“…the most unmoral, the most antisocial, the most critical alcoholic may gather about him a few kindred spirits and announce to us that a new Alcoholics Anonymous group has been formed.”
A line in a meeting list
The groups in this story started rooms of their own, and some had to ask to be listed. Today a group of its own is a line in a meeting list. AA’s Meeting Guide app gathers more than 150,000 meetings a week from the websites of more than 500 AA areas, districts and offices, in one common format, and the format lets a meeting call itself Spanish or Young People, Gay, Lesbian or Transgender, People of Color, Native American or Indigenous, or American Sign Language, among dozens of other kinds.
Deaf members came the same way, later. The history written for AA’s office in 1985 says the first Deaf group “apparently” started in Los Angeles in March 1962, with as many as 18 at a meeting, and the Eye Opener group started in Washington, D.C., in 1970. By 1985 AA’s office listed about 100 groups and contacts. But groups only for Deaf members, the history says, “have tended to lose members to regular A.A. groups which have increasingly tried to provide an interpreter…”
AA had put the Big Book and the Twelve and Twelve, its book on the Steps and Traditions, into American Sign Language more than 15 years before, and Deaf members told its office it might be time for new translations. In January 2018 AA filmed the new Big Book at its office in New York: ten days of filming, after three translators had spent three or four months preparing. As chapters were finished, Deaf members reviewed parts of it, and in 2019 it came out on four discs, 409 minutes long. The new Twelve and Twelve followed that December.
AA’s pamphlets for particular members have been revised and renamed: LGBTQ Alcoholics in A.A. in 2018, Black in A.A. in 2024, with twelve members’ stories, and Indigenous People in A.A. in 2025, with nine new ones. Access to A.A., revised in 2019, has stories from members who are blind, Deaf or DeafBlind, or have had a stroke or a brain injury, among others.
And AA counts who comes. Its survey of members in the U.S. and Canada, taken every few years since 1968, asks them about race and ethnicity. In 2022, of more than 6,000 members who answered, 87.7 percent said they were white.
It’s January 2018, at AA’s office in New York. For ten days, translators stand in front of a camera and sign the Big Book in American Sign Language. Deaf members asked for it: the last version was more than fifteen years old. As chapters are finished, Deaf members review parts of it and send back notes. In 2019 it comes out on four discs, almost seven hours long.
The first Deaf group, as far as a 1985 history could tell, met in Los Angeles in March 1962, with as many as eighteen at a meeting. By 1985 Deaf groups were losing members to regular groups, which more and more tried to find them interpreters.
It’s how this story has gone, again and again: Black members, young people, Spanish speakers, gay and lesbian members, Native communities. A few alcoholics who didn’t fit the rooms they found started rooms of their own. Then, slowly, the rest of AA made room.