The Accidental Homecoming

Lesbians, Camps, Bruce Springsteen, and Utility Vans

The first time I went to New York City, I was nineteen and very confident in that special way you can be when you don’t fully understand how the world works or have a functioning credit score. I was headed to a summer job at a prestigious theater camp in the Poconos, a place for rich children with jazz hands, passive-aggressive headshots, and testimonials from campers who used the word “Meisner” more than I care to think about.

Before heading to camp, I stopped in the city to visit my friend Tara, who was studying at AMDA and living at the Stratford Arms—a former hotel turned dorm turned semi-functional social experiment. It housed musical theater students on one floor, elderly recovering alcoholics on another, and residents in community-based psychiatric housing somewhere in between. No one explained this. You just noticed, after a while, that not everyone belting high C’s or practicing stage combat in the hallway was doing it for a grade.

The shower situation was especially bleak, to be generous: a damp cave with a single naked light bulb swinging overhead, just waiting for an ominous voice to say, “I want to play a game.”

It was the center of the world.

I wandered the city for a few days in the way only a nineteen-year-old can, broke, aimless, and deeply convinced that if I made eye contact with the right person on the subway, my entire life would change. As usual, I called my friend Kathleen, who was working at a summer camp in New Jersey, and she told me to come visit. So, I jumped on the next train to Dover to spend a few days with her.

That’s how I ended up at Kids Camp, a ramshackle, weirdly star-adjacent operation in Newton, New Jersey, owned by someone’s father, a high-powered New York attorney who apparently knew Bruce Springsteen.

Earlier that year, the previous camp directors had apparently thrown a massive party, and the place was still in recovery mode. Staff were cleaning up and fishing fire extinguishers out of the lake ahead of a visit from Danny Federici of the E Street Band. He was supposedly going to report back to Bruce and see if they might donate money or... something. I was never entirely clear on the details.

The camp was full of ghost stories from summers past. One cabin, it was said, had once been the site of a grisly murder back when the property was a Boy Scout camp, committed by who they referred to as a "drifter." Another story involved a neighbor who was allegedly in the Klan (which, I realize, adds to the uncomfortable pattern of white supremacy popping up in more of my stories than I’d prefer). There were even rumors that this was the original "Camp Crystal Lake" from the Friday the 13th movies. I have no idea if any of it was true.

Somewhere between the broken fencing and the rumored Springsteen donation, someone asked if I knew how to swim. I said yes. Then they asked if I wanted to be a camp lifeguard. I also said yes, which was more of a “sure, why not” than a calling. Within a day, I was enrolled in lifeguard training, which lasted about two weeks and took place in a pool that had recently been “renovated", a word I am using because I lack the vocabulary for what it really was.

I remember one day we had an inspection and the chemical levels were off, so we all had to sit along the edge and kick our feet to help circulate the water before the inspector came back. It worked, somehow, and no one died. That was the general energy of the camp.

During my off hours, I’d sit by the pool with my bootleg copy of Oops!... I Did It Again, which I bought for five dollars on Canal Street from a guy selling CDs off a bedsheet. The album insert was an early aughts quality photocopy, meaning it looked like it had been run off a dying Xerox and gently insulted on the way out, but I played it on repeat anyway. It felt oddly luxurious… just me, a folding chair, the chlorine haze of a half-working pool filter, and Britney's warble bouncing off the cracked concrete.

It was a peaceful kind of strange.

As camp started to gear up for the summer season, things began arriving. Boxes of T-shirts. Bins of half-deflated sports equipment. A shipment of cafeteria food that seemed to consist entirely of giant buckets of pickles and chocolate milk.

And then, one day, they delivered the Irish.

A van pulled up and out spilled a group of twentysomethings with matching accents and wildly mismatched expectations. They were from a town called Downpatrick, in Northern Ireland, which I misheard as Dom Patrick for an embarrassingly long time... like until I started writing this story and looked it up.

They all seemed vaguely confused, slightly traumatized by the events of political unrest, and committed to the idea that this was going to be fun... I didn’t know how or why they had been recruited. One of them told me they’d seen a flyer. Another said something about a work visa. No one had the same story, but there they were.

By the time the Irish had settled in and the pool chemicals were mostly stabilized, it was late June. We were told we’d have weekends off, which felt like an outrageous luxury after a week of sunburns, bug bites, and eight-year-olds asking if I was married.

And that’s when someone floated the idea of going back into the city.

One of our coworkers at camp, whose name I’ve completely forgotten, so let’s call him Kevin, was an architecture student at NYU or Columbia from somewhere like Ohio, which felt impossibly far away even though I was from Indiana. Kevin was tall in the way that made you nervous around ceiling fans, and he had the kind of intense, clipboard energy that suggested he was the original character sketch for Leslie Knope.

Kevin had taken it upon himself to organize a tour of the architecture of New York City. He said it just like that, “the architecture", with a reverent hush, like the buildings might overhear and be offended.

So, we went. Kevin had mapped out an itinerary that included Grand Central, the Flatiron Building, and the World Trade Center (#neverforget), none of which I’d heard of, but all of which I nodded along too politely, as if I had a deep, long-standing relationship with early 20th-century urban planning.

We followed him dutifully from one historic facade to another, squinting up at keystones and pretending not to be deeply dehydrated. It was hot, my feet hurt, and I had no real interest in how the Chrysler Building’s setbacks were a metaphor for industrial ambition or whatever Kevin was saying.

Eventually, we landed at the New York Public Library. Kevin was mid-monologue about the building’s symmetry and how Patience and Fortitude were modeled after some French neoclassical something-or-other. I knew nothing about all that—only Zuul. (Come on, it was right there. What was I supposed to do, not make the reference?)

That’s when I noticed the crowd. Mostly women, a lot of leather, very butch, and definitely boots. There were drums, whistles, and signs. A low, thumping energy that didn’t match the dusty reverence of Kevin’s library soliloquy.

I leaned over the railing and said, “Um... is this a protest?”

Someone else said, “Is this gonna be a riot?”

We didn’t know.

We were camp counselors from rural New Jersey, squinting down at a street full of confident queer joy, completely unaware that we were standing at the edge of something beautiful.

And somehow, without meaning to, without even knowing it was happening, I had arrived at my first Pride.

Of course, in 2000, we didn’t have the internet in our pockets. (This is the part where I remember I’m older than the internet. Sigh.) We couldn’t Google

"Gaggle of lesbians outside the library."

We had to ask someone what was happening. Talk to someone. With our mouths. In broad daylight. In public.

A woman with a shaved head and a clipboard told us it was the Dyke March. She said it like it was obvious and handed us a handmade flyer, complete with letters cut from magazines and photocopied until the toner ran out. Like the real grassroots movements and awful punk bands.

We stood there for a long time, just watching. The drums got louder. The crowd thickened. There were cheers and chants. A woman walked by topless except for electrical tape and a sense of purpose.

Without discussion, the architecture tour was over. Kevin came to show us flying buttresses. Instead, he got something a little cheekier. You know—because butts.

We were no longer interested in cornices or columns. We were interested in this—whatever this was. (gesture vaguely at the crowd)

Pride.

The march. The flags and the noise and the feeling of something bigger than all of us moving right past the lions and into the afternoon like it owned the place.

By the time we made it down to the street, we were already plotting how to come back the next day for the full parade. People were asking around, digging out crumpled maps, trying to find the Pride edition of The Village Voice so we could plot our movements like tiny, sweaty, queer generals.

I bought an “official"—got scammed—white t-shirt that just said NYC PRIDE 2000 in pink block letters. It cost twenty dollars... checks notes... which was expensive, considering we were only making $125 a week.

I didn’t know what Pride was supposed to feel like, but I was pretty sure it started with a twenty-dollar overpriced shirt that said I belonged.

The next morning, we jumped up like we were late for something holy and sprinted to the train, barely caffeinated and completely committed. By the time we made it into the city from Queens, people were already lining the sidewalks. We found a spot and stood there like wide-eyed children at Macy’s during Christmas—except instead of animatronic reindeer, there were shirtless men in angel wings and Dykes on Bikes.

The parade went on forever. Or at least it felt like it. Float after float, over a hundred of them, stretching across hours and neighborhoods and parts of myself I hadn’t met yet. There were drag queens in platform shoes taller than my career prospects, leather daddies riding Harleys, queer cheerleaders doing synchronized flips, and an Asian man gliding past in full magenta body paint, with gold jeep nails, riding on top of a white utility van.

Not the most glamorous of chariots, but a striking juxtaposition, beauty and function. A metaphor really

The streets were filled with people cheering, dancing, and urine. It was still New York, and it was a six-hour parade. There were protest signs and banners, glitter and sweat, whistles and bubble machines. A group of Episcopalians handed out bubble gum and salvation.

My uncle used to joke that if you ever pissed your pants, you’d become Episcopalian. It was the only thing I knew about the denomination, and somehow it felt thematically appropriate.

At one point, a man in a thong handed me a sticker that said “TWINK.” I didn’t even know what a twink was. I just said, “thank you,” like he was offering a college brochure.

There was something about the crowd, the joy, the refusal to be anything less than huge and loud and alive, that made me feel like I’d been accidentally let into a club that I so desperately wanted, nay, needed to join.

I wasn’t really out yet. Let’s be real, I didn’t need to come out. It was obvious. I had a bootleg copy of Oops!... I Did It Again. My aura was already doing heavy lifting.

But in that moment, watching the world pass by in sequins and sweat, I felt something shift. Just a click. Like a door I didn’t know was locked had quietly opened.

That night, we took the train back to camp sunburned, sweaty, and mildly glittery. No one talked much. We were all a little dazed, like we’d witnessed something important but didn’t have the vocabulary for it yet.

Back at camp, the bunk was hot and smelled like wet towels and that weird cabin smell, like plastic mattresses and damp wood. I lay there in the dark, listening to someone snore two beds over, still wearing my NYC PRIDE 2000 shirt.

I didn’t feel radically transformed. There was no grand revelation, no triumphant coming out, because, like so many of us, I had to do that quietly, to myself, in a world that didn’t always feel safe enough to hear it.

I’d been given permission to exist. Out in the open, right there on the streets. In broad daylight. In public.

We owe everything to the trans women who stood at Stonewall and refused to disappear. Who met violence with defiance and lit a fire that still burns today, right there in the same streets where I was standing.

To stumble into that legacy at nineteen, accidentally and awkwardly, felt like a kind of homecoming.