Running Proud

It's 10:30 p.m. on the night before exams begin. I double-check my watch, drop my pen on my desk and slam the notebook closed. I pop the soundtrack to Hair into my roommate's CD player as he picks up his things and leaves for the library. I call my friend O., who has agreed to help me out. She's not home, so I assume that she's on her way already, and I leave the door unlocked. Kicking off my shoes, I fast-forward to track 20 on the Hair CD ("Be-In") and unzip my jeans. When O. Walks in, I'm standing in my boxer briefs by the bathroom sink, holding cartons of body paint in both hands and wearing a sly grin. She crouches down behind me and whips out a paintbrush. I hike up my underwear, and she starts to work, applying the paint in smooth, gooey strokes that will have to be toweled off later. Not having a paintbrush, I use my fingers to trace the outlines of a peace symbol on my face.

Ninety minutes later, minus three minutes, I'm standing in subzero conditions outside Holden Chapel. I shake off my jacket and yank off my shorts, and the canvas is unveiled to a motley audience of screaming, shivering students in several stages of undress. Most are too busy to notice me. The men, scattered around the clearing, are undressing clumsily and pumping their fists with alternating wicked grins and nervous glances. The women, gathered in small circles and slowly peeling off one piece after another, smile hesitantly at each other, their arms folded across their chests in symbolic gestures of modesty. A group of saucer-eyed first-years stands at the edges, fully clothed, staring, violating. I wave them away with curses I've never used before, but they stay anyway, chuckling and looking to each other for reassurance, emboldened by swelling ranks behind them. I laugh--at least I've made them feel some shred of shame.

Art is meant to be seen; indeed, all of us in this jumbled tableau of naked skin have volunteered for the exhibit. But you sorry lot with your flash photography and your jostling to get a better view--you may see the art, but we, the streakers of Harvard Yard, we get to be the art. We are the intermediaries between your smoldering spirit, your shackled freedom and their ultimate fulfillment. What we do, we do for you--but we also do it against you, and, ultimately, without you.

Why do I streak? Why don't you streak? I know why you don't, because I, too, have had doubts. For one thing, you're afraid that you'll never be President if you drop trou for the masses. I think, however, that the example set by our current chief executive should put those fears to rest. And any evidence that shows up twenty years from now will testify to your ability to bear close scrutiny and to do what is necessary for your peers when called upon to serve. Plus, if you choose your vices carefully over the next few decades (avoiding the usual Harvard-graduate pitfalls such as mail bombs or embezzlement), you can easily afford a few nude laps around the Yard.

Perhaps you're afraid of being naked in front of hundreds of people. I assure you that at the speed you're jiggling by, no one will remember what you look like. So many people streak that the crazed crowd will have trouble matching, say, a breast with the face of its rightful owner. Nor will your fellow runners remember much, and if they do, who cares? You've seen them naked, too.

The most common excuse for staying clothed is the cold weather. But as any streaker will testify, the adrenaline flooding your veins will keep you warm. And for men who are afraid of the "shrinkage factor," induced by nerves as much as by the cold, just remember that it's happening to everybody else as well, and no one out there will notice.

But what about the pictures? Well, anyone who admits to bringing a camera to Primal Scream has more to be ashamed of than you do. In the end, however, what emerges from the film accumulated by the Primal Paparazzi is a record of the streakers' triumph--their indifference to their audience's attempts to trap them as trophies to be tucked away in a drawer and pulled out on lonely nights. So if you're afraid that your beautiful bouncing body could end up violated, processed and produced, only to be downloaded off the Internet by some 13-year-old in Saginaw, the answer is quite simple: don't. And you won't.

The secret desire of every non-streaker is to be among all those naked people, to get a closer look at them, because to do so is to feel a sense of knowledge, power and arousal. But we streakers have transformed these petty appetites into a source of greater power. By becoming naked, we not only gain knowledge of each other's bodies; we give knowledge of ourselves to our comrades. We don't empower ourselves at each other's expense, but rather increase our collective exhilaration as we whoop and take off on our victory lap. It is not an immediately sexual experience, but a joyful one. The only sexual aspects are wistful recollections of the event or new relationships that sometimes blossom in subsequent weeks among fellow streakers.

Streaking is the quintessential act of non-violent resistance. When you have thirty pages to write before noon tomorrow, or when a few hours of examination determine the difference between medical school and academic probation, streaking is the ultimate affirmation of individual power. Against our fears of failure and the constraints of an institution to which we have traded our money and our well-being, we streakers assert our fleshy, warm-blooded freedom. From the roaring din and flapping flesh of the midnight hour, we conjure forth the revolutionary spirit, to remind ourselves that it still exists behind the redbrick walls of the ivory tower. Plus, everyone's naked, and that's big bonus.

Joel B. Pollak '99 is a social studies and environmental science and public policy concentrator living in Dunster House.