The Surprising History of Streaking (Yes, the Naked Kind)

The Surprising History of Streaking (Yes, the Naked Kind)

More than 500 years ago, the first known streakers ran with noble intentions.
The first time I saw a live streaking event was on the Tuesday of my first finals week at the University of Notre Dame. I was an 18-year-old freshman who had seen maybe four instances of full frontal male nudity in her entire life, and two of them had definitely been accidental. I’d surmise most of my female classmates at the very Catholic university were in the same boat.
Still, we crowded the second floor of the Hesburgh library, eagerly awaiting the promised parade of Alumni Hall men trotting nude through the wide-open study space named after a priest. We were giggling. We were whispering. We couldn’t wait.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but it turns out that a large group of nude men, many of whom were covering their heads with such accessories as sombreros and oversized Yoda masks, isn’t that enjoyable to watch, especially when they’re jogging. I felt bad for them. It looked like it hurt. And after it was all over, I congratulated a friend of mine who had participated, like he’d just completed a difficult task.
And he had. Not in the same way a runner accomplishes something in the traditional sense. Running’s most dignified iteration involves running toward a medal stand, a finish line, a PR. Slightly less dignified but still impressive is the act of running away from something: a bear, a vice principal. Then there’s a third way to run, the act of running through something for the purpose of disrupting or entertaining. The kind of event we lined up for all the way back in the early aughts.
Yes, streaking—the kind people first think of when you talk about run streaks, and the silly counterweight to the emotional heaviness of giving your all. Just as an asthmatic pug is the same species as a greyhound, so too is streaking in the same species a Kipchoge marathon. It is running’s wacky cousin, its quirky neighbor. And it’s a reflection of how seriously we take our own rules, and ourselves.
Running through a public space fully or partially nude has a long history with motivations to match the era. During the 15th century, the Adamites protested the Holy Roman Empire’s buttoned-up morality by running naked through their Bohemian village, as Adam and Eve would have intended, if Adam and Eve, like the Adamites, had regarded monogamy as a sin. Historians say Quakers—Quakers!—revived the practice in the 17th century, protesting the Church of England and often urging onlookers to repent.
America’s first streaker was a Washington & Lee (then called Washington College) student named George William Crump. Though his motivations were lost to time, he was suspended for a semester after being arrested for running nude through his college town in 1804. But don’t worry about Crump. He would go on to become a doctor and, later, a congressman.
By the 1960s, American college students would rediscover the Adamite joy of gathering in groups and running naked through public places, much to university administrators’ chagrin. Observers can’t pinpoint exactly why young adults suddenly decided to take their clothes off and run around in nude groups, but it could have been due to several factors: changing attitudes toward sexuality and nudity, generalized distrust of authority and institutions, and the fact that streaking tended to garner a lot of media attention, which begat more streaking. People love attention!
But 1974 was the year that streaking went from a countercultural campus joke on The Man to full-on craze, like pet rocks or Slinkies. Streaking made the cover of Life magazine. A solo streaker even interrupted the 1974 Oscars, in an incident that some say was a pre-planned way for the award show to grab the zeitgeist, like a stadium security guard grabbing a nude interloper.
Around this time, streaks became more organized, involved more people, and transformed into spectacles. It became such an “epidemic” at Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas that college administrators made time and space designated for a nude run. (Think “The Purge,” but bouncing genitals instead of murder.) The largest group streaking event on record occurred in March 1974 at the University of Georgia, when 1,543 people got naked and went for a jog. My Fighting Irish were beset by the streaking craze then as well, and I can imagine that Our Lady’s first batch of female students, admitted in 1972, probably felt as shocked by all the library dong as I was 30 years later.
Streaking thrived through the 1970s and evolved as we approached the Reagan era. During the Me Decade, streaking expanded to become a “Me” activity, a way for a person to claim 15 minutes of fame.
The first notable sporting event to be interrupted by an attention-grabbing solo streaker was the England-France rugby match at London’s Twickenham Stadium in—of course—1974. An Australian named Michael O’Brien made good on a bet with an English friend when he ran nude onto the pitch around the match’s halfway mark. As O’Brien was hauled away, a police officer placed his hat over the man’s nethers, which led to one of the most iconic photos of streaking, if not all of sports, in the 20th century.
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