There's something so adult about a community of people organized around a sexual interest. Kind of like Kiwanis, only with leather, or diapers, or glitter. Community — whether the word follows "Southern Baptist" or "cigar fetish" — connotes a suburban mental space, where adolescent angst and doubt are banished.
     Sexual communities are one of the great gifts of the Internet. The Web allowed the sexual "ugly ducklings" to find each other and realize they were really scattered swans. Most of their online communities don't concern the rest of us any more than sites for stamp-collectors or Civil War re-enactors do. Either you want to get it on dressed up like a horse or you don't, and most of us don't. But occasionally, one of these new online villages plays with universal fire: even if you don't go their way, you can see they're invoking the same powers that squeak and gibber in your own sex life.
     Which brings us to the little naked people. All the images around these words were taken from websites with names like "Flasher Contest" and "Voyeurweb" and "Flashing for Fun." They're a community as well — the one for safe, sane and (at least, to their Web viewers) consensual flashers. They like to run around naked (or near-naked) in public places, and they want you to know about it by reading their stories and seeing their pics. They're people who are living a dream — specifically, the one when you're in line for the bank and realize you're not wearing any clothes.
     Assuming you looked at the pictures on this page before you read this (if you didn't, I mean, I'm flattered, but you certainly are a strange one), then you've just been reminded that nudity is magnetic, in a way that buggy whips and sweaty jock straps are not. Not everyone makes a fetish of it, but the rest of us at least understand those who do.
     Questions of nudity — like why, when, where and in what company — are ones that everyone, the world over associates with sex. (In tribal groups where the men wear nothing but penis sheaths, people giggle about the plopping sound of a man taking it off.)
     They're also questions of power. Those who have it can suspend the rules (the emperor in that fable could parade in the nude because his subjects were scared to mention it) or twist them (the city of New York, for example, will be paying millions of dollars in settlements over the next few years to people wrongly strip-searched).
     Unexpected nudity has its own kind of power, one political types have been tapping for centuries, from Lady Godiva (taxes) to Dr. Helen Caldicott (nuclear weapons) to Dona Nieto, an anti-logging activist who silences the chainsaws in the great Northwest by performing her "striptease for the trees." Artists, too, have used the attention magnet, so that nudes have been an emblem of freedom and daring in art. Some would-be artists think speaking nudely is enough to establish their bona fides, like the rep for a loosely organized streaking group of arty types in one of New York's trendier neighborhoods, who emailed me: "What's going on here is totally revolutionary. We believe we are part of a vast and growing groundswell reaction to the lame, consumerist and conservative attitudes that have prevailed for over twenty years now. We believe a big change is on the way." Sure, kid.)
     Oh, and, I'm told too that showing naked bodies has been known to make some people a bit of money.
     Nudity serves a lot of purposes. Purposefulness, though, is not what this fetish, or any other, is about. A fetish is not a road from one point to the other. It's a cul-de-sac; it's about itself. And before the Internet gave them a place to look each other over, the people who prized public nudity for public nudity's sake were on their own, with only stereotypes of grubby old men flapping their raincoats for company.
     Which is why when I came across a Web-posted photo of a perfectly ordinary person filling up his old Chevy with regular — while wearing sneakers, period — I was surprised. Wasn't this guy supposed to be scurrying around in a back alley, ashamed to show his not-displeasing face? Why did he feel safe going public? People naked in a public place fall in about the middle of my arousal continuum. It doesn't squick me the way, say, people trampling bugs for thrills does; nor does it compel me to drop what I'm doing to follow the call of the wild. I get it, but I don't get it, and that intrigued me enough to keep me clicking from link to link. That led me to a familiarity with the "regulars," and to realizing that the warm blankety concept of community has wrapped itself round nudity as a fetish, a buzz for its own sake.
     Othello, a regular on several sites, a fit professional guy in his forties (like all the people in this article, his tag here is the one he uses on the Web), was certainly a flasher before the Internet. As a teenager, he tried naked walks out into the street late at night, which turned him on. But it wasn't until he found the flasher sites that he made flashing friends (one of whom crossed the Atlantic to visit him for some two-person streaks), and a girlfriend, who flashes with him sometimes.
     The flasher sites provide another service — they let the regulars serve as an audience for one another. Flashers love encouragement. (In her email answers to my questions about the pastime, Roanne, thirty-three, happily recalls the time she walked nude down five flights of stairs in a Hilton hotel; when she passed two couples, one woman among them, she writes, "slapped my bare butt and with a smile said, 'You naughty girl!'")
People who don't approve don't hang around the websites, or if they do, the sites' owners bounce them. That leaves the flashers to be amused and admiring for each other. You watch my backside and I'll watch yours. "Part of the enjoyment is getting direct feedback," says Tigress ("wrong side of thirty," Midlands of England, married), who, as one of the most "out-there" of the flashers, generates a lot of comments on their BBS's. "One has to discount the sometimes abusive comments, and concentrate only on the intelligent and amusing."
     Communities aren't just for egging their members on. It seems they also reassure the flashers that what they do can be part of being a perfectly okay person. "I have become friends with many flashers by email, and have met face-to-face with several whom I met on the Net," wrote Banjo (fifty-eight, father of two adult sons and companion to a sweet-looking blond lady who posed nude with him as they mailed a letter at the local post office). These friends, Banjo went on, "all turned out to be very pleasant people, and we had a lot of fun doing normal social things in addition to flashing together." "Scared Chicken," a mechanical engineer whose site offers many pictures of his pale, middle-aged face and grave, full-bearded face, is a Scoutmaster. Roanne, far from being a pervert weirdo outcast, isn't even a Democrat. The reassurance they offer each other, I think, is important. If your kick doesn't cast you of the village altogether, then the human decencies still hold.
     Instead of just passively assuring the streakers that they're okay, the sites I found actively enforced okayness. Browse through the messages on a site called Streaker.org, for example, and you see that the Webmaster and the regulars frown on scaring people or playing their games anywhere near kids. Raincoat types looking for an understanding word get shooed off.
     None of this is to say that all the flashers are alike. Their understanding of their motives vary. During a streak, Roanne explained, "my state of mind is never fearful. Cautious, yes. Aroused, just about always. My heart races." For Tigress, the thrill is more overtly sexual. She remembers fantasies of public nudity that made her come, long before she shopped for a used car, picked up late night take-out and dropped into a truck stop for a cuppa tea, all completely starkers, with her husband clicking away.
     What Othello describes is more like skydiving than furtive frottage. As it is when one flirts with literal death, the tempting of social death lets you get a high from discovering you're still alive. "Most flashers I know agree that they feel more confident in many seemingly unrelated ways after pulling off a good flash," he wrote me.
     Indeed. Compared to naturists who claim that nudity is no big deal, the flashers are refreshingly realistic. To them, nudity is a big deal. And whether they talk about a direct sexual buzz or the thrill of bending the rules or the look of surprise they get from an onlooker, what runs through all their comments is a jolting current of power.
     Scared Chicken, in fact, makes it sound like Outward Bound. "My main gain is that I have overcome much of my shyness. Through my experience with all this, I gained much confidence, which is a big help in my job and in my everyday life," he wrote. "It sort of makes me strong, gives me a strange kind of power." Tigress put it this way: "You start off with great feelings of anticipation, excitement and fear of the unknown, not knowing exactly what is going to happen. But within minutes you realize that it's you who is in control of the situation, despite being naked!"
     The scenario she described rang a bell with me, as I suspect it would for any one who makes a living exposing his or her psyche — writers, which is why I got it, but also trial lawyers, actors, singers, politicians, salesfolk, you know what I mean. The rest of you, hear this: before we step up before you with our novels or performances or ten-point plans for a better America, we think troubled thoughts, along these lines: What will they think of me? Who am I to ask them to pay attention to me? What if they make fun of me? Maybe I shouldn't do this.
     But if we're lucky, we stumble along and a moment comes, which we shall now call the Tigress Moment, when we realize, Hey, because I took the chance, I'm in control of the situation — despite being naked! Hurray! (Of those times when it does not work out this way, we shall not speak. It is too, too sad.) So maybe the flashers and streakers have found a way to be Bill Clinton or Mick Jagger, briefly, without the legal fees. Sometimes that dream about being naked at the bank is actually about wanting to stand out, about being vulnerable and overcoming fear.
     That, I realized, was what had drawn me to the flasher sites in the first place. It wasn't breasts and testicles, nor even breasts and testicles posed by highway signs ("dangerous curves!" is a big favorite). Pictures of paid models and T&A are everywhere. It was, rather, the knowledge that these are not paid models, but ordinary citizens, freely deciding to go where most of us won't or can't or wouldn't. The flashers smile in their pics and giggle in their written stories in a way that says, What you tell yourself is only a dream can, in fact, be a reality. Take it as you like: you can open that ice cream parlor in Ketchikan. Or, you can walk down Broadway in the nude. The rush of confidence is contagious, kind of sexy, even. Page past twenty different people naked in laundromats and hotel lobbies and outdoor cafes and the Eiffel Tower, and you end up feeling, hey, anything's possible.
     That was the effect it had on me, anyway, one afternoon as I was working on this piece. I realized the mail must have come, so I went down to get it. I left my clothes behind. You could call it cyber–peer pressure. I'd prefer to call it research.
     It was four flights of stairs down to the building vestibule, where I stood, noting a couple of passers-by bundled for winter as they walked past the building. I opened my mailbox, took out the catalogs and bills and threats-about-bills and walked back up the stairs. Ran, actually, might be a better word.
     Well. So I now I know what the building sounds like in the wind, because my ears were extra-keen, and I can describe the carpet on the stairs, because my eyes were sharp. Heart knocking? Check. Arousal? I could see the possibility off in the distance, on the other side of terror. But terror was right there. A rush? Sure. But so is getting shot at, if you don't get hit. None of the doors I passed had opened (just as well — I don't think "I'm working on a magazine article!" would have cut it).
     But what I felt, much more than physiological jolts, was an emotion that surprised me. What I felt, mostly, was alone. The absence of clothes had been like an awkward robe that said "outcast" attached to an invisible dunce cap.
     If someone had been with me, chuckling at my bravado, or laughing at what we were both getting away with, that might made for a different experience. And come to think of it, on the flasher sites I paged through, the difference between the images that were just data and the ones that were kind of sexy was the difference between timidity and confidence. The most attractive people on these sites aren't the ones with the centerfold bodies. They're the people who don't blur their faces, who stand regally looking at the camera, as smiling and confident as a Florida Republican. These are people, I suspect, who've gotten some support, some TLC, some props; these are people with their backs covered. Members of the community. I get it, first hand. My two-minute trip would probably have been a blast, if I hadn't been alone.