Many of the images of naked men in Sunshine and Health resembled the highly stylized representations used in male physique magazines that also gained popularity with a gay male audience during and after the Second World War. (Sunshine and Health, March 1947, inside cover; courtesy of the Sunshine and Health Publishing Company)
The anxieties and fears that homosexuals served secretly in the U.S. military redefined the many images of naked men in Sunshine and Health as potentially homoerotic. During the Second World War, many psychologists and military officials believed that male nudity portended homosexual behavior. According to Allan Bérubé’s Coming Out under Fire, one technique that psychologists employed to uncover latent homosexuality was to force soldiers to expose themselves to examiners.173 The degree that the “naked selectee” felt discomfort or self-conscious about his exposed body represented “‘slight signs’ that might suggest homosexual tendencies.”174 The suggestion that the selectee should be made to remain naked through the interview further indicated that many psychologists believed that “physical nakedness could reveal the ‘naked truth’ about the hidden aspects of a man’s personality.”175 The idea that the naked male body somehow unmasked homosexual tendencies may have had little merit, but it did demonstrate that many military officials and personnel associated male nudity with homosexuality. First Lieutenant Norman H. Noel, who served in the South Pacific, where he not only observed the naked bodies of indigenous peoples but also found that “nudity became an everyday occurrence,” worried, “fellows might think I was queer to encourage [nudism].”176 In a sex-segregated environment, where military officials attempted to expose homosexuals and soldiers worried about appearing “queer” because they went naked, the images in Sunshine and Health of strong, svelte, and handsome young men fostered the anxiety of communicating homoeroticism as much as its many images of attractive naked women catered to heterosexual desires.
Other content in Sunshine and Health revealed that the magazine in fact did appeal to men of all sexualities. In an exposé titled “A Nude Night in Normandy,” the magazine featured the romantic story of two male soldiers determined to sleep naked in a bunker that was being heavily bombed by Nazi forces. Alone and setting up camp for the night, the two men planned to “take off all [their] clothes, sleep in the nude above ground, and be really comfortable for a change.”177 With strong homoerotic tones, the article then described how the two soldiers “crawled luxuriously down between the blankets, snuggled up against each other, and prepared for a really heavenly night.”178 The article alluded almost explicitly to a sexual encounter between the two men only to have bombs interrupt the scene. Determined nonetheless, the two soldiers vowed that they “would sleep without clothes this one night even if it did have to be below ground, and regardless of the fact that the Nazis had apparently determined to make it an unpleasant night for [them].”179 Hidden behind covers of attractive, large-breasted, naked women but placed alongside images of naked men, articles such as “A Nude Night in Normandy” drew the interests of a homosexual audience.
Sunshine and Health also provided a space for homosexual readers to contact and communicate with one another. In the back of each issue appeared numerous classified advertisements offering private and confidential developing of uncensored “art photos.” Martin Meeker has found that gay men who feared arrest under the Comstock laws often exchanged nude images using such terms as “physique photos” or “athletic model photos.”180 One advertisement for a “graduate masseur” named Leo Lehman suggests that Sunshine and Health ads also used coded language such as “bodybuilding” and “Swedish Massage” to signal a desire for either photos or sexual contact or both. The advertisement, which began appearing in the July 1942 issue of Sunshine and Health and ran continuously for the next five years, also listed an address that located Lehman near a part of Los Angeles known by police as a “gay pick-up grounds.”181
The image of the homoerotic, naked male body even represented the nudist movement in the pages of Yank magazine. A large photo of a middle-aged, naked Alois Knapp stood next to the profile of the nudism feature in Yank. The photo stood in stark contrast to the many images Yank used to excite the heterosexual male soldier. It conveyed a distinctly homoerotic quality with its exhibition of Knapp’s fit and tan body and his warm, friendly face turning toward the camera and through the playful effort of the editors to obscure his penis with a phallic black label that read, “Alois Knapp, nudist.”182 The blocking out of the penis represented a common trope in postwar beefcake images. According to Richard Meyer, decorative objects served to “both obstruct and insist upon the sexual display of the male body.”183 The choice to represent American nudism with an image of Alois Knapp that brought attention to his penis through a large, black, rectangular image more than likely reflected an effort to label the movement as queer. Private Debs Myers, the author of the article, completed his coded communication of nudism’s homoeroticism by concluding the article with the example of a Sunshine and Health classified advertisement from an officer deployed at sea who wanted “to meet a companion who also enjoys sunshine and health.”184 Myers, perhaps invoking the campaigns waged by the U.S military during the war to crack down on the homosexual community in San Francisco, made a point to note that the ad listed a “San Francisco post office box.”185 He then sarcastically ended his piece by writing a skeptical “Un-huh” as a final remark on the sexual orientation of the author of the classified advertisement.186 The article on nudism in Yank showed that for many in the military, nudism represented a queer movement.
This photo of a middle-aged, naked Alois Knapp stood next to the “People on the Home Front” feature on American nudism in the June 22, 1945, issue of Yank and conveyed a distinctly homoerotic quality with its exhibition of Knapp’s fit and tan body and his warm, friendly face turning toward the camera and through the playful effort of the editors to obscure his penis with a phallic black label. (“Alois Knapp, Nudist,” Yank, June 22, 1945, 7)
The popularity of Sunshine and Health during the war emboldened nudists to challenge the boundaries of acceptable representation further by gradually including full-frontal nudity. In the magazine’s first ten years, 1933 to 1943, very few images of genitalia appeared in the nudist publication. In the next seven years, almost 370 images that included genitalia graced the pages of the magazine.187 Initially, the publishers sneaked a glimpse of pubic hair into the magazine amid the many pictures that avoided or airbrushed the region. It then began using uncensored images of men and women taken from a distance, gradually including pictures of women standing and facing the camera completely uncensored and, by the end of the war, violating the taboo against showing close-up images of the male penis.
Although these images exhibited genitalia, they still followed many of the previous conventions of nudist photography that attempted to mute eroticism. They relied on implied movement and activity and natural backgrounds and made sure that the subject of the photo did not directly interact with the camera. One image capturing a couple walking naked on a path surrounded by dense vegetation and seemingly unaware of the photographer emphasized the act of hiking while exhibiting the full naked body. In other images, Sunshine and Health guarded against implying sexual contact by isolating single men or women in representations that exhibited genitalia. Here men and women looked away from or past the camera with relaxed stances that displayed the genitalia but did not accentuate or draw further attention to the area. The images reflected the movement’s longtime goal to shamelessly exhibit the naked body while also satisfying the desire for more explicit erotica.
The editors of Sunshine and Health often sneaked a glimpse of pubic hair into the magazine amid the many pictures that avoided or airbrushed the region (Sunshine and Health, August 1945, 15; courtesy of the Sunshine and Health Publishing Company)
Other images presented full-frontal nudity from a distance. (Sunshine and Health, January 1945, 17; courtesy of the Sunshine and Health Publishing Company)
> After the war, close-up full-frontal female nudity became increasingly common in Sunshine and Health. (Sunshine and Health, June 1946, inside cover; courtesy of the Sunshine and Health Publishing Company)
Even close-up full-frontal male nudity began appearing on the pages of Sunshine and Health in the postwar period. (Sunshine and Health, January 1947, 12; courtesy of the Sunshine and Health Publishing Company)
The same period that brought pubic hair to the pages of Sunshine and Health also witnessed the increasingly provocative imagery of the publication. While most of the covers in the decade prior to the war attempted to portray nudist life, many of the covers during and after the war served the same function as pinups. These issues featured full-breasted women exclusively, did not recall the natural setting of the nudist camp, and lacked the sense of realism that the magazine had long tried to convey in its pictures. The publishers officially announced this shift when they proposed using a “wide variety of treatments in respect to front covers” in order to determine what would be most popular.188 The article prepared readers to see covers using “full color, duotones, combination of line cut and half tone, crayon reproduction, water colors and oil paintings.”189 The March 1947 cover, for example, featured a colored sketch of a full-breasted, smiling woman with windblown hair from the chest up. Officially, the editors explained that this shift would provide readers with the opportunity to “freely express their own judgment as to what appeals to them as most effective in the public presentation of our principle and practices.”190 Nevertheless, the increased emphasis on artificiality, the focus on full female breasts, and the exaggerated windblown hair of the March 1947 issue suggested that the magazine attempted to appeal to consumers who had no intention of visiting a nudist camp.
Conclusion
The exhibition of pubic hair for the first time and the use of pinup-style covers during the Second World War transformed Sunshine and Health. The increased sales of the flagship magazine and its acceptance within the ranks of the U.S. military gave its editors the confidence and security to stop self-censoring and posing its images restrictively. The movement, however, also provoked an almost immediate response from censors. Nudist covers that directly appealed to male readers attracted not only soldiers but the attention of postal agents. The U.S. Post Office refused to deliver the March 1947 issue of Sunshine and Health in New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Ohio, and many other locations across the country.
While most of the covers in the decade prior to the war attempted to portray nudist life, many of the covers during and after the war served the same function as pinups. (Sunshine and Health, March 1947, cover; courtesy of the Sunshine and Health Publishing Company)
Facing “complete financial ruin” but no longer willing to submit to the guidelines that constrained the magazine during its first decade in circulation, the editors of Sunshine and Health chose not to back down from a historic struggle to define the decent and indecent.191 Instead of airbrushing their images or using subtle posing to avoid the display of genitalia, the editors dramatically confronted the Post Office by blocking out all the private parts of men, women, and children from the magazine. Placing small white pieces of paper over the breasts, genitalia, and even the buttocks, the editors mocked what they perceived to be the ridiculous policies of the Post Office. The editors considered the looming court battle in the federal courts “by far the most important, the most significant, and the most costly that [will have been] undertaken.”192 Neither the Post Office nor the nudist movement was willing to compromise anymore. The legal battle that ensued over the next decade offered a unique moment to determine where the lines of sexual expression should be drawn in American society.
4
Naked in Suburbia
Family Values and the Rise of the Nudist Resort
The August 1946 issue of Sunshine and Health printed a letter from a soldier who recently returned from serving overseas. Having discovered nudism in Europe, the soldier expressed enthusiasm for the lifestyle and an interest in the movement from a “health angle.”1 At first glance, the letter confirmed the beginning of a long-anticipated and unprecedented period of growth and prosperity for American nudism, spurred on by interested veterans and a pent-up desire for leisure. As a self-admitted “single man,” however, the letter writer complained that several groups did not welcome him into their clubs.2 Club managers informed him that they maintained “strictly a family group”; another emphasized that the club was “absolutely a family group,” while others had suddenly “fizzed out” or reported that they would “never think of taking in younger members.” The letter writer, citing his trouble-free experiences in European nudist clubs, did not understand the need to “ostracize the single man” in the United States.3 Many club managers refused to accept single men because they raised concerns about voyeurism, infidelity, and homosexuality and ultimately threatened nudism’s tenuous place within the heteronormative boundaries of sexual liberalism.
The use of eroticism to sell the therapeutic principles of the nudist movement during the Second World War attracted single men to nudist camps. The large number of bachelors attempting to enter the movement after the war highlighted the eroticism that many camps had attempted to mute through rustic locations and a commitment to health and recreation. Admitting members without girlfriends and wives invited accusations of voyeurism, raised the possibility of sexual transgressions, and simultaneously threatened to define camps as homosexual spaces. Although nudism profited from the interest it generated through the sensual images and content displayed in its flagship magazine, the movement’s continued prosperity in the postwar period depended on maintaining its precarious position within the boundaries of sexual liberalism by promoting the family-oriented character of the nudist camp.
The popularity of domestic tourism presented a particularly good opportunity for nudists to advance their cause in the postwar era. Vacationing spots often relaxed otherwise-entrenched social conventions. Resorts, historians have shown, had long been a place where visitors could experience “new sorts of pleasures” and “experiment with new, often less restricted, rules of conduct and behavior.”4 The tourist experience often implicitly or explicitly accepted the uncovering of the body, the public expression of sexuality, and even casual eroticism.5 Ellen Furlough has described how the postwar French Club Mediterranean resort derived much of its allure from the potential pleasures that guests could explore in a climate that “relaxed the rules regarding sexuality.”6 Karen Dubinsky has shown that at Niagara Falls, the “honeymoon capital of the world,” “sex tourism” flourished during otherwise sexually repressive historical periods. Niagara Falls, especially in the postwar period, relied on strict heterosexuality and the institution of marriage to prosper as a site where young couples “learned what was expected from them in entering public sexual culture.”7 Within the boundaries of marriage and the vacationing experience, many Americans experimented with public sexuality.
American nudists presented their resorts as familial, heterosexual, and respectable like Niagara Falls and hoped to prosper from the postwar tourist boom. By strictly managing or excluding individuals with naked bodies that suggested uncontrolled eroticism, nudist camps projected respectability by excluding the single man and the nonwhite body. American nudists protected themselves from legal troubles by conforming to homophobic, racist, and domestic heterosexual ideals. With a tenuous respectability earned through enforcing a rigid form of heterosexuality based on family, marriage, middle-class status, and whiteness, nudists subverted the proscription against public sexuality. The promotion of images of naked married men, women, and children on scenic grounds, sunbathing next to expansive lakes, and enjoying games of volleyball allowed the movement to successfully defend its expanding network of resorts against police raids.
An analysis of the postwar nudist resort demonstrates that early Cold War culture incorporated alternative sexual practices into its rhetoric of domesticity, conformity, and consensu
s. In 1958, the State Supreme Court of Michigan overturned the long-standing legal precedent established by the Ring trial that had prohibited nudist activities since the early 1930s. The decision resulted from a decade of rapid growth in nudist camps, fueled by respectable, middle-class, white families that accepted nudism as a legitimate vacationing experience defined more by family recreation than explicit eroticism. By the mid-1950s, 124 nudist parks were operating in all but ten states.8
“The Single Man Problem”
The naked bodies of single men represented a threat to all nudists regardless of their gender or age. The editors of Sunshine and Health explained that the “unlimited admission” of single men into a camp might “overbalance the membership of any group,” driving away families and defeating the very purpose of social nudism.9 The editorial reported that many nudists believed that the “motives of all single men who apply for nudist membership cannot not be accurately known at the outset.”10 Fearing heterosexual predators as well as latent homosexuals, camp members worried that a few “scalawags of the worst sort” might ruin the movement.11 The insecurities of jealous husbands, in particular, led to fears that several “wolves on the prowl” would take advantage of their wives or children.12
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