and a safe space to LGBTQ+ individuals struggling with substance use.

“You walk in the door, and you know that your queerness just as much as your recovery is going to be part of your experience,” said James Dillon III, the founder of the group.

THE GROUP

Dillon, who uses they/them pronouns, started the group in May 2022 in the early stages of their recovery. They lived in Providence Place Sober Living in Portland for about 10 months and described it as a “clean, safe and calm environment.”

But they also said they “knew I couldn’t be my full queer nonbinary self there” in an all-male and mostly heterosexual and cisgender facility.

James Dillon founded Queercovery in May 2022 during the early stages of their recovery. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer

Dillon, 36, who is 6 feet 2 inches tall and a “sturdily built assigned male at birth,” found themselves wondering what others were feeling as they tried to get help – which was the impetus for Queercovery.

“Our recovery doesn’t exist in a vacuum,” Dillon said.

The meeting uses the All Recovery Meeting method, an alternative to the 12-step program. Some participants are still in the thick of it and trying to get sober. Pleas called the meeting a safe space to talk about recurrence.

The group also makes room for members to discuss what’s affecting them beyond drugs and alcohol – including gender, sex, sexuality, political frustration and socioeconomic status. During a weekly dialogue guided by a specific theme, they unpack their triggers, including getting misgendered at work or family members repeatedly deadnaming them, calling them by names they no longer use.

The group spends the last 15 minutes informally responding to one another’s shares and asking for extra support if they need it. That’s rare in meetings, said Pleas.

Many participants arrive at meetings early and eat dinner together, and some linger after to talk, Dillon said. Members walk home or carpool together. They also have monthly sober potlucks, often around holidays.

A drug and alcohol counselor with Pine Tree Recovery Center, Dillon plans to make Queercovery a nonprofit. Eventually, they would like to create a Queercovery campus with LGBTQ+ sober living and treatment facilities.

THE BIGGER PICTURE

Nationally and in Maine, LGBTQ+ people have a higher risk of substance use disorder, according to Heide Lester, part of the Maine Drug Policy Coalition. According to the Addiction Center, an online resource for those working through addiction, 20% to 30% of LGBTQ+ adults have been diagnosed with it compared to 9% of  the general population.

LGBTQ+ people turn to alcohol and drugs to cope with the violence, isolation and discrimination that they disproportionately experience, said Lester. Lesbian, gay and bisexual adults are more likely to “experience mental health issues including major depressive episodes and experience serious thoughts of suicide,” according to Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, a public health agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

“It is challenging to be suffering from substance use disorder,” Lester said. “Yes, and what happens when someone is not only dealing with the discrimination and stigma associated with substance use disorder but is also dealing with the discrimination and stigma of being LGBTQ+?”

These trends can be found among young people, too. LGBTQ+ high schoolers in Maine are more likely to regularly use or try substances than their non-LGBTQ+ counterparts, according to data from the 2021 Maine Integrated Youth Health Survey. At the same time, LGBTQ+ high schoolers are more than twice as likely to experience violence, offensive comments, bullying and adverse childhood experiences, and they are more than three times more likely to have seriously considered suicide.

For their short film “Queer Voices, Recovery in Maine,” filmmaker Riss Bickford, who uses they/them pronouns, researched and interviewed community members across the state fighting these trends. Active in Queercovery since 2022, Bickford was inspired by people creating safe spaces.

Filmmaker Riss Bickford has been active in Queercovery since 2022. Inspired by people creating safe spaces, they researched and interviewed community members across the state fighting substance use for their short film “Queer Voices, Recovery in Maine.” Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer

“So many people across the state are doing the work,” Bickford said, and resources are concentrated in little pockets.

Greater Portland, for example, has a substantial recovery community including many “recovery residences, mutual aid support groups, a recovery community center and treatment options spanning the full continuum of care,” said Tess Parks, an advocate with the Maine Recovery Advocacy Project, a grassroots coalition.

But when Parks, who identifies as a lesbian, moved to Portland 10 years ago, she said it was challenging to find recovery spaces specifically geared toward people like herself.

“I would find people who I knew accepted me for who I was, and I would gravitate towards folks who wanted to form community with me, but there wasn’t really a place or a meeting or a recovery house that was for people like me,” she said. “The onus is always on our community to create spaces.”

Dillon said that resources for LGBTQ+ people in recovery are growing, including Queercovery. At first, sometimes no one showed up at the meetings. Now sometimes 30 do.

Dillon often also participates in DAA Queers, a 12-step fellowship for members of the LGBTQ+ community working through drug addiction. For the past two years, the group has met at 9:30 a.m. on Saturdays at the Portland Recovery Community Center, a flagship location for peer recovery services statewide.

Pleas considers the LGBTQIA Sober Sunday AA meeting at the ECC her “home group.” She said the meeting has been running for decades and “is the reason I’m sober.”

Such resources aren’t so common in other parts of the state, said Bickford, the filmmaker, who interviewed people in rural Maine who had to drive an hour to attend LGBTQ+-focused meetings.

Last year, for Bickford’s one year of sobriety, they brought in cupcakes topped with plastic My Little Pony rings and joked that it was their own take on a sobriety chip. This August, they will celebrate two years sober.

Bickford said that Queercovery “feels familial.”

“There’s a base-level understanding,” they said. “We can talk without any explanation. You can just say it and know that there are at least one or two other people in the circle who see you and get it.”