Streak to Win

A Brief History

BY LYDIA KIESLING, PROFESSOR & STREAKER EMERITUS

Streaking has always been, for the most part, a collegiate enterprise, and, in its origins at least, an American one.

In 1804, Great Britain was languishing under George the Mad, recovering from the loss of its lawless American offspring and warring with the diminutive Frenchman next door, and that's when Washington and Lee student George William Crump made a different sort of history with a bold streak through Lexington, Virginia. The University took a singularly humorless position on the matter and suspended him for the remainder of the year. Nonetheless, in the grand tradition of wayward students sent down from august academic institutions, Crump landed on his feet (at Princeton), and went on to become first, a Congressman and finally, the U.S. ambassador to Chile.

After its illustrious beginning, streaking vanished for a period. Perhaps the strictures of the Victorian age came across the Atlantic with the trade winds, stifling our bacchanalian spirit. The Civil War certainly had a dampening effect, and in the beginning of the twentieth century, good old fashioned Babbitism and the Labor Menace proscribed unorthodox behavior - a trend that continued into the McCarthy era. Streaking earned a place in the collective consciousness with the advent of the Groovy Generation. Angry and confused about everything from The Bomb, racial inequality, Vietnam, the Pill, the Pigs, the Fuzz, and everything else., young Americans took to protest. Nudity, in addition to being transgressive and categorically anti-establishment, was fun; it existed in the place where protest, navel-gazing, and basic exhibitionism collided.

It was only natural that it should flourish in the college atmosphere. People began to hold contests to see who could gather the greatest number of streakers in one venue. Princeton began its prestigious Nude Olympics. University of Michigan chartered an annual streak. In 1974, gauche as it was Ray Stevens's "The Streak," from the album "Boogity Boogity" topped the charts. In its clumsy way, the song brought attention to the fact that people who vociferously opposed streaking were in fact jealous–of the naked bodies, of freedom, of open sexuality.

At this juncture streaking exploded into the mainstream. Solo streaks of crowded events became the norm: the Oscars. Wimbledon, the World Series, the Superbowl. People worldwide joined the trend. And with that has come the inevitable effect of capitalism, the transference of an ideal, however abstract or poorly stated, into a marketable commodity. Certainly in Nike advertisements, movies like Old School, and the like, the humorous aspect of streaking is emphasized; and not its implications (or rather, not all of them), like the basic desire to break free of convention even for a moment. Maybe our good friend Saul Bellow was more right than he new when he said "I have never lifted a fig leaf without finding a price tag on the other side."