BILLINGS — If they could bear cancer, they can bear some teasing.

Yet some of the Miles City cancer survivors who bare it all — or nearly all — in a fundraising calendar seem a bit apprehensive about the calendar’s release this weekend.

The 16-month calendar revealing “The Naked Truth About Surviving Cancer” is a take-off on “Calendar Girls,” the 2003 movie in which middle-aged women pose nude to raise money for a hospital. The Miles City calendar will raise money for the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life.

Photos show a Miles City rancher with a strategically placed saddle, an artist tastefully shielded by her canvas and a guy with his catcher’s mitt covering just the right spot.

Doug Flint, a retired lineman, shimmied up an electric pole wearing nothing but his hard hat, climbing boots and tool belt.

“I’m Mister November,” Flint said in a phone interview.

Flint, 70, was diagnosed with prostate cancer in October of 2006. He was shocked when organizers asked him to pose in the nude.

“I didn’t think I wanted anything to do with it,” he said. “The wife and I talked about it, and we saw the other pictures from another calendar and they were very tastefully done.”

The clincher came when he heard the wife of a retired minister agreed to pose.

For Flint, the naked truth about cancer is that it doesn’t have to be a death sentence.

“If you get to the doctor to do the checkups like you’re supposed to, you don’t have a problem,” he said.

Flint went 25 years between checkups.

“Had it gone another six months undetected, it would have gotten me,” he said.

He realizes his pin-up position may shock some friends.

“They’ll probably drop their teeth when they find out what I did. My children don’t know whether to be embarrassed or to be proud,” he said.

Flint began working for Montana Power Co. in the 1960s and later worked for Puget Sound Power & Light in Washington State for 25 years before retiring in 1996 and returning to Montana.

Dixie Rieger, who works as a surgery department instrument technician at Holy Rosary Hospital, came up with the idea to raise funds for the Relay for Life’s East Main Animal Clinic team. Toni Gaglia, who co-chairs the Miles City Relay for Life with Maria Schock, helped Rieger with the project.

Last year, team members staged a successful dog wash. But they needed something bigger to give the Broadus fundraising team a run for its money. The Broadus team traditionally raises more money than other Relay for Life teams by staging an annual golf tournament.

The 16-month calendar sells for $15, and the team ordered a first printing of 1,000 calendars. The professional photographer, Kari Brewer, donated her talent, and the team got a break on printing costs.

“The neatest thing about it is they’re all just smiling and it’s just like they’re saying, ’Ha. We’ve got cancer, but we’re living. We’re enjoying life,’ ” Rieger said.

One survivor told her that if the photos gave one person hope to fight the disease, it would be worth it. Another survivor thought Reiger had to be joking about taking nude photos right up until the last moment.

“He came out in his Sunday best, and he had to get into his birthday suit,” she said.

Shayla Hagen posed at the Strawberry Hill Recreation Area, east of Miles City along the highway to Baker. The red scoria hill filled the background, along with some cows grazing in a green field. One of her watercolors sat on her easel while she held another painting diagonally across her body.

“It was enough to cover the areas on the body that you really don’t want people to see,” she said.

Hagen, who owns a grocery store in Ashland, was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1997. Posing for the photo was a bit unnerving and totally out of character, she said.

“Posing was not as hard as thinking about people buying the calendar and looking at them,” she said.

Although all of the pictures are tastefully done, she said, she has thought about going into hiding for a few months after the calendar’s release.

Contact Donna Healy at dhealy@billingsgazette.com or at 657-1292.