We went to a diner where, over plates of eggs and bacon, he told me his story. Larry was a name partner at an entertainment law firm based in Beverly Hills. He was gay but, until seven years earlier, had been deep in the closet. Once a month he flew to San Francisco for what he called his “lost weekends.” He hit the bars and bathhouses, alternating booze and cocaine, and having as much sex as he could to get him through the next month of enforced celibacy. Eventually, as the alcohol and drugs took over, he began to slip and started haunting the bars and bathhouses in L.A. where, one night, he met a young man and took him home. The kid figured out Larry’s situation and blackmailed him.

“The worst part wasn’t the shame or the guilt or the terror that he might expose me, but my complete lack of control. Here I was, with my Yale law degree, my house in the Hollywood Hills, a client list that included Oscar winners, and this twenty-three-year-old punk had me by the balls. Naturally my drinking and using accelerated. Then one morning I woke up with the hangover from hell and a bloody nose from snorting coke and I had a revelation.”

“What was it?”

“If I wanted to be free of this little pisher, all I had to do was tell the truth. All I had to do was come out.” He looked at me over the rim of his coffee cup and smiled. “All I had to do was jump off the cliff.” He sipped his coffee. “I’m not brave, but I knew at that moment it was either come out or kill myself because I could not live another day the way I had been going. I went into the office and called my partners into the conference room and told them I was a queer. You know what they said?”

I shook my head.

“They said, that’s fine, Larry, now what are you going to do about the drugs and drinking because that’s the real problem.” He put his cup down. “Can you believe I was offended! Then they told me, one by one, how my drinking and using had affected them. Turns out they’d been waiting for the opportunity to stage an intervention and my coming out gave it to them. By the time they were done with me, my denial was in shreds. Being gay wasn’t a problem, it was who I was. Addiction, that was the problem. Two days later, I went off to Hazelden. That was seven years ago. Been clean and sober since. Now, tell me why you don’t think you’re going to make it.”