Kamp Ketchakunny was created for one reason, to give parents a place to
send their daughters where there was near certainty they would engage in
sexual escapades with other girls. Many of these girls came from homes
with two mothers and were no strangers to love between females or the
activities that would take place at camp. But some of them came from
more traditional families, eager to discover an exciting and coveted
world where girls love girls. And others yet were unsuspecting of what
was to transpire in the weeks to come.
The consensus these days among many parents was that girls should be
encouraged to hook up with each other. By imposing lesbianism as the
norm, pregnancy and disease are almost entirely eliminated, and awkward
and unpleasant sexual experiences are replaced with exciting and
fulfilling ones.
Perhaps homosexuality is the earmark of an advanced society. Pregnancy
is never accidental; children learn to understand their bodies via
bodies very much like their own; self esteem is greater when we may
truly find our own sex (and therefore ourselves) desirable; the shame
once attached to sex is virtually eliminated as the pitfalls
inextricable from heterosexuality are removed; lovers have equal status;
lovers are emotionally compatible because they have the same needs;
lovers are sexually compatible because they have the same potential;
relationships are born of true friendship instead of unattainable fairy
tales.
It was this incredible insight that lead lesbians with daughters to
search with ferocity for community among trail-blazing and like-minded
women. This tremendous energy from so many exceptional women became
focused like a laser beam in a sci-fi movie, and ultimately to the
creation of their own camp, a camp that endeavors to produce the next
generation of lesbian moms prepared to teach their daughters the right
way to live. And so it came to be.
A committee of these women was formed and they had their first meeting
in a chat room but it quickly became apparent that they were going to
have to meet face to face to do the real heavy lifting around finding a
camp they could call their own. The group plotted a spot equidistant
from their homes and arranged a fly in, airport based conference where
they could rent rooms to stay in and have a meeting room.
There were 6 of them on the search committee from all over the country
and they had never met one another. The first night they spent together
someone brought the wine and someone else started them going on telling
their own camp experiences. By the time the third or fourth one had
related their first camp sexual experience, the lot of them were so
horny, there was shortly a room full of naked lesbian moms playing with
themselves.
Then someone remembered a game she used to play at camp called ‘Catch The
Snatch’ and related the rules which went like this; All of the girls get
naked and take turns in a circle drawing a name from a hat (or
alternatively they can spin a bottle). When you select a name, the girl
you selected becomes ‘the snatch’. You must chase the snatch on all
fours and attempt to lick her vulva from behind within a 3 minute time
limit. If you catch the snatch, you can continue to lick and drink all
you want and the other girl cannot move anymore. The next girl in the
circle gets to have her turn. If you cannot catch the snatch, your turn
is over, and the other girl (the snatch) must choose a name from the hat
and take a turn. After her turn if she succeeds, the play then resumes
again with the next girl in the circle.
The moms played the game until they had worn themselves out. They
promised themselves that they would try harder the next day to attend to
the task at hand and not tell anymore camp stories until some decisions
had been made about the new camp they were creating.
It wasn’t hard at all to find an abandoned camp for sale. Lots of them
had gone out of business of late. What was a bit difficult was to find
just the right camp. It had to be isolated enough so that it couldn’t be
easily viewed or accidentally discovered. The lesbian moms wanted to be
sure that activities could occur out doors in the nude if they wanted
them to without fear of outsiders lurking. That got the group to narrow
the available camp list down to former nudist camps and they created a
short list of two that they decided to visit. Before they all flew home,
they wanted to pick a name for the camp and the lesbian mom who had
taught them the ‘Catch The Snatch’ game suggested Kamp Ketchakunny.
They all enthusiastically agreed.
Camps for sale were visited and one seemed ideal. With such an
outpouring earlier when this topic was originally raised, raising funds
to purchase it proved easy and it seemed, by their estimate, that they
would have enough money left over to do the necessary repairs, hire the
staff for the summer, and keep it open one year, even if no one came.
But they were sure they would have campers. The committee of six met
again at the camp to figure out what to do next. It was late March and
it seemed like they would have enough time to get everything in place
for a July 1 start if they could get the staff hired.
Hiring staff turned out to be one of the toughest parts of the whole
business. First they had to screen for like minded girls and women. To
do that as quickly and efficiently as possible, they devised a little
test that they mailed out (so you could cheat if you didn’t know the
answers but either way, you would have a sense of what you were getting
into when you answered them). Here is the test to see how you would do:
- What was the name of the Island where Sappho had a girl’s
school?
- How old was Mary Hammon when she and Goodwife Norman were caught
performing ‘lude behavior upon a bed’ in 1649?
- Name one of Marlene Dietrich’s famous girl friends?
- What is the significance of the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich
Village?
- What year did Mona’s open in San Francisco?
- What was the first state to decriminalize homosexual acts? And
in what year?
Even with the test, likely eliminating girls and women who were not like
minded with the camp sponsors, there were still plenty of applicants. In
fact, the sponsors began to believe that once the word was out about the
camp and the test circulated, there were even more applicants for
positions than there would have been if they had left things alone.
There was nothing left to be done but to perform personal interviews
with the candidates who had the best looking credentials. While the
group would have preferred that all of them get to interview each of the
candidates, either individually or as a group (particularly as a group
given the increased interaction and energy that would have been
available), they were forced to split up. So, they divided the
candidates up and took them on individually. The 6 women wrote out slips
of paper with the different kinds of functions that they hoped to have
at the camp and then drew them one at a time out of a hat. Each
committee woman then was responsible to a particular function of the
camp.
The women divided up the cooks, aquatic staff, management staff, other
recreation personnel, cabin counselors, and the custodial staff. Drawing
a type of function out of a hat didn’t always work out exactly because
the person getting management staff really wanted to work with the young
women who wanted to interview as cabin counselors and the woman who got
the counselors, really wanted to interview the adults that would be the
camp management. But luckily there weren’t many of these anomalies and
they were able to trade the functions amongst themselves.
The advantage of this approach was that the women got to do interviews
with functions and people that they felt comfortable with. Sometimes the
interviewers met one on one with the candidates and, depending upon the
interview style of the interviewer there might be some physical aspects
of the interview that became critical to their outcomes.
It wasn’t at all unusual during interviews while talking about camp
activities that interviewer and interviewee alike might be interested in
demonstrating some skill or technique important to a camp experience for
young girls and before you know it they would be naked and rolling
around.
So the interviewing took a lot longer than it probably should have but
before summer’s high season had arrived, the camp or Kamp as they called
it was ready to open. The committee had personally sacrificed to
guarantee that the most suitable staff had been hired to provide the
campers with best summer of their lives.
-- added by Thom, April 8 2006
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