Cleanliness is not the only issue. One of the more popular activities at these events is something called "poi", or "fire spinning". The poi is a marshmellow-shaped object which one drenches in something flammable, ignites, and swings from a chain. People will usually swing two of them. In the dark, the afterimage of the bright flame lasts long enough, that one gets the illusion that a stream of light has formed. Pretty. There are also other fire toys, like fire wands (a stick with a long point at the end, held onto with a ring attached to the other end).

Anybody who would use any of these, wearing normal street clothes, would have to be insane. If your clothes ignite, and you're inside of them, you will be one large mass of scar tissue for the rest of your life. God forbid that anything you have one should be made of polyester - it will melt and bond to the bubbling remains of your skin. So, what do you do?

The options are : wear something nonflammable (like leather or chain mail), get your clothes dripping wet so that they can't ignite, or remove them. At this one particular burn, I was short on clothing changes, so wetting the clothing down was out of the question. (Really fun, until I'm left going wet for the rest of the night). I didn't have a flame retardant outfit, as this was my first time doing poi, and leather and chain mail just wasn't in fashion that year. So, since this was a Burning event, and I had been assured by the organizer and those that I was with that nudity was no big deal, I lost the clothing, and spun away. Good thing too, because I managed to hit myself. Nude, I was left with a little redness that went away in an hour or two. Clothed, I would have found this a life-altering experience.

Sure enough, in "Black Rock City", itself, this would prove to be no big deal. However, at this Burn, it was. During the burn, I was approached by somebody who asked me if I'd be willing to take part in a performance piece that he was setting up. OK, I said, sure, why not. I went up, and as he asked, started fanning one of the smaller fires with a piece of plywood. What I did not know, was that he was setting me up to be videotaped, without my knowledge, and without my consent.

Up against the fire, my eyes adjusted to then brighter light, leaving my darker surroundings mostly invisible to me. Hidden in the shadows, this person who had asked me for a favor, used my granting of that favor as an opportunity to snap a few still shots, and shoot a little videotape, on the sly. Imagine my surprise and general disgust when I found out about this on my return home.

The situation was radically different from shooting at Burning Man. Only three people got undressed that night. I was the only one who appeared nude in these shots. I was up all night, and, given my size, as conspicuous as a person can be. Coming up to me, after the fact, and asking me for my permission to use those shots, would have been incredibly easy. Our man never bothered to do that.

Let's emphasize that there is an understood ettiquette for clothing optional events, and it isn't a new one. Naturism has been with us for decades. One doesn't shoot somebody going nude, without his permission. This is not an arbitrary rule. Such photos, should they appear in the wrong place, can make life very uncomfortable for one.

Where the still photos appeared, without my so much as being asked, was in the photo section for the list for the burn. Where the videotape was going to be played? The guy wanted to put it on Public Access, in a few cities, including one of over a half million people. This burn had been a private event, where certain understandings were in place, and I had a reasonable expectation of privacy. It is hard to imagine a less private place than public access television.

I believe that the word for this is "betrayal".

With no small amount of justification, I protested this, online. The right and the wrong of the matter were clearcut, and, as regular as clockwork, the regulars made sure to chime in on the wrong side. Yes, I'm serious, they defended the act of shooting this footage without the permission (or knowledge) of the person being taped (and photographed). Far from being contrite, the offending party became indignant, and went on the attack!

The way I found out about this, was that somebody who had seen the videotaping wrote in to express his concern about the practice. Quite logically, he felt that it would have a chilling effect on participation at the burn, and it certainly seemed to. (Almost nobody did anything at it, but watch. The only thing that the person videotaping the burn ended up with, was a picture of a few people dancing around a really big bonfire, and everybody else staring). The defense offered by our would-be papparozzi was that the organizer had given him permission to tape, which didn't answer the man's point at all.

It also didn't justify this kind of video ambush. The organizer did not have the right to consent to something on behalf of anybody else, I pointed out. The reply was to state that the upcoming videotaping of the burn had been announced in advance in the list. I went back, and checked this claim. What I found was that our would-be papparozzi had been given permission to shoot, on the condition that he "first ask, then shoot". He assured the membership of the forum, both before and after the fact, that he would (and had) given those photographed the opportunity to opt out.

That didn't quite cut it, I pointed out, because the people advertising the event promoted it far and wide, and got a lot of people (myself included) who couldn't reasonably have been expected to see that notice. (The videotaping was mentioned nowhere except on the home forum for the burn, whose very existence wasn't mentioned to many of us until after we returned home. How would I have known, even to look?) Far from honoring his promise to "first ask, then shoot", he shot out of the shadows, and compounded the offense by setting up his shot with a dishonest and deceptive request. His claim that he had allowed us to opt out, I could report first hand, was simply a bald faced lie. He had done nothing of the sort. In fact, he refused to take down the photos he had snapped of me on the sly, down from the photo section of the forum, until I threated to contact the forum's provider and report the "Terms of Service Agreement" violation. It took me some days to get angry enough to do so.

So, he broke his word to the event organizer, sworn before the forum, and lied through his teeth about what took place. He has been exposed as a liar, by somebody whose trust and desire to be helpful, he betrayed. None of this is good. Who could a reasonable man possibly side with?

A moot point, because reasonable men were in short supply that day, and reasonable women were even scarcer. The organizer, incredibly enough, stuck up for the man who broke his word, offering some vague handwaving defense that we lived in an age of video and electronic media, in which the concept of privacy no longer meant anything, any more. He actually, seriously tried to argue that anything one did outside one's home, should be expected to be seen by a global audience. "Maybe in a bad science fiction film", I said. There are 6 billion people on this planet, over 260,000,000 of them in this country, alone. Imagine how long it would take to give global exposure to each and every one of them. My name was not "Brad Pitt". Celebrities have to deal with the paparozzi, and expect it. Private citizens don't.

The organizer, the man who one would expect to be the voice of responsibility here, wasn't about to let go of this one. He argued that if I didn't want to see a mass audience watching me do something, then I should examine my reasons for doing it. The sentence, like a lot of rhetoric, flows so smoothly, that it lulls the reader into such a restful state, that his attention wanders, and he doesn't get around to noticing how little sense it makes. I trust that you, the reader, went to the bathroom, today, and maybe took a shower. How would you feel if you found that these things had been videotaped without your knowledge, and put on television? Would you be OK with that? I'm sure that most of those reading this will say "no". Does that mean that you're secretly ashamed of bathing and going to the bathroom, or does it simply mean that you'd like to have your right to privacy respected?

Have you ever made love to somebody, without feeling ashamed about it? If so, does that lack of shame mean that you wouldn't mind having your date, or the first night of your honeymoon, put on cable, or sold on tape in adult video stores? Every action, including the ones we aren't ashamed of, has an intended audience. Going to the bathroom, the only "audience" that almost anybody other that a fetishist is going to feel comfortable with, is that consisting of himself, alone. Making love to somebody, the audience is oneself and the person one is with. In the case of doing something at a burn, the intended audience is the supposedly more openminded group of fellow burners, not the entire, not so openminded planet.

I would have to say, supposedly openminded, because I then saw a line of my "fellow" burners making snide remarks about my clothing-free state that evening. One argument that I heard a few times was "if you don't want people to see your peepee, keep it covered up", phrased in just that kindergartenish of a fashion. Except that I had never objected to people looking. Quite the contrary, I had made it clear that if somebody had enjoyed seeing me that way, while I might find her taste mystifying, I didn't see how that hurt me at all. I certainly was not bitching about people who looked in my direction. There is, however, qute a difference between doing something in a private gathering, and appearing on the Jumbotron in Times Square, for example.

A long string of similar misrepresentations and sophistries followed, which I then had to waste a large amount of time rebutting. People never seemed to tire of trying to rationalize what the sneak photographer had done, while getting highly personal and abusive in the process. Finally, somebody ("BobbyG") had the actual nerve to complain about how many pages I had filled with my replies, after being ganged up on by a group of people who had decided to mix manipulation in with their abuse. He actually complained that my arguments were objectionably subtle! "Nuance. It's what I don't do". What an asshole. He made sure to do this a few days after the argument had died down, apparently trying to restart a flamewar. Instead of snapping at the bait, I homed in on that one point.

I then left that forum. I won't be going back to that event. I don't see how I could ever trust those people again.