When my son...I think I'll call him Nate, was about seven, bees had it in for him. On his seventh birthday, a bee stung him right in the face at his birthday party. Then a few months later, I took him fishing at a pay lake and a bee caused him to completely lose his dignity. Except that it wasn't really a bee. It was a fly. He only thought it was a bee. But technically since he thought it was a bee, and since he feared them due to the birthday party incident, you could say that bees were at fault for the loss of dignity also.

A pay lake is one of those places where the trailer park crowd is likely to hang out. I hadn't realized that until I actually went to one. I just wanted my son to have the experience of catching a fish and wasn't sure where to take him. A pay lake, which is just what it sounds like...you pay a certain amount of money and you get to fish all day, seemed like a good idea because I assumed it would be well stocked with fish. There may have been a lot of fish there, but there were also a lot of rednecks there, and a lot of trash, and very little in the way of grass.

I think it's generally true that where you have a lot of rednecks, you're likely to find port-a-pottys.

So Nate's in this port-a-potty doing whatever it is he went in there for, and I'm waiting for him outside (on account of I'm his mom and didn't want any rednecks to kidnap him and sell him into white slavery on his way back to where we were fishing). Then BOOM, the door to the port-a-potty flies open, and out comes Nate, butt-first, shrieking, with his pants around his ankles. Every head turned. Of course he bit the dust immediately because it's really difficult to move fast backwards when your pants are around your ankles. I know this because I've tried it.

It was when I was helping him cover his...dignity...that he explained about the bee. Which turned out to be a fly. A little one.

When my son was a toddler, I was in college and on welfare. I did that for three years or so, not quite long enough to get a degree, but close. We lived in subsidized housing -- basically the project. My rent was $67 a month for a not particularly glamorous apartment with no carpet and all the roaches I could want. My welfare check was for $300 month, and I got $90 a month in food stamps. The spare $200 plus a month went for gasoline, diapers, art supplies, clothes for a growing baby, soap, toilet paper, stamps, and whatever other household goods I couldn't buy with food stamps. On the rare occasions that I went out for fun, my friends paid my way. I had no telephone, no cable tv. On the upside, no utility bill, no medical expenses, and no car payment (my grandmother bought the car for me). I don't know how I would have managed if I'd had a car payment to make. I couldn't afford car insurance either, so I just didn't carry it.

I did this (this being the welfare/school thing) because I wanted to do something with my life. I wanted to take care of my son. I was a single parent and it seemed a reasonable thing to do. My family had been paying taxes for years, it seemed fair to take some back long enough to get through school.

The bad thing though is that people have a real bias against the poor, especially the poor who are on welfare. Everybody gets lumped in with the generational abusers of the systems that we've all heard about. I wish I could remember the exact statistic, or find some current ones, but I remember reading back then that over 80% of welfare recipients were single mothers, and the vast majority of them were on welfare for two years or so -- just long enough to get on their feet and find a good job and child care after having a baby. There's this idea that everyone on welfare is living high on the hog. Unless the benefit systems were vastly different elsewhere from where I lived, in Ohio, I don't see how that's possible. Even with lots of kids, you weren't going to be living like Donald Trump. I told you how much I was getting and what I was spending it on...you do the math.

I experienced first hand some of the resentment and bias that people on welfare run into. When my son was an infant, before I lived in the housing project, I rented the basement in a house owned by a young preacher and his family. They lived upstairs. I was paying them $375 a month rent to live in a basement and had to go upstairs to use the bathroom because they never put one in, although they'd agreed to do so. I was able to afford to live in this palatial splendor because my father was sending me a couple hundred dollars a month at the time -- which I appreciated and which he did not continue to do. The preacher's wife, who had three kids of her own, had to get up before dawn every morning and go to work. She confronted me after I'd lived there a few weeks to tell me that as she walked to her car in the mornings, she could see a small light shining in my bedroom and that she deeply resented that I, who was on welfare, felt entitled to have a light on in my room when she, who had to work for a living, was paying the electric bill.

I was going to school full time at the time. My son was only a few months old and very tiny (he was a preemie and didn't even weigh six pounds when I moved into the basement). He slept in a crib in my bedroom. I left a small lamp on at night so that when he cried, I could see him immediately and make sure he was alright. The preacher's wife did work for a living, but she also had a husband to help her, and her husband's family and the church secretary to watch her kids while she worked. And I had assumed that by paying rent, I was contributing to the electric bill. She hated that her taxes were going to to me. It seemed a terribly unfair and pretty direct kind of deal to her. She worked, I didn't, I got her money.

I've had cashiers in grocery stores take books of food stamps out of my hands and count them for me because they apparently assumed I was too stupid to know how to do that for myself. I've been talked to like I was very, very slow witted by social workers who I know were not as smart as me. And then there were the mandatory six month reviews. Every six months, I'd have to get all my paperwork together and go sit in the welfare office for several hours until my social worker was available to review my case. I found these reviews to be horribly demoralizing.

Finally, I couldn't make myself go to another one. I was a year short of graduating from college. I dropped out and got a job at Dominos delivering pizza. Since I wasn't on welfare anymore, my rent shot up to nearly $400 a month -- retroactively for three months. I had to move in with my grandmother for a while.

My self respect was in better shape after I got off welfare, but I still look back and think my timing sucked. I wish I'd stuck it out for another year. I've never seemed to be able to get the logistics in order to go back and finish my degree, but I still think about it.

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.

The first woman I ever slept with was someone I met at church. She was 31; I was 19. I'd never met anyone like her. She was big and beautiful and so smart and wordly. She expanded my view of the world in so many ways. Introduced me to feminism, modern art, politics, literature. Oh, and did I say that she slept with me? I was so deeply smitten by her that I followed her around for the next three or four years, believing that every word she spoke was sacred. Her name wasn't Bee, but that's what I'm going to call her. It fits, as she saw herself very much as the Queen Bee.

At some point a couple of years after I met her, Bee got involved with a church that held some fairly extreme views. They, and she, believed that there were evil spirits lurking about in homes and on inanimate objects which could threaten a good christian's relationship with god. Bee was a smart woman, but when she decided to embrace a belief, she'd embrace it wholeheartedly and hold to it in the face of all logic until she moved on to the next thing. The first casualty of this plague of evil spirts was a series of drawings I'd done of her. They were some of my best work at that time and they'd hung as a group in her living room. They were a gift from me. She threw them all in the dumpster one day when she found herself staring at them. Obviously they had a 'spirit of seduction' on them.

Shortly after that, she refused to let me into her apartment because I was carrying around a 'spirit of lesbianism'. Even though she'd seduced me and slept with me on several occasions, she didn't consider herself a lesbian. She was aware of my feelings for her and I was aware that she didn't return them; nevertheless, I spent lots of time at her apartment and enjoyed her company very much (and I always figured there was a chance she'd take me to bed again), so I was fairly upset when she wouldn't let me in anymore. I asked what I could do to fix things, and she told me I'd have to go and see an exorcist to get the spirit cast out before I'd be allowed back in.

Conveniently, there happened to be an exorcist passing through town the following week. This wasn't a Catholic priest type exorcist, this was some kind of weird hybrid between an evangelist and well...I don't know. A snake handler or something. He was one of those guys who you see on television grabbing people and screaming "come out of her!" He was having a service in Bee's church where he would preach and then cast out demons. I resolved to go see him.

Bee went to the service too, but she wouldn't let me ride with her. I had to go by myself, sit by myself, and not so much as speak to her until I was fresh out of demons. I sat through the preaching part of the service basically feeling bored and fantasizing about how great it was going to be to be allowed back in Bee's house.

I'd like to take a moment here to interject that I did get some therapy later and resolve some of my self-esteem issues.

After the preaching, everyone who wanted a demon cast out was instructed to make a line in front of the door to a church office. I was the first in line. When I went into the office, the Exorcist was in there with an assistant (presumably for those hard-to-remove demons). He asked what I needed cast out and I told him, "a spirit of lesbianism." I said this quietly because I was somewhat ashamed of it. I didn't mention to him that the reason I needed it cast out was so that I would be free to enter the home of the only female lover I'd ever had. Somehow I think he might have doubted my sincerity.

The exorcist grabbed my head, and his assistant put a hand on my shoulder, and they began praying loudly, some in English and some in tongues. Then he started calling for the demon to come out of me. "Come out of her, you filthy spirit of lesbianism! Leave her! In the name of Jesus, come out!" and then "Come out, you spirit of masturbation!" 'Oh my god,' I thought, 'how did they know??' After they got tired of shouting, they'd ask, "Do you feel lighter now?" Twice I shook my head no, and both times they resumed praying and shouting. Finally I realized that if I didn't say "Yes, I feel lighter, praise God," we were going to be there all night. So I professed a lightness I didn't feel and we all praised god and I got the hell out of there.

And I resolved never to value myself so little that I'd put myself through something like that. I did go back in Bee's house after that, but I didn't feel good about what I did to get there. It was also the beginning of the end of my time in church. I started seeing that for me, lesbianism and fundamentalism were mutually exclusive. Maybe some folks can do it, but I can't. And besides, those evil spirits just didn't stay gone long.

Here's another story from when we lived on the farm. I think about this every time I hear the phrase "adding insult to injury."

One of the many pets we had on the farm was this black dog that just wandered up and decided to hang around. We called him Dog to distinguish him from the dogs we'd acquired on purpose -- our 'official' dogs, Smokey, Spot and Fifi. Of course we did call him Black Dog on formal occasions. He was a friendly dog and we liked him.

One day I was outside eating a Brown Cow. Or a Black Cow. I don't remember exactly what they were called, but it was some kind of chocolate or caramel on a stick that was really chewy and quite tasty. Sort of like a Sugar Daddy. All of which is beside the point. The point is that I was enjoying this candy to the fullest. I was probably moaning in rapture as I ate it.

And Dog was keeping me company, which I also appreciated. He was just sitting by my feet, wagging his tail, being all friendly and doggish. I couldn't have been happier overall. Pretty much all the ingredients that a six year old needs for a happy life had come together. It was a beautiful day, I was outside, I had candy, and Dog was keeping me company.

Then without warning, Dog jumped up and grabbed the candy out of my hand. I was stunned. I was shocked. I was heartbroken. I opened my mouth to cry out at the horror of it all and Dog jumped right back up and licked the very last taste of candy off my tongue.

He licked my tongue. A dog. Not even an 'official' dog. A volunteer dog stole my candy and licked my tongue.

I'm still not over it.