At OprahMag.com, we encourage our readers to authentically be themselves. So we’re commemorating Pride Month and the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots with Loud and Proud, a selection of voices and stories that highlight the beauty—and ongoing struggles—of the LGBTQ community. Here’s to celebrating every color of the rainbow.

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Alyssa Edwards absolutely does not want the wind to snatch her wig.

It’s an overcast Friday afternoon in Marble Falls, Texas—a smallish town about 100 miles north of San Antonio—and the 39-year-old, two-time RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant is saddling up to do what no drag queen has ever done before: zip-line across the Lone Star state’s Lake Ted.

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Wearing a neon yellow-orange-pink dress with a matching cape, she apprehensively wiggles her lithe body up a 10-foot pole, where she’s then secured into a harness before taking the dive. “Ya’ll ready?!” she screams a half dozen times. Within seconds, a group of 30 chitter-chattering adult campers watch with a kid-like sense of awe as Edwards literally flies above the horizon. By the time she lands across the water bank, her Dolly Parton-style wig is still perfectly aligned atop her forehead.

“Now that was an entrance! A true, iconic, Alyssa Edwards entrance. Zip-lined in, honey,” she tells me the following day. “I’d never done anything like that—let alone with a wig on! I broke a nail. My lashes came off. For a moment I thought, I need to reevaluate my life. What is really going on? But the whole idea of this weekend is to get out of our comfort zones.”

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In October, Edwards—otherwise known as Justin Dwayne Lee Johnson, to his hometown Mesquite, Texas friends and family—was tapped not only as the face of Tazo Tea, but as the camp director for a spring 2019 weekend getaway designed to help people across the country break out of their shells. 5,000 applications were submitted, and a lucky group of 30 were selected to attend Edwards’s Camp Tazo.

Which brings us back to Marble Falls.

During the course of three days, I, too became one of Edwards’s wide-eyed campers, participating in a kaleidoscopic list of alcohol-free activities that included hiking, campfire karaoke (Edwards is partial to Parton’s “9 to 5”), “glam crafting,” “Richards Simmons’ hip-hop aerobics,” a hidden talent show (embarrassingly enough, I performed Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic” with my squad), communing with nature (camp jargon, not mine), axe-throwing, canoeing (a group of three flipped over and splashed into the water), plus all of the kumbaya humdrum that at times felt like a scene from —or better yet: RuPaul’s Drag Race.

Brady and Nicoletta. Sasha Haagensen Getty Images

At first, the jaded, seen-it-all New Yorker in me rolled my eyes at the idea that 30 complete strangers could really bond and form friendship in such a short period of time. Back home, my friends and I joke that it’s almost offensive when someone you don't know greets you on a subway ride to work, let alone asks you how your day is going.



But Edwards and her fabulous group of camp leaders—which included an on-site therapist, plus Nicoletta and Brady, two energetic cheerleader-like masters of ceremonies that led us from one exercise to the next—managed to do just that. By the last day, people exchanged tight hugs and phone numbers, confessing that three days spent with Edwards and each of the campers was life changing. And, yes, I'll admit: I cried twice during the experience.

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Why was it so touching? Unlike real-life pressure-cooker circumstances, Camp Tazo gave adults the opportunity to peel back their layers and openly discuss the struggles they may be unable to address with friends and family back home. At a campfire hosted an hour before Edwards’s zip-lining grand entrance, campers—all of whom were members or allies of the LGBTQ community—were asked to ceremoniously “let go” of what held them back.

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The items being let go of were truly heart-warming, from a mother discussing her excruciating battle with cancer to new friends revealing the challenges of loving your body, pushing past toxic masculinity, and what it’s like to be Black and have no seat at the table. My confession? That I’d like to stop striving for unrealistic standards of perfection.

'We lose sight of allowing ourselves the ability to play.'

According to Alexis Conasan, PsyD, a licensed clinical psychologist in New York, it makes sense that a group of adult strangers seeking to escape their comfort zones would find just that at sleepaway camp. “When there’s a common purpose, that draws people together. We lose sight of allowing ourselves the ability to play. In our culture, we encourage intense productivity, which can be harmful to our wellbeing,” she says. “Humans are by nature social and something like summer camp can fulfill our need to truly connect with others.”

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Like most of the campers, I also instantly connected with participants that shared common interests. My newly-made friends included Henry, a New York City-based shoe designer who I gravitated toward because of his inches-long nails and stiletto boots, plus Alex, a body positivity champion who figuratively held my hand when I was nervous as hell about performing the Morissette hit (an Edwards favorite) in front of the entire camp.

Edwards hugging Trish. Sasha Haagensen Getty Images

Edwards told me she adored seeing new connections form, though she particularly fell in love with Trish, a sweet and huggable grandmother and former Navy member in her late '50s who’s now using her camp experience for good in Florida. Everyone called her “mom” all weekend.

“Right after camp, the mothers’ group I belong to, who are all parents to LGBTQ children, put out a call for help in carrying the Pride flag at Tampa Pride later this month. Stephanie, another camper, and I are going to participate together,” Trish later told me. “I always credited my transgender son for his bravery, but didn’t see my own place in the LGBTQ family. At camp, the passion I found is simply being among the ‘rainbow unicorn’ community, a joyful and playful environment I want to keep nurturing.”

Ultimately, it’s the exuberant confidence that Edwards—who is also host of Dancing Queen on Netflix—delivers on camera and in person that led me to this realization: when the going gets tough as an adult, sometimes the solution is to just live a little—to view the world through the same carefree lens children do. Or as Edwards says, “Let go and let God!” And it’s drag, she says, that’s allowed her to do so.

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“Drag is art and art is subjective, which makes it even more beautiful,” Edwards says. As a child, Justin would play dress-up in his grandmother’s nightgowns and heels, pretending to be in a pageant or fashion show.

Edwards continues, “Before drag, I was so socially awkward. Once upon a time, boys wore blue and girls wore pink. I’d think, 'Well I want to wear that lavender over there.' I didn’t know where I fit in. Now, there’s a little more understanding. You know RuPaul’s song lyrics, ‘We’re all born naked, and the rest is drag?' That’s genius.”

A little intel: Edwards wasn’t keeping it cool before she climbed that ladder and zipped across the lake. “I was so nervous, I’m not gonna lie to you,” she admits. “I’m terrified of heights. I thought, 'If my wig falls off, what am I gonna look like?' But honestly, I would have laughed it off so hard and kept it moving.”

And even in their most uncomfortable moments, laughing it off is precisely what every one of her campers did the entire weekend.

Want to try an adult summer camp of your own? Here are five you can book right now:

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