Speaker addresses drug use in LGBT community

Ken Schneck, Dean of students at Marlboro College, shared personal experiences and offered reasons on how alcohol and other drugs are issues in the LGBT community at a two-hour presentation at SCSU last Monday.

The presentation was hosted by the LGBT resource center and U-Choose.

The presentation kicked off with Schneck sharing his own drug and alcohol problems.

He explained how he didn’t have a way to socialize with other members of the LGBT community that didn’t involve alcohol and other drugs. His first experience with drugs was with crystal meth.

Schneck explained how drug use in the LGBT community was an issue to address and that the only way to begin addressing it was to be aware of it.

Using drugs in his early years of college was a result of issues involving his family’s shunning of his lifestyle coupled with the environment of the LGBT community.

His college didn’t have an LGBT resource center, which made the LGBT community move underground to clubs and bars.

These resources may be crucial to making LGBT students feel as though they fit into the college community as well.

“The gay bar served the function of the family I never had,” Schneck said.

St. Cloud is one of only a few colleges to have an LGBT resource center, which assists this community.

“St. Cloud is literally light-years ahead of many colleges,” Schneck said.

The presentation also showed how family and mainstream cultures’ shunning of gay communities act as an entry point for alcohol and other drugs.

The presentation used the Vivienne Cass model to show how drugs come in with the coping mechanism of dealing with coming out.

The Vivienne Cass Model is a five-step model involving the steps associated with difficulties people experience with coming out of the closet.

It is specifically for them, to help them go through and understand changes and progresses during their lives.

Schneck has a love-hate feel for the Vivienne Cass theory, because he loves it, but hates it because not all people go through all the steps, or some go through them in different orders.

One of the steps that Schneck spoke about was emersion from mainstream culture. He spoke about how that step involved him using drugs to identify his difference with mainstream culture.

Difficulties with quitting alcohol and drug use arise because the recovery methods in many programs didn’t fit with the LGBT community, therefore felt uncomfortable sometimes reaching out for assistance in issues.

“It’s hard to change your people, places and things when it means that you lose your status as an LGBT community member,” Schneck said.

Schneck said that queer cinema was a good way to show the events leading up to drug use in the LGBT community.

He showed clips from some movies depicting lesbian and gay characters interactions involving drug and alcohol and how it affected their lives.

The movies did not represent the gay community as a whole, but that the situations were a good way to depict the reasons why some in the LGBT community would choose to use drugs.

Schneck advocated the use of LGBT programs to bring interactions out of places involving drugs and drinking, to give people a sense of the other opportunities and choices they can make.

Programs involving positive LGBT role models for young students to look up to would help combat many of the drug problems in the LGBT community.