ComFest 2017

I’ve written about Columbus’ ComFest before. As I said then, it’s a bit hippie, a bit progressive, a bit community volunteerism, a bit local music, and an artist shindig well-worth going to. Given that nature, you won’t be surprised to hear that you’ll also see quite a few people going barefoot there, even though they are what I tend to call blanket barefooters.

And this year there was added drama with a lawsuit.

ComFest is short for Community Festival. It’s been going on since 1972 (told you there were kind of hippie roots) and is into collective action, living in harmony, and removing prejudice of all sorts. If you go you will find an extremely tolerant crowd and they’ll be dressed in all sort of ways: some pretty conventional, some that really catch your eye, and some that’s just canvas of personal art.

Included in that is the occasional topless woman. (Women going topless is legal in Ohio). Here’s one of the pages of their 2005 program addressing that.

Program Note

YES, WE LIKE BOOBS A LOT

It’s nice to live in a city where it’s legal for women to go topless, and even nicer to have an event like this where it feels comfortable. The flip side of all this niceness is a resolute commitment by Community Festival to intervene to stop any imposition on, or inappropriate behavior toward, women who choose to go shirtless.

In other words: chill, dude. They’re just boobs.

Remember, it’s everybody’s job to maintain the mellow!

There were also similar admonitions in the programs for 2006, 2008, and 2009.

While women in Ohio can go topless where men can, ComFest provides a level of support and safety, so it is (a bit) more common there. There aren’t many women who do go topless there, but it is more than usual in a park.

The lawsuit was against the Ohio Department of Public Safety (which controls the Ohio Liquor Control Commission). See ComFest organizers file federal lawsuit against liquor agents to allow women to go topless. It seems that, after last year’s ComFest, agents of the Liquor Control Commission issued them a citation because of the bare breasts, and they threatened to do so again this year. The Liquor Control Commission also threatened to revoke ComFest’s liquor license.

You see, ComFest reserves the whole of Goodale Park for the festival, and sells beer and wine there for the duration. In fact, most of their revenue for putting on the festival comes from those liquor sales. And the Liquor Control Commission was going to be citing ComFest for bare breasts because of rules written to address strip clubs: the Ohio Administrative Code 4301:1-1-52 (Entertainment—prohibition against improper conduct). Those rules prohibit anybody on the premises (in this case, the whole park) from appearing in a state of nudity, which includes

the showing of the human male or female genital, pubic area or buttocks with less than a fully opaque covering; the showing of the female breast with less than a fully opaque covering of any part of the nipple and/or areola; the exposure of any device, costume, or covering which gives the appearance of or simulates the genitals, pubic hair, natal cleft, perineum anal region or pubic hair region; or the exposure of any device worn as a cover over the nipples and/or areola of the female breast, which device simulates and gives the realistic appearance of the nipples and/or areola.

Furthermore, under the rule, it becomes the duty of any ComFest personnel to enforce the rule or lose their license.

Unsurprisingly, this goes completely against the grain of the whole point of ComFest. It ruins the whole collective vibe. It’s a violation of treating everybody (men and women) equally. It forces ComFest personnel to be nasty enforcers against expressive conduct by the fair-goers and violate their own principles. (And it insults ComFest by comparing it to a strip club!)

Hence the lawsuit.

(It was also strange that, after 40+ years, the Liquor Control Commission suddenly got its panties all in a knot. As the program page implies, things stay mellow.)

Anyways, there was an emergency hearing in Federal Court (which the news said went poorly for the Liquor Control Commission). Here’s a news story on the result: Judge grants injunction allowing women to be topless at ComFest. While the story says that the judge granted the injunction, if you read the injunction (available as a link in the story), you’ll see that it was really more of a strategic retreat by the Ohio Department of Public Safety. They agreed that they wouldn’t issue any citations during this years ComFest (and presumably by next year the judge will have ruled on the constitutionality of the rule as applied to venues like ComFest).

So, ComFest went on as before, and on Sunday I went to it.

First, let me give you a flavor of some of the interesting people and style you’ll see at ComFest. This guy caught my eye for his long dreadlocks and interesting headwear.

ComFest Style

People bring pets to ComFest. Usually dogs. But not always.

Fashion Accessory

I mentioned that you’ll see quite a few barefoot people around. However, they’re mostly blanket barefooters: people who arrived shod (or more likely with sandals of some sort), set up a blanket, and then wandered barefoot away from their blanket (but generally not too far). For instance, this guy (I also like the tie-dye style, hat, and hair) left his blanket (and walked a fair distance) to hit the restroom.

Blanket Barefooter

Occasionally I’d see someone who really was walking around barefoot (so I wouldn’t call them a blanket barefooter), but they were carrying sandals, like this woman.

Barefoot With Backup

(The sandals are in her left hand under the mugs).

There was also this woman for whom footwear was not in evidence but they might have been in the backpack.

Barefoot With Carryall

This young woman, though, was barefoot and looked like she didn’t have any footwear with her.

Care- (and footwear-) free

Switching gears for a moment, there is always great local music and arts at ComFest, spread over quite a few stages. On the Bozo Stage (yes, that’s what they call it, and it is the main stage a ComFest) we got to see and hear Terry Davidson & The Gears playing “Rockin Blues Original”.

On the Bozo Stage

Over on the Gazebo Stage (named for obvious reasons) we got to listen to Reggae, HipHop, and Ska from the A.A.R.M.S. Band.

On the Gazebo Stage

That stage was also used later by Ria Greiff, who hosts a program, You Inc., on the local NPR stattion: 90.5 WCBE. They were recording her radio program as she talked.

Barefoot on the Gazebo Stage

I noticed that she came on stage barefoot. I imagine she did have footwear around somewhere, but didn’t bother with them. Because ComFest.

Back to B and B (barefoot and breasts).

There were a few others I saw who were barefoot without evidence of any footwear. I saw this woman soon after I arrived.

Sole Sister

It was clear from her soles that she had been barefoot for a bit.

This man, who was running a booth, also pretty clearly had soles that had been barefoot a while.

Sole Brother

There were plenty of other people tending booths who were barefoot, but it was clear that they’d removed footwear to be comfortable, not because they regularly went barefoot.

All in all, as a sloppy estimate on my part, I probably saw about 10 people who I figured were people who came to ComFest without footwear. In some ways that’s disappointing for a festival with hippie-type roots. I guess it shows how much the footwear culture has infiltrated everywhere. And there was a huge crowd there. Here’s a general group shot to give you a feel for the density around the Bozo Stage.

Crowd Size

And we can compare that to the number of topless women I happened to see: five.

Chill, Dude

The count of those confident enought to go barefoot to such a festival compared to the count of those confident to go topless were both miniscule and within a factor of 2 of each other. One has a culture of prejudice against them for hundreds of years, and the other only declined 40 years ago. But they are now similar in numbers.

I’m not sure what to make of that (but pointing it out is the main point of this posting).

Let me end with one more picture, taken after I had left the festival, but with a lot of people coming towards me to enter the festival.

One More

One more person confident enough to just walk the streets to ComFest barefoot, without backup footwear.

So I guess she took it up to 11.