Welcome to the Naked City

Burning Man is, of course, about a lot more than nudity, though it does push some of the issues surrounding naturism in an aggressive way, just by being where it is. Or should I say, the issues surrounding opposition to naturism.

However traditional, this opposition was always a curious thing. Go out on a August afternoon in the Midwest. It's in the high 80s, just ten degrees cooler than your blood. You hang on every breeze, and every garment you shed buys you a few more degrees of comfort. Even with your shirt off and in shorts, you're overheating, and you can watch people collapsing into the chairs around you. If you'd only lose the shorts, you'd lose maybe 10 degrees worth of misery. But you don't do so. Why?

Because you'd get arrested, that's why.

The law fails to make sense, in a really drastic way. The US has essentially subtropical summers and a dress code dreamed up on an island located next to the North Sea, an inlet of the Arctic Ocean. Bad craziness, even at home, and this is how change occurs. Eventually, the craziness gets to be too much.

Back in the mid 1980s, so the story goes, Larry Harvey burned a large wooden sculpture on Baker Beach in San Francisco. It had something to do with his girlfriend breaking up with him. What it had to do with that, nobody seems to know and if Mr.Harvey himself knows, he's not letting on. But ... have you ever heard the story of stone soup? Stranger goes into a village where everybody says that they have no food. He takes a rock out of his pocket, puts it into a cauldron of water, and starts boiling it in the town square. Every once in a while he tastes it, saying how good it is. People come out to see what this madman is up to. Somebody else takes a sip, loves the hallucination and says "yes, it's a very good soup, but it needs some cabbage", goes, comes back with a head of cabbage and in it goes. Another says "and maybe a little bacon" ... and by the end of the day, the village has a pot of stew to share.

What Larry Harvey had was the world's largest rock. There was no great significance to that wooden sculpture or the fact that he was burning it. But, the time was right. People wanted to get involved in something , and seeing a chance to participate in an event, they went for it. People gathered around, and Harvey decided to do it again next year. People started bringing their own interests by his little stretch of the beach each year, and a participatory arts festival was born. Like the pot of stew, that festival had been waiting to come into existence and the sculpture burning gave it a good excuse to do so.

This couldn't go unnoticed by the San Francisco police department forever, and eventually Harvey and company were thrown off of said beach and had to find an alternative place for their gathering in a hurry. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere, where they could be left alone, and that's how they found their way to the Black Rock Desert of Northern Nevada.

Thinly populated areas are not thinly populated because they're easy to live in. The Black Rock Desert is a harsh place. Daytime temperatures regularly top 100, and while it is dry, it is not so dry that one doesn't feel that 100 degrees, especially when clothed. If the demand to stay garbed is a bit unreasonable in the Midwest, it is stark staring lunacy under those conditions, especially given the limited effectiveness of what washing is available (sprinkling oneself with water out of a bag), and the way clothing can make clammy skin feel clammier. The original crowd had gathered on a nude beach (Baker Beach) in the first place, and those who joined them out in the desert often found that the sudden loss of creature comforts was the last straw when it came to compliance with a custom which never made much sense to begin with. Would you want to be stuck in a coating of sweat for a week?

Those who got undressed quickly made a pleasant discovery. Suddenly, 100 degrees felt like 75 degrees, and that nasty, sweaty funk didn't start building up on them. Naturism at Burning Man became a matter of simple practicality.

"More than the nudity? You mean, like there's sex, too", might come a cynical response. No, not really. That aspect of the event tends to be greatly exaggerated. Certainly, there are people who go out and make love on the Playa, mostly under the cover of darkness, but most do not do this. Remember, you're trying to conserve your cleanliness and besides, Burning Man started its main growth spurt during the 1990s, when AIDS was already very much with us, and a heavy contingent from San Francisco has always been there. Those who arrive expecting an orgy quickly find out that they are not, in fact, living in the 1970s and the Playa is not a singles bar.

What the event is about is interactive art. Some of it does, as one might expect, focus on the nudity in a giggly way; the participants are often products of a culture that has trouble handling that subject in a mature fashion. However, to the credit of the participants, most of the art rises above that level, albeit in an amateurish fashion, because Burning Man, above all else, is a celebration of the amateur. Not a celebration of a lack of knowlege or ability, but a celebration of the willingness of those whose professions have been in other areas to take a chance and do what they've always seen others doing, to have the growing experience of doing something creative themselves. Conversely, it is a chance for those who have achieved some degree of mastery in an area to share what they know with others, at this creative potluck that we call Burning Man.

At its best, this event and others like it serve as a reminder to man that he is not a machine constructed for some narrow economic purpose, but a living entity who begins to die a little the moment he lets himself become defined, and for this reason should always been exploring new interests and new possibilities. The moment he accepts this he's going to find that the world is a far less isolating place than the one he's gotten too used to remembering, and that he's been sealing himself off from the world around him with a lot more than a few millimeters of smelly, sweat drenched cloth.

• The Alternative Illinois/Indiana (Chicago/Ft.Wayne) list
• An Unofficial Politically Incorrect Burning Man list
• The Anti-Playa
• The Unofficial Midwestern Burning Man Rideboard

Offered in the spirit of what is essentially an anarchist event, these are forums unaffiliated with the "official" Burning Man organization. Freedom of expression through the creation of competing alternatives. The largest of these, for some reason, is the New York list, and if you'd like we can go there now .