A-Camp

I have sat and stared at my screen for a good ten minutes trying to figure out how to explain what A-Camp is.  

A-Camp is a camp for lesbian/queer/trans* identified people hosted by Autostraddle (www.autostraddle.com) held up in the mountains in Angels Oaks, California.  It is several days and nights of workshops, panels, activities, games, shows, performances, drinking, dancing, and being in a safe space.  People come from all over the US (and the world!) to meet others and share feelings and explore. 

You are assigned a cabin and cabin mates, you have counselors.  You partake in color wars and attend educational panels on things like gender, race, kink, non-monogamy, spooning, your period, whiskey, and more.  You craft.  You dress up for a dance on the last night and watch a talent show.  You get drunk at night and make out in the woods.  You experience a closeness and a bond with these other queer people that isn't able to be found in the real world and you never want to leave and you have all the feelings in the entire world. 

A-Camp changed my life. 


A-Camp was the reason I moved to Chicago.  It was the reason I landed comfortably here, bonded to a group of Chicago ladies I had met up on that mountain. 

All these people live in Chicago and I met them all because of Camp!

 I met my best friend, Katie, on my shuttle ride up to my first camp.  

One year later we both moved to this city to be nearer to our community and each other; we currently live a ten minute walk apart.  

Seriously, look how much we love each other.

I have been to camp a total of three times, every time it has been put on since its creation, and I hope to go to the rest of them as long as I live/can afford to go.  Explaining how and why camp is so magical is nearly impossible to do unless you have experienced it.  When convincing my friend Anne Marie to attend camp, the only thing I could say about it was "seriously, it will change your life."  She came to the last camp and now fully agrees with my declaration.  

See!  Look how happy Anne Marie (far right) is to be at Camp!

I wrote a thing about camp after crashing harshly back into reality post A-Camp 3.0 : 

It’s crazy missing something so deeply.  Something I never knew I needed, never knew would become so important to me.  It’s only been a little over a year since I went to my first A-Camp but I can almost single-handedly thank it for changing my life entirely.  Thinking of myself as a minority has always been foreign to me.  I feel lucky; privileged.  I am a cisgendered white girl living in a big city where not many people bat an eye when I kiss my girlfriend on the street.  Not always, but the places I choose to spend my time are fairly gay-centric and young.  But then I am reminded of the things people have said to me, the dirty looks, the uneducated and hurtful questions.  The times parents have pulled their children across the street so they wouldn’t have to explain to them why I look the way I look or why I am holding that girl’s hand.  Times I’ve been told I am going to hell by people I once considered closest to me.  The fact that I can’t talk about my life and the people I fall in love with to my parents as easily as I once could (or for the rest of my family, not at all).  When I go to a wedding, I choose to go solo because I don’t want to freak out my childhood friends’ families, the ones that saw me when I was little and pictured me growing up and marrying the right man.  I forget sometimes that I am a woman and I am queer and I am, in fact, a minority.
 That’s part of the magic of A-camp.  You are on a mountain and you are all queer and you are all different and the same and this sense of community and bonding is immediate and intense and suddenly you aren’t a minority anymore.  You’re just one of these three-hundred people who are all in love and searching for it and confused and happy and lonely and tired and elated.  And you all become one, and to leave and be thrust back into the real world is scary and difficult and overwhelming.
 On that mountain I am brave.  I can approach a person that I think is attractive/interesting/wearing something I want/lonely looking/hilarious and we can talk freely.  On that mountain I can wear a two-piece swimsuit at a pool party and not only do I feel comfortable, I feel sexy in the body that has for so long given me anxiety and concern and terrible feelings.  On that mountain the self-conscious late bloomer I so frequently identify with is replaced by someone who notices girls watching her and takes compliments with grace instead of mistrust and confusion. On that mountain I spoke to people who looked like they had their shit together, who were attractive and cool and untouchable, and found out that they are just as concerned and scared and self-doubting as I am.  And I loved them even more for it. On that mountain I wore a tight red dress and watched people stare at my ass and flirted and flaunted for the first time because it felt empowering and good.  On that mountain I opened up and let people in and spoke my true feelings on a stage into a microphone and it felt safe and humbling.  On that mountain I told the people I admired I loved them and they told me it right back and it felt real and solid and affirming in a way that nothing has ever felt before.
 On that mountain I am My Best Self, the self I wish I had the courage to be all of the time in a world that isn’t made up entirely of interesting fashionable articulate thoughtful compassionate understanding queers.  And the best thing I can take down from that mountain is knowing that My Best Self is somewhere inside of me and outside of me and it exists, and I am thankful for all of it.

It is as close as I can get to explaining how much of myself, my happiness, my awareness, my community, my sanity, my friends, and my life I owe to those moments spent on top of Mount Feelings.