Unsinkable is how Bob Kunst appeared as he shopped for yellow tights and tye-dyes to wear in yesterday's Orange Bowl Parade, "flaunting" himself he says, "for the third year in a row on a float with Major Players and Trinidad and Tabago Carnival folks."

Bob Kunst, the indefatigable Miami Beach gay activist who once made a nincompoop out of Anita Bryant on national TV, is humming a similar tune these days after a roller-coaster year in the South Florida public's eye and after passing through a bizarre confluence of events that would have stymied most people permanently.

But not Kunst. He was arrested the second time this year for playing himself in his role, but also, perhaps, "doing," as he puts it, "a bit From Here to Eternity, you know…that famous Burt Lancaster beach-clinch-scene with Deborah Kerr."

"If I was even the slightest bit lewd and lascivious on the beach," Kunst chirped to GayToday, "then so were Deborah and Burt . They started this whole thing. So there."

Kunst had been caught up in a phenomenon he had deplored only two months previously as a candidate for Miami Beach's mayor. At a community forum where 22 candidates presented themselves to a South Beach nightclub crowd, the Miami Herald reported that Kunst got the most pronounced applause of the evening when he critiqued plainclothes- orgasm-inspectors in Flamingo Park operating at taxpayer expense in a time when serious crime is rampant.

On December 14 in the dark of night Kunst and a companion were on a deserted beach. Except that it wasn't entirely deserted. As Kunst and his friend were about to discover, two Miami Beach officers of the law, both highly-paid city "orgasm inspectors," who were much intrigued over having sighted a lone coupling at 2:10 a.m., nosed up to Kunst and company. Whatever it was they claimed they saw caused the peeping police to charge Kunst— who was born and bred in a nearby Miami Beach neighborhood-- with "lewd and lascivious" conduct.

Joan Fleischman, however, who writes "Talk of the Town", a popular gossip column in the Miami Herald, failed follow police word-logic in their "lewd and lascivious" approach. Instead, she called Kunst's frolic with another male "a tryst."

Ms. Fleischman also called attention to another court plight that Kunst had to face, namely his scheduled appearance for a reputed assault—during a gay rights demonstration-- upon an officer of the law, an assault he vigorously denies but, because he and the police officer were surrounded by fundamentalist zealots, there were no reliable witnesses to contradict the officer.

Kunst had initially intended to fight this charge. In the meantime he managed, following the Miami Beach murder of Gianni Versace, to collect over 6,000 signatures on a petition to insure that Fernando Carreira, who discovered Andrew Cunanan, was given his reward by a Miami Beach which had initially planned to rule out its receipt by the deserving houseboat caretaker.

It was then that Kunst, angered by Miami Beach police cover-ups during their failed non-hunts for Cunanan, impulsively decided to run for the seat of Miami Beach's mayor. Lacking supportive funds but determined like a Don Quixote to proceed, Kunst went through a somewhat grueling campaign as an anti-over-development candidate, one critical of sex-in-the-woods-police-patrols. While he did not win the election, his spirits were not, thereby, dampened. He'd made many points, he felt.

It was just as the trial-date for reputed police-battery charge approached that Kunst created his own From Here to Eternity beach scene and found the police were lying in wait for him. He was told by authorities that because he had a second trial approaching that he'd have to pay a fee he couldn't afford or plead no contest to the charges leveled at him for allegedly assaulting an officer.

"So my bond would have been revoked and I would be in jail and so instead of fighting the police on the battery charge, I now had to plead 'no contest' and get 18 months on 'probation' for five years per count, but after one year this record could be expunged. I had to file with probation after deciding this issue."

Even so, Kunst exhibited to this reporter, a perfect calm as well as his perennial sense of humor. He described what had gone on at the beach just prior to his December 14 arrest: "A vacant beach on Miami Beach, full moon calm ocean, just gorgeous and there I was, former president of the Oral Majority, the originator of a slogan 'America Votes Yes, Oral is Moral.' What was I to do?"

Kunst said that he and his companion, while seeming to emulate Lancaster and Kerr, found that this male/male scenerio—though on a deserted beach-- didn't appear to the two policemen to be even remotely similar.