A dead dog draped over their mailbox. A tampon shot through with a bullet. Gunshots in the night, and shouts of “Damn queers!” from passing cars.

Those were some of the greetings Wanda and Brenda Henson earned when they opened Camp Sister Spirit in Jones County, Mississippi, in 1993.

---

---

The “married” pair had moved from Gulfport, about a hundred miles south, after years helping women victims of domestic abuse and racism find resources. Their camp, 120 acres on the site of a former pig farm, would be a retreat with the ambitious mission “to eradicate hatred and differences through education and interaction with our neighbors.”

In the camp’s early years, the goal seemed out of reach. The rumors started immediately.

“People were shocked, overwhelmed,” said Belinda Beesley, a resident of Ovett, population 400. Fifty lesbians were moving to the feminist retreat, she was told. Her daughter would be in danger. 

The town mobilized to shut Camp Sister Spirit down. Opponents organized a “family values” committee and filed a lawsuit to close it, claiming the camp didn’t conform to land-use regulations. Ministers railed that homosexuals were pedophiles, that lesbians would recruit the town’s women, and the Hensons were feminist grifters freeloading off the federal government.

The lesbians’ battle against the Deep South town became a tabloid sensation, riding a wave of gay headlines in 1993 over AIDS, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the massive March on Washington, and the first Senate confirmation of an openly gay presidential appointee, Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Roberta Achtenberg. The media was primed for more.

Oprah brought the two sides to her talk show for a shouting match. Larry King Live, ABC’s 20/20, and Jerry Springer all covered the small town, like a Southern Gothic morality tale. Overseas, a headline in Denmark read, “Lesbians at War.”

In December 1993, Attorney General Janet Reno was asked by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force to intervene, The Washington Post reported at the time. The Hensons had received a handwritten death threat in the mail — an act that could be a federal offense. 

“The situation in Ovett has clearly been dangerous since the time a dead dog was hung on the Hensons’ mailbox and town meetings were held denouncing the women and pledging to drive them from town,” said Peri Jude Radecic, the director of the force, at the time.

The same month, 250 people turned out in Ovett to hear speakers denounce the couple. “It’s taught against in the Scriptures,” Ray Thornton, of the Baptist Ministry Association of Mississippi, said of the lesbians.

A meeting in November in nearby Ellisville attracted 350 alarmed neighbors, who heard the Rev. John Allen, a Baptist pastor, say, “We are being invaded by activists with a radical agenda: …people who are different and want to change our community.” Donations to force the camp’s closure were collected.

Reno sent in mediators, and out U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) held a hearing in Mississippi’s state capital, Jackson, to investigate and publicize the case.

“The intolerance and bigotry demonstrated by some of the people of Ovett has no place in this country,” Reno wrote Radecic.

“We’re meeting local officials and representatives of Camp Sister Spirit to try to assess what we can do to help,” said Ron Tomalis, spokesman for the Justice Department’s Community Relations Service, who was charged with mediating the case. The case was the first to address anti-gay harassment and threats ever in the history of the department.

Conservatives balked at the intervention, fresh off Janet Reno’s 1993 standoff with the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas, where 76 members, including 20 children, died in a fire set during the government’s raid.

“Two Sapphic sisters set up shop to offer the therapeutic goop such misfits crave,” Samuel Francis, a syndicated columnist for Tribune Media and much admired on the right, wrote in 1994.

“‘Camp Sister Spirit,’ as the pair called their former pig farm, offered seminars on the wickedness of sexism, racism and homophobia and drew in ‘womyn,’ as they liked to spell it, to be drilled in the evils of male dominance.”

Describing the death threats as “pranks,” and Ovett as “a community whose moral culture is under assault,” Francis wrote that “the real victims” are not “the uninvited and unwanted lesbian intruders, but the law-abiding community against which their own government is preparing to wage war.”

That war never came to pass.

As media attention waned and Camp Sister Spirit focused on their mission, tensions in the town eased, and the threats faded.

The women’s good works became the dominant “interaction with our neighbors.”

One of those was Belinda Beesley, the Ovett resident who’d been alarmed that 50 lesbians were moving to town. She was also one of the townspeople who filed suit to shut the camp down.

It turns out Beesley and the Hensons’ daughter had a mutual friend, who died of cancer. Beesley said she started to understand that the women of Sister Spirit were good people because of how well they treated her. Tentative waves of “hello” on the street turned into roadside chats. They soon became friends, too.

“It’s all about acceptance,” Beesley said during an anniversary celebration at the camp in 2003, before Sister Spirit finally closed during the pandemic.

“That’s the bottom line,” she said. “Out of this, I’ve gained some very good friends.”