Naked
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The effort to maintain the respectable character of American nudism, even after its legal victories in the late 1950s, clashed with a new generation of activists who used public nudity to advocate for the politics of sexual liberation. The nudist movement that began in the 1930s promoting health, nature, and family transformed in the late 1960s and early 1970s into an assortment of organizations that challenged the heteronormative boundaries of sexual liberalism. The many young men and women drawn to nudist activities and groups no longer wanted to be confined in isolated rural clubs; they embraced sexual expression outside marriage and waged high-profile campaigns to change public attitudes about nudity. The widespread willingness of many Americans to reexamine the limits of acceptable sexual behavior influenced many nudists to reject the restrictive rules and exclusionary policies that had long defined American nudism. Nudists, adopting the European term naturism, created a more inclusive and sexually tolerant approach to nudism on sandy beaches, isolated river banks, and out-of-the-way parks. Naturists promoted a closer relationship with nature, advocated for nudity on public beaches and parks, and critiqued the intolerance of organized nudism. The progressive agenda of naturism brought together advocates of sexual freedom, feminists, people of color, gay men and women, and left-leaning activists.
With sexual liberalism under siege, the contradictions that once defined nudism—family oriented yet also a site of eroticism, a refuge for healthy conceptions of the body and a source of commercial pornography—fragmented the movement even as it made its growth possible. Feminist activists, in particular, rejected the assumption that good intentions and the family orientation of nudism/naturism guarded against illicit sexual behaviors. The debates raging over pornography in the 1980s influenced feminists to take a more critical view of naturist activities, its values of sexual liberation, and the representations featured in its magazines. Many feminists—frustrated by a fractured women’s movement, the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment, and the lack of a progressive sexual-rights platform—shifted their focus from a broad critique of sexism and gender inequality to a campaign against pornography. Antipornography feminists alienated many civil libertarians and activists in the women’s movement, especially lesbians, who opposed state censorship and the effort to impose a single conception of sexuality on society. Yet the critiques leveled against nudism and naturism by feminists resonated with a public seeking to reestablish limits on sexual expression. Throughout the 1980s, nudists and naturists confronted questions about the sexual exploitation of women, the problem of pedophilia, and the movement’s relationship with pornography. The liberal sexual values that shaped naturism clashed with the politics of antipornography feminism and made it difficult for the two groups to work together toward a common goal. The conflict and division that erupted over pornography influenced naturism to increasingly define itself as a lifestyle that offered rest, relaxation, and nude recreation.
“A Situated Morality”
The late 1960s represented a transitional moment for the American nudist movement. Rev. Ilsley Boone, who worked tirelessly to establish nudism in the United States since the early 1930s, died in the fall of 1968.11 Maurice Parmelee, whose Nudism in Modern Life helped establish the philosophy of nudism in the United States and became the subject of a congressional scandal during the Second World War, passed away in the spring of 1969.12 That same year, Kurt Barthal, who organized the first nudist gatherings in New York City with fellow German immigrants, died at the age of eighty-five.13 As many of the longtime leaders of nudism passed away, the number of nudist camps across the country grew to 130, and the membership of the American Sunbathing Association surged by 12 percent to fifty-six thousand members.14 Paula Krammer, the owner and manager of Camp Goodland in Hackettstown, New Jersey, confirmed this growth at her club, which had grown to eleven hundred members by recently adding two hundred men and women. She explained that most of the new enlistees were “young adults who are interested in raising their children under the principles of health.”15 No longer the subject of constant police raids and still offering a number of resort-style facilities with lakes, swimming pools, cabins, and recreation halls as well as protected spaces for sunbathing, hiking, and a variety of other athletic activities, nudists clubs attracted a new generation of young men and women interested in experiencing the pleasures of social nudity in a rustic natural setting.
The participation of younger men and women in organized nudism remained small in comparison to a predominantly older, well-established, family-oriented membership. The increased interest in nudism from the mass-market sex-advice literature that emerged in the late 1960s produced extensive demographic data about the movement. The studies detailed the average age, education level, type of occupation, marital status, and church affiliation of American nudists. Surveying over two thousand nudists across the United States, William Hartman, Marilyn Fithian, and Donald Johnson’s Nudist Society reported that nudist men averaged 40 years in age, 85 percent had graduated high school, and 20 percent had graduated from college. Almost 40 percent claimed a professional type of employment and boasted an income level 50 percent higher than the average Californian.16 Nudist women averaged 38 years in age, and almost 50 percent reported their occupation as “housewife.”17 Similarly, Manfred DeMartino’s The New Female Sexuality reported 34.7 years to be the average age of the 102 female nudists surveyed; 80 percent were married, 32 percent had graduated high school, 37 percent had received some college training, and the most frequently listed occupation was “housewife.” In contrast, the 73 “potential nudists” DeMartino interviewed—women who were interested in nudist activities but who had never participated in organized nudism—had a much lower average age of 26.9 years.18
An older, family-oriented membership influenced most nudist clubs to maintain exclusionary policies and strict codes of conduct that limited sexual behavior. Since the 1950s, many nudist clubs in the United States excluded single males; prohibited drinking alcoholic beverages; discouraged unnecessary body contact, nude dancing, deliberate staring, and sexual jokes; and imposed strict rules regarding photography. In addition, individual members unofficially controlled the sexual behavior of other nudists by ostracizing men who had the misfortune of experiencing an erection, gossiping about women who regularly assumed provocative poses and postures, and whispering about guests who engaged in open displays of affection. Martin Weinberg, a sociologist at the Kinsey Institute who spent two summers as a participant-observer at a Chicago-area nudist club, argued that nudist clubs relied on numerous rules to construct a “situated morality” in response to the widely held perception that a close relationship existed between nudity and sexuality.19 The restrictive atmosphere that prevailed at many nudist clubs began as a way to avoid police raids and to assure new members of the group’s genuine commitment to the therapeutic principles of the movement.
The sexually liberated attitudes and values of many of the young people joining the movement, however, threatened to undermine the situated morality that prevailed at most nudist clubs. One nudist, for example, cited the less inhibited behaviors of “young people or carousers” as a reason to ban alcohol consumption at clubs, even though he regularly kept beer in his own refrigerator. He feared that drinking at camp might embolden “guys and girls” to “get fresh with someone else’s girl.” Nudists, according to him, had to “bend over backwards to keep people who are so inclined from going beyond the bounds of propriety.”20 At the ASA’s 1967 annual convention at the Penn-Sylvan Health Society Camp, the organization rejected attempts to relax the ban against alcoholic beverages by voting down a motion that would have given individual clubs the right to make their own policies on the liquor question.21 Well after the legal victories in the late 1950s, owners of nudist clubs continued to enforce policies that ensured the clubs appealed to respectable families rather than young singles and unmarried couples.
The exclusionary racial policies of many nudist clubs also discouraged the participation of
many younger Americans who were sympathetic to the struggles of the civil rights movement. Although many university students volunteered in voter-registration campaigns and participated in protests against racial segregation in schools, on buses, and in local drugstores, an older nudist membership assumed that interracial sex remained deviant, and they feared that any association with the civil rights movement might further imperil the fragile respectability of American nudism. John Howard argues in his analysis of queer Mississippi that local residents who long ignored the queer incidents and behaviors around them began to consider the civil rights activism by white men and women from outside the state as an act of “perversion.” This resulted in an increased awareness of queer behaviors by local Mississippi residents and a more “strident legal effort to ferret them out, punish them, and banish them.”22 The social and cultural prejudices against interracial sex did not remain confined to the South, as evidenced by a 1964 club newsletter written by the director and manager of the New York–based Stonehenge nudist group. The club manager responded to the recent passage of the antidiscrimination laws of Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Act by asserting that he was “not in favor of inviting a ‘HUMAN SEA ASSAULT’ of negroes upon our white parks” because it “would certainly result in a loss to both peoples.” Although he did want to “accept those colored nudists that have honored us by wanting our companionship,” he preferred to have “parks just about all of one color and others mixed and near enough so a nudist could choose the type of club that best suited the individual temperament.”23
The racial prejudices of many nudists caused clubs to defy and resist antidiscrimination laws. In 1966, Sunshine Park in Mays Landing, New Jersey, which had been founded by Rev. Boone in 1937 and had served as the national headquarters of the movement for decades, refused to admit an African American woman, her female companion, and her two daughters.24 After the woman wrote to her senator and attracted the attention of the Division of Civil Rights in the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office, the owner of Sunshine Park apologized and claimed that the incident had been the result of a “misunderstanding.”25 The attempts to maintain an older, whites-only membership put the nudist movement at odds with many progressive and young Americans who supported the civil rights movement.
The anonymous social interactions that prevailed at nudist clubs and activities also betrayed calls for sexual liberation. High educational levels, professional occupations, and higher-than-average income levels meant that many nudists lived in communities and worked for companies that likely disapproved of nudism. Nudists often assumed that the majority of their neighbors, family, friends, and coworkers considered nudism a deviant behavior and associated the movement with sexual promiscuity and “nuts.” Many anticipated severe social and economic sanctions if they revealed their interest in nudism. They feared that they would be labeled “odd,” that their children would endure ridicule from their friends, and that their teenage daughters or wives would be considered “sexually available.” Other nudists worried about losing their jobs or being passed over for promotion by their employers. According to Weinberg, only 10 percent of the nudists he interviewed for his study on nudism openly disclosed that they regularly visited a nudist club. Those who did share their interest in nudism generally chose to do so with friends or coworkers who they felt were likely to respond with a positive reaction. In their suburban homes, many nudists renovated floor plans and constructed higher backyard fences to ensure that their nude sunbathing would remain hidden from neighbors and visitors.26 Even when visiting clubs, nudists worried about sharing their identities. One man described how he looked “behind to see if anyone [was] behind [him]” every time he entered a nudist club.27 Nudists also protected their identities at clubs by rarely using last names and almost never discussing their place of employment. Even though nudists claimed to reject the shame attached to the naked body, many remained uncomfortable sharing their weekend activities and chose to live a double life.
As much as the reticent atmosphere of the nudist club attempted to preserve the respectable, white, family-oriented character of the movement, it also concealed a variety of extramarital sexual behaviors. The same sociological studies that detailed the demographic composition of the movement surveyed the sexual behaviors, preferences, and experiences of practicing nudists. Many of the respondents remained unwilling to discuss sex and refused to answer questions addressing sexual behavior. Yet through one-on-one interviews and in the data collected from willing respondents, the studies revealed that erections happened at clubs, that extramarital affairs did occur, that gay men and lesbians visited and joined nudist clubs, and that older, established married couples interested in the “swinging” phenomenon looked to nudism to meet other couples. The respectable atmosphere promoted at many nudist clubs protected men and women interested in exploring a variety of sexual behaviors.
The preference of many nudists to remain anonymous and the effort to maintain the movement’s family-oriented character made nudism an ideal place to meet couples interested in discreetly exchanging sexual partners. “Wife swapping” or “swinging” grew in popularity in the mid-1960s as a largely suburban phenomenon in the United States. Mostly highly educated, professional men and women, dissatisfied with the routines of suburban life, experimented with the boundaries of monogamy at parties where several married couples came together, occasionally in the nude, engaged in small talk over drinks, and then transitioned to bedrooms with someone other than their spouse.28 The nudist club provided a similar setting where couples felt comfortable openly propositioning fellow nudists to “swing.” A thirty-seven-year-old nudist man and his wife who were “not interested in swinging” described being “approached by various nudists” to switch partners. Offended by the repeated unwanted advances, they changed their club membership. Another nudist woman, in her midthirties, endorsed swinging in the movement because it “filled an unacknowledged need for extramarital sex”: “[It] enriched my marriage by demonstrating how much our mutual love meant to us.”29 The unstated acceptance of swinging in nudism provided opportunities for spontaneous sexual encounters between consenting couples. One woman described an incident in a “nudist group of two other people” besides her husband and herself in which they had sex as a group, while another woman recalled an incident involving “one man and five girls who were sitting around nude when it [group sex] started.”30 And yet the nudist movement’s insistence that clubs keep extramarital behaviors hidden behind restrictive rules, exclusionary policies, and anonymous social interactions alienated many young people who saw public nudity as a way to liberate sex from repressive attitudes and beliefs.
The Sexual Freedom League
For Jefferson Poland, a young student activist attending San Francisco State University in the early 1960s, going naked on a beach, in a park, or on a public sidewalk represented a way to liberate sex from shame, guilt, and repression. After moving in with “two anarchist girls who practiced nudity and promiscuity” and meeting Leo F. Koch, a biologist who had been fired in 1960 by the University of Illinois because he endorsed premarital sex between advanced undergraduates, Poland began his campaign for sexual freedom by advocating “civil disobedience on a number of then-neglected domestic issues, including the rights of nudists.”31 After volunteering as a Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) voter-registration worker in Plaquemine, Louisiana, in 1963, Poland moved to New York City, where he worked with Koch to form the New York City League for Sexual Freedom in 1964. The small organization enlisted an advisory committee that included the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg; Ginsberg’s partner, Peter Orlovsky; the Living Theater directors Julian Beck and Judith Malina; the cofounder of the Washington, D.C., branch of the Mattachine Society, Franklin Kameny; and several other well-known Beat poets and authors active in Greenwich Village. Bringing together homosexuals, artists, and sex radicals and following the activist strategies of CORE, the League for Sexual Freedom set out to challenge the white, heteronormative boundarie
s of sexual liberalism that continued to influence the American nudist movement.
Poland’s League for Sexual Freedom protested the limits placed on sexual expression in American society and defended marginal sexualities and practices. The belief that “sex without guilt and restriction is good, pleasurable, relaxing, and promotes a spirit of human closeness, compassion and good will” shaped the organization’s efforts to change the way Americans thought about sex and eroticism.32 It asserted that “marriage, engagement, or ‘going steady’” was not necessary to “justify sexual relations,” and it endorsed “wife and husband swapping, group sex, sex in public,” as long as it was “mutually agreed upon between indulging parties.”33 It declared laws and restrictions that made sex between persons of different races to be unconstitutional, and it expressed support for repealing all laws that restricted a woman’s “freedom of choice . . . in regard to having, not having children, birth control, and family planning.”34 It believed that films showing full-frontal male and female nudity should not be considered obscene and that sex engaged in by consenting parties for financial gain should be legal. In addition, it objected to the “fuss against children being exposed to sex or indulging in it” and asserted that a “sex organ in the hand of a child is more desirable than a toy machine gun.”35 The League for Sexual Freedom practiced a queer politics that celebrated marginal sexualities and campaigned to disrupt social and cultural assumptions that restrained sexual behaviors, maintained gender hierarchies, and imposed racial inequalities.