"KEEP COMING BACK"

A long long time ago in a place that was not a place, there were several of us who attended a gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgendered recovery meeting. That is to say, there usually weren't any straights [heterosexuals] at that meeting.

At that meeting, someone who came in once who said he had been imprisoned twice for sexually offending. And he said that now that he is out, he would like to have some woman --any woman.

AND THEY ALL SAID, "KEEP COMING BACK!"

And I began to wonder if I was the only one in that room who heard what the strange man had said.


Unfortunately, a lesbian woman friend of mine was "befriended" by this man over the course of less than a week before he RAPED her.

Being as she was a lesbian, the judge gave him--the two-time sexual offender--eight months in the county lock-up. Out after five on "good behavior."

He put the word out that he was going to kill her. She left town and never came back.


We assume that people who are in the same space that we are-- in a mall or on an airplane or jogging in a park or at a recovery meeting or in church or at the local gay juice bar or in cyberspace--are all safe, all okay, all there for the same reasons that we are.

Them people on the airplanes on 9/11 are no longer around to tell us this ain't so. The Central Park Jogger has a TRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURY today and it took her months before she was out of the hospital and months before she could jog again. A woman I met on-line in recovery states that she was STALKED by someone in recovery she had met on-line. He had traveled unbidden to her town and showed up on her doorstep and at her recovery meetings. It was difficult for her to extricate herself out of that situation.

There have certainly been people at my local recovery meetings that I would not walk out to the parking lot with alone.


So please blogging buddies, don't assume that any of us is automatically "OKAY" just because we are blogging buddies. And don't assume that EVERYONE in the same place doing the same thing you are is "OKAY."

SAFETY ORIGINATES FROM THE INSIDE.

So be safe.

~sapphoq