The great and all-powerful RuPaul once proclaimed, “We’re all born naked and the rest is drag.’
When we are children, we don’t think anything of nudity, and society generally doesn’t bat an eye at a naked child either. When I was a kid I used to proverbially swing my dick around all the time as far as running around naked went. My parents, usually so clinical and scientific in their words and analyses could somehow only bring themselves to call a penis a ‘thing’, so for a couple of years my brother and I referred to our dicks as our ‘things’. Probably a good idea, as we no doubt would have run around screaming ‘penis’ at the top of our lungs. (Not gonna say it didn’t eventually happen anyway.)
As a child, I remember being without pants a lot. I don’t know if I specifically enjoyed being naked as much as I simply enjoyed being free and unfettered by the bonds of clothing. It sometimes felt like such a Herculean task to simply get dressed with all the socks and belts and tucked-in-shirts. Too much bother when all I wanted to do was run around the yard in my underwear. So I often did.
I still don’t know when exactly the shame crept into being naked. It happened prior to the onset of adolescence, because I remember knowing that showing off your body was not something we were supposed to do, and it was around that time that I suddenly became very shy. It wasn’t just about the naked body either – it was a shyness I can now see as the initial onset of the social anxiety that would haunt me for my entire life. Intertwined was the shame and guilt of the Garden of Eden and a bunch of other religious dogma that fucked me up in ways I’m still trying to fix.
Over the years, I’ve come to realize that my getting naked here on this blog is a way of reclaiming that childlike innocence, when I felt absolutely no shame whatsoever about the human body. It’s not easy getting rid of that kind of shame, particularly when society heaps on its antiquated enforcement of such tenets. America is hypocritically prudent when it comes to nudity, and when there’s any aspect of sexuality imbued in the mix it proves doubly resistant.
Fuck all that. We’re all naked under our clothes. Our bodies are the maps of where we’ve been – physically and mentally – they are marked with scars and flaws unique and special to each and every individual. No two are alike, but our basic make-up is remarkably similar. Underneath it all, it’s very hard to tell who is who. We should celebrate our bodies, and our differences. Every wrinkle and gray hair, every ounce of weight, every hidden muscle, every line that could tell innumerable tales of happy laughter, sorrowful tears, or righteous anger. These bodies are our shells, and no matter how gaily or extravagantly we dress them up, in the end they will return to the earth, becoming part of the universe in some form. We will fold back into this universal womb, no longer skin, flesh and bone, but only the eternally-fading remnants of such stuff. In some ways, life is but one long series of degradations of our physical form. How much of my newborn self still remains? I can’t say I remember much of my soul in those days. We change so much.
Here, then, is a marker of where I am right now.
You can go back several years on this site to see where I was back when.
And when I’m gone, and my body is nothing but ash or dirt, maybe these photos will survive, existing in the technological cloud we’ve created, living on as proof that I was here, that this body once existed, that it once laughed and wept and breathed, that it once ran and played and danced, that it was an element of matter that, to a few select and magnificent people, actually mattered.
