FEATURE
Miracle on K Street In a humble storefront, recovering LGBTQ folks in Boston find community and support By
Mark Krone
Sometimes, miracles occur in the most overlooked places. Six blocks from Fenway Park, meetings for Boston’s LGBTQ community in recovery have been held in a small storefront since 1987. Some say the space and its meetings saved their lives. Many are at a loss to explain why talking with strangers in this modest storefront about their common problems has completely turned their lives around when all the doctors and medicines in the world had failed them. Unlike a lot of other 12-Step spaces, K Street has no metal chairs or podium. Instead, sofas with matching pillows line both sides of the room and more run down the middle. These sofas are monitored for wear and tear by a member, who restores them as needed in his custom drapery business. On one wall, a banner with the words “Sober and Proud” hangs next to two pull-down signs enumerating the 12 Steps and 12 Traditions. On the other wall is suspended a rainbow flag. K Street shares a one-story building with a couple of familyowned businesses that include a convenience store and a sub sandwich shop. On the side of the building, the green paint is peeling in some places and the sidewalk is littered with cigarette butts. The block is a slice of 1970s Boston that’s hanging on by a thread. Everything about this storefront for recovering queer people says it shouldn’t still be here. And pretty soon, it probably won’t be. A story in the Boston Globe last March reported that the space will be sold to a real estate company that plans to demolish it. But portents of K Street’s imminent demise have proved premature before. Its future can never be entirely ruled out. Still, its members can’t ignore the ever-growing number of Fenway skyscrapers that press down upon the tiny recovery space like long pointed fingers. They may not like the recent, dramatic changes to the neighborhood, but these are people in recovery who have long since given up the enticements of denial.
98 | Boston Pride 2017
Dave has attended meetings at K Street almost since it opened. His voice on the phone is calm and earnest, and there are deliberative pauses between his sentences. After hundreds of recovery meetings, he’s used to sharing the intimate details of his life but he wants to get them right. In the 1980s, there were long nights of drinking and playing pool at the Ramrod, he says. Whether he thought he had a problem or not didn’t end up mattering. He was court-ordered to attend meetings because “I got a drunk driving arrest on September 9, 1987.” He began attending meetings at K Street mostly because it was gay and near where he used to drink. K Street was different then. For one thing, it was located at 74 Kilmarnock Street, next door to the present location. It was a night-time drop-in shelter for homeless women who could stop in, take a shower, and relax. “The couches were arranged in two semi-circle rows facing a TV with a lamp on it. If people really had something to say, they sat in the first row. People who weren’t ready to talk or were still drinking tended to sit in the outer layer, the couches behind the couches.” Each meeting, a collection was taken. “There were two refrigerators: one that worked and one that didn’t. We put the collection money in a coffee can in the broken fridge.” At night, the money was divided among the women to help them buy something when they left the shelter. K Street was launched in June 1987 by Peter, a gay man who lived in a first-floor apartment on nearby Queensbury Street. He was determined to establish more gay meetings in Boston. He believed that a city the size of Boston should have a space dedicated to queer recovery. Marcus, who has attended K Street meetings from the beginning, recalls that, at that spring’s roundup (a large gathering of people in recovery), Peter spoke to him about starting a new meeting in the Fenway for gay people. Peter approached the women’s drop-in shelter and asked if he could hold a 12-Step meeting there. When
