The Naked Pumpkin Runs

Naked festivals are held in many cities around the world, but in most parts of the United States, public nudity is a criminal offense.

Back during the freewheeling 1970s, it was merely a violation, or at most a misdemeanor -- lots of high school and college kids participated in the fad of streaking.  But now we've become even more puritanical, and it's often a felony.

So what do you do if you want to participate in a nude run?

You put a pumpkin on your head.

At Halloween 1999, over 100 University of Colorado students ran through the streets of Boulder wearing only shoes and pumpkins, or sometimes other masks.

They carried on the tradition for a decade, but in 2008, the police threatened to arrest participants, charge them with indecent exposure, and have them registered as sex offenders, along with the rapists and child molesters.

15 runners were arrested.

In 2009, Boulder passed a new anti-nudity ordinance, mandating fines rather than jail time, but people were scared off, and the runs have not resumed.

However, runners are taking up the tradition in cities which permit  public nudity as part of a "festival or performance, such as Portland, Oregon and Arcata, California.

 In Seattle, Washington, there's a full week of activities, including day and night runs and skinny-dipping.

Skinny dipping?  The temperature is usually in the 40s!

Can't Stop the Music

My brother, who is heterosexual, was a big fan of The Village People (also Barbara Streisand, Liza with a Z, and Olivia Newton-John).  During the winter after Grease, when their "Y.M.C.A." hit #1 on the pop charts, he kept asking me "Why don't you like them?  They're gay, aren't they? Like ABBA?"

That's the problem.  They weren't about being gay, they were about innuendo.

During the 1970s, the old stereotype of the gay man as a mincing, lisping queen received some competition from the stereotype of the Castro Clone: slim, hairy, with a Tom Selleck moustache, a lumberjack shirt, and tight jeans.  The Castro Clone had three passions: disco, drugs, and sex, and he partook of vast quantities of all of them.  So they were pure ids rather than prissy superegos.  It caught on, and even today, students tell me that "Gay men can't control their sex drive" about as often as "Gay men think they're women."

Record producer Jacques Morelli capitalized on the new stereotype by designing the Village People, a mismatched group of Tom of Finland cartoons solicited from the streets of Greenwich Village: The Soldier, The Cop, The Construction Worker, The Cowboy, The Leatherman, and The Indian (wait -- Tom of Finland never drew any Indians).

Only The Indian (Felipe Rose) was gay in real life, and even he gave interviews with teen magazines talking about the kind of girls he liked.

They were all straight pretending to be gay, or rather hinting that they might be gay (except the Indian, who was gay pretending to be straight hinting that he might be gay).

The lyrics to their songs seemed perfectly innocent and uplifting.

"In the Navy": Can't you see we need a hand, come and join your fellow man.
"Y.M.C.A.": They have everything for young men to enjoy, you can hang out with all the boys

But the fun for listeners was in realizing that the lyrics could be read as dirty, feeling marvelously knowledgeable about the nasty, decadent world of the Castro Clone.

I didn't find it fun.

I still went to see the fictionalized account of the rise of the Village People, Can't Stop the Music (1980), because it starred Steve Guttenberg (who starred in The Chicken Chronicles) as record producer Jack Morel, who wears incredibly tight pants as he roller-discos through life.

And athlete Bruce Jenner (now Caitlin Jenner) as Ron White, his business partner and apparently his boyfriend.

There are ample shirtless and underwear, plus full frontal male but no female nudity, and no heterosexual sex scenes.  But there's a heterosexual love story, all of the Village People are presented as heterosexual, and no gay people appear.

Or rather, everyone is gay.  The fun is in seeing how open they could get without actually having to admit that they are aware that gay people exist.

See also: Culture Club.

Runner for the King: A Dream of Hispanic Freedom

When I was little, I loved Runner for the King (Rowena Bennett 1944), about a boy named Roca who is part of a relay of runners in the Inca Empire of South America.  They deliver messages to and from the king in the form of knotted cords, or quipu.

But as Roca tries to deliver the latest message, things go wrong.  A relay station is abandoned, a rope bridge is cut; he must go through the jungle, where he is attacked by a jaguar.  He rescues his friend Cachi from the savages who are planning an attack, and they run together to deliver the message personally to the Inca.  

Cachi and Roca's perilous run entered my dreams.  My friend Bill and I were racing across a vast sandy desert beneath a midnight sky. In the distance I saw a city of sharp jagged towers, brightly lit with green lights. We ran for countless hours, for all our lives, never tiring, never stopping to rest.  The landscape never changed, the sun never rose, the city grew no closer. Yet we were content.


Sometimes as we ran, I glanced over, caught Bill's eye, and he smiled. It was the same smile that Chekhov and Sulu shared in their room on the Enterprise, and Rich and Sean at the inn in rural Ireland. It was the most important sight in the world

Later I read Temple of the Sun (Evelyn Sibley Lampman, 1964), about a 12-year old boy named Chimal, whose quiet life with his best friend in the ancient Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan is disrupted by the arrival of Cortez and his conquistadores.
















And I saw Royal Hunt of the Sun (1969), with the Conquistador Pizarro (Robert Shaw) capturing the extraordinarily muscular, semi-nude Atahualpa of the Incas (Christopher Plummer) and holding him for ransom.  But the plan becomes complicated as he develops feelings of respect, affection, and finally love for the god-king.

All I knew about Latin America at the time was Pre-Conquest, about vast empires rising from the jungles, Aztecs, Incas, and Mayas, who wore loincloths and built step-pyramids and worshipped the Feathered Serpent and validated same-sex love.

In the fifth grade, we had a choice of Spanish or French.  I took Spanish, and soon learned about Maximilian, Bolivar, Juarez, Santa Ana, and Zapata.  I soon read Los de Abajo, Don Segundo Sombra, the Ficciones of Jorge Luis Borges. I watched Santo, El Blue Demonio, La Gran Aventura, Papa soltero.  I dated Hispanic men. Eventually I learned about gay Latin American writers, like Arenas and Puig.

And I ran. Track in high school, cross-country in college, 5-Ks, 10-Ks, fun runs.  I've been running ever since.