Brenda Weathers, 68; Founded Center for Alcoholics

Brenda Weathers, an activist, writer and founder of a pioneering alcoholism and drug recovery center for women in Los Angeles, died March 20 at her Long Beach home. She was 68.

A lifelong smoker, Weathers died of lung cancer, said her partner, Vicki Lewis.

Weathers founded the Alcoholism Center for Women in 1974 and served as its first director. The center, which operates out of two Victorian-style houses on Alvarado Street west of downtown Los Angeles, was believed to be the first such facility in the country to primarily serve gay women.

A recovered alcoholic herself, Weathers understood that society treated drunk women more harshly than their male counterparts. Lesbian alcoholics, she believed, had three strikes against them -- female, gay and alcoholic -- that resulted in their drinking remaining hidden longer.

Lesbians, like gay men, are believed to have higher rates of alcoholism than the general population, but they were often shunned by traditional recovery programs, which were dominated by men and sometimes compounded the stigma that gay women felt by trying to convert them to heterosexuality.

The Alcoholism Center for Women, which began as a program at what is now the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center in Hollywood, encouraged women to accept themselves and fostered a feminist awareness.

In addition to offering traditional crisis intervention, counseling and weekly Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, it organized dances, potluck suppers and other recreational activities as alternatives to gay bars.

“Women were fighting to be heard, and it was difficult during those times,” recalled Nora Steel, a longtime counselor at the center who worked with Weathers. “Brenda forged ahead and said, ‘We have issues and needs. We’re out there drinking and dying and no one cares, and I want do something.’ She was courageous.”

Born in Smithfield, Texas, the daughter of a Baptist preacher had been expelled from Texas Women’s University in 1957 after college officials learned of her sexual orientation. When the father of her girlfriend discovered their relationship, he beat both girls with a rubber hose.

Weathers moved to California in the 1960s. She earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Cal State Long Beach, then became a social worker for Los Angeles County. She eventually turned to alcohol in an attempt to hold together her dual identities as a closeted lesbian and straight professional, but her drinking got out of hand and she quit to avoid being fired.

She opened a second-hand store in Los Angeles called the Junk Lady, where she would cloister herself after hours and get drunk on jug wine.

“I’d wish and wish someone would call me, and no one did,” she told The Times in a 1975 interview. “I would be filled with self-loathing. I’d hit myself on the head, throw myself against the wall, screaming, ‘I want out of this.’ ”

She eventually became sober through a self-help program and began working at the Gay and Lesbian Center, where she helped write a proposal for a $300,000 federal grant to start an alcoholism recovery program for women.

The proposal was funded and evolved into the Alcoholism Center for Women, with a 13-bed recovery house and bustling outpatient program. It observed its 30th anniversary last year at a celebration honoring Weathers.

After leaving the center in 1977, Weathers moved to San Francisco, where she ran an alcohol and drug recovery center for the Whitman-Radclyffe Foundation. In the early 1980s, she directed the Gay and Lesbian Chemical Dependency Program in Seattle, where she met Lewis, who became her longtime partner.

Weathers is also survived by a sister, Carolyn Weathers of Long Beach.

In the 1990s, Brenda Weathers ran the Northern New Mexico Animal Protection Society and later the Los Angeles nonprofit Actors and Others for Animals.

Most recently she was executive director of WomenShelter, a Long Beach agency that provides emergency housing for battered women.

Weathers began to write fiction after living in a house in Maine that she believed was haunted. Her experiences there inspired her first mystery novel, “The House at Pelham Falls,” released in 1986 by Naiad Press. Naiad, one of the country’s first publishers to specialize in fiction by lesbian authors, also published her second mystery, “Miss Pettibone and Miss McGraw,” in 1996.

Her third novel, “Murder on the Mother Road,” will be issued later this year by New Victoria Publishers.