In Leaving the Rest, gay men open up and share their own personal experiences of being a gay alcoholic/addict and living as a sober gay man, including experiences leading to and following recovery.  Addiction and recovery are often life-changing and lifelong issues for many gay men.

Leaving the Rest explores a wide range of sober experiences, each in relation to a twelve-step program and with varied levels of success. Among the stories, a businessman is committed to the practice of the twelve steps, but writes about the challenges of addiction and his subsequent recovery over twenty years; a Parisian ex-pat writes about finding his secret key to the twelve-steps in Dolly Parton; a boy from New Jersey parties his way from a broken home to an Ivy-League education and then gets sober; a member of the Bear community links his fifteen minutes of fame to his success in A.A.; erotic writer Edge discusses how his identity as a leatherman is enhanced by his sobriety and vice versa; a Texas farmer explores life "outside" the rooms of A.A.--he has yet to achieve "long-term" sobriety after two decades of attempting; and novelist Scott Alexander Hess writes about having sober sex with men who are using. Honest, at times harrowing, but ultimately inspiring these personal stories give voice to gay men and the ways in which sexuality intersects with addition and recovery on the path to sobriety.