These Boots Are Made For Camping

Or Tales Of A Tenth Grader Missing The Point And Having A Good Time

This is a story many folks have heard me tell (even with slight modifications from a lawyer, on a PBS affiliate), but I’ve been getting requests for a written version. I’m hoping that reading it today will make you feel better about the wisdom of your tenth grade self.

When I was a sophomore in high school, other kids my age were drinking wine coolers (it was the 80s), perfecting their Madonna moves, and providing each other with what I now know was NOT great um, physical, um, intimacy. I was going to church at least three times a week, haranguing my peers into attending before-school prayer meetings, and asking complete strangers, "Excuse me, have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?"

I also wore this shirt. Unironically.

I was a fervent born-again Christian; this made my fervent Christian mom very happy.

But I was also a huge lifelong tomboy; this made my fervent Christian mom very sad. Or at least it made her worried.

One spring afternoon my sophomore year in high school, I came home from school to find a piece of folded paper on the kitchen table. My mom had written on it with one of those new-fangled post-it notes (it was the 80s, they were new-fangled) "this looks like something you'd really love!"

It was a glossy brochure for God's Boot Camp missionary training program.

"Get dirty for God" was written in traditional log-as-letters camp-related font on the front cover. Inside were photos of enthusiastically smiling teenagers engaged in missionary training tasks like physically building churches and asking total strangers, "Excuse me, have you accepted Jesus as your personal savior?"

I thought, hey, this does look like something I'd love.

Once I decided to attend, I had three months to raise the 1200 dollar fee for participating in the Lord's Boot Camp. At first, this seemed daunting, but as soon as the adults in my church heard about this possibility, they threw the entire weight of their Jesus-loving hearts into helping me get there. They set me up with a hose and a bucket to wash cars for donations in the church parking lot. They contributed a variety of goodies for a substantial baked-goods auction. They even lent me the choir's commercial-size popcorn machine so I could vend cones of the salty snack to the crowds of folks driving down Ridgewood Avenue, engaging in the unique Florida tradition of families going directly from church to the beach.

The Lord's Boot Camp brochure did warn, "this is no pamper camp," and I arrived to find that boy howdy they were not kidding. It was essentially a large stretch of unimproved Florida wetlands with no electricity, running water, or indoors of any kind. We slept in tiny ancient two-person tents that were so covered in spots of black mildew they could easily be mistaken for the side of a Guernsey cow.

We washed our clothes by hand in sulfur water we drew from a manual pump. We were strictly forbidden from slapping the plentiful mosquitos because that would be destroying God's creation.

The place we were supposed to wash up was a swampy pond area that they called–completely unironically–God's bathtub. The drainage ditch attached to God's Bathtub was home to two full-grown alligators. When we questioned our leaders about it, their response was an incredulous "Now, do you really think an alligator is going to eat 500 teenagers?"

None of us thought 500.

But isn't even one kind of a lot?

An actual letter home. It starts out with ‘sorry this letter is dirty, I’m dirty” and this was no lie. The actual physical letter is still visibly soiled, 40 years later.

Every day at 5 am, we'd run the Lord's Boot Camp obstacle course, which consisted of Biblically named physical challenges that our leaders said would help us develop character traits we'd need to handle the challenges of missionary life.

The first obstacle was the Children of Israel's luggage, which consisted of decommissioned wooden artillery crates filled with sand and nailed shut. Each one had the name of a book of the Bible painted on the side. We'd approach them in a jumbled heap. One team member would yell, "Genesis! Exodus! Leviticus! Numbers! Deuteronomy!"

The rest of the team would scramble to put the crates in the order found in the Bible.

The next obstacle was labeled "Mount Sinai" in, of course, the log-based camp font, which seemed so cute on the brochure but felt redundant, if nothing else, after weeks in the wilderness. Mt Sinai was an aptly named truly mountainous pile of tractor tires. The tires at the bottom of the heap were bolted together to provide the basic structure, but the top layers of tires were simply heaped onto the form, which made climbing it feel like ascending a two-story mound of jello.

After Mount Sinai, we were supposed to grab a rope and swing across a three-foot-deep muddy ditch called the Slough of Despond. I had neither sufficient height nor bodyweight to arm strength ratio to make this happen. By the end of Boot Camp, I had given up on the rope and instead would just walk through the ditch. It felt more dignified than doing a grab and fall, but it also meant I sat for hours in wet and muddy clothes every morning because we were not permitted to return to our campsites to change. Between the obstacle course dunking and the torrential Florida summer rains leaking into our ancient tents and soaking my sleeping bag, I felt soggy a fair amount of the time.

This is not what I looked like when encountering the Slough of Despond. I was not unathletic, but I was less than five foot tall.

The last obstacle was a series of six-foot walls painted with names of sins we would have to overcome to serve Jesus. These potential evils included (among others) pride, greed, gluttony, lust, and doubt. My recollection was that the last wall said 'sexual confusion," but there is absolutely no photographic evidence of this. Perhaps this is a bit of after-the-fact projection on my part.

Each evening we'd gather under the colorful striped circus tent that our leaders called "The Big Top" for an epic church (tent?) service that the Lord's Boot camp called a "rally." Boot camp rallies could not have been more scientifically engineered to create a Pavlovian response to their intermittent positive reinforcement.

Singing “love is the flag flown high from the castle of my heart.” Unironically.

We'd croon the evangelical equivalent of an 80s power ballad. "When you come to place where I'm all you have/you'll find I'm all you need."

We'd sing to each other, but using the words, we really hoped God meant.

Campers with the least tidy tent site would be publicly named and given laminated "I live like a pig" signs they'd be required to wear for the next 24 hours.

Boo, sinful lazy nature!

We'd hear a speaker who would share how God used them to convert a bazillion people in a country we hadn't known existed. Now those people would spend eternity with Jesus in heaven instead of being burned in a never-ending lake of fire in hell.

Yay, missionary person!

Yay, Jesus, for using missionary person so mightily!

On Tuesday nights, there would be a demonstration of what we'd learned that day in puppet ministry. A chosen few participants would make the puppets sing a Jesus power ballad, act out a Jesus related-sketch, or deliver a Jesus-related monologue. The puppeteers were always careful to observe that puppets could talk, share, or perform. However, they shouldn't pray to accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior because as we were reminded each time we had puppet ministry instruction–unlike teenagers, puppets do not have souls.

Rallies were also the most physically comfortable moments of our days. This was partly because there were few other boot camp situations when we weren't engaged in various physically demanding tasks and partly because the circus tents that covered us at rallies, unlike our sleeping tents, actually kept out the rain.

Rallies were also the only time we sat on proper chairs rather than sideways logs.

Looking at this photo, I can almost catch that Teen Missions smell: bug spray mixed with wet smelly teen age body odor.

Once during a discussion of this sideway log sitting business, I joked, "it makes you wish your crack ran the other way, doesn't it?"

One of our team leaders overheard this comment, deemed it "ungodly," and gave me the equivalent of a boot camp detention. That day instead of having time to wash the Slough of Despond out of my underwear, I was sent to a distant campsite with other rebellious team members where we carried dirt from one location to another using five-gallon plastic buckets.

These 90-minute work-instead-of-free-time detentions were called "special blessings" because, our leaders told us, punishment was God's way of showing us he cared enough to correct us. I got specially blessed a lot that summer.

We were given extraordinary opportunities to learn the construction skills we might need to physically build God's kingdom. That summer, we mastered how to drive a nail without hitting our thumbs, how to lay blocks, tie rebar, put together trusses and even mix concrete by hand.

So obviously, I was having a great summer.

It was a whole summer of being a tomboy.

But every afternoon we were divided by gender for what seemed like highly random classes. The boys attended the aspirational sounding "God's Gentleman." Our confidential informant from the boys' side shared their curriculum, which seemed primarily focused on how to attract a Christian spouse by carefully choosing recreational pursuits. Playing a sport was an excellent idea. Getting involved in theater was not.

The girls' group was called "Grubby to Grace." The class focused on grooming and, in particular, grooming for a ladylike appearance. There was an entire chapter in the textbook devoted to makeup. It included a quote from the boot camp founder Bob Bland, who explained the importance of these lessons: "if the barn looks better painted, why not paint the barn."

I have the entire book of Grubby to Grace, a reader kindly sent it to me. If you’d like to read a whole piece just about that wonder, let me know.

I recently came across a letter I'd written my mom from boot camp.

"I'm in G2G–that means Grubby to Grace," I had scrawled. The paper was smeared with visible boot camp-related dirt. "This class seems a little strange."

Aside from that annoying and seemingly random class, I remember having a great summer.

I returned home with a newfound Christian zeal.

I also returned home with a new haircut. I had subjected myself to a spiral perm before I'd left for boot camp, and while there, I'd attempted to bleach my hair surfer blonde with actual bleach. Because I had special blessings instead of time to do my laundry, I consolidated my clothes washing and bathing time and used Fels-Naptha bar soap to wash my hair. By the end of the summer, my it was so damaged I couldn't even pull a comb through it. One of my fellow team members took a razor and trimmed off almost all the hair on the sides and a lot of the hair on top, leaving me a long rat tail in the back. It was the 80s, remember. I looked fantastic.

I also had a bunch of newly enlarged muscles from a summer of physical labor.

Walking onto my mom's front porch, dragging my swampy-smelling backpack, I chirped, "Mom, don't I look like a new person in Christ?

She said, "You look… a lot the same."

She had a tear in her eye, which touched me deeply. I thought, man, she really missed me.

I've been an out queer person for 20 years. For nearly that entire time, I've been telling the story of The Lord's boot camp summer socially to illustrate what a fervent Christian I was in my teen years. It wasn't until last summer, when I was googling "the lord's boot camp" to show my girlfriend a picture of the obstacle course, that I realized what it seems almost anyone could have figured out.

I found the boot cmp on a list of less expensive options for Christ-Centered teen camps that could help Christian parents extinguish sexual confusion in their teenagers.

I haven't mentioned this to my mom, not just because of her advanced age and because she's accepted that my girlfriend and my tomboy swagger are with us long term.

Although she has.

And I haven't mentioned this to my mom, not just because her machinations were so extraordinarily skillful.

Yes, she sent me to a defacto gay conversion camp, but she sent me to a defacto gay conversion camp where I went 100 percent willingly–even enthusiastically– after raising all my own money to get there.

What we were supposed to bring to Boot Camp. 1985

And she also had me convinced for 35 years that this was entirely my own idea.

At some point, one has to say, "fair play to you scared homophobic parent, fair play to you."

But the most genuine reason I've never mentioned this whole defacto gay conversion camp situation to my mom is that I spent an entire summer learning how to use power tools.

If you know anything queer folks who look like me, you know that Home Depot is our dating app. The summer that was supposed to make me less of a lesbian taught me skills to attract lesbians.

I don't think I owe my mom a scolding so much as I owe her a thank you note.

PS If you’re wanting to buy one of my helpypants boi lego creations but haven’t been able to get out to a show, you’re in luck. Starting later this week I’ll be posting ALL my creations for mail order. This will be a one time deal because I know I’m not really going to the post office multiple times. Stay tuned for more info, or you have a special request, let me know. All proceeds go to support the virtual storytelling workshops I’m doing for queer and trans youth. I’ve filled 3 workshops so far!

This is one of my favorites, but I also have: Cat Ladies Come In All Genders, Accepting Help is Hot, Queer Books Save Queer Lives and some special bigger presentations, including a 10 figure recreation of the NYC Dyke March!