You mind if I rant for a minute, O?

Jesus loves me, this I know. All my music tells me so.

All of the posters on my wall and all of the friends my parents want me to hang out with say the same thing.

I guess it's pretty much fucking unanimous.

Jesus loves me, even though I'm a fucking lesbian. Not because I'm a lesbian, mind you. The manual states it clearly, I've been told. He loves me despite my sinning ways. I guess that's the way it goes, though. Jesus loves a fucking project. He loves the sinners more than the rest because they have more to feel guilty about.

He loves the sinners so much that all those straight-laced fuckers who arrive at church ahead of me each week are desperate to be sinners. The totally invent sins out of thin fucking air, just so they can feel guilty and get some loving.

Like "sins of the mind". What the fuck is that? They want to feel guilty for just coveting someone's ass. Not me. If I'm going to pay the price, the least I'm going to do is have a real, bad-ass, don't-look-at-me-that-way-or-I'll-kick-your-ass sin to atone for.

I go to church all the time now, just to embarrass my parents. It's my way of getting back at them for sending me to that camp.

Do I sound bitter? Not at all. Nope. I'm just having some fun with it.

Oh, the camp? Yeah. That's what you asked about, isn't it, O?

I'll smut it up if you want. Let me know. Then you can blast it out to the smutverse if you want. I think your friends would like it. The sweet part of the deal is that no one will take it seriously.

Mom is fucking retarded. She thinks she can still get me excited with wedding magazines and romance novels. Like I'm going to wake up one day and totally get it. Dad's just in it for the money. He boasts over the dinner table. Yeah, we still do that. How totally motherf-ing quaint. He boasts about how much easy business comes his way from the church and churchgoers and the holy-ass Christian women's club. I mean seriously, can you even believe there is such a thing?

So when they figured out I was into girls (and it took them long enough to notice - it's not like I was doing an ace job of hiding it) they hit the roof hard.

Well, he did. Mom doesn't do that. She just gets disappointed, which is much worse because she may be an asshole but she's still my mom.

Where do you shop for one of these places, by the way? Not that you'd know. But I wonder, because it's not like you'd find it in the yellow pages. My parents found one though, right quick - probably through the pastor at our church. I wish they'd shopped around a bit. Or not. I don't know. I mean, this place probably fucked me up worse, but it's not like I really wanted to be cured. I guess if I were going to choose one, I'd want "ineffective but harmless" somewhere in the ad.

My parents wanted the cure though. Not for their sake. No. Of course not. For my sake. So I can be happy again (like it was ever picture postcard in my family) and be loved by God. Who, by the way, loves me anyhow. He just requires that I feel guilty about how he made me.

You mentioned you had a writer friend who was a lesbian, BTW. Did she ever have to deal with the religion thing? Just wondering.

So they drove me there, across three states. I'm not going to say which ones, just in case you do post this out there. Holy crap was that a road trip. Imagine being trapped in a car with your parents for hours on the road, just after they tell you that they're bringing you to a camp that'll fix you right up from being gay.

Yep, I was gonna be cured. Hallelujah. Is that even how you spell it? My spellchecker still has it underlined.

The place was nice, in a holy motherf-ing Christian boot camp sort of way, with horses and daily nature hikes and all that shit. I know I should set the scene better ('k so I'm not gonna be a writer) but I can't wait to tell you the best part. I actually knew one of the other girls there!!

I'll call her "Leah". Why? Well, I have to call her something, right? And I don't want her real information out there. I may have been pretty shitty to her recently, but she's still sort of my friend.

How fucked up is that, though? Like, did my church pastor get bonus Jesus-bucks for sending out two lesbians in as many weeks?

Which is a laugh, because "Leah" <-- (okay I'm gonna stop using the quotes) had to be there on one of those 'sins of the mind' technicalities. Like she must have accidentally brushed against another girl in the showers at school, and had some warm and shivery thoughts about it after.

Whatever.

But it was weird. If we had've known, maybe we could have carpooled. It might not seem like it, but that's the funniest thing I'll say in this whole story because there was no way either of our sets of parents was going to admit where they were taking us - not even to each other. Plus they probably would have been worried that Leah and I would be making out in the back seat. OMG my parents are so stupid.

They brought in a Christian rock band that night and I kicked back and hung out with the other kids and enjoyed it because there's really no point in having a chip on your shoulder about it and treating these other kids like assholes. I mean, we're all in the same boat, right? Gay boys and girls of the SS Heterosexual. Destination: the wedding altar with a member of the opposite sex. Or, at the very least, back into the closet.

Our day-to-day was: prayer and hikes and bible study and more prayer and Christian music and therapy and prayer ... and you get the point. Lots of prayer. Because if you just want something bad enough, and ask for it in a naggy enough way, God will just hand it over, right? And some of these kids really wanted it. I'd put Leah in that group. If one of us was coming back cured, even I would have put my money on Leah. Her parents would be so fucking proud.

Okay Orestes ... have you ever seen A Clockwork Orange? Like at the end, where they pry that guys eyes open and totally fuck his mind up with images of violence so that he'll be cured. You can cut this part out if you want to post this story, but I just brought it up because I always get images of that scene when I think about the SHAME room.

The SHAME room was our name for it, us kids. It was like holy fucking legend well before I came along, and probably still is. I don't know what the printed on the actual door. Probably just some other name or number like linen closet or number 28 or something. I never went there. I just heard stories.

Because as bad a badass as I want to sound like in my letters to you, there was no way I wanted to be strapped to a chair with my eyes pried open so they can forcefully condition the queerness out of me. Or whatever the Christian hetero equivalent of that treatment is. Safer to just pray, and hike, and maybe roll my eyes now and again, but not to defy openly.

One of my newly found friends went there shortly after I arrived. Yes, O, I pressed her for details. How could I not? Not so I could write about it - I didn't even know about authors like you back then - but just because, well, I mean it sounded so much like folklore. The SHAME room.

But it was totally real. Shannon got sent there because she was always lipping off during bible study. They took her there at night, while the rest of us were in bed. One bonus of being in a camp for curing our sex problems was that we each got our own room. It was a crappy little room, but at least we didn't have to put up with some weirdo roommate who snores and crap like that. So when they took her, nobody noticed.

Now I don't really know if there's any real thinking that goes on about these therapies. Maybe these people just want to feel like they're doing something. The lord's work, and all that. So I couldn't tell you whether boring us with Bible study had any real chance of "curing" anyone. But the other way ... the SHAME room...

Totally fucking opposite. Like they looked at what they were doing during the day and said "If you can't see that Jesus loves you, maybe you'd like to see what the other guy has in store."

I don't know if Shannon was lying. I doubt it. She told me that they totally forced her into doing dirty nasty extreme lesbian shit with some crazy bull-dyke staffers - along the lines of curing a fat kid of an eating disorder by making him eat so much chocolate cake that it makes him sick. Kind of associating lesbian sex with being something ugly, shameful, painful. Negative conditioning, I later read.

She had real bruises and shit. I saw them.

And believe me, Shannon never piped up about the old testament, the new testament, or any other fucking testament again in Bible study. She kept her big mouth shut. Cured? Probably not, but sure as fuck she was silent.

Now here I'm going to fess up. I had some misplaced anger about the whole scene. It feels so concentration camp, shipping us all off to a reprogramming center to cure us. And what drove me crazy - I mean really crawled up my ass - was that some of the kids were really buying into it. By this I mean Leah and her crowd. I probably should have been more mad at my parents, or the staff, but I knew what was good for me, and any of that would just land me in the SHAME room.

I feel guilty about this part. But hell, guilt is holy fucking currency. Jesus is going to love me even more because of what I did. Actually, more what I said. Because it was my idea. I didn't actually do it. I just suggested it, mostly in joking. Well, partly anyway.

I told Shannon that it would be funny to see one of these goody-goody earnest please-cure-me-and-make-me-closer-to-the-Lord kids get nailed for something and have to go to the SHAME room. We picked Leah. Okay, it was my choice. Great. More fucking guilt. I'm going to be the most popular girl in church.