Why West Philly photographer Jillian Bauer is collecting personal stories of addiction and recovery
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
"Here's a real person, in their real environment, and this is their real story told candidly, from one addict or alcoholic to another," Bauer explains. "This is real recovery."
It’s on a brisk but sunny mid-December afternoon that photographer Jillian Bauer is shooting Tee, a drag performer with the Liberty City Kings, within the empty upstairs space of the Tabu bar and nightclub.
The room is echoing and peculiar without the usual spectacle. Multicolored glitter is ground in aged layers into the grain of the stage, like footprints wearing into a centuries-old step. This is where Tee, as “Timmy Tinderloin,” performs on the first Saturday of each month.
Tee’s sitting in the metal folding chair that Bauer brings to each photo shoot. It’s the type of chair you’d see in a church or community-center basement as part of a group recovery meeting.
“You went to art school, you must have sat for people before,” Bauer says to Tee, while hopping around to find the best light.
“I nude modeled,” Tee says, and Bauer is silent for a beat, considering the guts necessary for the gig.
“I was high, I didn’t care,” continues Tee, and the two burst out laughing.
Something Bauer said in a prior conversation springs to my mind.
“I have so many stories I consider to be funny now that I’m in recovery, like, ‘Wow, I was totally batshit crazy.’ If I tell them to somebody not in recovery, they’re like, ‘Oh my God, that’s so sad,’ and I’m like, ‘No, it’s not!’ If it’s somebody in recovery, they’re laughing, because they’ve been there. They’ve done the same things,” Bauer told me.
Tee and Bauer are both living clean and sober, and attend recovery-focused meetings regularly. Tee’s one of the 30 people, as of press time, featured on Bauer’s website The Rooms Project, where she posts photographs and audio stories of people who are in recovery from drug or alcohol addiction. She started the project last March.
Bauer aims to feature 100 individuals on the site by the end of this year. The Rooms Project Kickstarter — which is to fund the trips Bauer wants to take outside the city, to meet more storytellers, and which ends Feb. 21 — has thus far raised nearly $2,000, and was chosen as a Kickstarter “staff pick.”
At Tabu, Bauer and Tee bond over the significance of the place.
“This is a meaningful space for me, too,” explains Bauer. She recalls that the night of her last drink, she had gone to Tabu with friends, and then went to Woody’s, a block over. They refused to serve her — she was too drunk.
“If it’s 1 a.m. and you’re fucking flagged at Woody’s …” Bauer says, trailing off into a chuckle.
Tee pulls a wide-eyed “you know it’s bad when …” face as Bauer’s words resonate.
“I think there’s something about seeing somebody who is also in recovery, it’s like a relief,” Bauer says. “This person will understand. There’s no judgment there.”
No judgment, and shared experience — that’s the exact premise of The Rooms Project.
“Here’s a real person, in their real environment, and this is their real story told candidly, from one addict or alcoholic to another,” Bauer explains. “This is real recovery.”
Tee, 28, was visibly a bit edgy as Bauer hit “record” on that December afternoon.
A typical session with Bauer for the project is straightforward — the subject picks a place that’s meaningful to them, meets Bauer there and simply speaks as she records. Bauer directs people to follow the storytelling guidelines: “What was it like? What happened? What’s it like now?” Bauer hardly speaks, only guides if the speaker loses track. After that, the storyteller has a seat in Bauer’s “meeting chair,” and she starts clicking.
Before the shoot at Tabu, Tee and Bauer talked at the William Way LGBT Community Center. Tee — who identifies as transgender and uses the gender pronouns “they, their or them” — started to look more at ease while talking about finding a place in Philly’s LGBT community — Tee’s won the Mr. Philly Drag King and Mr. Philly Gay Pride competitions and is also part of Philadelphia’s Queer Leather Alliance.
As a trans individual, Tee’s seen how addiction-recovery programs can be restricting.
“There needs to be more inclusive language, and more inclusive gender pronouns, and more inclusive feminism, and less misogyny,” Tee says in the Rooms Project interview.
“I’m not bashing,” Tee says. “I’m more or less just saying that it needs to expand — a lot.”
To that end, Tee’s one of a few people who started the Two Umbrellas support group, which invites “all gender minorities and anyone who identifies under the trans umbrella from any recovery group or space” to meet at William Way every Tuesday at 7 p.m.
Still, Tee says, “I love recovery ... I’ve gotten to be out about my recovery and firm in the way that I’m going to live my life.
“I sort of just get to be in all these communities that otherwise, I’d be dead,” Tee says.
Weeks after the shoot at Tabu, Tee reflected on the experience.
“People have this idea of what it’s like to be an addict,” Tee says. “A lot of people have come up to me about [Tee’s story on the site].” Tee had alluded to rehabs, jails, institutions, sexual history and disease. “People were a little taken aback.”
But, Tee continues, “I don’t want people to be afraid to come forward. If that means I have to sort of be honest in that way, it’s a good thing.”
In 2013, an estimated 21.6 million Americans older than 12 were classified with substance dependence or abuse in the prior year, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ annual National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which is based on interviews with almost 70,000 people.
That same survey says that 4.1 million people age 12 or older received treatment for “a problem related to the use of alcohol or illicit drugs.” Of them, 2.3 million people received treatment at a self-help group.
It’s hard to determine exactly how many people go to meetings regularly; there’s the element of anonymity.
The Rooms Project gives those in treatment the chance to shed that anonymity. Bauer says that’s led to some mixed opinions.
She writes in an email: “Some people have expressed that the people I have featured should remain anonymous about being in recovery, since addicts and alcoholics can relapse and give people the impression that recovery doesn’t work. Then you have people who are in support of the project, who think we should be open about being in recovery, because it’s something to be proud of.”
Abigail Woodworth, vice president for strategy and public affairs at the Treatment Research Institute (TRI) here in Philly, learned of The Rooms Project from a co-worker whom Bauer had contacted.
TRI conducts chemical dependency research studies to “fill the gap between research and practice, [and] translate the best in science to better treatment,” Woodworth says. The tenet of TRI’s research is that addiction is a chronic medical disease.
“I think this idea that people should remain anonymous because they relapse and that somehow takes away from the fact that you can recover — I think that’s part of stigmatization of the disease, like saying, ‘You had cancer and it came back, so you shouldn’t get to go to chemo,’” Woodworth says.
Tee agrees.
“If people are saying it’s a bad thing to shine light on something that can potentially help a lot of people, that’s ignorant. Just because you’re in recovery doesn’t mean you’re ‘fixed.’”
Projects like Bauer’s, as well as nationwide projects like Faces & Voices of Recovery and Young People in Recovery, Woodworth says, lend a human element to addiction, one that could help destigmatize it and help addicts get treated in the same way as other illnesses.
“The real key is that addiction has been treated [using] an acute-care model,” Woodworth says. “‘I broke my foot and I’m getting a cast on it and I’m healed in 30 days’ — that’s the wrong approach. Addiction is not an acute condition; it’s a chronic condition … it needs to be managed over the life cycle.”
By not celebrating publicly the positive stories of long-term recovery, Woodworth says, we’re doing a disservice to how the public perceives addiction.
“That’s one of the most powerful things this project can represent,” she says of Bauer’s work. “It’s highlighting that people are out there. They’re our neighbors, and our parents and our friends.”
Bauer, 31, grew up in Connecticut and moved to Bucks County when she was 13, eventually attending college at Temple, where she’s now an adjunct professor of multimedia journalism.
It’s unsurprising that Bauer specializes in talking to strangers about their darkest days. She’s a calming and uplifting presence — she’s well-spoken but relatable and witty; relaxed but emotive. She quickly feels like a friend. Arriving for a meeting to talk about her project, she’s sporting work boots, and her small frame is loaded down with a large backpack. She looks ambitious and purposeful.
Her sobriety date — the last time she had a drink or a drug, that night at Tabu — is March 24, 2013. She got sober by going to meetings.
“The meetings are story-based, and the stories are really what kept me coming around,” she says.
Growing up with two loving parents who were hardly drinkers themselves, Bauer says it was during her first year as a student at Temple that her drinking began to take off.
“Nobody in my family really drank when I was growing up, but alcohol definitely had a pretty big impact on my life before I was born. My mom’s mother, when my mom was 1, was hit and killed by a drunk driver,” she says, and then pauses.
“I was a habitual drunk driver,” Bauer says of her pre-sobriety days. “I drove drunk all the time. I used to be ashamed of it. I’m not now, because I’ve made right any of the wrongs related to that in any way I can.”
But it’s personal history like that, she says, that allows her to connect to people in recovery who have been in similar situations.
Shortly before Bauer spoke for this story, she had interviewed a woman in West Chester who had gotten into a near-fatal drunk driving accident when she was 21. Now she’s in recovery, a nurse with two degrees.
“She had to have a full facial reconstruction,” Bauer says. “She kept drunk driving after that. I’m like, ‘That’s me,’” she says.
As a Temple freshman, Bauer was hospitalized for alcohol poisoning, and blacked out “all the time,” despite pulling good grades. She was, she says, “the drunk friend.”
It wasn’t until after she got a DUI and spent 36 hours in jail at 21 years old that she started to realize, she says, that her behavior was not normal. Eventually she made it to her first meeting.
“They had changed the meeting time but didn’t update the website, so I was sitting alone in a room, no one’s there, I’m surrounded by recovery quotes … It was awful,” she says.
A man came in, wondering where everyone was, and after learning it was Bauer’s first meeting, rallied to get a full meeting together.
“I get teary-eyed thinking about him,” she says. “He scrambled to pull this together for me. Today I’ve realized that’s what so many of these recovery organizations are about. They’re about being in service.”
Still, she says she “wasn’t ready” for complete sobriety yet, due to some misconceptions.
“At the time, what I saw was: I showed up to a meeting, I was alone, there was only one other person there, he was twice my age, he was living in a recovery house, and he ‘only’ had six months sober. I just didn’t identify with him,” she says.
She kept drinking, even blacking out at a wedding where she was hired to be the official photographer.
“My bottom was that wedding, hands down,” she says. But it wasn’t until later, after that night at Tabu, that she reached out to someone on Facebook, who was in recovery, for some guidance. With a support network, she started going to meetings again.
“A few months in, I was like, ‘Oh my God, the inspirational stories you find in any of these rooms, in any recovery organization, I feel like they’re relatable to anybody going through anything,’” she says.
She then made a website and a Facebook page for the project. Once word spread, she was speaking with others in recovery frequently.
Many on the site are people she knows from meetings. Others reach out to her after they see others’ stories. Many of her subjects are people on the younger side, close to Bauer’s age, and she says she’d love to feature a more diverse, older age range.
The project, she says, aids in her own recovery.
“I’ve met people I wouldn’t have otherwise met who are in recovery … every person I’ve met, I’ve identified with, no matter our backgrounds,” she says.
Bauer is hoping that the individuals featured on The Rooms Project might break any preconceived notions, like she had, of what an alcoholic looks like or who they are. It might lead someone in need down a path of recovery.
She recalls the acquaintance she reached out to on Facebook when she needed help.
"This was somebody I identified with. This person dresses like me, this person is the same age as me, we listen to the same music, we go to the same shows, we have these friends in common," she says. "If they're an addict or an alcoholic, then maybe I can be an addict or an alcoholic, too."
Bauer is looking for individuals from up and down the East Coast as well as Ohio and Illinois who are willing to share their addiction and recovery stories. Visit theroomsproject.org for more information.
