Bill Kirkpatrick: It Beats Rocks and Tear Gas (p. 3)
The 1974 Streaking Wave
Streaking's origins are, unsurprisingly, rather uncertain, but a few incidents made the archives. Quakers were among the earliest documented streakers, running naked through streets in 17th-century England "to show the naked truth of the gospel” (David Martin 26). A less spiritually motivated streak occurred in 1776 when continental soldiers ran naked past houses in Brooklyn "with a design to insult and wound the modesty of female decency” (“Founding”). In this century, probably the earliest reported incident was at Stanford in 1918, and various streaks were reported over the years (“Streaking: One Way” 41-42). Nonetheless, these were relatively isolated incidents, and neither the term "streaking" nor the phenomenon itself was in mainstream circulation in the early 1970s. The 1974 wave appears to be the first time that streaking became a concentrated nationwide phenomenon and media event.
The exact beginnings of the 1974 wave are also murky, but two behaviorists who studied the phenomenon credit students at Florida State with the first streak in this wave in late January 1974, quickly followed by Washington State, Maryland, and Texas (Evans and Miller 403). The first national press reports appeared in early February, and incidents increased throughout the month (Evans and Miller 404, Aguirre et al. 578). By early March, all three networks, the three major newsweeklies, and the wire services had run stories on streaking. The peak of the wave was March 2-9, during which 156 incidents were reported (Evans and Miller 404-6).
Typically, students would streak between dorms or down the local frat row. But there were variations, including streakers on bicycles, in wheelchairs, and on roller skates. The creative heterogeneity of the streaks became a topic in its own right, with papers delightedly reporting the most outrageous or humorous new twist. At the University of Georgia, a small group of streakers parachuted onto campus; sadly, one of them landed in a cesspool. At South Carolina's main library, a streaker paused at the circulation desk just long enough to ask for a copy of The Naked Ape before running out. At Michigan State, a class on "Criminal Sexual Deviation" got streaked. At the University of Maine, a meeting was called to discuss how to handle streaking incidents; sure enough, the meeting itself got streaked (“Where Are” 2). Campuses around the country competed for the largest mass streak, a title ultimately won by Colorado's 1200 streakers.
Although predominantly a college phenomenon, streaking was not limited to campuses, with streaks reported on a Pan Am 747, on Wall Street, and in the state legislatures of Michigan and Hawaii (Marum and Parise 178-180). Johnny Carson's Tonight Show was streaked, though the incident was edited out before broadcast (Brown 71). So-called "reverse streakers" ran through a Florida nudist colony fully clothed (“A Streak of” 22-23). During a Beach Boys concert, two naked men ran across the stage; they were later discovered to be none other than two members of the band, Mike Love and Dennis Wilson ("Random Notes" 28). The most famous non-collegiate streak, and the one that gave network executives sleepless nights, occurred during the 1974 Academy Awards show: a streaker ran behind David Niven as he introduced Elizabeth Taylor. Liz was "unnerved," but Niven coolly quipped, "Isn't it a laugh that the only laugh that man will get in his life will be by stripping off his clothes and showing his shortcomings?" The streaker, Robert Opal, was soon getting gigs as a "guest streaker" at Hollywood parties (Nordheimer 36, Schnakenberg 551-2).
By the end of April, campus streaks had become increasingly rare, even as the wave began to spread to the rest of the world. A "Western diplomat" streaked a crowd in Peking, and incidents were reported at the Eiffel Tower and St. Peter's Square (“Miscellaneous” 336). By May, coverage had shifted into post-mortem mode, pondering the significance of the phenomenon. Although the occasional streaker might still be seen, usually at sporting events, streaking as a national media event was over by June, 1974.
While even the earliest national reports tended to link streaking with goldfish-swallowing and other pre-Vietnam-era acts (some of which were themselves revived from the 1920s and '30s) that history had deemed innocuous, what is most striking in the struggle to secure a social meaning for the 1974 wave is the strong need to stabilize the practice discursively. In other words, journalists and other observers had to figure out what they were dealing with before they could be sure it was harmless. For example, the first article in the New York Times asked: "Is it an art form? Is it an uncontrollable urge? Is it political? Perhaps perverse? Healthy? Naughty?" (McFadden 35). The problem, of course, was that streaking was potentially all and none of these things, which helps account for the deep ambivalence in initial mainstream reports about the threat that streaking might pose. Newsweek, for instance, dismissed streaking as "play," but "like playing bank robber." Using metaphors of war and disease ("Blitzkrieg," "epidemic"), it reported prominently on streakers who were injured during their streak, as well as one who assaulted a campus official (“Blue Streaks” 63). Similar ambivalence marked the New York Times' reports, which referred to streakers "frolicking," even as it put "A Form of Assault" in a bold-faced subhead (McFadden 35). But over the course of the next few weeks this ambivalence gave way to certainty: streaking, mainstream America soon concluded, was indeed safe.
In the next two sections I will examine the process by which this transformation occurred: how and why streaking was made to make sense as a "harmless fad," an apolitical, desexualized "return to normalcy" of the nostalgically constructed 1950s.
White Boys Streaking
The first act of reterritorialization that streaking accomplished was a situational "retaking" of the university campus by white males. It is crucial to note that the streakers were overwhelmingly male and frequently associated with fraternities (Evans and Miller 412, Anderson 227-8). Unsurprisingly, press accounts overrepresented the percentage of female streakers in their photo selection and reporting, but although many women did streak, they were much more likely to wear some kind of covering. Significantly, they were also frequently subjected to leering and abuse, such as the Barnard College woman who, surrounded by a pawing crowd, had to climb up a statue and be rescued by police ("Streaking: One Way" 42, Judith Martin B14). Such incidents reinforced that streaking was an essentially male prerogative: only males enjoyed the security to streak fully and without fear of molestation. Equally importantly, streaking was an activity practiced by whites. Although it stands to reason that there must have been some African-Americans among the thousands who streaked, no reports or pictures of black streakers appeared in either the mainstream press or the major black press. Effectively 100% of streakers were white, a fact reinforced when some African-Americans actively sought to distance themselves from streaking. For example, a student at traditionally black Howard University said, "Nothing like that will ever happen here. The students that go to Howard do not reflect the lack of morality, or the banality and just outright decadence that occurs at white institutions” (qtd. in Judith Martin B14).
The semiotics of white masculinity deployed by streaking were not merely an accident of demographics, then, but were constitutive of the activity itself. Indeed, given that streaking prominently foregrounds race and gender in its signification, the whiteness and maleness of the streakers was largely the point, especially in the context of the political changes on campus and in American society. At least some observers recognized streaking as a reaction to these changes. As one anti-feminist wrote to Time in praise of the outbreak of streaking, "They have chosen the best possible way in which to show people that men and women are not equal. When women start wearing the pants, men start shedding them" (Vealey 5).
Nonetheless, students attempted to legitimate streaking by silencing any overt sexual and racial politics and by drawing instead on nostalgia for pre-1960s apolitical student-ness through a discourse of youthful innocence. As a streaker at Yale explained to Newsweek, "We're college students, and college students are supposed to have fun" ("Streaking: One Way” 42). Likewise, a Memphis State senior disavowed politics by locating streaking within the realm of meaningless play: "Maybe you don't need a reason to streak. I mean what kind of reason is there to play basketball or anything else?" (Malcolm 49). This sentiment was echoed by a Wisconsin student who said, "We just want to have an old-fashioned college prank. You know, streaking for streaking's sake" (Pinsley 2). Constructing students as non-political pranksters, and the university as a space in which harmless hijinks are a time-honored tradition integral to the college experience, students worked to efface streaking's reactionary semiotic content.
Although most streakers claimed not to have a politics, their attempts to depoliticize streaking did not go uncontested, particularly in the early days of the streaking wave. A poem in one of the Wisconsin student papers called out the politics of streaking, noting the failure of these white males to support women's and blacks' civil rights:
Oh, my conscience cannot rest! It must be asked—
Where was your shivering torso when Joan Roberts got the axe?
Your ice-blue shriveled dong as the Afro Center's bag was packed? (Peary 6)
In addition to such criticisms, some students and academics attempted to articulate streaking to issue-oriented political agendas. For example, a few students at the first mass streak at Wisconsin declared it a "Streak for Impeachment," an idea that had been circulating on other campuses as well (Pinsley 1; McFadden 41). The UW's Daily Cardinal quoted various students who claimed explicit political meanings for the activity: fifteen students who chanted "Dicks against Dick" during their streak; a woman who planned to streak for women's rights; a male streaker who said, referring to Nixon, "We have to show that bastard we don't care about him and want him out. Streaking is an expression of freedom against his policies" (Wang 2). The paper also reported on "streak-ins" planned by the Yippies and ran an editorial by a leading African-American campus activist, Kwame Salter, calling for more political streaks:
Imagine if political utility were found in streaking. … People streaking for Joan Roberts, feminism, … ethnic minority opportunities, … better dorm foods, lower tuition … Could administrators dismiss the impact of 5,000 or more streaking bodies? Campus Police Chief Ralph Hansen would hyperventilate. Chancellor Edward Young would probably regurgitate. (4)
Such discourses, while only rarely calling attention to issues of race and gender (the women's rights streak, significantly, apparently never came to pass), attempted to construct streaking as a new addition to the methods of social protest available to student activists—to locate it, one might say, within the discursive realm of the 1960s university rather than of the 1950s. Despite these efforts, however, streaking and issue-oriented politics soon emerged as mutually exclusive categories. Even Salter, in his suggestion that streaking could be made political, was acknowledging that this potential had not been realized: "Streaking is more political than mooning–or it could be. … Imagine 'streaking' for a cause–and not 'just because'" (4). But one student feared that a politically motivated streak "might possibly turn off a few people" and reiterated his preference for an "old-fashioned" prank—streaking "just because" (Pinsley 2). A few days later, the student paper of the University of California, Santa Barbara echoed this depoliticization: "Is it a spontaneous outpouring of emotion against oppressive established social mores, or merely the latest fad of those lovable campus crazies?" The answer was not in the article, but in the accompanying photograph: a streaker smeared in peanut butter, looking for a female smeared in jelly with whom to make a "sandwich" (O’Connell 1). The "latest fad" of those eternal "lovable campus crazies" was winning the day.
The reterritorialization of the American university effected by the discursive construction of streaking as a non-political student fad was not merely symbolic; it helped make the physical campus safe for white male streakers. This victory did not always come easily; as sociologist William Anderson wrote of officials' predicament, "[It] was such a new phenomenon [that] there were no university regulations which explicitly prohibited or even referred to the fad. … Even the campus police were confused as to whether streaking constituted illegal conduct when the first incidents occurred on campus" (226-7). Most cities had laws prohibiting lewd behavior and indecent exposure that seemed to outlaw streaking, and some citizens were calling for a crackdown. But if streaking was a harmless fad similar to goldfish-swallowing, as most streakers themselves (and most of the mainstream press) were arguing, then a different response seemed to be called for than if it was "perverted" or "lewd." As one officer at the University of Iowa expressed the dilemma, "This sure is a lot of fun. Too bad it's illegal" (Roemerman 12). At the same time, giving in to demands for repression could lead to greater instability: although a few schools such as Brigham Young had effectively deterred mass streaking through early and well-publicized arrests, riots had resulted on at least four campuses when police attempted to repress streaking incidents (Evans and Miller 407-8). Essentially, school officials were caught in a crossfire of meanings, and the discourse into which streaking was placed—innocent play or sexual crime—would both produce and be produced by the response from authorities.
Expected to formulate a policy in the face of competing discursive constructions, authorities on many campuses adopted an approach that is critical in understanding streaking as a reterritorialization of the campus: they established different rules for the university and for the rest of society. Memphis State, for instance, blocked off the campus and permitted streaking within the perimeter, but arrested anyone who streaked off-campus. The Associated Press reported that at the University of Massachusetts, "There have been scattered arrests, generally when the streaking spilled onto city streets and interfered with non-students" (“Streakers Getting” 7). Similarly, officials at other schools at most referred students for possible disciplinary action, while non-students were arrested and turned over to local authorities for prosecution (Evans and Miller 414, Anderson 233). In other words, for students streaking was a prank; for everyone else it was a crime. Not only was the non-student streaker more likely to be arrested, he was also more subject to social sanction. For example, one psychiatrist wrote, "It should be noted that just as anything innocent can be perverted, some adult streakers, such as those attempting to appear on television, are doubtless exhibitionists" (Toolan 152).
This distinction between student and non-student is more crucial than previous scholars have recognized, since it not only helped decriminalize streaking "on the ground" (thereby increasing its "harmless" connotation in wider society); it also actively constructed the campus as a site of youthful hijinks—as it ostensibly was before the revolutions of the 1960s. And although streakers and authority figures were constructed as adversaries in this process, in fact they very much collaborated in reterritorializing the campus. Both needed students to be "students" in order to legitimate both streaking and the tolerance of streaking. Therefore both participated in constructing the campus as an innocent, apolitical space: the student streaker in order to engage unmolested in an activity antithetical to the politicized campus of the early 1970s, and authorities in order to contain more threatening and destabilizing student activities. Campus police, in particular, seemed relieved to interpret streaking as a return to a pre-1960s university culture. The public safety director at the University of Massachusetts favorably contrasted streaking to "throwing bombs and fighting police" and added, "I see this as indicative of a change back to normalcy, a return to traditional student behavior" ("Streakers Getting"). As one campus security officer summed up the prevailing attitude while idly watching a streaking episode at Wisconsin, "It beats rocks and tear gas" (Wang 2).
Note:
This paper is provided under a Creative Commons for-attribution, non-commercial, share-alike license. For all other uses, contact the author at mwkirkpa@gmail.com. The article will be appearing in the Journal of Popular Culture in 2008.
Please cite as:
Kirkpatrick, Bill. "'It Beats Rocks and Tear Gas': Streaking and Cultural Politics in the Post-Vietnam Era." Journal of Popular Culture (forthcoming, 2008).
Download a copy of the article as a Word document here.