After I started hanging around with Bee and before I visited the Exorcist, I went to see a "Christian Counselor". I was struggling with the idea that I might be a lesbian and I wanted to get some help. I was very involved in a fundamentalist church at the time, so a christian counselor seemed like the way to go, so I carried my twenty year old self in for a visit with Marsha Hoppy.

Marsha was probably in her late forties and looked like your basic country club gal. Very tidy. Thin. And like the exorcist, she apparently thought she needed a little back-up. There was another woman there whose name was Jill, I think. The interesting thing about Jill was that as soon as I looked at her, I thought she looked like a lesbian -- kind of the preppy golfer type. Maybe she was one of those ex-queers.

I began by explaining to Marsha that I'd always formed very close attachments to my female friends. When I was in my early teens, I'd heard someone say that one in ten people were gay. I used to pray at night, "dear god, please don't let me be one in ten." I strongly suspected that I was, but I was horrified by the idea. My mother evidently had the same concerns because she was always explaining to me that I wasn't to hug my girl friends, I wasn't to tell them I loved them -- that behavior was "funny". I knew there must be something wrong with me, because I really loved to hug my girl friends.

When I was sixteen or seventeen, Mom and I were sitting on the couch having a conversation when she asked me to stand up and turn around. I did, and asked why. She said, "I wanted to see if you look like a dyke. I thought you might. But you don't look like a dyke."

Then when I was nineteen, I started having sex with Bee and was pretty sure that wasn't something I wanted to stop doing. But I still didn't want to be a lesbian.

When I'd finished my tale, Marsha said we should all join hands and I should follow her in prayer, meaning she would pray and I would repeat after her. So she started, "Dear God, we come to you in Jesus' name...." and I repeated, "to help Charlotte know that you love her," and I repeated...and I repeated various other things, until she said, "and help Charlotte to know that she is not a deek." I can only assume she meant to say "dyke." But at that point, the repeating after her was pretty well over for me. At first I was in a quandary trying to decide whether to say "deek", which would've just cracked me up, or "dyke", which would've cracked me up too. So I didn't say anything. I knew that if I uttered so much as a syllable, I was going to begin laughing hysterically. In fact, although I was as still and quiet as I could be, my body was already shaking with periodic wild giggles.

So there was this long silence while she waited for me to repeat after her. Finally, since I clearly wasn't going to, she got around to the "amen." She didn't have much to say after that. She probably thought that I was completely unrepentant, since I'd been unwilling to pray along. The meeting didn't last much longer, and I was dying to get out of there anyway so I could laugh out loud. I never went back.

I got a real therapist about a year and a half later (sometime after the Exorcism), and started dealing with coming out to myself. All that's another story, but I will say that it was a huge relief to me to finally admit to myself that I was a lesbian. I've never been sorry, or wished for anything else since then. Leaving church was hard too, but I've never regretted that either.