The White Flag meeting (pp. 363–364)
There’s maybe half a dozen or so other veiled people in the White Flag hall tonight; a decent percentage of people in the 11-Step Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed are also in 12-Step fellowships for other issues besides hideous deformity. Most of the room’s veiled AAs are women, though there is this one male veiled U.H.I.D. guy that’s an active White Flagger, Tommy S. or F., who years ago nodded out on a stuffed acrylic couch with a bottle of Rémy and a lit Tiparillo—the guy now wears U.H.I.D. veils and a whole spectrum of silk turtlenecks and assorted hats and classy lambskin driving gloves. Gately’s had the U.H.I.D.-and-veil philosophy explained to him in passing a couple times but still doesn’t much get it, it seems like a gesture of shame and concealment, still, to him, the veil.
Context
The passage that makes U.H.I.D. an institution rather than Joelle's private eccentricity: half a dozen veils in one Provident cafeteria, membership overlapping the 12-Step world like any other Boston fellowship, a named male member with an origin story. Gately's honest verdict — "shame and concealment, still" — is the reading Joelle spends all of scene 104's doctrine statement trying to overturn.