Houston has joined the worldwide trend of Baring Witness against war. This recent phenomenon was initiated by 45 women in Marin County, California, who last November, shed their clothes and shaped their recumbent bodies into the letters of the word "PEACE". Since the first posting of that photo on the Internet, groups on every continent, including Antarctica, have taken their own Baring Witness photos, though the scientists at McMurdo Station remained clothed in deference to the bitter cold of Antarctic summer.

Donna Sheehan, an organizer of the California pacifist group called Unreasonable Women, began the Baring Witness project last fall as the White House escalated its war rhetoric. Their action at Drake's Beach near Point Reyes caught the notice of local media and the progressive news outlet CommonDreams.org. The worldwide attention it received led to the creation of the group's official website, www.baringwitness.org, where they feature a constantly expanding photo album of similar events held all around the world. The PEACE photo fad, in all its variations, has resulted in what Sheehan calls a "global spelling bee."

The concept of spelling peace messages with bare human bodies primarily symbolizes the vulnerability of the human body and the fragility of what relative peace we enjoy. It also gains inspiration from the women's action against Chevron-Texaco in Nigeria, wherein women threatened to bare their bodies in a "shaming" gesture toward the men who work and manage the refineries there. The Chevron Corporation has been a dominant presence in oil-rich Nigeria for decades, helping to keep oppressive governments in power and exploiting the nation's resources with little benefit to its people.

As Sheehan writes on the website, "It is no accident either that women would choose to get naked for the sake of peace and justice. For Baring Witness is about using the greatest weapon women have, the power of the feminine, the power of our beauty and nakedness to seduce our male leaders and stop them in their tracks. In this way Baring Witness is about redefining seduction." It also is designed to give women the power to use their own resources to make fundamental changes in society, directing humankind away from the path of war.

Two occasional Houston Indymedia Center contributors began forming a Greater Houston chapter of Baring Witness in early February. By the middle of the month, there was an impromptu action on the Rice University campus with the collaboration of student members of Club 13. Since 1974, Club 13 has regularly run around campus on the 13th of the month-and sometimes the 26th and 31st -- wearing only shaving cream and sneakers.

Not deterred by the essential feminine nature of Baring Witness, the Houston organizers sought from the beginning to hold gender-neutral actions. Also, since there isn't a clothing-optional beach or resort close by, they decided to use urban settings to make their statements. The group violates no state or local statutes, since Federal precedent has declared such actions to be protected political expression.

Greater Houston Baring Witness held its first genuine event on the evening of February 28. Immediately following the weekly candlelight vigil at Mecom Fountain, a group of about 40 people showed up for a photo shoot on Hippie Hill, adjacent to Miller Outdoor Theatre in Hermann Park. Several photographers snapped photos of the entire group, fully clothed, holding candles and forming a giant peace symbol. Then a smaller group posed bare, lying on the hill, forming the letters "PAZ" (which is Spanish for "peace"). Two "official" photos of the February 28 action are posted on the Baring Witness website. On that same page, visitors to the site can find links to the Greater Houston Baring Witness webpages and photo archive.

One week after the February 28 Houston event, a smaller contingent held a "guerrilla" action at the Baker Institute for Public Policy on the Rice University campus. (Guerrilla, as in posing and escaping quickly, without prior announcement of the time or place.) The shoot at the Baker Institute was a targeted event, since James A. Baker was the US Secretary of State during the first Gulf War in 1991, and he was a key architect of the carnage. The chapter members posed bare and holding peace posters in front of a chunk of the Berlin Wall which is installed outside of the building.

The Greater Houston chapter of Baring Witness continues to plan for new actions around town. Informal and sporadic meetings have been held at Valhalla, the graduate student pub at Rice. Email updates and discussions are facilitated through the chapter's email address, houstonbarewitness@yahoo.com. The group continues to distribute informational flyers at local anti-war demonstrations and various locations around Houston.