I Was A Baby Queer at Bible Camp

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…

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.

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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Special Note: Autostraddle’s “First Person” personal essays do not necessarily reflect the ideals of Autostraddle or its editors, nor do any First Person writers intend to speak on behalf of anyone other than themselves. First Person writers are simply speaking honestly from their own hearts.

NYC Rock Camp Director Karla Schickele Is Badass: The Autostraddle Interview

This is the second time I’ve interviewed Karla Schickele, executive director and founder of Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls in New York, but last time we spoke I didn’t get to say the words “gender binary.” That’s the difference between interviewing Karla for my day job at a parenting magazine and interviewing her for you rockstar queers at Autostraddle. Read on to learn more about why Karla started the camp, what makes her cry every summer, the camp’s kick-ass non-discrimination policy, and much more rockin’ goodness.

What made you decide to start a girls rock camp in New York?

I volunteered at the Portland Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls in 2003 and 2004 as a bass teacher and band coach. I just immediately got hooked. It was the most extraordinary environment that I ever found myself in. The whole thing was so inspiring… it completely blew my mind. I knew that it was what I wanted to do with my life, so after the second summer I asked the organizers there if it was okay if I tried to start [a camp] in New York. I got their blessing, so a group of us started working together and the following summer we had our first session in New York. It just felt like a good thing for the world–beyond music–that I really wanted to be involved in.

When you started Willie Mae, were there already a lot of girls rock camps out there?

There were very few. We started in 2005, and in 2007 there was the first convening of rock camps and there were seven of us, including a camp in Sweden called Popkollo that had started up around the same time as the Portland camp but didn’t know the Portland camp existed. It was just sort of an idea whose time had come. And then we just had this year’s conference last month, and there were 40 camps from all over the world and more than 100 people. It’s been a complete explosion.

Why did you decide to name the camp after Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton?

We were interested in giving it a name that was a little bit more poetic, and also specific. We try to use everything that happens at Rock Camp as an opportunity to educate people about some of the pioneering women of music, and Big Mama Thornton felt like a good example because she made some great music and also had some difficulty as a woman–and as a woman of color–in the music industry, and had to overcome a lot of challenges in order to make her art. And we liked the sound of “Willie Mae”; it felt like a musical sounding name.

How did Ladies Rock Camp evolve?

It came out of Portland, like the original program model. They started it as a fundraiser for their activities, and also because so many adult women say, “I wish that Rock Camp been around when I was a kid.” Our first Ladies Rock Camp session was pretty early on and it was really well received. We’ve been doing them ever since, but last year we made a pretty big change: we changed it from a fundraising event into a program. Now it’s offered with sliding scale tuition, like all of our youth programs.

Tell me a little bit about Ladies Rock Camp. What can people expect when they sign up?

They can expect joy! [laughs] And to have any nervousness that they might encounter at the prospect of starting a band on Friday and playing your first gig on Sunday completely met with encouragement and support and cheering on by everyone around them. We do instant bands at Ladies Rock Camp but we also do instant community. It’s really extraordinary how by the end of the first day there’s a real community of people who want to rock, and also who want to encourage each other to try something new and take some creative risks and to not be afraid to play a quote unquote “wrong note”, or to put out a lyrical idea that they might feel shy about. All of these things that feel so daunting in every day life become very possible and much less scary in an environment like Ladies Rock Camp.

Is there a typical “Ladies Rock Camper”? Is there anyone who should NOT go to camp?

I mean, I think that camp is for everyone. We have a lot of shy and nervous folks, but then we have folks who come in who say, “I’m a rocker, I know all the chords, I know everything,” and then by the end of the weekend they might learn some new stuff that they didn’t even know was out there to learn. The experience really lends itself not only to musical beginners and to people with a lot of experience, but also to a range of personalities. We have some people who come and say, “I’ve been daring myself to do this for four years, and this is the first year I finally got up the nerve to really do it.” I guess the only person who shouldn’t come to rock camp is the person who’s dead set against supporting other people. That wouldn’t really jive with us.

So there’s no average profile?

No! And that’s one of the great things, that there’s no average profile at all. We’ve had campers who are 19 years old and we’ve had campers who are in their 70s and then everyone in between, from all backgrounds and ranges of experience. It was cool, there was one band that had a young person in her 20s and then some older campers who were in their late 60s, and they wrote a protest song. The different members of the band wrote from their own backgrounds of protest music which spanned all these decades of music.

That’s so cool! Like a history lesson.

Yeah, really cool stuff like that can happen. People get nervous that camp isn’t long enough, but we feel like there’s something to be said for not having too much time to over-think stuff. You join a band on Friday, you write a song, and then you rock it on Sunday. The experience of just jumping in and doing something like that can be really empowering for making change in other areas of your life.

Let’s talk about your awesome super-inclusive non-discrimination policy that appears on your mission page. It feels very deliberate and I’d love to hear how it came about. (Guys, you can check out the full text here, but FYI here is a teeny tiny portion of what it says: “Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls welcomes campers who self-identify as female, trans, and gender non-conforming…The organization welcomes the support of male-identified allies, and expects male-identified allies who would like to volunteer to respect the importance of leadership by women.”)

Questions around gender are something that are really important to us as an organization and something that we’re actively in conversation about as an organization. Our policies and statements reflect a lot of values that we hold that we don’t consider to be mutually exclusive. We value the importance of there being a space for female-identified people, and we also value the importance of creating an environment that is inclusive of trans-identified and gender non-conforming folks. So that’s the reason behind our policy. You know, it’s called Ladies Rock Camp…but we feel very strongly about creating an environment that is welcoming and inclusive of people who may not identify as female.

What has been the most rewarding thing for you about starting and running the camp?

Oh man! You know, the Girls Showcase is always really moving to me, but it’s at the Ladies Rock Camp Showcase that I always cry. I’m so blown away by the bravery, and the arc of amazingness that I see in a group of 50 women who on Friday are not sure what they’ve gotten themselves into, but are such total rock stars on Sunday. It just kind of blows my mind every time.

Sign up for Ladies Rock Camp. Karla suggests signing up sooner rather than later so you have a better chance of getting your first choice instrument (you will be asked for your preference, but there must be a balance so it is a first come first serve situation.) Karla also suggests that “giving the gift of rock camp” makes an amazing Mother’s Day gift (OMG imagine sending your mom to rock camp)!

Rock n’ Roll Camp: Volunteering Is The Purest Form of Awesome

This is our second post about the Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls. To read all our “On Camp” posts, click this image:

I went to college thinking I’d be an environmental scientist, but by the spring I’d switched majors to communications and was quietly revisiting old dreams of being artist and working with musicians. I’d been running off to New York on the weekends, going to shows and just walking around, taking pictures, when a tuition refund of $3,000 turned my life around. It was more money than I’d ever had or even thought I’d have, and the possibilities seemed endless! Suddenly, this city I’d been pining for — that life — could actually be mine. In the span of a few days I found a sublet in a collective in New York City and filled out a form online for my one planned responsibility for the summer: Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls. I’d kept WMRC in my heart since stumbling across it when I was 17, and now I was going, for real.

A couple months later, I was navigating New York like a pro — reading in the park, finding odd jobs on CL and going to bars that served free food. But I didn’t really have many friends, thanks to a shyness that I couldn’t seem to shake, despite the young confidence I had backpacks full of at the time. I didn’t know where all the people like me were, or how I would even talk to them if I saw one in the wild.

All of that changed during the training session for first-time Rock Camp volunteers. We stuffed into a small high school cafeteria and started learning what camp meant. It was more progressive, more in-tune and more supportive than I thought possible. Everyone, myself included, was so enthusiastic, and it felt so much easier to interact in that air. There was direction. I was quiet, but instead of ignoring me, the people around me made an effort to include me and ask me what I thought. These were my people — these women with books in their purses, smiling queers and confident ones who raised their hands to clarify the meaning of “people first language.” We talked about intentional safe space, and what it meant to build that with bare hands. It was a day that crackled and buzzed with revelations and language and feelings. It was a primer for the shock of rock camp.

My life was so changed by Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls that in memory, I exist “before camp” and “after camp.” I’d been in spaces labeled “safe” before, but nothing compared to WMRC. The environment of camp gave me the most effective model for forging affirming and supportive spaces within my own life.

One of the most mindblowing facts about the Rock Camps across the world is that their summer programs are staffed almost entirely by unpaid volunteers. (Just kidding, we’re actually paid in burritos, Luna bars and happiness.) We do almost every job at camp — from working the kitchen to wrangling kids — and even though the camps are music based, no music experience is required to volunteer. From the first year I was there, I realized that Rock Camp was like a secret world where suddenly everyone I interacted with had good taste in music and a cool bookshelf at home, also probably a pet with a funny name. Their ‘day jobs’ were just as awesome as they were: social workers, badass zinesters, incredible nannies, award-winning writers and journalists, groundbreaking artists and of course, musicians. I mean, these are the people who change the world.

Here’s a list of bands with members who volunteer at Willie Mae Rock Camp in NYC!

Rock Camp Volunteers, Totally Relevant To Your Interests

Slothrust is a NYC-based blues-influenced grunge band made up of WMRC volunteer Leah Wellbaum and bandmates Kyle Bann and Will Gorin. The three graduated from Sarah Lawrence with Jazz and Blues degrees. With their irresistible punchy momentum and undeniable technical precision, Slothrust updates grunge to a new territory without giving up any lo-fi ground. They’re currently booking a national tour so keep on the look out for a show in your area! For those in NYC, they play Glasslands on May 10.

Sabrina Chap has the voice of a “whiskey angel”, an apt description of her soulful, playful powerhouse of a voice. She has volunteered at Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls for three years and performed at the Girls Rock! Chicago. Her newest album, We Are the Parade, is described as a “queertastic horn explosion” and that sounds really exciting. Sabrina is also the editor of the Lambda-nominated compilation Live Through This: On Creativity and Self Destruction, which features many people loved by Autostraddle, including Sara Quin, Eileen Miles and (rock camp volunteer!) Cristy Road. The book is going into its second edition and adding pieces by Margaret Cho and Amanda Palmer and other people you might care about.

k. is the music project of Karla Schickele. Karla is the Executive Director of Willie Mae Rock Camp and a former volunteer of the Portland’s Rock ‘N’ Roll Camp for Girls. Her band mates, Ruth Lockwood and Matt Sutton are rock camp veterans, too. The music of k. shines with calm and confident melodies ridden by the purity of Karla’s haunting alto. The sparse but insistent percussion creates the perfect backdrop to their album History Grows, bringing the multi-instrumental talents of the trio to the forefront. They’re releasing a new album in May! For those in the NYC area, k, is having a record release show at Zebulon May 12 and you should go.

We’ve featured Clinical Trials in the past and band members Somer Bingham and Caryn Havlik are familiar faces at WMRC. Both also have the stage energy of legends and really endearing smiles. Crystal described their latest album Bleed Me as “a panther; it’s a little dark and dangerous, it stalks and menaces and makes my heart thump that tiny bit faster” and there aren’t words better than that. You can catch Somer on the upcoming season of The Real L Word!

Starina is a Chicago native who has volunteered as a band coach and guitar teacher at WMRC for two summers, currently works as part of the year-round Music Lab after-school program, and previously volunteered at Girls Rock! Chicago. Her album The Snow Years comes out on July 1, 2012 and she plays a free show at Pete’s Candy Store on May 19th.

The Shondes have gotten a lot of attention— from VH1’s Best Week Ever Blog to Pitchfork and Entertainment Weekly, who called them “giddy garage melodics with Sleater-Kinney twist”. The Shondes played a lunchtime showcase at WMRC this summer and their guitarist Fureigh has volunteered as a guitar teacher since 2006. They played a bunch of shows at SXSW this year, and they’re heading off to their first European tour this year. They’re currently on tour in the US to promote their album Searchlights, check their Facebook to see if they’re coming to your area, they’re not to be missed.

Naomi Less is a Jewish rock musician and writes for pre-teens, teens and adults. In addition to volunteering at WMRC every year, she has a unique project called Jewish Chicks Rock, doing music workshops with girls at camps and in schools. She wants to inspire more girls to pick up instruments and express themselves.

Keyke is a singer-songwriter and a vocal standout. Her urgent twang and simple inspired lyrics developed through an uncommon writing style. She improvises all her music and transcribes herself later. She has a lot of stories and a cat named Juniper.

Jane Lee Hooker’s name is a twist on John Lee Hooker, the blues legend who is one of their influences. Another is Big Mama Thornton, who Willie Mae Rock Camp is named after. Their drummer and rock camp drum teacher, Melissa, was picked for the band before finishing her audition. All five members are mad talented ladies with stage names like “T Bone” and “Hail Mary”. Between the five of them they’ve had about 100 years of experience touring in the US and abroad. They play rad rock covers of blues songs.

Glass Anchors is the band of WMRC volunteer Annie Sicherman (and currently features another rock camp volunteer on bass!). Her music is crafted to break your heart in a good way; Annie’s velvety voice coaxes the pieces back together. Glass Anchors is signed to Cakeshop’s in-house label Capeshok.

 Volunteers Relevant To Your Intersts Playlist

Rock Camp from Autostraddle on 8tracks.

We Are the Parade – Sabrina Chap
Are You Ready – The Shodes
Sparrow – Glass Anchors
Stevie – k.
Animal – Clinical Trials
Bobbie Joe Watkins – Keyke
Shouth ’em Out – Naomi Less
Before We Began – Starina
Shake Mix – Jane Lee Hooker
7:30am – Slothrust

Volunteering is such a great way to experience camp as an adult. Find your local Rock Camp and see what you can do! Share your own Rock Camp volunteering stories in the comments, and if you’ve been as a camper, tell us about your awesome volunteers!

Rock n’ Roll Camp for Girls: Role Models, Riot Grrrls and Revolutions

Feature image from Dania Maxwell / The Oregonian

I was never a kid who went to camp. My parents were broke, and I wasn’t a fan of having to wake up early in the summertime anyway. But when my dad read about a brand new day camp, he clipped the article out of the local alternative weekly for me. Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls cost only $20 for the week, and he hoped it would inspire me to learn to play the used drums he had bought me a few weeks before to celebrate my eighth grade graduation.

I filled out the application, got my acceptance letter, and wrote the dates of the camp on my calendar in marker. At 14, I was a painfully shy and very insecure kid. I had few friends, thought I was hideous, and spent most of my time reading books, watching Buffy and listening to music. I wanted this camp to turn me into a rock star.

Now there are Rock ‘n’ Roll Camps for Girls all over the world, but the first one happened in the summer of 2001 in Portland, Oregon. I didn’t know that the camp would eventually have its own building, that the idea would spread all over, that there would be a documentary and all sorts of press for years to come. I just really hoped I would fit in and also learn to play the drums.

I quickly figured out this wasn’t a place where I had to worry about fitting in — everyone accepted each other. There were girls who were dressed punk, and girls who looked like they were the popular girls at their schools, in Gap and Abercrombie, and girls who looked like they didn’t care about clothes at all. Weirdly enough, clothes didn’t end up defining who hung out with whom. It wasn’t like anything I had ever experienced. I had discussions with counselors — all volunteers, mostly in their twenties — about feminist issues and they talked to me like I was smart and what I had to say was interesting. Most of the girls were learning new things and taking risks and we were all working together because at the end of the week we would be on stage at the showcase. We were also all working together to figure out what room we were supposed to be in — the first year of camp took place on a huge college campus and everyone was constantly getting lost. There was no time to tear each other down.

I learned about zines from Nicole Georges, I learned about fat-positivity from Nomy Lamm, I discovered riot grrl music years after it happened but at the exact time I really needed it in my life. There was a self-defense class that made me feel like I could be physically powerful, which was not a feeling I had experienced before. We stood in a circle and took turns screaming and I discovered how loud my voice could be. I got to know adult women — musicians and camp volunteers — who were awesome because of who they were and what they did, not because of how skinny they were or because boys liked them. For the first time in my life, I had actual role models.

In the fall I started high school. I was still shy, but I was excited about playing my drums. I listened to Sleater-Kinney CDs in my bedroom nonstop. I spent a lot of time thinking about Carrie Brownstein. A lot of time.

The next summer, I went back to camp. It was even better than the last year. It was held in a small building they rented, instead of in random rooms all over a college campus. It felt organized, like a real summer camp instead of a class project. Everyone being in such close quarters inspired more socializing and spontaneity, like impromptu lunchtime dance parties in the yard to Le Tigre songs. As Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls grew up, I was doing some growing too. My shyness was slowly fading. I was excited instead of terrified about the showcase, and it was easier to make new friends.

This was the year when I started to realize a lot of the camp volunteers were probably not straight. It was also the year I started thinking more and more about how I might not be either. It didn’t seem as scary anymore. Near the end of the week, I was chatting with a friend I had gotten close to the year before, who was also learning drums. She was older and wiser than me and I was amazed that she wanted to be my friend.

“Who’s your favorite drum teacher?” she asked.

“Umm I really like Rachel, she’s so nice. But I think Jordan is the cutest,” I said, feeling like it was a very daring thing to say. Jordan looked like a tiny butch elf. I had listened to her band’s music and it just sounded like noise to me but there was something about her that I liked.

“Jordan is really cute,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said, feeling more confident. “I have a crush on her. I’m bisexual.”

“Yeah, I’m bisexual too,” she said.

That was the first time I came out to anyone, and it was pretty amazing to do it in an environment where I knew no one would judge me. Not that I made a general camp announcement or anything, but I could have, and it would have been fine. I felt lighter. The whole world just seemed less frightening.

That week Sleater-Kinney played a benefit show for the camp and I was invited to dance on stage along with some other girls. OK, so I was too shy to actually dance on stage. I just stood there. But it was still amazing.

The third year I went to camp, I was about to turn 16. Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls finally had its very own building instead of a borrowed space. I had survived two years of high school. I was still shy, but I had an inner confidence that I didn’t have before. I was starting to accept my body for what it was, with the help of so many talks about body image at camp. I was beginning to suspect that maybe, in a post-high school world, being queer would actually make me cooler instead of making me feel like more of an outsider. I got to have a conversation with Carrie Brownstein and I tried to be chill about it even though all I was thinking was, I want a girl like this to be my girlfriend. (Carrie, if you’re reading this, I’m 24 now so it’s not creepy if you want to hang out sometime.) I decided to branch out from the drums—I had been taking lessons for a while anyway—and learned to DJ instead.

I really want to live in a reality where every girl has the opportunity to go to a Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls, or at least has an experience where she feels completely accepted, has positive role models and gets to meet Carrie Brownstein. Sometimes I try to imagine an alternate reality where I never went to camp, and I see a life full of crash diets, being afraid to leave my apartment and hating my queer self. Maybe that’s an exaggeration, and I could have figured things out on my own eventually, but I know Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls had a huge impact on who I am today. As an adult I’ve volunteered and given money, and I tell every girl I meet she should go. I figure it’s an investment in the future, because of course I want a future where all women are strong and confident and know how to rock out, or at least scream really loud.

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Special Note: Autostraddle’s “First Person” personal essays do not necessarily reflect the ideals of Autostraddle or its editors, nor do any First Person writers intend to speak on behalf of anyone other than themselves. First Person writers are simply speaking honestly from their own hearts.

OPEN THREAD: Let’s Talk About How Awesome A-Camp Was

I’m sitting at the desk in Crystal’s hotel room — she’s flying out to Australia tonight, so Marni and I stayed with her here last night — and I slept for like eight entire hours and I’m not even hungover! So I’m feeling pretty good, is what I’m telling you. But not as good as I felt at A-Camp — sans sleep, nutrients or sobriety — because nothing in the entire world that I’ve seen so far has felt as good as A-Camp. As you may or may not know, I’ve had a LOT of feelings throughout my tender exploratory life on earth, but I don’t know yet how to talk about the A-Camp feelings.

Luckily, we’ve got an eight-hour drive and two battles with transportation companies ahead of us today, and you know what that means — lots of time to process!

For now, I have this: I wish it had gone on and on and on and on, just like in the song, that I could’ve sat down and talked to every single camper instead of just some of the campers, that I had words for this (rather than just facial expressions). I’ve never been so proud of my 35-strong team and so honored to be working with them, or more in awe of their incredible talent and intelligence and spirit — and I’d like to specifically mention Robin and Marni here, too, ’cause they organized and ran this weekend like pros.

I’ve never been so proud of all of you — 163 beautiful, energetic women and otherwise-identified queers — who came to a spot in the mountains from all over the world with such enormously positive attitudes and open arms. We talked about writing, made ‘zines, went hiking, drank tea, cross-stitched, pressed flowers, got alternative lifestyle haircuts, had our breasts pelted by giant super soakers wielded by Julie Goldman & Brandy Howard, met and geeked, performed slam poetry, played jeopardy, took photos, did interviews for Carly’s documentary, speed-dated with Hannah Hart, learned to sing with Haviland, attended gender panels and queer women of color panels and sex panels and queer-women-in-media panels and activism panels and career panels and formspring panels and also we drank/danced/laughed/sang/played/loved. I laughed so fucking hard my jaw ached by the end of every day, and we all clapped and cheered for all the things. And I believe somewhere in between planning elaborate pranks on one another, many of you got laid!

But maybe the one personal memememe feeling I think I’ve got right now at 30 minutes ’til check-out and three unpacked bags is that maybe this weekend I finally started to get it, what you’ve been telling me all along — I did this, right? I found you crazy-ass motherfuckers and we made this place and I had this vision and you all helped me realize it and we all found our words and now lots of people have been transformed forever and we have THIS — THIS THING! So — I guess I’m pretty proud of myself, too.

So yes, we’re looking at October (UPDATE: Maybe September or November actually, we’ll let you know!) for our next A-Camp event — in California again, although we do plan to host camps on other coasts hopefully next year (we’re aware of your 50 billion requests for this, never fear) — and I need to see all of your faces and also a lot of new faces next time.

And now I turn this open thread over to you and your feelings. We’ll have lots of camp-related content throughout the week to share our joy with you, but if you’re anything like me, you probably have lots of joy you already need to talk about right now. Take it away, special snowflakes!

Five Small Contributions: On Being A Queer Person of Color

To have a conversation about race is too singular. And to have a conversation about being a queer person of color? Oh, girl. That is an encyclopedia of conversations, stories, dialogues, whatever. And by encyclopedia, I mean the whole set.

At A-Camp, a large bunch of the writers of color from the website will be coming together in order to properly descend upon the campers with their wisdom and wit about race. Not really. But there will be a panel! When we sat down to talk about the topics, they kind of built into a laundry list. After all, what isn’t relevant? Race isn’t a “part” or a “component.” It’s the whole she-bang. (Get it?)

We wanted to sit down and share stories with you around this virtual campfire to somehow express one little piece of what it means to be queer and a person of color in this crazy, crazy world. Please take us as we are. And above all, please let us know about your own experiences! This is a conversation, after all.

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That’s Not My Name

by Brittani Nichols

Labels and identity are funny creatures. As a person of color (and as a woman) I was slapped with a set of expectations from the day I was born. Every person I come in contact with has their own unique assortment of anticipations about who I am as a person based on these absolute and non-negotiable aspects of my identity. I would love to wake up every morning and choose to be a woman or choose to be black but I can’t and though it is something I’m saddled with, it’s also something I embrace, flaunt, and value. Though being gay doesn’t fall entirely outside of this scope, I’ve found I can craft my queer identity to be more nuanced with about half the effort. To embrace a title is to partially surrender some aspects of who you are as a person or at least willfully participate in the muting of certain qualities that don’t jump to mind when some titles are invoked.

“You describe yourself as preppy, right? You wear a lot of cardigans.” – a lady homo

I don’t truly identify as any of the many subcategories we use in the lesbian vernacular. My own paranoia about these titles, whether fed by my own insecurities or not, complicates a process which some may find freeing and exciting–and if you don’t believe that, you haven’t encountered the right high femme. Countless times after being asked “what am I?” has a discussion broken out about my qualifications. Am I a stud? A boi? A stemme? Butch? Sporty? A tweener? I have the same problem here that I do pretty much all the time. I’m weird and no one really knows what to do with me. I’m only bothered by these labels because there’s something I’m uncomfortable with. I don’t think it’s the perceived masculinity of being called butch, AG, or stud that causes it. Rather it’s the racially coded and oft painful stereotypes that accompany the terms.

“You don’t want to be butch. You want to be stud. Studs have swag.” – a gay lady

As is the case with a lot of things people don’t encounter in their own lives, you might pull from popular culture to draw a picture in your mind. And who’s the most popular stud in America? Snoop from The Wire? That’s not really the image I want popping up when people think of me. Studs are often aligned with black masculinity and I don’t like being called aggressive because it’s often paired with the word ‘too’. There are qualities I’ve worked hard as shit to become associated with that unfortunately aren’t popularly aligned with black masculinity and I feel like if I identified as stud, I’d be stripping myself of those things. If I could barely get people to respect me as an intellectual as straight mostly gender-conforming Brittani, getting people to believe a black stud lesbian could be knowledgeable on anything even remotely related to academia seems a daunting task that is teetering on impossible.

“You dress like a tweener but you have a boi attitude.” – a lesbian

I may refer to myself as a bro or stud or pretty much anything in a moment the same way I call myself gay, queer, or lesbian. I don’t necessarily object to being placed in these categories. I just don’t make a point of belonging to them. They all apply and yet none of them do. None of them quite fit but they’re not meant to capture every degree or detail and I don’t expect them to. But at least I get to choose. At least I get a say. There’s a power in saying, “Yes, I am a crunchy ass granola lesbian” but there’s also a power in saying, “No, I’m not a crunchy ass granola lesbian.” Will me saying that keep someone from filing me away in that box in their brain? Probably not. But it makes me feel a little better for whatever reason.

I’m everything and nothing and that’s one of the things about my queer identity I cherish because it’s something that I feel being black doesn’t afford me.

This Is An Essay About My Hair

by Carmen Rios

I got my hair cut on May 10, 2010. I wrote about it the night before on Tumblr:

the next time washington sees me i will not look like myself, and the last look from new jersey windows is going to be bright and big and voluminous and brave.

i was never brave.

Most people think a haircut is this thing you do. I feel like even now haircuts induce panic in me where they simply irritate everyone else. I think it’s probably because to most people, a haircut is a thing you do and to me, my hair is everything I am in this one thing.

For years I hated my hair so much that it was impossible not to kind of dislike myself. Ew. Being ten, and thirteen, and different is one of the most uncomfortable experiences to live through out of all of the experiences available in a lifetime. I applied gels, used ceramic irons, and searched through relaxers using trial-and-error testing. I distinctly remember the first time something actually worked as the first time I ever believed I was beautiful. It made my hair so different that I looked like someone else entirely. I was happy about that.

After that, though, different stuff started making me feel beautiful. I made these amazing friends during my first years of college, and that made me forget about whether or not I was beautiful, because I was satiated, full of love. I also kind of finally felt like I fit in with something and that made me feel beautiful. Eventually, there was a person who loved me (I’m 99% sure) and all these other people who cared deeply about me and I lived in this big, white house in Cleveland Park with them and I began growing my hair out, growing it and growing it, frizzy and natural and not straightened or altered. Eventually someone finally said the words to me: “your hair is just so cool.” It was Libby and I admired her and suddenly, I admired myself. I cancelled my hair appointment that summer and continued growing out the straightened strands so I could eventually cut it into an afro and only wear what was true me. I felt more beautiful than ever. Kind of like it would never go away. It hasn’t.

I grew up with pale skin and blue eyes and I saw my hair as this one obstacle, every morning, every day, in every photo, stopping me from being like everyone else. All of my friends had pale skin and blue eyes and shiny, long hair, and I just had this absent father and his one remaining piece, this mane, this untamable, unchangeable thing. And to think, I didn’t even appreciate it! Now I wake up every morning and I’m just so certainly not everyone else – the models, the magazine pictures, everything that used to terrorize me about my body and my hair and the way I dressed – that I figure fuck it, they don’t matter anymore. Suddenly I’m beautiful and wearing exactly what looks good on “my body type.” Suddenly I’m outside of all of it, free from all of it, living in silence in a world that never stops telling girls who they should be. Hell, there isn’t even an afro on my edition of The Sims. It’s because I live on the perimeter of everyone else’s imagination, and right outside of their boundaries of reality. I live in a completely different world than all of these other people. My own world. And suddenly I love being so utterly only Carmen Rios that I can’t help but love myself.

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Solidarity

by Katrina Casino

I think I found out that I wasn’t white when I was about seven years old. I was growing up in New York City at that point, so I guess you could say I was surrounded by diversity, and I guess that you could evidence that as being true through the fact that I had no idea what diversity was. I didn’t know I wasn’t white because I didn’t know what whiteness was. I knew the guy who owned the corner store pronounced all his words differently than I did. I knew that the restaurant across the street sold tacos but that all of the workers were Japanese, and that there was something strange and maybe even comical about that, though I didn’t really know why. There was a girl named Jocelyn in my first-grade class. She was Chinese-American, and one day someone called me her name by accident. And someone else said, “Well you look like Jocelyn!” and someone else said “Are you related?” And although I didn’t have the words to say it at the time, I knew that racial innocence shit was over for me right then.

I wasn’t friends with any of the Asian kids; I stayed as far away from them as possible. I didn’t care if they were Japanese or Chinese or Korean and I was Filipino. I knew no one would bother to differentiate between us, so I would have to do it myself. I hated their silence, as well as my own. I wanted to be loud, to be anything but them. By the end of high school, I was so done. It had been 12 years since I realized I wasn’t white, and since then I had been mistaken for literally every Asian girl I had ever met. I was tired of my Asianness being dismissed as a fucking joke. I didn’t think I was different, I didn’t feel different, so why was everyone insisting that I was?

I graduated high school and went to a private university on the East Coast to study business. I was mistaken for an international student. I switched my major to sociology. I learned the academic language of inequality and injustice, but my classmates were so White and so Upper-Middle Class that every conversation we had just seemed distant and rhetorical, like we were analyzing literature. But I figured that’s what academia was, like you were just supposed to look at something, not relate to it.

I wished I had been given the language to express what I was feeling. I wish I knew that language existed so I could have searched for it; instead I meticulously perfected my white English, which would eventually turn on me. When I got older I would receive compliments on my fluency because, of course, no one who looks like me should be expected to speak English so well. And when I got catcalled on the street and didn’t respond, it wasn’t because I understood them perfectly. To them, it must have been because I didn’t understand them at all. So I hear “konichiwa” and “ni hao.” I never had the language to turn around and say, “Yo, that’s racist.”

Having POC conversations and creating POC spaces is important because without these conversations, we sometimes feel like we’re alone, that our experiences – both positive and negative – are individual rather than shared. It’s easy to misunderstand what we’re mad at. These conversations help us know who we are, what we should be proud of and the systems that work against us. We need to realize that stereotypes and violence hurt all of us and that the solution is not silence, but solidarity.

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Writing About Race

by Whitney Pow

If you want to write about race, you have to make yourself vulnerable. You have to talk about the time that boy called you a “china doll” with a sneer at a swimming pool when you were eight. You have to talk about how you felt when your elementary school classmate’s grandma called you an “oriental girl” and couldn’t remember your name but could remember your white classmates’ names. You have to own all of the experiences you’ve had with race and racism and look at them, point blank, and figure out how to talk about them. Because talking about all of these memories, these pieces of your identity, the pieces that make you a person of color, is an important, angry, frustrating process. You look at everything you’ve ever experienced and maybe feel angry. Maybe furious. That’s okay. Write it down.

Writing about race involves taking down your defenses, and getting rid of the antagonistic voices in your head, nixing the part of you that tells you “people won’t think what I have to say is important.” You put your heart and brain and fragile identity on a table for people to look at and inspect, because people need to read about it — to identify with it, to think about it. You stand behind what you have to say about race, even when there is a seemingly endless number of racist comments tagged onto your articles by anonymous authors. Sometimes it gets so overwhelming you might have to shut off the computer for the evening and cry a little and maybe eat some dinner and take a nap.

But still you get back on it — you try to respond to the people who ask genuine questions, and you continue writing even when the anonymous commenters tell you you’re being “too sensitive” about race. You kind of want to punch these people in the face because how are you being too sensitive? You are talking about how racism is real and affects your life. You’ve felt that pit in your stomach for days after that white guy started speaking to you in broken English because he assumed you were foreign or a half-wit and you were too shocked at being treated like that to tell him off. You think about how your brother was yelled at by his soccer coach for not passing the ball to the coach’s daughter. “That’s not how you get girlfriends in America.” There are a thousand things that inform your identity and most of them are experiences that have told you that being treated as less than human is acceptable because of the color of your skin.

By speaking up, by being “too sensitive,” you are pushing back. You are being angry and feeling entitled to be angry. And it is important to fight back for all of your previous selves that experienced racism and felt ashamed of being a person of color. When you are writing about race, especially as a person of color, you put yourself in the line of fire. You’re asking people to look at your experiences and your identity, and people still trample on you. But there are the people who don’t: the people who pause and think about what you have to say, the people who comment and argue against the racist comments, the people who write you emails that thank you for being brave and writing what you wrote. It was their story, too.

For me, writing about race is the most difficult thing I’ll ever do. It is intensely exhausting. It is difficult. It is sometimes heartbreaking. But it is also liberating. It is empowering, it is standing up for myself and for the other people of color and women of color. It’s about fighting for our own self-worth and developing the vocabulary we use to fight against the oppression we experience every day. It’s about connecting with other people and women of color in knowing that what we have to say is terribly important. It’s about fighting for us.

It’s about fighting for me.

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Isolation

by Gabrielle Rivera

My queer identity has been shaped by white lesbian culture. That is just a fact. Give or take coming out to my also queer ‘Rican homegirl when I was 14, white girls have basically shown me the way of the gay. This has created a complex paradigm of queer code switching, adapting, assimilation and isolation – insert all of the big important gay words here. I’m going to isolate isolation because it’s used to it and because it’s been on my brain lately.

My real lesbian “growing up” phase began in college surrounded by a radass circle of white lesbians. They aided my development and awareness of things like contraceptive rights, Ani DiFranco, proper pronoun usage, fisting and other such things that all new lesbigays should totally be schooled on. It takes a village, ya’ll. Learning these things outside of ones ethnicity and in the confines of another forces one to exist as an insider and an outsider, even if no one makes you feel that way that’s kinda how it is. I’ve been the token Puerto Rican chick in so many lesbian circles and it’s been fine for the most part because people are people and lesbians are so good at loving others. I’ve had my issues but one of the most interesting issues is the one that other queer POC have with me and my “white tendencies”. It’s kinda like how you’re not supposed to touch the babies of certain animals because the moms will smell the human on them and eat them, yeah it’s kinda like that. Other POC can “smell the white” on me and sometimes it leaves a funny taste in their mouths. (That phrase has actually been said to me btw. Talk about almost smacking a bitch…) Apparently, golf shorts, Polo shirts and Tegan and Sara are for white lesbians only. This is not to say that all Caucasian homos like all of the same things or that all gay POCs have this attitude towards individuals like myself. This is based on sentiments I’ve experienced often enough over the years. It’s strange to be othered by minoritized people that look just like you.

I’ve also never really understood how certain tastes in music or the fact that I read books can make me less ethnic and more white. But when you’re the only butchy brown lesbian not wearing a Yankees fitted, voguing to Madonna and dating a white girl, motherfuckers want to strip you of your race card quick. These attitudes bother me less and less as I come into myself as a Rican queer. I know now there are others like me. QPOC that either grew up in all white neighborhoods, came out in predominantly white colleges like me and they can code switch with the best of them. I often meet these awesome chicas in predominately white spaces like Autostraddle or queer hipster parties in Brooklyn. Most of the time, it’s awesome! Like two unicorns meeting along a rainbow or it can kind of be like this:

Shit is complicated and this could easily turn into a book, or maybe a graphic novel. Yeah, a graphic novel is more my style anyway. This piece has no exact end, because I’m waiting for you to join in on it.

This post goes hand-in-hand with A-Camp’s Queer Women of Color Panel with Whitney, Carmen, Brittani, Gabby, and Katrina.

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Special Note: Autostraddle’s “First Person” personal essays do not necessarily reflect the ideals of Autostraddle or its editors, nor do any First Person writers intend to speak on behalf of anyone other than themselves. First Person writers are simply speaking honestly from their own hearts.

On Camp: You Need a Pocket Knife

Regardless of whether you’re using it on a camping trip or just around the house, a pocket knife is hands down one of the Most Important Gadgets you can own. You can do so many things with it: slice cheese, open bottles or even carve the perfect stick for toasting marshmallows. They were the app for that before there was an app for that!

In general, pocket knife blades are smaller than regular knife blades for convenience and transportability. For the most part, the blade will be between 2″ and 4″ long. This may not be a long or strong enough blade if you want to do something like field dress an elk, but if your goals are more along the lines of cutting ropes and vegetables, you should be just fine. Manufacturers use all kinds of materials–from aluminum to wood to bone — to make the handle and all your favorite metals (think carbon and stainless steel) for the blades.

You have so many options at your fingertips when shopping for a knife, so narrowing down what you might use it for is a good place to start . Pocket knives can be as basic as a single blade, or they can hide two blades, three, or more! Maybe you will find a reason to need the Air Force Karambit Rescue Folder Spring Assist Pocket Knife or some scorpion throwing knives. Who knows? Variety is the spice of life.

Then you’ve got multitools. Multitools are perhaps more familiar to you as those little transformer-esque devices that house all kinds of useful tools in their handles. They’re well known for their ability to solve any and all your camping (and life, if we’re being honest) problems.

Make sure you check your new multitool’s list of components before you buy it! It was W.C. Fields who wrote, “Once, in the wilds of Afghanistan, I lost my corkscrew, and we were forced to live on nothing but food and water for days.” Do not share his fate! Make sure you have a corkscrew and a bottle opener! Check out Amazon’s consumer reviews for a more diverse perspective.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the frankly frightening array of knives available to you.

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The Classic

The Original, Timeless Swiss Army Knife

Did you know that the Swiss Army knife got its name from U.S. soldiers during World War II who couldn’t pronounce “Schweizer Ofiziersmesser,” the German translation of “Swiss officer’s knife?” And yes — while all Swiss officers have carried a version of the same knife since the 1890s, it has become so popular since then that it is now part of the required gear for all astronauts on the international space station. The Swiss Army knife has evolved with the needs of the Swiss Army, and as of the early 2000s, modern models have been introduced that include features like USB flash drives, digital altimeters, and MP3 players.

You can start small with a keychain-sized baby Swiss Army knife (Sooo many colors! And animal prints!) Or you can go crazypants with the world’s largest Swiss Army knife, the Wenger 16999, which will only set you back $1,000. It definitely won’t fit in your pocket, but it does include a fish scaler, a flashlight and what I’m pretty sure are tools with dental functions.

The thing I really like about Swiss Army knives is that they are engravable, which makes giving and getting them as presents kinda special. There’s something about getting a Swiss Army knife in your favorite color with your initials on it that makes you feel simultaneously loved and ready to assemble furniture.

Price Range: <$10 – $1,000

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Leatherman Multitool

Leatherman multitools were developed by Mr. Timothy Leatherman in the 1908s. Leatherman was inspired to design a “Boy Scout knife with pliers” after spending a large amount of a trip though Europe and the Middle East trying to repair a the repeatedly malfunctioning car he and his wife were travelling in and leaky hotel plumbing. The first prototype of the Leatherman multitool was (unsuccessfully) named “Mr. Crunch.” Unlike Swiss Army knives that are structured predominantly around the central knife blade(s), Leatherman tools are built around a set of pliers, with the other components of the knife stored inside the two handles.

Price Range: <$20 – $100ish

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Gerber Multitool

In the 1930s—- back when they sold camping equipment instead of sex–Abercrombie and Fitch sold Gerber tools in their catalogue. Also! The host of Man vs. Wild uses a Gerber tool on the show. Like Leathermans, Gerber multitools are structured around a set of pliers. But unlike Leathermans, the pliers slide out of the end of the tool rather than folding out. Either way, though, both Leathermans and Gerbers come with cool holsters you can loop through your belt, so everyone’s a winner.

Price Range: $10ish – $50ish

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I have owned and used all three of these multitools and I liked them! Leatherman and Gerber are both relatively young companies and both originate from Portland, where I feel like they have the outdoorsy thing pretty much down to an art form.

It’s worth mentioning that if you aren’t into those and are really serious about buying a KNIFE knife, then there are also fixed-blade pocket knives. Fixed-blade pocket knives aren’t really “pocket” knives at all, since the blade doesn’t have anywhere to god. They’re more what you’d sling on your belt/over your shoulder if you were intent on hunting kinds of activities where it’s less about convenience and accessories than it is about winning the Hunger Games. There’s a menacing selection of fixed blade knives available, some of which come with brass knuckles, spiky bits, and alien heads. Cato and Faith shop here.

Finally, and most awesomely, there are other quirky survival tools that you probably never knew about but will now desperately need.

The 11 Function Credit Card Survival Tool. This thing fits inside your wallet and is smaller than a credit card! It can do so many things! Price: $1.50!

+

The SE 6-1 Detachable Knife. It has: all the regular stuff plus cutlery! Price: $4.59. Sporks are so last year.

+

Swiss + Tech Keychain Multitool. It has 2 wrenches, 6 screwdrivers, a hand drill, and other things. Price: $8.67

+

BodyGuard Emergency Hammer with Seat Belt Cutter and LED. For car-related disasters, this includes a spring-loaded hammer to break the car window, a seat belt cutter for getting yourself free, and a light and a sonic alarm to signal for help. Price: $14.00

+

Kershaw Carabiner Tool. It’s a carabiner! It’s a tool! It’s both! Price: $20

Once you have your knife, you need to know a couple last things about it. The experts agree: make sure that the blade is made from quality carbon/steel so it’s able to hold a sharp edge over time and keep it clean and dry. If you’re already on Amazon you can pick up a knife case and a sharpener for these purposes.

Oh also also! Responsibility! Open your knife away from you so you don’t snap the blade down on your fingers when you close it. I got my first pocket knife when I was six and the first thing I did was slice my palm open…so, don’t do that. Also try to avoid situations where a 127 Hours repeat could occur. I like your hands and want them to stay safely away from boulders. You need them more making s’mores and drinking microbrews around the campfire.

On Camp: Confessions Of A Very Unhappy Camper

The names of people, camps and places have been changed.

All the other girls loved camp. Like it sounded really magical. They had photographs, and memories, and “camp boyfriends” and I wanted that, too. Plus I’d seen Parent Trap and “Salute Your Shorts” and consumed many camp-based young adult novels and on Sundays I’d read camp advertisements in The New York Times Magazine’s backpages like they were the news, imagining my future at Camp LaJolla or Stagedoor Manor. Among other financial and logistical impediments, I wasn’t fat or exceptionally talented, which meant neither of those camps would have any use for me.

But I knew somewhere there was a place for me — a place where I’d acquire more pretty pen pals and maybe a boy would want to french kiss me. The latter was crucial, as none of the boys at my teeny-tiny school for “gifted” students wanted to french kiss me and if I didn’t french kiss somebody by the time I graduated middle school, I would be branded the biggest loser of all time, or, worse — A LESBIAN. It wasn’t about literally wanting the boy or the kiss, it was about what I could write home about.

Unfortunately my Mother’s Oppressive Reich condemned me to four or five years of Day Camp at the Jewish Community Center before I was deemed ready for ‘overnight camp.’ My last year at JCC camp was particularly special because that’s when Noah Cohen informed me that I was a “carpenter’s dream” — “flat as a board and never been nailed.” How was I supposed to get nailed at JCC Day Camp, though?

I aged out of day camp the summer after sixth grade. Still, my Mother’s Oppressive Reich forbade purposeless camping —  I couldn’t go with my best friend Becky to Silver Lake to do normal “camp things,” ’cause I wouldn’t come back smarter or more talented or more holy.

But because it was the only camp on the planet offering one-week sessions, my Mother (in cahoots with my friend Jessie’s mother) resigned to letting me attend Arrowhead, a camp with no readily apparent enrichment opportunities. My inability to be away from my Dad or Kentucky Fried Chicken for more than a week overruled the fact that I wouldn’t come back fluent in Mandarin. Plus Jessie’s younger sister, Erika, hadn’t been to camp before, and Arrowhead offered Jessie and Erika’s favorite activity in the whole world: horseback riding.

+

Camp Arrowhead + Summer 1993

Our Moms dropped us off and helped us settle in, but I was eager to ditch the ‘rents and get started on a lanyard or whatever. “I’ll be fine,” I insisted as my Mother stood in front of the minivan looking vaguely concerned, like she’d just dropped me off at Fort Hood.

“We’ll be fine,” Jessie echoed, putting her arm around me. My friendship with Jessie, like most of my pre-adolescent friendships, consisted of me being funny and weird and her being pretty, super rich, popular and really nurturing.

Approximately four hours later, I was not fine. Smashed into a table in a crowded “mess hall” with my cabin mates, a dish containing “mystery meat” (you know, the kind Ramona Quimby was served that one time) was passed around and as my stomach cartwheeled into a long spiral of homesickness and doom, I waved the meat away like a paranoid war survivor. “I think it’s liver,” Jessie whispered. What the hell had I gotten myself into?

Apparently the one-week session option wasn’t a very popular one — in fact, we seemed to be the only ones who’d elected it. Activities were loosely organized, if at all, and in general it felt like showing up at college mid-semester, sans orientation, and being told to fend for yourself. My dreams of theatrical stardom were dashed when I learned one-weekers couldn’t be in the show. Jessie found the riding program too rudimentary. There was a cute boy in the kitchen but he never looked at me for some reason.

We noticed a lot of the girls speaking Spanish, which Jessie and I had been taking since third grade, and soon learned that about half the campers were from Mexico and the other half were legacies from America whose mothers had attended Arrowhead as kids. Pilar explained that an Arrowhead ambassador had visited her school near Mexico City a few years back and now she and her friends came up every summer despite being indifferent to the camp’s offerings. “It used to be better,” she said, shrugging. “It’s going downhill.”

Pilar taught us dirty songs in Spanish, some of which we heard again at the Talent Show, at which all the kitchen boys donned drag and did songs by somebody I’d never heard of named Englebert Humperdink.

It rained a lot, thank the Lord, and I read The Face on the Back of a Milk Carton on my bed. To me the rain was a blessing from a merciful G-d who understood my fear of outdoor group activities, groups, the outdoors and activities.

Mid-week, Erika got sick with what Jessie diagnosed as appendicitis. However, at this point the camp had already fielded and denied our ten billion requests to contact our parents and therefore determined Erika was faking it. We trekked down to the lodge to appeal to the camp matriarch, a senile old woman who filled out her rocking chair and sported a wad of white curly hair atop her sad, distant face. We cried until the rain didn’t seem so wet anymore and nope, nothing. She didn’t know our Moms and we hadn’t come all the way from Mexico so she didn’t have time to care, really.

“This is so unfair!” I insisted, as political rebellion was always my go-to emotion. “She’s sick. This is inhumane!”

Also inhumane were Arrowhead’s group showers. There was no way in holy hell I’d be undressing in front of other humans and therefore I wallowed in my pre-pubescent filth for the entire week. Jessie showered once and said it wasn’t bad. On the last day, we went with Pilar on a day trip to the Sleepy Bear Dunes and met more girls we liked, just in time to leave. They wrote us letters the next week. “It got even worse, if you can believe it,” one began.

Family Camp + Summer 1994

The summer after Seventh Grade I switched my strategy to avoid blindly hurtling into another unexpectedly unseemly camp experience. I’d just accompany friends to their favorite camps!

Fortunately for the word count of this essay, I barely remember my week at this camp for University Alumni and their families. My friend Elaine invited me and despite the fact that Elaine hadn’t french kissed anybody, I went. Within 24 hours, I regretted this decision.

I was the more outgoing of the two of us, so together we were social suicide. My primary memory of this week was Elaine snoring and me throwing balled up socks at her face hoping she’d wake up long enough for me to fall asleep.

–

Camp Yavneh + Summer 1994

Next up on the roster was accompanying my friend Yael, who’d moved to Israel after 6th grade but was returning for the summer, to her favorite place in the world, Zionist Labor Youth Camp — for four entire weeks. Yael had kissed two boys there the summer prior, so I had high hopes.

At Yavneh, most everything was in Hebrew (Yael had to translate for me), we slept in platform tents, and had chores before breakfast, like real kibbutzim! I painted buildings, while others cleaned bathrooms, tended to farm animals, or did things involving trees and grass. Most campers were lifers who’d attend every summer, building up to some advanced age where you spend a year on an actual Kibbutz and then return to become a counselor.

Although I’d always protested when Mom insisted on celebrating Shabbat on Friday nights at home, I loved Yavneh’s sundown-to-sundown rituals with all the dressing up, trivia games, really good food, “reflective discussion groups” and lots of quiet time to think about G-d (a.k.a read Lurlene McDaniel novels about girls dying of various cancers). Although ‘dancing’ was right up there with ‘swimming’ for ‘things I can’t do’, Friday night’s Israeli dancing made Yael so enormously happy that I welcomed the respite on her behalf.

See — Yael was miserable, ’cause it allegedly “wasn’t as good as last year,” which means I had to like it enough for both of us rather than risk Yael telling everyone we’d had a bad time. Yael had serious social clout and since moving to Israel, she’d become a demi-god. Throughout seventh grade, my friends and I hosted an inordinate number of sleepover parties dedicated to “crying sessions,” during which we’d drink Crystal Clear Pepsi, eat Cheez-its, and cry about missing Yael, even though we were actually crying about hating ourselves.

Needless to say, the outlook on the french kissing front was dim. A handful of cute boys were quickly snatched up by equally cute girls and Yael’s crush from last year, Adam, had a girlfriend at home. Then I met Joseph.

“Um, there’s some weird guy outside our tent talking about how his brother is a transvestite,” Yael reported, returning to our sanctuary of Zionist cisgendordom from her field trip to the bathroom.

I went outside to see for myself and there he was, this awkward nerdy kid with glasses and a slightly-too-small sweatshirt and a sort of fey physical presence. “My brother is a transvestite, it’s true,” he told me, cocking his head to one side. “He wears dresses. But I love him.”

“He’s purposely trying to scare me!” Yael shouted from inside.

“I’m not a virgin,” he continued. “My babysitter had sex with me.”

“He’s crazy, don’t talk to him!” Yael said.

How could I not talk to him? He’d just admitted to having ACTUAL SEX, and clearly was willing to discuss it!

“I like you but I don’t like your friend,” he said. He told me I was pretty and I said I wasn’t. Later that night, I was performing some kind of heavy labor and Joseph popped up beside me and offered to carry my load.

“Why?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I want to.”

It kept on like this. Everybody warmed up to Joseph eventually, even the cool kids, because he was so nice and patient, and had the best stories. Yael still hated him though, and hated how he’d come over all the time at night to hang out with me and Talia Lobel, who had huge breasts and by the end of camp was sleeping with me every night, telling me stories about getting felt up by boys and french kissing. Joseph called me and Talia his “lovers.”

“If you were older, I would marry you,” he said. I laughed. I wrote in my diary: I wouldn’t go out with Joseph EVER. He knows that.

The strangest part about Zionist camp was that, unlike all other camps I know of, they made no effort to separate boys from the girls. Our tents were side-by-side. We couldn’t make out or anything, but we could hang out in each other’s beds. The boys’d often drop their towels on purpose en route to shower, and Joseph would perform ten-minute orgasms after “bed time” ’til all the campers yelled and his counselor threatened to pee on him. On rainy nights, we’d gather in one of the meeting rooms and listen to Dennis Leary CDs, or watch movies, like The Sure Thing, about four guys driving cross-country so one of them could lose their virginity to a girl guaranteed to put out.

Oh right, and then there was the day we had to re-enact the holocaust.

I woke groggily at 5AM to the sounds of male counselors yelling, “The Germans are coming! The Germans are coming! Get dressed and escape!” We floundered about, pulling on our pants in the dark while our counselor yelled at us to hurry out, lest we go to the gas chambers or whatever. She then led us through the woods for what seemed like 40 nights and 40 days, until dawn broke at a clearing where the other campers were waiting.

A counselor pretending to be somebody named “Shlomo” led us through some team-building exercises that may’ve been chores in disguise, and then we were shuffled out of the woods, at which point I was captured by somebody in a mask and taken to “jail” (the tennis courts). Thank Hashem Shlomo rescued me and I rejoined the others on our endless sojourn to “the land of milk and honey,” where we were given potatoes wrapped in tin foil to roast over an open fire and eat for breakfast, and also hot chocolate, which I promptly spilled all over my pants.

Returning from my tent after changing pants, a “guard” asked for my passport, which I’d obviously left in my other pants, and therefore I was barred from The Land of Milk and Honey unless I performed a special mission.

See, Adam (Yael’s ex-frencher) had slept through the whole goshdarn thing, and this was especially problematic ’cause he’d been slated to play his violin at the Opening Ceremonies for The Land of Milk and Honey. My compatriot for this misson was Rachel, a badass fat chick with dyed-black hair and sultry eye makeup who swore a lot and had been caught smoking like twenty times already. I was thinking this could be a special moment for Adam and I where I lovingly brought him to consciousness but Rachel would have none of it — screaming YOU MOTHERFUCKER WE’VE BEEN UP SINCE THREE AM ESCAPING THE MOTHERFUCKNG HOLOCAUST AND YOU’VE BEEN SLEEPING LIKE A G-DDAMN PUSSY and when that didn’t work, she lifted the mattress and literally threw him out of bed.

He played his violin at the Opening Ceremonies of Israel. They raised a giant wooden Star of David by the lake and said there would be chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast. I slept and slept and slept.

I liked Yavneh pretty much, but when Yael left a few days early I still panicked. By this point I’d stopped showering because the fear of male peepers that kept us all bathing-suited in the showers initially had since vanished, and I didn’t want to be the weirdo in the swimsuit. Apparently I preferred being the weirdo with greasy hair.

On the last night of camp I let Joseph kiss me. Not a french kiss, but still. I didn’t tell anyone, though, because I knew Yael would make fun of me and taint my friend’s opinions. A kiss that I couldn’t tell anybody about basically didn’t count.

It was definitely my favorite camp of all I’d attended, but I never really considered returning. I felt like a visitor there, like Yael’s friend, not somebody bound for a Kibbutz in five years.

On our way home, we stopped at Kentucky Fried Chicken and my Dad let me order two potato products. Baruch Hashem.

===

Pine Ridge Camp of The Arts  + Summer 1995

My friend Jill had french kissed a boy at Pine Ridge, so I was sold. Plus, it met my mother’s enrichment requirements and there’d be no group showers, so I could actually bathe and wash my hair, although blow dryers were prohibited and therefore I carried a tiny hairbrush with me for three hours, obsessively tending to my hair to ensure it looked how I wanted it to (but it never did).

Pine Ridge’s music program is its primary draw, but I, along with many other unwise children, thought the theater sitch was worth checking out. Serious actresses attended Interlochen Summer Arts Camp, near Traverse City up north, but its eight-week sessions scared the fuck out of me.

The food was horrible. I mean just terrible. So when I spiraled into my first-morning panic of homesickness and Jill told me, “Just get some Pepto,” nobody suspected a thing. Jill pointed at the long line outside the Infirmary, where kids lined up daily for small plastic cups of Pepto. I needed more than Pepto, though, they could see that on my face, and I was ushered into the infirmary, where I spent the day napping and crying and begging them to let my Mom come pick me up. They refused.

For  me, homesickness was never about missing home so much as it was about being trapped somewhere unfamiliar with no way to communicate to the outside. In a way, Arrowhead was easiest to bear because I was so close to Jessie, then, and completely comfortable with her. But it wasn’t like that with Yael, Elaine or Jill. The more thoughts I had that I knew I couldn’t share or act on, the scarier camp became. I guess that goes for life itself — pretending to be happy when you’re not is exhausting, and profoundly alienating. Why was everyone else so happy? Why was it so easy for them to be thrown into a crowd of strangers and immediately form lasting bonds and meet boys to french kiss?

The theater program quickly proved itself pointless. By that point in my storied career, I’d already written & directed three plays, starred in several including Our Town and The Comedy of Errors, and played bit roles in at least 15 community theater productions. But at Pine Ridge, someone’s brilliant idea for the summer theater program’s “big show” was performing 15-minute audience-participatory “adaptations” of Hamlet and Taming of the Shrew on 12×12 rolling carts, like minstrels at a really annoying fair or amusement park. As Ophelia, I delivered three stunning lines and as Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and I forewent lines in favor of a [we thought] very clever song, to the tune of “It’s the Hard-Knock Life” from Annie: It’s the hard-knock life for us, it’s the hard knock life for us, Pertrucio used to be real nice, ’til he got this Shrewish wife, it’s the hard knock life! Now he’s bossing us around, kicking mutton on the ground, it’s a hard knock life! 

Lacey, a tall, blonde, devout Christian and pianist who reminded me of Stacey from The Baby-Sitters Club, eventually became my Camp Companion over Jill. On Parents Day I went with her family to Pizza Hut and gorged on stuffed crust pizza while they talked about Jesus. She was way saner than me and I managed to make it through the rest of the session without crying every day (only every now and then).

The final night at Pine Ridge was marked by a four-hour concert dreaded all summer long — a chance to make paper cranes out of programs/enjoy orchestral music. The day of “The Big Ridge” it was raining — a light summer rain I almost liked — and I thought I was hallucinating when I got closer to the cafeteria and saw my Dad and brother underneath the awning. They were both wearing Bulls hats.

Dad: “Oh! Marie Bernard!! What a surprise to see you here! We were just passing through …”

Lewis: [giggle giggle] “Hi Marieeeee!”

Me: [melting, OMG!] “Can you take me off-campus? Now? Before the concert?”

Dad: “Well, we certainly didn’t come out here to watch a bunch of amateurs toot their own horns for four hours.”

It was one of the happiest moments of my life. My parents were divorced by this point, and neither planned on seeing my performance the next day, when Jill’s Mom would pick us up. But my Dad had still come up to rescue me! I invited Jill to sign off-campus with us and I still remember joyously chomping upon my patty melt and french fries at Big Boy’s, slurping my Vanilla Coke. Everyone was so jealous.

I left Pine Ridge the next day, never to return to camp again.

And Then

Things changed after high school started — I lost both my Dad and my affection for Kentucky Fried Chicken, for example, and at 14 I started working summers rather than camping. Then, at 15, I surprised even myself when I applied to Interlochen for boarding school as a creative writing student — the camp I’d feared for its eight-week sessions was also a year-round Academy and I wanted to go there. I wanted to spend eight months away from home, in a place where I’d have no agency or freedom, surrounded by complete strangers (although, in a bizarre twist of fate, Adam the violinist from Camp Yavneh resurfaced as a classmate at Interlochen).

I got in, and in September 1997 my Mom drove me there, and moved me in, and a few hours before she was due to return home — SURPRISE! — I had a complete mental breakdown. I started crying softly in Target, and my pitch escalated at Chili’s, reaching its peak in the lobby of my future dorm. What have I done? What was I thinking? I have great friends at home, why have I forsaken them? Although my relationship with my Mom at that point was probably the worst it had ever been and most of our communication took place during thrice-daily screaming matches, I was suddenly petrified for her to leave me alone in this place. She kindly agreed to stay an extra night and I processed my feelings and then clung to my roommate, who I didn’t really actually like, for about a month before I began making the friends who would change my life.

When my Mom took me home from Interlochen for Thanksgiving, I started crying when we veered off the highway towards downtown Ann Arbor, where I’d grown up and where we still lived. Ann Arbor was full of these ghosts, you see, this sad girl I didn’t want to be anymore — and wasn’t.

What changed?

I’d been going about it all wrong. In order to get away from my life at home, every summer I followed a tertiary friend from that same unsatisfactory life to their camp, and then was surprised when it wasn’t my dream, too. I wasn’t a Zionist. I wasn’t a musician. I’d even gone to a camp designed for people to bond with their families with somebody else’s family. I wasn’t a fan of kickball or horseback riding and I couldn’t swim very well due to crippling self-consciousness that prevented me from donning a bathing suit long enough to learn. Hell, I barely even liked being around other people. 

But then I went someplace alone, someplace I picked because I knew it was right for me, because on Visitor’s Day I saw people I wanted to hang out with not because their picture in my wallet would make me seem cooler, but because I wanted to talk to them and make things with them. Don’t get me wrong, it took a good few months of eating lunch alone in my room before I actually found my niche there, but the academic program was such a good fit that I didn’t care too much. I had no friends, but I was writing great fiction!

Like I’ve said before, back then I thought I was a total whack job and everything I did was wrong and every time I didn’t fit in wasn’t because I was picking the wrong “them,” it was actually because I was always the wrong ME. Then I found the right “them,” accepted the right “ME,” and for two years I was incredibly blessed to spend eight months a year in the kind of place I’d always hoped summer camp would be, but never was.

Oh, and, because I know you’re sitting here still thinking I’m a total loser, I should tell you that within a month of arriving at Interlochen, I got my first french kiss. BAM.

---

Special Note: Autostraddle’s “First Person” personal essays do not necessarily reflect the ideals of Autostraddle or its editors, nor do any First Person writers intend to speak on behalf of anyone other than themselves. First Person writers are simply speaking honestly from their own hearts.

On Camp: Not Burning Your Skin, A Kit and Lifestyle Guide

I really want to go in a pool right now. But damn it all to hell I forgot to buy sunscreen.

I need to buy sunscreen. I can’t really go anywhere in the sun without it, because as far as “women of color” go I’m kind of a porcelain doll. Whatever. I’m 50 percent Italian and 50 percent Puerto Rican and 100 percent strangely pale. And I gotta say, sunscreen is kind of a great thing — especially when it’s the right thing. And it’s on top of my Autostraddle Camp packing list, next to “backup sunglasses” and “subtly revealing top.” I promise, Mom. The last thing I want when facing 200 other lesbians in the sun-filled woods is to look like I was cooked to rare and then set free at the Jersey Shore.

So here’s my five favorite sun products and my five secret tips for never burning your skin, ever. Unless you’re in the desert or something with no resources, money, or way to get inside. But hey, if you have the internet you’re never really alone. Nice iPhone.

5 Sunscreens You Could Be Using

Your skin is gonna be so nice this summer that you’re going to forget about the time you missed class for three days because you forgot your mom’s sample-size generic brand sunscreen in your luggage. Did you know skin products are for adults now? Maybe you’ll even feel so sexy and not burned by the sun that you’ll let it all hang out this summer. (Please remember to reapply.)

Before you buy a sunscreen, begin a sun care ritual, or do your morning yoga today, please read Allure’s 11 Sun Protection Tips from Dermatologists because it will change your life.

Neutrogena Ultra-Sheer Dry-Touch Sunblock

Even though I doubt there is anything better than any Neutrogena skin product ever, I gotta say that using this line of what is pretty much SPF-infused facial lotion makes me feel completely fabulous. I remember that putting sunscreen on in middle and high school was kind of like resigning myself to feeling sticky and smelling like I did in the fifth grade at summer camp. But once I upgraded to “the real stuff,” there it was. This was how I found out that adults call sunscreen “sunblock.”

Skin So Soft Bug Guard Plus

Avon’s Skin So Soft line is full of thin, sweet-smelling sunblock that is also infused with magical ingredients, or more likely chemicals, that prevent bugs from biting your skin while the sun burns it at the same time.

Dermalogica Solar Defense Wipes

If you’re trying not to get caught with Coppertone Baby 50 SPF lotion falling out of your slightly torn and slightly patched backpack, it’s your lucky day, because suncreen in a wipe is the way of the future. It’s only SPF 15, but that’s all you need for a light afternoon of sun anyway. And oh, the places you’ll go without worrying about whether or not your sunscreen is squeezing out all over your books, laptop, and keys. Did I mention it smells like flowers?

SuperGoop Sunstick

This sounds like as much fun as portable sun care products are capable of being. Imagine being caught off-guard by the sun when walking back from your one-night stand. Imagine being able to do it without freaking out about sunburn! I hope she makes you breakfast.

BullFrog Sunblock

This isn’t glamorous. It smells like an intensive care unit, or maybe like putting the sunscreen and the after-burn lotion on at once. Or kind of like medical offices. But if you’re hiking or exposing yourself to the rays of the sun for an extended period, or if you’re me and you hate the idea of getting sunburn at your local college baseball game because you can’t wear a hat, you’re going to cave to the clearly superior suncare line of BullFrog. If a sunscreen is so thick it coats you in a cool gel coating that smells like the facial equivalent of Vicks VapoRub, what else can you ask for? It’s clearly working.

BONUS: COPPERTONE ANYTHING, ANYTIME

I feel guilty not admitting that I use Coppertone sometimes because I still love that girl and that dog and how fucking adorable and vintage that is.

5 Ways to Keep Your Cool

Being outside in the sun isn’t always about walking up a long hill and smoking a cigarette and thinking, “Did I get sunburn yet? Do I have it on my face? Why am I so hot?” Sometimes it’s about being prepared to face the summer sun like a real bad bitch, and look right at the sun through your 100-percent UV Block Ray-Bans so to say “hit me with your best shot.” It’s beautiful out and you look so good in bloomers. Please leave your apartment or at least open the windows.

1. Bring Back Hats

I know everyone teases you for buying that Boy Scout hat at the thrift store, but what if it could save your pretty little face from being the color of a tomato? Would it be worth it then?

Picking a hat to stay safe from the sun in can be super fun. I know Lizz is the resident fashion maven, but here’s some of my personal favorite ideas for hats that keep UV rays conveniently located around and not on your cheekbones.

If you’re thinking about hats and you’re having negative feelings, you either have a hairstyle like mine or you aren’t thinking of the right kind of hat! Please do take the time to consider sunhats, caps, cowboy hats, and any other kind of hat you think looks nice on your hot bod. (Another tip? Oversized sunglasses and a hat make an indestructible sun-avoidance team.)

2. Eat On the Porch, Not the Deck

Brunch is super nice outside in the sun, but once I did it and ended up with raccoon eyes just from one mimosa in my aviators. And we even had a covered table! So remember: patios are nice but porches are better. Decks are pretty but porches are better. Awnings are your friend and so are sunrooms with super open windows. If you’re gonna be staying a while outside, try to find some shelter.

3. Do Your Errands From 12-4

If the sun is out in the morning, afternoon, and early evening, then why are you gonna fuck with it when it’s being really super horrible? There is plenty of time to sit in the grass and pick flowers, ladies. Try to arrange your sun schedule so that you’re in the shade, inside, or really really really ready to face the impending doom of After Burn Cream from the hours of 12 PM to 4 PM each day, when the sun’s rays are harshest. You can thank me later. Or now.

4. Bring an Umbrella

I know that right now you’re imagining being the person with a half-broken travel-size umbrella looming overhead at the nude beach. No.

It’s a proven fact that nothing makes life in the sun more pleasant than shade; enjoying sunlight from a distance, keeping your eye on the pool while still basking in the warm afternoon to the sound of your pool toys bobbing, and even standing under the awning at the snack shack makes a day in the sun a little less exhausting. Shade has been everyone’s favorite thing ever since it was invented in the Garden of Eden. Why do you think those two kids got stuck under that tree?

Being the girl with an umbrella over her deck furniture is probably the number one popularity mechanism in the Western world. And bringing one to the beach? Surefire way to not only get attention from the babes, but also to offer them some lemonade in the shade should you see them squinting too much from the soft waves of the beach. Invest in an adorable one now and it might even match your pool towel.

5. Wear Light Layers, AKA Sleeves

Have you ever seen things that appear to keep you warm, but actually don’t? If there’s a breeze out, if you live by the beach, or if you’re not actually going to be outside for that long but there’s not a cloud in the sky, the answer to keeping yourself sunburn free may be in your closet. Think about unbuttoning your button-down and wearing it over a tank top with shorts, or rolling up the sleeves on your denim shirt. Wear one of those cardigans that’s actually made out of a fabric thinner than tissue paper. Maybe even just wear a tee shirt, for God’s sake. Just cover your shoulders for a second.

Sunburn is the kind of thing, like a torn-up knee or a good pair of sunglasses or a great strapless bra, that has the potential to change the entire course of your summer. It can also be extremely painful and kind of unsightly and, let’s not lie, it kind of sucks overall. So why deal with it? Take the extra effort, y’all. It will be very worth it — now and in the future.

On Camp: Girl Scout Camp – Freedom, Feminism and Hobo Pies

There’s a certain smell that takes me back to Girl Scout camp right away: sunlight on a carpet of pine needles. And there’s a certain feeling I’ve tried to recapture ever since: lying peacefully awake beneath wood smoke and starlight, talking with women. I’m 26 and I live in the city, but I jump at any opportunity to get deep into nature, either with my girlfriend or, for a few years running now, during an annual camping trip with our queer feminist book club. My first year at Camp Juliette* I was six years old. I went with a girl from down the block, who sobbed with homesickness all night and then promptly told her mother I’d been the one bawling inconsolably, as if somehow our parents would scent tears on us in the minivan on the way home. My mom didn’t believe that for a moment, since I had come home complaining that I couldn’t stay longer. I kept going back every summer until I was 16, working the last two years as a counselor-in-training.

Throughout this time I was kind of a loner, a weirdo. I read too much and cried at dumb things and made jokes that nobody liked. My awkwardness should have followed me along to Girl Scout camp, but somehow I managed to shed most of it in the 40 miles between the city and that patch of unremarkable forest. At the time I supposed that everyone else fit into their normal lives as well as they did into camp, and I was getting away with something extraordinary. Looking back, it’s clear that the woods had this normalizing effect on everyone. It’s clear because this “everyone” included: the hyperactive blonde (there on scholarship as I was) with seven siblings, all of whose names began with the letter K. The group of girls who, for an entire week, annexed the identities of the British royal family. The camp director, a dour-looking 30-something with a severe black bob, knee-length pleated shorts, and deep love for both romance novels and Star Trek. Counselors from Australia and South Africa and Russia, with accents of varying comprehensibility to our Midwestern ears. Counselors with dreadlocks and shaved heads and, sometimes, relationships with each other.

By my last few years at camp, it had become clear that one of the things that marked me as a weirdo was liking girls. I was well convinced that there were no lesbians in my town and very few in the rest of the world, and consequently it seemed both frightening and pointless to come out beyond the tiny handful of friends who knew. I felt sublimely at ease under the pines of Camp Juliette, and precisely because of this, I felt like I couldn’t be out there, either. It was a place of unceasing group intimacy — aside from half an hour a day of quiet time, we lived together. Connections were forged instantly. I had a hard time making friends at home; what relationships I did have tended to be chilled by reflexive irony and the need to seem much older than we were; the days of slumber parties had dried up. This closeness at camp was precious, and I wasn’t willing to risk making my camp friends uncomfortable around me. (Especially since I usually did have a burning crush on three or four girls at a time.)

I dropped a few little hints: talking about my love of Ani DiFranco, making rainbow-themed friendship bracelets during arts and crafts. And my eyes were wide open. As I watched and listened, rumors coalesced into miraculous facts: I was surrounded by gay women. They didn’t talk about it, but they also didn’t try to hide it (there had been glimpses of hand-holding, couples leaving camp together), and wouldn’t deny it if you asked. Word got around: some of the most beloved counselors were definitely queer. The astonishing fact was that nobody cared. I had sometimes flinched at casually homophobic remarks tossed off in the manner of preteens everywhere, but the same girls who made them continued to worship even the dykiest of counselors and jockey for a seat beside them in the dining hall. For the first time in my life, I had proof that you could be a gay woman and be not only tolerated, but liked. You could even be gay and weird and still be liked.

I knew Allie from the city, where we competed in poetry slams together. She was bisexual and Wiccan and had a boyfriend who believed he could contact real dragons. She also had caterpillar-thick, self-inflicted scars laddered from shoulder to wrist, which, at camp, she repurposed as an object lesson about why you should never scratch your mosquito bites. There was Sam, who had a buzz cut and no feeling in part of her hands because she’d punched out a garage window in a fit of anger. Among my closest mentors were Hayley and her girlfriend Kathy, who had been my counselors since I was tiny. By the time I was a counselor-in-training, I was carrying around biographies of Abbie Hoffman and registering my disapproval of the Bush administration and other American sins of the era by clasping a fist rather than an open palm over my chest during the daily flag ceremony, to complement my punk band and ineffectual political organizing back home. Hayley made a point of asking what I was reading and once whispered to me that when she dressed up as a kind of off-brand Captain America during assemblies, she took secret pleasure in letting the flag she wore as a cape drag on the ground.

In the context of the woods, removed from our normal social circles, nothing seemed odd or unacceptable about any of these women. When I tell people about my camp experience, they’re surprised that such a climate could flourish within a quintessentially all-American institution — an institution for American children, no less, who must be protected from just about everything. At the practical and local level, I think it worked like this: unless they’re instructed not to, kids are predisposed to adore the adults in their lives. It was only a bonus that these adults were young and cool and teaching us to build one-match fires, scare away raccoons, and sing songs that would stay in our (and our unlucky parents’) heads for the rest of our lives. Sure, some parents might have arched an eyebrow at the less-traditional-looking counselors, but what were they going to say when their children raved about the fun they’d had with them?

At the institutional level, the Girl Scouts are a whole different species from the conservative-minded, no-gays-allowed Boy Scouts. Autostraddle reported in October on the Girl Scouts of Colorado’s explicit statement of inclusion of all girl-identified children, whether cis or trans. Diversity is a core value, and in 2001, national president Connie Matsui confirmed publicly that the organization does not discriminate according to sexual orientation. They’ve rarely foregrounded these issues, preferring to carry out their mission of tolerance and girls’ empowerment through action rather than controversial proclamations. Even so, conservative ire does find its way to the Girl Scouts every so often. In February, Indiana State Representative Bob Morris issued a letter railing against their purported “close strategic affiliation with Planned Parenthood” that advocates “sexualizing young girls” and list 47 (!) “lesbians, feminists, or communists” as role models. He ends by announcing his decision to transfer his daughters from their Girl Scout troop into a scouting organization that will teach them “values and principles that will not confuse their conservative Hoosier upbringing.”

What strikes me about my gay Girl Scout camp days is just how confused we weren’t when it came to the queer women we looked up to. Most of us hadn’t encountered anything like them in our conservative Midwestern upbringings, either, but we were too busy learning how to fold a tent and make hobo pies to spend much time reeling with confusion. Give your girls some credit, Bob. They’re tough and resilient and confident in their own individual character — at least they should be if Girl Scouts has accomplished its goals.

* All names changed to protect a wonderful place.

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Special Note: Autostraddle’s “First Person” personal essays do not necessarily reflect the ideals of Autostraddle or its editors, nor do any First Person writers intend to speak on behalf of anyone other than themselves. First Person writers are simply speaking honestly from their own hearts.

On Camp: Being Queer Wasn’t a Big Deal, My Privilege Was

Power of Hope was different from Camp Fire or YMCA camp. It was a week-long art camp that attracted nerds, weirdos, and queers. Instead of gluing pipe cleaners onto Dixie cups, we had drum circles. Instead of hiking, we had belly dancing classes. We exuberantly created, painting murals with fern fronds and playing each other’s musical instruments. I loved it because the adults trusted us to make our own decisions instead of forcing us into group activities.

This was my third year at Power of Hope. I was seventeen years old. I had been out as bisexual for about 6 months. My relationship with my boyfriend was falling apart, although I didn’t really want to admit that yet.

Many of the usual suspects were there that year – the Rastafarian drum teacher, my mother’s colleague Charlie who had helped found the camp, the group that drove up from inner-city Oakland every year, the local islanders who didn’t have much else to do. There were also new faces – lots of other kids from the Seattle area, plus a group from an LGBT youth center in Portland.

There was one person from Portland in particular who caught my eye – a short, shy young man who wore a baseball cap pulled down over his eyes. He kept to himself, sitting in corners and sketching. Folks around me whispered rumors that he “wasn’t always a boy.” And I’m not going to lie – I thought he was abso-fucking-lutely gorgeous.

I don’t remember the names of most of the people I met that week. Except for his: Tuck.

One day we were sitting around, me and the other queers (both from Portland and from the general camp population) talking about our experiences. For me, coming out had been relatively easy – even the friends I pissed off were more angry that I had cheated on my boyfriend than that I had done so with a girl. But things weren’t so rosy for some of these other kids.

“I haven’t told my mom. I’m afraid she’ll kick me out of the house.”
“My dad thinks it’s a phase. He keeps asking me why I don’t have a girlfriend yet.”
“My friends at school… they don’t know because I think they’ll kick my ass.”
Then Tuck spoke up, his voice quiet. “My mother doesn’t believe that I’m a boy.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. No one knew.

He continued. “She told me that I need to start acting like a girl, and if I don’t… I’m out of the house.” He looked away for a second, then back to his sketchbook. Someone cleared the silence. “That’s fucked.”

We all agreed that it was, indeed, fucked.

“You shouldn’t let her bring you down,” I said. “You’re awesome.”
Tuck smiled his small, shy smile. “Thanks.” But there was still pain behind his eyes.

As the days went by, Tuck and I became close, by which I mean that I did everything I could to be close to him. I admired his sketches, which really were very good. We even walked hand in hand sometimes, which gave my heart a thrill. I knew I had a boyfriend back home, and that I had already betrayed his trust once, but he felt so far away.

“I’m sure your mom will see the light,” I said to him. “Parents are supposed to love their children.”

He sighed. “I don’t think so, D.C. You’ve never seen the way she looks at me. In her mind, I should be wearing skirts and gossiping about boys, not binding my chest and lusting after girls.”

I didn’t have any words that could make that better, as much as I wanted to.

I didn’t have words back then for the experience that I was having. Now I can say that it was one of the first times I ever confronted my own privilege. Power of Hope was excellent for that – talking to my friends from Oakland about their experiences with siblings and friends joining gangs and getting hooked on drugs and getting shot were as far from my white middle-class suburban life as one could get.

But listening to Tuck tell his story made me aware of an entirely different kind of privilege that I have – the privilege of being raised in a liberal household. My parents had gay friends that they introduced us to without shame. While my schoolmates and sometimes even teachers passed around misinformation about what it meant to be gay, I could think back to people who I knew. Never once did I have to fear that my parents would kick me off the street and stop loving me for who I was. When I came out to my mother, the first thing she said was, “Did you think I didn’t know that already?”

But that didn’t exist for my new friends, especially not for Tuck. As hard as I found it to be newly out in a world that didn’t think much of queer people, I had so much more than they did.

As camp drew to a close, we exchanged addresses. Tuck didn’t have an email address, so he gave me his mother’s address. When I got home, I wrote him a long, thoughtful letter telling him how glad I was that we had met and how happy I would be if we could keep up a correspondence.

After a couple weeks, the letter arrived back in my mailbox with this scrawled on the front: “No one by that name at this address. Return to sender.”

It’s been twelve years, and I still think about him. Not in a romantic way – I have a wife – but I do worry about what happened to him. Did his mom ever come around? Did he escape to his dad’s place or to a shelter, or was he unceremoniously dumped on the street like so many are? Was he able to find help and support, or did he end up as one of Portland’s many homeless youth? Is he okay today? Is he a statistic?

Listening to Tuck taught me that all people deserve dignity and respect from their families and friends. All people deserve to be heard – and, more importantly, to be listened to.

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Special Note: Autostraddle’s “First Person” personal essays do not necessarily reflect the ideals of Autostraddle or its editors, nor do any First Person writers intend to speak on behalf of anyone other than themselves. First Person writers are simply speaking honestly from their own hearts.

On Camp: How to Start a Fire

The thing about fire-building is that its a sexy skill. I’ve even included this awesome expertise on my dating profile. Yes, I’m so fantastic, I can build you a bonfire. We can roast marshmallows and talk about the stars. I’ve got romance down. (So why am I still single? The world may never know…) Anyway, I’m passing the torch. Start an awesome fire for the one you lust, and spend your evenings cuddled around it.

There are several important things you’ll need to get your fire crackling. First, a quick reference. Fire needs three important things to stay alive: oxygen, heat, and fuel. If your fire isn’t working, you’re probably missing one of these key components. If you’re missing fuel, find more! Just about anything burns, as long as its dry. And if your fire is hot enough, even the damp stuff will ignite. Heat is easy to solve. Matches, lighters, and magnesium strips will all bring flame to your pile of combustibles. Oxygen is probably the unsung hero of fire. After all, it doesn’t seem necessary. If you want to lose your flame, you blow your candle out, right? But fire needs to breathe. Make sure your flame has enough room, that there are levels in your fire, or you’ll end up snuffing it out. If you’re not comfortable putting your lips next to your campfire and physically blowing on it, take a thick chunk of newspaper, a clipboard, or even a trash can lid and fan the flames.

When setting up a fire, grab all of your necessary materials before you get started. There’s nothing so depressing as getting a flame, running off to the wood pile for supplies, and getting back to a smoking pile of ash. Grab your tinder, your kindling, and at least a few big fuel items before kneeling down over your campfire.

Tinder
Tinder is the stuff that instantly combusts. It’s critical stuff because you can’t just set a twig on fire. Every fire-starter has their preference for good tinder. If you want to look ridiculous (I often do!), you can start a fire with Fritos. All of the oil in them produces a pretty awesome flame, and it smells delicious as well. Laundry lint is my personal favorite. Hair works, whether synthetic or real. Newspaper, last year’s tax returns, dry grass, and brittle dry leaves (make sure they crinkle when you crush them) are also good choices. Put your tinder in the center of your fire and pile up your kindling and fuel logs around it.

Kindling
Kindling is as important as tinder because tinder won’t burn hot enough all on its own to heat up a thick log. Kindling is small wood — twigs, dry branches, or thin cuts off your large chunks of fire wood. Chopping kindling can potentially provide major props to your fire-starting sexiness. Make sure you do a few practice swings with the axe or hatchet so you don’t chop off your toe. Go for pieces that are small, no thicker than your thumb. The best method I’ve found for chopping wood is to take one good swing (with the grain of the wood), and get the blade stuck. Then just pick up the wood (stuck to your axe) and bang it against a hard surface (the ground, another log, a bench) until it splits. Tada! Now you’re a lumberjack.

Fuel
Fuel requires very little advanced prep. When you’re starting out, stick to cut logs where the bark is stripped and you can see the “guts” of your tree. The stringier your wood grain, the easier it will be to light it. Elm and cedar are my favorites, but stick to wood that is local to your area to avoid spreading airborne diseases to living organisms. As your fire gets going, add larger fuels that take longer to burn. Don’t add too much too soon. Let the flames work. They’ll eat what you give them.

Build It
To get a good fire operational, use one of the following building methods: the log cabin, lean-to, or tipi.

The Log Cabin is my personal favorite. It’s easy to build up after your flames eat the understory. Put a couple of fuel logs parallel in your fire pit. Build kindling on top of the logs, just the way you’d build a Lincoln Log toy cabin. Put your tinder in the middle and light it. As your kindling burns, add fuel logs to keep it going.

The Lean-To method is harder to build up, but heats up your kindling more directly. Place one fuel log in the fire pit, and lean four or five pieces of thin kindling against it. Stuff tinder underneath the kindling and ignite it. As it burns, add more fuel. It may look more haphazard than the log cabin, but as long as its flaming, it’s good.

The Tipi method is great if your pit or surface is damp. Don’t leave fuels sitting in water or on damp ground. Water suppresses heat, taking away one of the key factors in successful fire. To build a tipi, lean three pieces of kindling over a pile of tinder. If the ground is wet, put the tinder on top of something else (like a few pieces of extra kindling). As the flames rise, they’ll ignite the kindling. It can be difficult to build on this fire, but one it’s going, add more fuel any way feasible.

Mastering fire-starting is all about practice. Try not to light your clothes on fire. Keep a suppression method around for safety (metal trash can lids or buckets of dirt are better options than a bucket of water). Don’t forget the marshmallows!

About the author: Allison is a well-seasoned camp instructor, an outdoorswoman, and a fire enthusiast (read: pyromaniac). When not teaching kids to love the environment, she sets enormous fires on the prairies of Northern Illinois and pouts when she has to put them out. Allison lit herself on fire four times as a kid, and feels that any week where she doesn’t come home with her arm hair curly and singed is a week half-lived.

On Camp: I Hold Camp In My Heart

“On Camp” Month:

1. Introducing Camp Autostraddle, by Riese
2. “On Camp” Call For Submissions, by the team
3. 10 Super-Cool Movies About Summer Camp, by Riese
4. I Hold Camp in My Heart, by Robin

It was getting late and from our vantage point at 5,000 feet up, you could easily see menacing storm clouds rolling in through the fog. We had only a few minutes to make a decision. Who let us — four women in our early twenties — take these sixteen teenagers up this mountain and who the hell was going to save us now? The choices were simple: we could go back — hike down the way we’d came, try to find shelter in the dark with flashlights and lose a day in our mission, or we could continue on to Mount Katahdin’s Knife Edge, the infamously narrow path along the highest mountain in Maine.

There are certain times in your life when you’re in a position that you feel you’re just not ready for. Whether it’s a big move or your first day at work, you feel suddenly that you’re too small and whatever’s in front of you is too big and surmounting it seems impossible.

We climbed carefully over the slippery rocks as the wind whipped around us and the rain poured down. I watched these girls — who’d come to us as strangers, seeming so young and naive — stretch their hands out toward one another, and help each other up and over the rocks.

The next day, which was the last of our six-day trip, we canoed through torrential rain, stopping only because the lightning had started hitting close by. We pulled up under a bridge, docked and sat in a huddle, exhausted, mud up to our thighs, muscles sore, watching our canoes fill up with water. I would’ve cried if someone hadn’t started singing, and then someone else joined in. We sang and laughed until the sun came out! That was a decade ago and I still remember each of their faces. Those girls, that one trip, I will never forget.

From the time I was 9 years old until mid-way through college, I spent my summers at a sleep-away camp for girls in Maine. The camp was situated on a peninsula that jutted out into a beautiful lake, about an hour north of Portland. Every night I would fall asleep to the sounds of waves lapping at the shore and loons calling to each other from their sanctuaries along the water’s edge. We spent rainy days writing letters from our bunk beds, under the near-deafening clatter of the tin roofs, occasionally taking the time to add our names to the graffitied walls. “Robin Wuz Here, 89”.. “90”, “91”…

My first summer at camp, I signed up for a two-mile swim across the lake that began at sunrise. At 9 years old, I was the youngest to ever sign up and, because I was so young, the swim’s organizers forgot to wake me up until the swim had already started. By the time I’d thrown on my bathing suit and ran into the freezing water, I’d forgotten to put my towel and sweats in the van that would meet us on the other side. I finished my two-mile swim hours later and had no towel or shoes waiting for me. I vividly remember crying into my hot chocolate in a parking lot, utterly exhausted from the swim and embarrassed for having forgotten my towel, which is a weird reaction for a kid who’d just swum across a two-mile lake without stopping for a break or even touching the bottom. But it wasn’t long before I had about 10 towels and sweatshirts on top of my tiny shivering frame. All of these girls I’d never met sat around me and talked about how proud they were of me, the tiniest, smallest swimmer. I don’t remember feeling more loved as a kid, outside of my own family, as I did in that moment. That was camp: a family.

Our counselors were strong women, very much comfortable with who they were, and fearless. Not getting along with each other wasn’t an option, and our counselors made that clear. They played guitar for us at night and talked to us about things our parents couldn’t or wouldn’t, making camp the place where I could escape the stresses of school bullies and mean girls, learn about real friendship, and have strong feminist role models. After high school, I went back to work at camp, wanting the responsibility and opportunity of being a role model and helping younger women not just survive their adolescence, but thrive in it. Camp made me feel like I was part of something bigger than myself.

One summer I was chosen to be a counselor for the littlest campers. I wasn’t excited about this, as I’d never thought of myself as a “little kid person” and these girls were super young — six and seven-year-olds who wake up at 3am with wet sheets and tears in their eyes. But I found myself singing Disney songs to them at night so they would fall asleep. One night, after this tiny girl fell from her top bunk and we put bandages on her little knees, she crawled onto my bed, where I read stories to her until she fell asleep. I’ve never felt as important as I did that night.

Camp was also where I first started having crushes on girls, although I didn’t really understand them in that sense at the time. At ten, my friends and I would make out with hands covering our mouths and at 12, I was horrified when a gorgeous blonde counselor walked in on me with my shirt off. That was the one drawback to the camp — it was conservatively religious and discussions of sexuality outside of the home were not a part of maturing into adulthood. If those conversations could’ve happened at camp, it would’ve been heaven on earth.

For the past decade, I’ve lived near or in New York City. Hiking is no longer a word in my vocabulary. I take daily showers and very rarely forget to put on my mascara. I spend my days either behind a computer or a camera. I cram myself on to subway cars with a hundred other people and my dog has his choice of about 10 trees to pee on on our daily neighborhood walks.

These days, on top of being a city girl, I’m also an out and proud gay woman, and I probably couldn’t land a job at my old camp if I wanted to. That’s so sad to me, because while camp is totally about being outside and sleeping in cabins and sing-alongs and campfires and eating meals together, it’s also about a community of people building each other up. Camp is about loving all the parts of ourselves because they are all perfectly lovable. It’s about creating and having new experiences that we may not have a chance to have back home.

Being out and gay at camp has always been a dream of mine, and that’s part of why I was so excited to make A-Camp happen —  place where you can meet each other and revel in your awesomeness while knowing that being queer is part of your awesomeness. You want to talk about sex or activism together? Great! You wanna do some crafts with Laneia or write some stories with Riese? DONE. Even though sometimes I barely recognize that girl on top of Katahdin — thigh-deep in mud and singing around a campfire — I know she’s there, and ready to do it all over again.

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Special Note: Autostraddle’s “First Person” personal essays do not necessarily reflect the ideals of Autostraddle or its editors, nor do any First Person writers intend to speak on behalf of anyone other than themselves. First Person writers are simply speaking honestly from their own hearts.

On Camp: 10 Super-Cool Movies About Summer Camp

“On Camp” Month:

1. Introducing Camp Autostraddle, by Riese
2. “On Camp” Call For Submissions, by the team
3. 10 Super-Cool Movies About Summer Camp, by Riese

Summer camp movies are almost a genre in and of themselves: it’s ripe material, certainly, all that wily adolescence and isolation-enabled drama, all that swimming and crafts-making and such. To kick off April’s theme, “On Camp,” I present you with ten decent or otherwise memorable movies about summer camp. Salute Your Shorts isn’t on this list, because it’s a television show. But if it wasn’t, it would be.

Ten Great Or Otherwise Memorable Movies About Summer Camp

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10. Camp Cucamonga (1990)

This movie is bad, but it’s also amazing because it was released on my birthday and because it stars Rachel Green, Steve Urkel, D.J. Tanner and the guy responsible for Watergate.

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9. CAMP (2003)

[watch it]

CAMP, “a comedy about drama,” takes place at a performing arts camp (based on the director’s experiences at Stagedoor Manor) — a wooded respite for talented weirdos who can’t be gay, love musical theater, or get anyone to make out with them in regular life but live for their eight weeks of summertime freedom. I think if you cross it with Girl Interrupted, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and the The Dead Poets Society, you’ve got yourself a fairly accurate picture of what arts boarding school was like for me, which’s why I think this movie is better than it probably is.

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8. Little Darlings (1980)

[watch it]

This movie stars now-currently-out-lesbian Kristy McNichol as Angel, a girl who looks and acts like a lesbian but is not a lesbian — we find this out almost right away, when a group of de-virginized bitches tease Angel on account of her virginal status and then predictably accuse her of being a lesbian. The plot of the movie, then, is a contest between Angel, the tomboy “girl from the wrong side of the tracks,” and Ferris (Tatum O’Neal), the rich girl, to see who can lose their virginity first. Now-currently-out-lady-lover Cynthia Nixon also stars.

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7. Stagedoor (2006)

[buy it]

I first encountered storied performing arts camp Stagedoor Manor in the back of The New York Times Magazine, where the Catskill Mountains-based summer program advertised relatively luxurious accommodations and a staff prepared to foster young people’s dreams of stardom. Unfortunately my parents didn’t see the hidden child star I saw inside of myself and were uninterested in sending me to Stagedoor. Parents who did see fit to ship their kids to Stagedoor include the parents of Natalie Portman, Lea Michele, Mary Stuart Masterson, Mandy Moore, Zach Braff, Michael Ian Black, Jon Cryer, Robert Downey Jr., Jennifer Jason Leigh and Mia Tyler.

The documentary is a winner, and any former theater kid (or any kind of awkward outsider) will see themselves in these young aspirants, grappling desperately for affirmation and praying for the possibility of unveiling transcendent talent.

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6. Meatballs (1979)

Bill Murray made his lead-acting debut in Meatballs, a movie about dudes and girls in bikinis and — let’s be real, I have no fucking idea what this movie was about, only that it was a huge deal in the 80’s, spawned a lot of sequels, and is considered a “quintessential” camp film.

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5. Girls Rock! (2007)

This empowering documentary tells the story of the five-day Rock ‘n Roll Camp for Girls, where girls between the ages of eight and 18 “are taught that it’s OK to sweat like a pig, scream like a banshee, wail on their instruments with complete and utter abandon, and that “it’s 100% okay to be exactly who you are.” The affirming emotional experience of making rock ‘n roll opens the door to discussions about the trials and tribulations of contemporary girlhood, from eating disorders to drug addiction to your more benign everyday self-loathing. As the website promises: “What happens to the girls as they are given a temporary reprieve from being sexualized, analyzed and pressured to conform is truly moving and revolutionary.”

Also; Carrie Brownstein.

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4. Jesus Camp (2006)

[watch it]

Unlike most of the other films on this list, Jesus Camp is kinda serious and also quite scary. Documentary filmmakers Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing earned an Academy Award nomination for this look at an Evangelical Christian Summer Camp “Kids On Fire School of Ministry,” which essentially indoctrinates children into “taking back America for Christ” every summer. This involves worshipping a cardboard cut-out of George W.Bush, speaking in tongues, participating in anti-choice protests, confronting strangers in bowling alleys about their relationship with Jesus, “training for God’s army,” decrying Harry Potter and listening to Ted Haggard deliver a sermon condemning homosexuality. It’s also a pretty damning look at how Evangelicals took over American politics.

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3. Ernest Goes to Camp (1987)

[watch it]

After Ernest Saves Christmas, this overlooked gem is the best of the Ernest cannon. I can say this with certainty because I was a big Ernest fan throughout childhood. In Ernest Goes to Camp, Ernest gets promoted from handyman to camp counselor when the camp’s participation in the “Second Chance” programs lands a rowdy bunch of juvenile delinquents on site and nobody but Ernest is willing to take care of them. Hijinks ensue.

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2. Wet Hot American Summer (2001)

[watch it]

This cult movie takes place on the last day of a Jewish Summer Camp in 1981. It stars Janeane Garofalo, David Hyde Pierce, Amy Poehler, Molly Shannon, Michael Ian Black, the guys from ‘The State’ and Detective Stabler. How can you go wrong with a cast like that? You can’t, actually.

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1. Parent Trap (1961/1998)

[watch the 1998 version]

I know the Lindsay Lohan version has captured a place in your young sweet hearts, but the Hayley Mills edition will forever hold a special spot in mine.

Call For Submissions: “On Camp” and More Queer Girl City Guides

Hey-o Yes Homos! Is it ever your lucky day! March’s theme has been “Here/Queer” — stories with a strong sense of place — and ’cause we feel like there are so many more city guides and et cetera to be written and read in this great big world of ours, we’re gonna keep publishing these city guides periodically over the next six weeks or so. We will have an April theme as well though, so hang tight.

First — Moar City Guides!

We’re especially interested in somebody doing a guide for Los Angeles, ’cause a lot of A-Campers will be taking some time in the city at the end of April while journeying to camp!

We welcome submissions from wherever, and we’re especially looking for:

– Manhattan
– San Francisco
– Oakland/Berkeley
– Atlanta
– Houston
– Miami
– New Orleans
– London
– Melbourne
– ANYWHERE IN THE SOUTH!

If you wanna submit a city guide, email Laneia with a letter describing your connection to the city you wanna write about. She’ll let you know if it’s already been taken or not, at which point you’ll be responsible for crafting a comprehensive guide (see other guides for tips) and providing at least five of your own high-res photos (which you own the rights to), links to the places you talk about (and phone numbers/addresses when necessary), and whatever insidery details you’ve got.

I+

Secondly, Our April Theme is “On Camp.”

We’ll be publishing more Here/Queers as well as “On Camp” posts from April 1st – May 15th, at which point we’ll announce the June theme and then take a breather! Isn’t it cute how we like to make things as complicated as possible? I thought so!

“On Camp” is — you guessed it! — about camp, and we chose this theme to celebrate the launch of our first ever A-Camp, taking place the last weekend of April.

On Camp pitches could include anything from “how to build your own shelter” to your favorite trail mix recipe to the history of girl scout camp to a personal essay about how your torrid affair with another lady at band camp helped you accept your homogayness. It need not be explicitly queer, but we do prefer stories that explore or relate to issues that affect queers, feminists and/or outsiders.

Examples of “On Camp”-ish material from around the web:

+ How Nerd Camp Saved my Life, nerve.com – “The summer I was 14, I went to two different summer camps. The difference between them summed up the central crisis of my life at the time: Was I going to identify as the geek or the Kid With Issues?”

+ Notes on Camp, nerve.com – “Public masurbation and other things I learned at Vacation Bible School.”

+ Summer School Is Bunk: Why Camp Shouldn’t Just Be for Rich Kids – “Admittedly, my skepticism about year-long school is connected to my own summers, which were unusually fruitful. My parents were able to afford to send me to a summer camp where I learned not only swimming and sports, but history and politics. “

+ Jazz Hands, Everyone!, New York Magazine – “The story of Stagedoor Manor, where Robert Downey Jr and Lea Michelle honed their chops.”

+ Beauty Q&A: Pack and Travel, Pack and Travel, the hairpin -“Summer means music festivals and camping. And for me, music festivals and camping mean trying not to look like I haven’t properly showered in three days even though I haven’t properly showered in three days. “

+ Notes on Camp, rookie – “First kisses, Friendship Night, and the importance of snuggling.”

+ Camp Out, nerve.com – “The director of the first gay Christian summer camp on turning the political tide.”

+ Ten Movies to Go Watch if You Can’t Go to Summer Camp, Gawker – “As June creeps on, school kids across the nation are getting released from the crumbling prisons that are America’s schools and being sent off to life-guarding jobs, coal mines, or, if they’re lucky, sleepaway camp. Not one of those lucky kids? Well here are some movies to watch that will make it feel almost like you’re there.”

+ What I Learned at Luxury Boot Camp, Good Magazine – “If you are among [the wealthy who can afford it], wonderful: I highly recommend you explore it as an option if you’re looking to seriously reboot. If you are not, click through the slideshow to read about some of the lessons I gleaned from my week on Ranch time.”

+ My Imaginary Wet Hot American Summer, The Rumpus – “Even though I’m Jewish, I never went to summer camp. A popular girl in the sixth grade called me “Pizza Legs,” because of my purple spider veins and red splotches and moles—bright, textured flaws that looked like pizza toppings on pale skin. During a pool party, I refused to get in a swimsuit, and a different popular girl called me a lesbian. What did a lesbian look like, I wondered. I guess they looked like me. I tried not to look like me. I’d now like to imagine what summer camp could have been if everything were different.”

+ Notes on Camp: This episode of This American Life has quite a few examples of what we’re looking for (but in writing, not audio, obvs)

Send your pitches to Laneia [at] Autostraddle [dot] com and cc Rachel [at] autostraddle dot com & Laura [at] autostraddle dot com by April 3rd. Include a resume and three samples (either PDFs from print publications or link to your work published online).