I Was A Baby Queer at Bible Camp

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The summer after I turned thirteen, I decided that exactly two things needed to happen in order for my life to matter: I needed Rosie Collins to like me, and I needed my parents to send me to Bible Camp. Fortunately the two were largely interdependent, as Rosie’s family owned the most exclusive Bible camp in South Texas and all of her best friends attended.

Rosie Collins was the only girl in school who was allowed to wear New Balance sneakers to class. Most of us were supposed to wear saddle shoes, or the tacky Keds-brand dress shoes, but Rosie was allowed to wear New Balance sneakers because she had an extra bone in her foot, or something like that. Mrs. Barnes, the vice-principal of our small Episcopal school, told Rosie that the shoes had to be all-white so that the other kids wouldn’t “get any ideas.” No one was quite sure what that meant, but we envied the white shoes all the same.

Rosie, however, hated them. She hated their whiteness. One day she brought a brand-new toothbrush to school, unwrapped it at snack time, and plunged it into the fresh mud behind a bush in the courtyard. She scrubbed the muddy toothbrush over every crevice of her clean, white sneakers and then tossed the toothbrush in the trash. I watched as the shoes turned brown and couldn’t help but feel as if the act was in someway unholy, or at the very least ungrateful.

“What?” she said in my direction. I hadn’t realized I’d been staring at her.

“I just don’t like it when they’re too clean, OK?”

A few weeks earlier, Rosie had transferred to our school from the public middle school down the street, which, as far as I was concerned, was an institution overrun with punks and goths. Rosie was neither a punk nor a goth. In fact, she braided her smooth, blonde hair every morning and (for the most part) her uniform was always clean and pressed. Her tie, however, was always undone, like the laces of her white-brown shoes. She never wore the right color socks and would occasionally doodle on the inside of her forearm. She had a habit of fixing the hem of her skirt with Mrs. Dallagher’s stapler in class.

We became the kind of friends who belonged to a larger group of mutual friends. While Rosie and I occasionally had fleeting conversations about how creepy the P.E. teacher was, I would only see her laugh and laugh with other girls. I wanted her to laugh with me like that. Bible Camp was the obvious solution. I wasn’t exactly a Christian, but I was used to trying on identities. How hard could it be, really?

I had spent the summer before at a camp in West Texas, which had been forced out of its previous lakeside location by what was rumored to be a “Chinese cult.” I had excelled at useful activities like archery, riflery, and canoeing, but routinely embarrassed myself at crafts, choir, synchronized swimming, and dance – or, more generally, anything where I had to feign enthusiasm.

“You should come to my camp.” Rosie said to me as we were practicing drawing angels on pieces of wood in art class. “It’s much more fun. We don’t have structured activities, really, and we get to have shaving cream fights.”

I lit up. Not only was Rosie Collins trying to get me to go to camp with her, but shaving cream fights were something that I had a vested interest in.

“Plus, there are boys,” she said.

“Oooh.” I made a noise with my tongue that sounded more like a confused owl than an excited teenager. While the addition of pre-pubescent boys could possibly provide a welcome change from the all girls’ camp I had previously attended, I wasn’t quite sure how to explain to her that I didn’t really care whether or not there were boys where we were going.

In the days that followed, I convinced my parents to let me switch camps, employing every last bit of rhetoric I had in store for these kinds of occasions.

“But they have boys there!” I pleaded. While this might seem like an odd way for a thirteen-year-old girl to lobby her parents in hopes of attending a sleep-away social situation, this argument almost always worked on my mom, who secretly harbored suspicions of my latent homosexuality.

Soon enough, I was off to Generic Evangelical Bible Camp with a trunk full of medium-sized clothing from Old Navy and a brand new Bible tucked into my sweating armpit. It wasn’t until somewhere between C-town and A-ville that I realized that I was going to Bible Camp and I didn’t even know the first thing about the Bible. I went to an Episcopal school for the majority of my young life, but the only thing I could remember was that Adam and Eve happened and then a few years later God wiped everyone out with a shit-ton of rain. It was bad enough that my dad was making me arrive a day late because of a stupid basketball tournament, but the fact that I wasn’t a real Christian might actually ruin my chances of fitting in. What if they find out? I thought. What if Rosie finds out? I opened the front cover of my highlighter-blue King James Version. In the beginning…

mchenrycountyblog.com

When I finally arrived at the doorstep of Cabin E (“E for lov-E E-veryone”), a blonde, skinny girl jumped down from her top bunk and hugged me so tightly that I nearly lost the bagel I had choked down in the car.

“Umm…” I mumbled, perplexed, but trying not to sound rude. I had never seen this girl in my life.

“Hiiii,” she sang. “I’m so happy you’re here. I’m Erin.”

The rest of Generic Evangelical Bible Camp would continue in this fashion: nauseatingly cheery and over-caffeinated, which was severely detrimental to the most recent attitude I had adopted for Rosie’s sake — an attitude that I thought exuded a cool nonchalance, but probably came off as more of an awkward laziness. At Camp, however, Rosie was best friends with Erin. And the worst part was that in this place — which I had started to refer to as “Candyland” in letters to my friends at home — Rosie was no longer the carefree tomboy who scrubbed mud all over her shoes. She was excessively cheerful, incredibly preoccupied with shaving her legs, and not at all interested in breaking the rules. To make matters worse, Rosie wasn’t even in my cabin. She and Erin were in a cabin of “older” girls who had been together at Camp every year. But I still wanted her to like me, and I needed things to change immediately.

I decided to become a Christian.

It is a widely known fact among Texans that simply attending church or an Episcopal school doesn’t make one a Christian. No, you have to have a testimony, a religious conversion experience, a turning point along your path of sin that led you to the Lord Jesus Christ. This immediately posed a problem. I had no material. I wasn’t beaten or raped as a child, I didn’t have atheist parents, I never experimented with any drugs or prescription meds, no one in my family had died recently, and I sure as hell wasn’t ready to talk about the fact that I sometimes wanted to kiss girls. Also, I had never had sex, which in this world was an act of equal offense. I had only one thing, and it would have to do.

Every night after dinner we had Cabin Time. Cabin Time was a ritual in which the entirety of Cabin E would sit on the front porch and chit-chat about topics including, but not limited to “how to ask God for better friends,” and “what to do when you feel persecuted for your Christian beliefs.” One of these nights was devoted to sharing our testimonies as good Christian children with the entire cabin. It was supposed to make us feel closer to God and, by extension, each other.

“…and then after he touched me,” one of our counselors was saying. “I told him that it was over and that we could never see each other again after he did that. It wasn’t God’s plan for me. And after that, I just prayed and prayed that God would forgive me for letting him touch me, for being stupid. And here I am today,” she said. “I’m so happy.” And she was. Or maybe it was just her Southern accent.

The rest of the girls had similar experiences. Two recounted graphic tales of sexual abuse from family members, several told stories about how their boyfriends had once pressured them into “going too far,” and one girl expressed extreme remorse for shaving off her pubic hair in order to better find her own vagina. The counselors, in effort to assuage her sudden sobbing, assured her that God would forgive her if she just prayed about it. Eventually, she believed them and reduced to a quiet blubbering.

west texas at night via wired.com

I hesitated when it was my turn. There is no way they’re gonna believe me, I thought. I wasn’t a real Christian and everyone knew it. But I didn’t have a choice, I had to say something.

“I almost died once,” I began.

Dammit, I thought. I screwed up. That wasn’t how I was supposed to say it. Everyone stared, waiting for me to explain myself. Their eyes felt like tiny, little video cameras with the red lights blinking. “Um… well… I mean, I thought I was dying.” One of the girls rolled her eyes and I tried to pretend that she was just a villain in a cartoon movie, easily foiled by simple-mindedness and innocence.

“Last year at camp,” I said, “I completely thought that I was going to die. This one time at like, 12:30 at night the room started spinning and I couldn’t see anything. So I stumbled over to my counselor’s bed and said ‘Rachel, I need to go to the infirmary.’ So it turns out that I had a fever of 103 and they had to call the doctor in. I spent the night in the infirmary and prayed and prayed and prayed for God to make me better, and He did. By the morning, my fever had reduced to normal and I was completely fine.”

What I hadn’t mentioned was that in actuality I had come down with an acute form of TSS, or Toxic Shock Syndrome. The thing they warn you about on the backs of tampon boxes. I had left a tampon inside of my body for over a day and I had started to notice a sticky, green puddle in my underwear. In a feverish haze that night I had gone to the bathroom and removed the tampon. My fever dropped drastically and by the morning I was fine. I had not once asked God to make me feel better.

“That must have been very scary,” one of the counselors said to me, breaking the silence.

“It was.”

No one else said a word. That was it, I thought. They definitely knew. I was going to be shunned from the rest of the group for my obvious lack of any “real life” experience. I was just a small and insignificant child who would never be taken seriously as a Christian. It was all over. What would Rosie think?

After Cabin Time, I slinked back into the cabin to sit on my bunk and cry to myself. No one would notice if I turned toward the wall. I tried not to listen to listen to Molly, the cartoon villain, and her cronies as they laughed and made a list of “Things We’ve Masturbated With.” Hairbrush… Bathtub faucet… vibrator. I rolled over and put the pillow over my head. The laughing didn’t stop.

Eventually I heard someone shouting my name over the now thunderous laughter. I was the only one not participating. Confused, I rolled back over and looked at Molly with tears sticking to my red, chipmunk-y face.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. I didn’t know whether or not to believe her.

“Oh,” I said, surprised. “I dunno, it was a long day.”

“Come down here,” she said.

I threw one leg after another over the ladder on the side of my bunk and slipped into the group next to Molly. She smiled at me through her dark eye makeup and I relaxed a little.

“Have you ever masturbated?” she asked, flatly.

The truth is that I had. A lot, actually. Or at least more than I thought was normal. I just didn’t understand why anyone would want to talk about it. In fact, I had never heard anyone say the word “masturbate” out loud before that day. The only way I knew what it meant was because it was written on a piece of paper that my mom brought home from the doctor one day. Rather than discuss it with me, she had left the paper in her bathroom underneath a stack of old magazines. I found it when I was peeing one day. “Masturbation is a normal part of teenage development,” the paper said. Perhaps that’s why she hid it.

“Well, yeah.” I answered finally. “Hasn’t everyone?”

The girls laughed and Molly said, “You little dirty whore.” One of the girls squealed and then everyone laughed again. Most of the girls there didn’t even know what masturbation meant, which Molly took great pleasure in explaining. To the other girls it felt dirty just to think about it. And it just so happens that God himself definitely frowns upon masturbation – and possibly every other sexual or pseudo-sexual act on the planet.

Masturbation conversations became the norm at Bible Camp. We would take turns sharing stories about touching ourselves and touching others and perhaps even touching each other (you never know). The point, it seemed, was to bring yourself to the brink of supposed moral deprivation so that you could experience the ritual of being saved. Each increasingly sexual conversation was followed by prayer, reflection, and public repentance. And admittedly, it did feel good. There was a build up and a break down. Like an orgasm, only holier.

That next night the entire Camp convened in the large hay barn/pit we used as a chapel. The counselors were going to perform a skit that illustrated what it meant to be a Christian. The girls in our cabin were excited because all of the hot boy counselors were in it. I just liked skits. We sat together in the middle row, chattering about last night’s conversations, trying to get a sideways glance from the younger girls in front of us. When the lights went down, everyone cheered as counselor Hot Rob emerged wearing a plain, white v-neck. Then, all of a sudden, he was swept into a whirlwind of other counselors who proceeded to dirty his shirt with things like beer, mustard, and lipstick. He held up his hand to this all-consuming whirlwind of debauchery and everything ceased. He held up a Bible and a bright light shone from the ceiling. A girl counselor wearing a clean white v-neck waked onstage and removed Hot Rob’s dirty shirt to reveal a clean, new v-neck underneath it. Hot Rob and the girl counselor walked off stage, hand-in-hand, and never looked back.

That night after cabin time and another casual masturbation conversation, I curled up in my bunk, waited until everyone fell asleep, and stuck my right hand down the inside of my pajama pants. I was finally gonna get this whole Christian thing, I thought as I reached for my clitoris. Tomorrow I would confess my “sins” to Rosie and she would laugh and tell me about hers. Together we would walk away, hand-in-hand, with matching white v-necks, pure and clean. It made perfect sense.

I found her sitting by the river the next day, in a rare moment of solitude. She was waiting for Erin to come out of the cabin for lunch. Nervous, but strangely excited, I sat down next to her and stared at the heat waves rippling on the water. She asked how I was liking Camp so far and I smiled and told her it had been Awesome so far (with a capital “A,” a favorite adjective at Camp). She smiled. I counted the seconds in my head or the beats in my heart until she turned to look at me. I looked back down at the river.

“So do you guys ever talk about masturbation and stuff?” I muttered.

“What?” she said “Ew. That’s gross.” She laughed nervously and threw a rock at the sun’s reflection on the water. It rippled for a second and then returned to a semi-perfect golden sphere. I felt older than Rosie Collins for the first time in my life. Secretly, I knew that soon enough Rosie would need to feel clean again one day, and I would be there waiting with a clean, white v-neck — or a new pair of shoes — whichever she preferred.


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Lemon

Lemon has written 15 articles for us.

35 Comments

  1. I kind of wish female masturbation was talked about openly more. When I was a lot younger I really only thought guys were capable of it, so I didn’t understand what I was doing haha.

    • Oh, lord. When I was about 15 and in super repressive Irish Catholic school I got hold of a copy of The Vagina Monologues and Sarah Bunting’s slut rant (http://tomatonation.com/culture-and-criticism/a-four-letter-word/) and was like “Everyone, we have to talk about masturbation NOW.” By the time I was done I don’t think anyone within a 10-block radius of me didn’t know about it. It was basically a slightly obnoxious one-girl riot movement. Good times.

      (Reasons I never became a prefect, #254.)

    • real talk: the way i wooed my first girlfriend was me admitting out loud that I masturbated and often. I had just turned fifteen and probably had bigger ovaries then than I do now.

    • Srsly, I also went to an Irish Catholic school and when I was 14 I cried on the way to school because I thought that people would be able to tell what I’d done by looking at me and would think I was a pervert.

      ALSO, thanks to the whole “all girls masturbate but no one talks about it” thing, I thought “all girls are sexually attracted to other women and no one talks about it either, right…?!”

      • I thought the same thing and didn’t realize that that wasn’t the case until one day when I accidentally watched But I’m a Cheerleader and realized that Megan and I were essentially the same person.

      • “We all have feelings for our girlfriends Dana, it doesn’t mean you have to act on them.”

    • I’d never even heard the word ‘masturbation’ until I was in 7th grade and my best friend explained it to me in terms of “this is something gross that guys do.” I think I was 16 when I learned that girls could do it, and I learned that from a religious book that said that it was sinful.

    • I actually learned about masturbation from two of my guy friends. They asked me if I had ever masturbated and I lied and said I hadn’t and we actually got into a really good conversation about it. But I always got along better with guys when I was growing up. They were also the first people I came out to.

  2. Being an Episcopalian and a Texan who grew up going to church camp, this article triggers conflicting feelings of nostalgia and nausea. Brilliant nonetheless!

  3. Gonna come across as really ignorant, but: were all those 13-yo girls lying about their sexual encounters, or is it really that prevalent in America?? I feel old and sheltered right now.

    • i think they could have very easily been lying, but when i was 13 i wholeheartedly believed them. some of the girls were more convincing than others. but also, it was kind of ambiguous because “going too far” could have meant anything from holding hands or touching to making out. either way it was always a sort of dramatic confession.

      • Thanks for explaining, Lemon.
        Full disclaimer: in my middle school in France in the mid-90s, there were only one or two person per class who had boyfriends/girlfriends. And I don’t think they did much at all. The rest of us, we were all single. Even in high school… Very few people were in relationships (we don’t “date” in France. We’re either single or in a relationship). So anyway, hearing about sexually active 13-year-olds being the “norm” made me go O_o
        So, not so much a case of “Different times, different places” as just a bunch of lying teens. Okay, I feel better. :)

        • If you want to maintain that feeling of ‘better’, don’t move to the UK. Kids are doing it at 12 here and not lying about it.

      • Also I love this: “an attitude that I thought exuded a cool nonchalance, but probably came off as more of an awkward laziness”
        Very familiar! ^^

    • In elementary school, it was pretty common for girls of a certain boldness and age bracket to tell filthy anatomically-impossible jokes or outrageously fabricated sexual experiences in order to gain social currency. Since none of us knew a damn thing about the mechanics of sex or how anything actually worked–and anyone who DID know anything was suspect of being The Wrong Kind Of Girl–it was an easy way to get everyone’s rapt attention.

  4. This is so irrelevant but I have been searching for the word “interdependent” all my life. Forreal. My google searches are 50% along the lines of “opposite of mutually exclusive” (cuz lets get real, mutually ‘inclusive’ just isnt it).

    Damn. Thank you so much.

    • That’s funny, I got hung up on how good of a word “interdependent” was when I was reading too.

  5. I was between 12 and 14 when I finally learned about the word “masturbation.” I knew people touched themselves, I just didn’t know there was a word for it! Stupid catholic school and its lame sex ed class.

  6. This is relevant to my interests since I went to church camp for may years and its an odd experience that needs talked about along with masturbation.

    However, I wish I got find out what happened with Rosie. Things ended too abruptly.

  7. Beer, mustard, and lipstick? That sounds like some interesting debauchery. (What happens at Oktoberfest stays at Oktoberfest?)

  8. I had no idea that girls didn’t know that other girls masturbate. I knew a lot of my friends that did when we were young. I used to go to sleepovers and my friends would show me how they masturbated when we took showers. I thought everybody did that??
    *(LONGish)Side note* I also went to an Evangelical Bible Camp(Brookhill in Arkansas). I went for 4 summers and was a counselor for one summer after that, too. By the time I was a counselor I had began to have questions about the appropriateness of some of the views being taught. I guess they ID’d me as a bit of a skeptic and outsider so I was sent off for kitchen duty for the last month of the summer. After that I went off to to college and I started to come to terms with being gay, I send several e-mail to the “preacher” running this camp. Initially, I assumed that the guy was just a little bit confused about the fact that he was seriously mind-fucking a bunch of little helpless queers into hating themselves and I was there to help him realize the error of his ways. I WAS SO WRONG, you guys so wrong!! He responded with the most hateful and bitter communication that I have ever been privy to. (Any my dad is a lawyer and I’m in law school so I’ve been privy to some awful shit) Every word was snarling and dripping with vitriol and venom. I sent more e-mails to him that I poured over to make sure that they presented my points as best as I was able. He continues to spew hate at unsuspecting kids who just wanted to make friends and shoot arrows a few weeks every summer…

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