Douglas Stewart

I often think about people being homophobic, how they were fundamentally good people, but they just didn't know that that wasn't the way to be in the world.

And I think that's something that's really changed now.

But there were so many people that just didn't know that how the world really was, I suppose.

That's exactly it.

Yeah, I think when men drink or when they have a problem, then it can be a very public thing and we can forgive them for it.

But there's an extra layer of stigma when a woman fails like that.

And, you know, so it's done very much at home and the family oftentimes, certainly my family tried to sort of keep it at home, mostly to protect my mother's reputation.

But I think, you know, alcoholism seems like a very individual problem.

But in places where hope evaporates, it's a social problem.

And so my mother often had friends and neighbors who would come and drink with her during the day.

And, you know, sometimes this could be a huge amount of fun.

It was never fun for me, but she would have a lot of fun.

And other times it would lead to great troubles.

As a kid, one of the strangest things that happened to me is because I was with my mother almost all the time, you know, there was no other childcare.

I was sort of privy to this very private space of these women discussing life, you know.

And they would talk about everything from their love affairs to their concerns about money, their concerns about their children or their parents and everything.

Oftentimes, they would talk about sex in a very graphic way.

And I'm only a six, seven, eight-year-old boy sitting in the corner sort of minding my mother.

And I had this real front seat to the inner workings of sort of women being very unguarded because, you know, alcohol is a great leveler.

It drops all drugs.