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OPINION: A new Freaknik documentary coming to Hulu has some folks concerned about seeing people they know. Based on my experience, that concern is valid.
Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
I actually went to Freaknik. Once. I am not embarrassed to say that. The name Freaknik has reached epic proportions in the Black community — even people who never attended have heard that it was an insane party. I’m here to tell you that reputation is completely earned. A lot of people are all in a tizzy about the upcoming Freaknik documentary and worried about seeing women they know. They’re worried about the wrong thing.
Back in the early ’90s, when I was in college at Emory University in Atlanta, we heard a lot about Freaknik. That was when the party was reaching its peak — it started in 1982 with a small group but in the spring of 1990, when I was a freshman, about 300,000 people attended. I didn’t go that year but a lot of the Black Emory students did, and they came back talking about how crazy it was. Most of them didn’t talk much; they just shook their heads or said the name Freaknik with their eyes wide like it was so crazy that they had seen things they’d never seen before. They made me want to see what it was for myself.
I went on a Saturday afternoon by myself. I had heard it was wild but damn. I went to a park where I heard a lot of the action was happening. I don’t recall the name of it. When I found the crowd and wandered into the middle of it, I felt like I had walked into a moving orgy. I didn’t see any actual sex, but it felt like sex was happening all around me. There were cars with their tops down stopped along a road and people milling all around. There were women wearing very little and dancing very, uh, suggestively — we didn’t use the word twerking then but women were twerking. Men were walking around with their shirts open and their eyes falling out of their heads. Most of them had small handheld camcorders, which were relatively new back then — for the first time, people had the ability to film things in a convenient way. So you had lots of guys holding camcorders surrounding women as they danced or walked, getting all up in their space as if they were making a porno or a music video. It was lascivious.
I’ve been to my share of cookouts and parades and big parties but this was different. Men were grabbing women by the hand, the arm, the leg. They were touching the butts of women they did not know. It felt like I was in the middle of something insane. It would not have surprised me if everyone around me suddenly started screwing.
An oral history of Freaknik by Complex gives details from a few others who were there:
Killer Mike: We were doing all that wild shit, all that country wild shit. We were freaking girls while we were out, I mean just wild dancing … It was an unorganized Mardi Gras of sorts, and it was all about showing your car, girls showing their bodies, and dudes showing their gold.
Panama Jackson: Chicks with no clothes on, women being extremely explicit … women taking their tops off in the street. It’s basically gridlock, Black gridlock, and ignorance mixed in one.
Bun B: You saw a lot of nudity, a lot of girls dancing on cars. Like one guy had a van of girls and they pulled up to the corner and he put the girls on the top of the van and then if you wanted to see the girls naked, you had to give money. Once he got “x” amount of money the girls would get naked on the van and they’d dance around.
Alex Tehrani: I remember one of the moments on the highway where people pulled over, and this girl got up on the roof, and she was bending over and doing all kind of crazy stuff, and people pulled over and started grabbing at her, taking pictures and stuff… It was dancing, it was taking clothes off, it was getting freaky all over each other. It crossed a lot of lines.
All of that resonates with my experience at Freaknik. It felt carnal and out of control as if this whole thing might just go over the ledge at any second. And we know it did many times — a lot of sexual assaults happened at Freaknik over the years.
I’ve gotta be honest — I felt really uncomfortable being there. I’ve been in some stews, but Freaknik was beyond my taste. I had planned to stay a while and explore what it was all about but after about 45 minutes, I left. I had seen enough.
There are photos from Freaknik here and here that will give you some sense of the hypersexuality of it all but videos from Freaknik really show how far over the line things got.
Since the Freaknik doc was announced, a lot of people have said, oh, I better not see my wife, my mom, my sister was out there being loose in them Freaknik streets, but they’re not looking in the right direction. What about the men? Are men — fathers, husbands, brothers — afraid that they’ll be seen in doc while grabbing a girl they barely know? They should be.
Touré is a host and Creative Director at theGrio. He is the host of the podcast “Toure Show” and the podcast docuseries “Who Was Prince?” He is also the author of seven books including the Prince biography Nothing Compares 2 U and the ebook The Ivy League Counterfeiter. Look out for his upcoming podcast Being Black In the 80s.
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