Dan Tyler

I first encountered flagging during Boston Gay Pride, Summer 2000. The intersection of Clarendon and Chandler streets in the heart of Boston?s gay-ghetto between Back Bay and the South End was roped off for the street festival, and a bunch of muscle-boys had taken over the stage, twirling and fanning brightly-colored silk scarves in the most fascinating patterns and waves; rippling musically in the gentle wind, and entrancing a certain green-behind-the-ears, newly out-of-the-closet kid from Montana?me.
I sidled up to the stage and shyly asked one of the guys if I could try out what he was doing with a pair of purple-sequined flags, and he hopped down to my level and tried to show me how to hold the 3? x 4? pieces of fabric. I could tell there was some fashion of weights sewn into the hems along two of the edges, which he told me were meant to help the flags flare when I whirled them through the air.
I enthusiastically emulated the other flaggers, but my flags promptly tangled themselves into a knot.
He?Junior?patiently showed me how to shake out the knot and urged me to try again.
I criss-crossed my arms frantically and nearly took out my boyfriend?s eye with the weighted tip of one of the flags.
After a few more disastrous attempts, I conceded flagging was not nearly as easy as it looked and returned them to their owner, much to the relief, I am sure, of any passersby.
Fast-forwarding six months and trekking two hundred miles north, I found myself awed by the massive crowd of revelers, 80, 000 strong in Montreal?s Olympic Stadium during the 21st Annual Black & Blue Festival?another mostly gay celebration of electronic dance music.
By this time, I had ventured into ?locking and popping? like a robot alà mid-1980?s breakdancing revival, incorporating glowsticks wedged between my fingers, and spiraling them in a style of hand-dancing dubbed ?liquid.?
I met a bunch of other glowstickers, some of whom had tied long strings to their glowsticks and were twirling them like helicopter blades in wide circles of neon light.
I would learn later this dance/performance art was a derivation of Polynesian poi, which traditionally entails spinning balls of live fire on ropes or chains?but given the immensity of the crowd, safety dictated the ravers substitute glowsticks.
I went far off from the crowd to practice this new technique?I didn?t want to accidentally blind anyone with a wild piece of twirling plastic.
I began to understand the rhythm of the centrifugal force created by spinning my cords; learning to anticipate the backlashes, and laughingly recalled my high school physics class experiments in waves, coils, and springs.
Over the winter I fashioned a variety of homemade devices to spin glowsticks using lengths of plastic boondoggle cords; beaded chains from dog tags rummaged at an Army surplus store; and fishing swivels to easily clip off glowsticks as they faded over the course of a night.
Eventually, I wanted to try flagging again, as I realized a lot of its motions utilized the same techniques of utilizing centrifugal force to get a piece of fabric whirling overhead like one of Salome?s proverbial veils.
Again, I dug into my tackle box, and I sewed a chain of BB-sized fishing weights into the hem of a red-sequined piece of nylon fabric I found at a shop in Cambridge. With the completion of an identical piece, I was set?ready to conquer Valentine?s Day?s Red Party with a storm of ingenuity!
I suppose there is nothing quite so pathetic a sight to witness as a wannabe flagger trying to flag for all he?s worth with a pair of misbegotten flags, which came apart midway and sent fishing lures whisking through the air like bullets.
By something short of a miracle, no one was hurt, and my friends confiscated my flags, spotting any number of lawsuits a mile off and benevolently intervening to save me from my new hobby.
Resolutely, I kept at it; continuing to hit gay pride festivals, circuit parties, and raves all over the Northeast from Toronto to Washington, D.C., picking up a better understanding of the subtle flicks of wrist and spread of fingers to get successively constructed pairs of flags to flare, spin, and lash out-and-back like tongues of brilliant flame.
I experimented with different fabrics and methods of weighting them. Most importantly, I discovered an essential component called drapery weight?a cord of tiny lead beads sheathed within cotton fabric like a shoelace and sold by the yard on giant spools at specialty textile shops and upholstery stores.
I learned how to tie-dye sheerest silk with UV reactive colors, which pop off the flags under blacklights; often seeming to float like clouds of nuclear radiation above our heads. Particularly when seen from a distance, a flagger fades under the neon miasma of swirling colors, leaving the flags to seemingly dance by themselves.
The crowds love it, and I loved it, and they loved me, and I loved them, and the flaggers loved each other. And we danced, and it was good.
There are not many things in this world, which I have been able to analyze at depth and judge with conviction that are categorically, inherently, fundamentally good.
However, I?ve come to believe music is the language of God, and dance, the penultimate form of worship, and it was through flagging that I was finally able to experience the numinous.
Some call it finding the center.
Flow.
Ecstasy.
Rapture.
Epiphany.
Sacred truth.
Whatever.

After the Red Party I wrote:
Finding the center, as I call it, is one of those moments that make life worth living. It is that moment of shining glory when all events come together in your mind, nay, in your soul, if you can dig it, whereupon you achieve a certain clarity that reveals all the other shit for just what it is: shit.
It is a moment of transcendence when nothing else matters.
It is a moment of focus, of pure, uncomplicated joy.
A moment of understanding and embracing the miraculous.
A moment of truth, when you see the writing on the wall, and get the joke. Yeah, man, that?s what I am talking about?getting the joke. And laughing! I spent a great deal of time wandering the streets of Boston and asking God, Allah, the universe, or whomever a lot of questions. I painfully felt the weight of the world upon my shoulders, and I was frustrated and hurt, locked into a body wasted by my time in the hospital and struggling with immense, soul-sucking, spirit-crushing problems. I had enough on my plate to ask God if maybe I was the butt of some divine joke, and if so, maybe he would let me in on it sometime.
Finally, in the Canadian über-nightclub Stereo, washed in a sea of flashing red lights, surrounded by a milling throng of gyrating, gay muscle-boys, and as a wave of juicy flavor exploded in my mouth from my Sour-Apple Blow-Pop, I twirled two shimmering, ruby-sequined flags like Salome?s legendary veils about the figure of a silver-clad, forty-five year old disco queen; there, there! on the dance floor as my senses were overwhelmed in a rush of color, sounds, caresses, flavors, and scents, I got it.
I got the joke!
And I laughed, and I laughed, and I laughed.

The Dutch philosopher Johan Huizinga theorized humanity had evolved beyond Homo sapiens into Homo ludens; effectively from the ?people who know, ? into ?the people who play.?
I understand this to mean our objective as a species is no longer merely to examine ourselves alà Socrates et al, but we are also meant to enjoy the things we discover. Perhaps to truly evolve to the highest state of humanity, you have to take pleasure in that knowledge, to sit back and enjoy this great, wacky and wondrous, often-terrifying-&-grim-but-always-entertaining world in which we live.
I might further propose that gay people by definition deserve to be categorized as more highly evolved humans, because your average queer not only knows where he is in life, but he also gets a kick out of his own fabulousness and how much fun he?s having.
In fact, I would also venture this theory helps restore the original meaning of the term gay?being lighthearted and fun-loving.
Looking back on that magical night in Montreal, as I shook my groove thing with the rest of the crowd, it occurred to me: who better to exemplify the Homo ludens than the queers, nay, let me reiterate, the gays of the world?
Or, at least those gay boys and gay girls in that club, for in that moment, there was no other world outside the club.
It had ceased to exist.
It never was, and for all we knew it would never be.
Four o?clock was a lifetime away; Monday morning incomprehensible.
We were there; that?s all we knew, all we had to know, and it was then, in that moment where time ceased to exist and space had no function, we were alive! Wacky stuff, humans.
Similarly, anthropologist Lyall Watson wrote about a group of early humans called Strandloopers, who once lived centuries ago on the beaches of the Ivory Coast in western Africa. They are an anthropological curiosity as their bones show they had unseemingly large heads attached to very small, child-like bodies. They left no lasting signs of civilization such as fortifications or much more than the most rudimentary tools, and yet he idolized them.
He envisioned these humans had made an evolutionary jump far beyond contemporary Homo sapiens and became something else: humans with huge brains so intellectually advanced they eliminated the need for crude tools and the objects of war.
Instead, they lived naked and free, playing on the beach and napping after simple meals provided by the fish and frogs they caught in rocky tide pools. They contemplated the world around them, and took pleasure in raising their small families peacefully under the warm sun and comforting stars.
The Strandloopers disappeared without leaving much to account for their existence but a few graves here and there and the imagination of the occasional scientist and his students. Maybe humans have already reached the pinnacle of evolution there by the sea, and after briefly flaring in the evolutionary darkness, it quietly burned out.
Sometimes I recall vacationing on the tiny island of Naxos far out in the Aegean Sea and the beautiful, sun-browned people I met there.
My distant Greek cousins have a lovely perspective on life. All the young people are gorgeous; the women are lithe and willowy, while the men are supple and strong. They exude a zest, a vibrancy for life, and they live their days fully, devoting equal portions of their time to work, rest, and play. Their island gleams like an incandescent lily in a turquoise sea, and flocks of goats dot the craggy, flower-covered mountains like satyrs out of a myth. They eat their fill of sumptuous meals and drink and smoke and make merry. By their thirties they shrink in height while they broaden in girth, and no one seems to care a bit. They have perspective; a magnificent sense of perspective and my days there were some of my happiest.
Perhaps the Strandloopers, née Homo ludens are still very much alive.
In fact, I?m sure of it. I guess that?s one of the reasons why I love gaydom, especially at Pride celebrations and circuit parties so much. At those events all the walls come down, and everybody just comes out however they want to be and are accepted, embraced, and loved for who they are.
At San Francisco Pride, one of the Twin Peaks above the city had a massive pink triangle emblazoned on it while searchlights pierced the sky.
Picture me flagging on the edge of my friend Tom?s roof, silks fluttering in the wind; the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence cavorting below along with candy ravers, leathermen, drag queens, gypsies and snake charmers.
Even though I had sewn a couple of outrageous flags just prior to Pride, I actually ended up borrowing a pair from Tom?s roommate William, and with his neon-orange flags I enjoyed one of those rare moments of shining glory viz. finding the center, when everything came together in a brilliant wash of color, light, sound, and motion.
I pranced at the tip of a stage, which through some unspoken acknowledgement, the other flaggers at that moment ceded to me, and I pulled those flags into a fiery swirl of orange and gold that stirred a cheer from the crowd which went straight through my soul.
Yeah, it was pretty cool.

Eve 6 sings:
Here?s to the night we felt alive.
Here?s to the tears you knew you?d cry.
Here?s to good-bye, tomorrow?s gonna come too soon.

That?s Homo luden philosophy at it?s best.
The humans who laugh, indeed.
While in San Francisco I pushed my way through a crowd of leathermen, Dykes-on-Bikes, drag queens, and little Latino boys in white tank tops. Everyone was smiling and holding hands and laughing at the many shapes and sizes and colors humanity came in, and I sighed in relief and thought ?Okay, God, maybe there is hope for us after all.?