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__ Memories of an Aggie bonfire boy
Between the grueling hours and the golden showers,
the cadets of A&M; enact a homoerotic rite of passage.

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By Dave Morris

Dec. 8, 1999 | It's an image I'll never forget: My roommate, a 6-foot-6 good old boy from East Texas, stood 40 feet up on the third tier, pissing on the back of one of our chief tormentors during "push," the height of bonfire building season. The junior, who was on the second tier and trapped 30 feet off the ground, could do little but endure the steady stream of my roommate's righteous piss and inspired obscenities.

It was one of the hundreds of Byzantine traditions governing life in the Texas A&M; Corps of Cadets -- up on stack, anything goes. Translucent against the Friday-night lights, the urine cascaded 10 feet and bounced off the back of the hated junior, forming a perverse golden halo around his hunched body.

This pinnacle of Sedgwickian (as in queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick) homo-sociality typified the course of my four fall semesters at Texas A&M; University. It was a rite of passage for the hundreds who participated; as each log was added, another second of our extended childhood was gone. Unfortunately for Aggies everywhere, this childhood came to an end on Nov. 18 as the 60-foot stack collapsed, trapping 28 students in the falling oak and killing 12. An unprecedented "unity rally" followed the next week on the steps of the capitol in Austin. Thousands of University of Texas students and Aggies attended, their grief eclipsing a notoriously bitter rivalry that extends beyond the football field, as alumni compete in the workplace and boardrooms.

The 90-year tradition was spawned when an ebullient group of cadets stole flammable furniture (including an outhouse) from around campus and razed it one night. In 1969, the stack captured the world record for the tallest bonfire ever at 109 feet, 10 inches. For years, the structure was viewed by campus radicals as a potential fire hazard and by campus environmentalists as a conspicuous embarrassment. But the vagaries of its design and construction had never really been called into question. The lighting of bonfire was cancelled only once, in 1963, when President Kennedy was shot just up the road in Dallas a few days before it was set to burn. Ostensibly, the bonfire symbolizes the A&M; student body's burning desire to beat the hell out of T.U. (as Aggies refer to the University of Texas).

In reality, Bonfire is a tribute to the traditions of a quasi-military university (A&M; was a military institution until the 1960s). More than that, Aggie Bonfire is an annually renewed monument to the supremely male subculture that produces it and a pagan ritual that serves the most primal of instincts: dancing naked around a raging fire in the archaic night, chanting for the death of your enemies. It is a burning sacrifice to the gods of Texas football and a searing symbol of the bond that transcends sexual love and unites fraternities of arms.

My relationship with the behemoth, a Saturn V rocket pyramid that stood 200 yards from our dormitory, was always a rocky one. "Push" required 24-hour participation from the Corps of Cadets for one week every November. I grumbled bitterly for the four Saturdays every fall semester we were required to rise at dawn and head out to local forests and fell the trees that make up the bonfire. Despite the protests of campus liberals that Bonfire was a waste of trees, some foresters contended that such clear-cutting actually promotes healthier forests by giving younger trees more breathing room. I wore my "virgin stripe," a white piece of athletic tape around the right leg, that all first-year Bonfire participants wear with pride. Along with my buddies, I spent all night "fucking" 500-pound oak logs -- carrying them to the base of the stack where a crane would pick them up -- and watched the sun rise around the ramparts of the great stack.

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