Naked

by Brian S. Hoffman

  Baxandall recognized the need for an activist organization willing to promote social nudity outside the nudist club. The goals and ideals of the ASA, according to many free beach enthusiasts, represented the economic interests of “nudist park proprietors” rather than the interests of the average nudist. Free beach activists decried the “hidebound conservation of capital investment” that defined the ASA and led to the “tacky trailer parks that, willy nilly, now . . . symbolize the vision of a humanity free of clothes-compulsory ideology.” Unhappy with the strict rules limiting sexual expression and the organization’s isolationism, free beach activists rejected nudist clubs since they constituted “ghettos of free flesh behind walls of fig leaves and barbed wire.” Baxandall, joining with other free beach activists across the United States, including Eugene Callen, the organizer of Beachfront U.S.A., envisioned an organization born out of the “youth rebellion of the 1960s” and dedicated to an “understanding of social nudity defined through the individual’s relationship with nature.”93 Preferring the European concept of naturism over the “superficial term” nudism, Baxandall believed that social nudity played a vital role in the “restoration of nature’s balances” and made it possible to “more completely ‘humanize’ our culture.”94 Public nudity, according to Baxandall, “permits us to heighten our awareness of how much we are like one another and as vulnerable as one another,” and as result, “individuals grow in sensitivity and dispense with the trappings of difference and privilege and fear.”95 Baxandall outlined an organization built on egalitarian ideals and capable of bringing together the many different people, groups, and organizations that had long struggled in isolation to establish a strong, unified movement capable of responding to antinudity policies at the federal, state, and local levels.

  The Naturist Society (TNS), established by Lee Baxandall and several other free beach activists in May 1980, promoted an activist approach to nudism through a decentralized organizational structure and a mission to increase public awareness of recreational social nudity. Baxandall’s family printing business in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, served as the group’s headquarters, where a few dedicated activists coordinated and scheduled events, distributed newsletters and magazines, collected information about sites friendly to nude sunbathing, and fielded calls from newspapers, television and radio stations, and magazines. Instead of promoting individual clubs, the organization held regular “gatherings” of members interested in social nudity. At gatherings, members assembled at hospitable sites in different regions of the country and discussed ways to promote recreational nude sunbathing, to confront legal challenges, and to reform nudist practices that they considered unnecessary or inappropriate.96 To increase public awareness of the “free beach issue” and attract media attention, the organization also set up and sponsored events such as National Nude Beach Day. Held in mid-July or mid-August, the national spectacle sought to re-create the mass nude demonstration that occurred at Truro Free Beach in the summer of 1976. In 1983, TNS also commissioned the Gallup organization to survey American attitudes about nude sunbathing at designated beach sites. Based on a sample of 1,037 adults, the poll found that 71.6 percent of Americans believed people should be able to sunbathe nude at a “beach accepted for this purpose,” and another 39.1 percent thought the government should set aside “special and secluded areas” for going naked.97 The favorable poll numbers validated the mission of TNS and raised the organization’s public profile.

  The publication of Baxandall’s World Guide to Nude Beaches and Recreation in 1980 dramatically increased awareness of naturism, free beaches, and social nudity. Baxandall and Jan Smith, who helped edit the project, wanted to make naturism accessible to “outdoors people” who already enjoyed to “backpack or canoe.”98 The self-described “life style book” shifted the free beach movement’s focus from establishing designated, legal clothing-optional areas to enjoying already well-established locations popular with experienced naturists or nude sunbathers.99 Smith explained that “naturists really aren’t after designated nude beaches” since these attempts often “bring out the Moral Majority” and create an unfavorable impression of naturists.100 She acknowledged that “there are laws on the books everywhere” prohibiting public nudity, but she saw room for leniency. The intent of most antinudity laws, according to Smith, was to “keep people from going naked down Main Street.”101 She believed that “if no one is offended, just let it happen” and that the authorities should be encouraged to adopt this approach.102 Accordingly, the World Guide to Nude Beaches and Recreation included thousands of listings that described a particular location’s natural features, provided a brief history, included detailed directions and parking information, and noted the presence or absence of hostile neighbors and/or local authorities. Many profiles also included large, attractive photos that advertised the specific charms and characteristics to be enjoyed at a particular site. The information provided by the guide made it possible for any individual, couple, or family to locate a spot to safely go naked almost anywhere in the United States or around the world.

  Baxandall also saw the creation of TNS as an opportunity to confront the fractured sexual politics of the Left and to build a coalition among liberal activists, sex radicals, and feminists. During the late 1960s and 1970s, many women felt insulted, excluded, or exploited by the often sexist attitudes of the male-dominated anticapitalist New Left. In addition, although the counterculture encouraged women to explore their sexual desires, it often did so on male terms and for the benefit of male pleasure.103 The rejection of the double standard and the endorsement of casual sex often only meant that men gained greater access to female bodies. Meanwhile, New Left political organizations continued to uphold traditional gender arrangements and relegated women to secretarial work or domestic responsibilities. The male leadership of the New Left responded to women who articulated a gendered critique of modern society with sexist heckles or feigned interest. The growth of a strong women’s liberation movement directly confronted the sexism of mainstream society, the New Left, and the counterculture. Feminists demanded control over their bodies, critiqued sexist media representations, and campaigned for a platform of sexual rights that confronted rape, incest, and abortion.104 Yet the women’s movement also splintered as working-class women, women of color, and lesbians clashed with the interests of a leadership dominated by white, middle-class women. The confrontations and clashes that occurred over sex divided progressive politics and profoundly shaped the membership of TNS.

  In the early 1980s, TNS brought together advocates of sexual freedom as well as feminists who critiqued the objectification of the female body. Jefferson Poland, who had previously been rebuffed by members of the ASA when he called for a more activist and sexually aware brand of nudism, found a place in TNS, where he assisted in providing information about nude sunbathing locations and frequently attended events. Ed Lange, the longtime nudist who maintained ties to the pornography industry and opened the sexually liberated Elysium resort in Tujunga Canyon in Los Angeles, also lent his support to TNS by hosting the organization’s first “gathering” in 1980.105 At the same time, Baxandall allied himself with feminist campaigns to condemn sexist, demeaning, and violent depictions of the female body in magazines, advertisements, Hollywood movies, and pornographic films. In his World Guide to Nude Beaches and Recreation, he critiqued the “tantalize-and-deliver sensationalism of our jaded consumer culture” that justified the “repression of healthy female nudity.” He argued that women who undressed at free beaches were “shattering the invisible bonds of an inherited sex role” and denying “one of the chief means of mind and destiny control by the patriarchy.”106 He hoped that “mixed sex beaches” would bring “health to infants and elderly, straight and gay, male and female alike.”107

  Baxandall built alliances with feminist activists who made headlines across the country for going naked from the waist up in the name of “shirtfree equality.” Nikki Craft, a committed feminist activist, street
performer, and artist, founded the Cross Your Heart Network in 1981 after two police officers arrested her for sunbathing topless on a Santa Cruz beach.108 Over the next fifteen years, the police arrested Craft more than seventeen times for removing her shirt in public in several different states, including Santa Cruz, California; Cape Cod, Massachusetts; Rochester, New York; and Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Craft organized the “shirtfree equality” movement to demonstrate that the “female body is not obscene, that women should have control over their bodies, and there is a difference between acceptance of human nudity and the exploitation and marketing of women’s bodies in the pornography industry.”109 Craft asserted that laws denying women the right to go naked from the waist up—whether for sunbathing, for breastfeeding, or just for physical comfort—unfairly discriminated against women and enforced the sexist assumption that the female breast existed for male sexual pleasure. At demonstrations, Craft resisted the objectification of her body by dramatically standing with her arms raised, her unshaven armpits exposed, and her naked breasts in full view. Craft, who worked closely with Andrea Dworkin and several other prominent feminist activists, considered her campaign for “shirtfree equality” part of the larger struggle to eliminate pornographic depictions of women. Baxandall identified strongly with Craft’s cause, and the two began working and living together at the Free Beach Documentation Center in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Baxandall hoped to encourage more women to participate in naturism through the strong feminist perspective that Craft contributed to TNS publications, at organizational meetings, and at regional gatherings. A delicate alliance emerged between feminists and naturists through the close relationship that developed between Craft and Baxandall.

  Baxandall also welcomed a growing interest in TNS among gay men and lesbians who saw naturism as an alternative to an urban gay identity defined by privilege, whiteness, and a depoliticized commercial culture. The ASA continued to characterize itself as being “pretty conservative” on the issue of homosexuality and reported that 64 percent of its members were married and that the organization was “geared to families and couples.”110 Baxandall, in contrast, encouraged interest from the gay and lesbian community through his World Guide to Nude Beaches and Recreation. In his entry for Lands End Beach in San Francisco’s Golden Gate National Recreation Area, he noted a “totally nude and a very mixed scene by day; a gay crowd tends to take over after dusk.” For New York City, he assured readers that “the 72nd Street Pier and Drydocks” was “by no means gays only,” and he went on to document the “straight and gay subdivisions” at Jacob Riis Park. Another entry, on Cherry Grove and Fire Island Pines, informed readers that “gay is prevalent here,” under a picture of two naked men holding each other and facing the camera, unashamed and revealing their genitalia.111 The World Guide served as a valuable resource for gay men and lesbians across the United States looking for friendly destinations where they could safely and openly socialize while contributing to a tolerant community. TNS received numerous membership inquiries from gay men and lesbians across the country. Baxandall asked Murray Kaufman, a gay man from New York City who regularly participated in naturist activities, to take an active role in organizing a special interest group dedicated to gays and lesbians. In 1983, Kaufman set up Gay and Lesbian Naturists (GLN) and formed the group Males Au Naturel (MAN) in the New York City area. Over the next several years, GLN enlisted 395 members and oversaw the formation of thirty-three other independent groups across the United States.

  The rural orientation of naturist activities appealed to many gay men and women, who did not identify with the bicoastal orientation of urban gay life and, instead, sought out communities that practiced what Scott Herring has termed “critical rusticity.” The emergence in the 1970s of trendy “gay urban ghettos” in New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco along with national gay publications such as the Advocate that promoted a middle-class, cosmopolitan image of gay urban communities betrayed the “intersectional Gay Liberation Front politics that engaged with concurrent critiques of racial, imperial and capitalist norms” and alienated many activists, people of color, and nonurban gay men and women. In response, according to Herring, “critical rusticity” emerged in a number of publications that exhibited a rural orientation and a desire to create an “intersectional opportunity to geographically, corporeally, and aesthetically inhabit non-normative sexuality that offers new possibilities for the sexually marginalized outside the metropolis as well as inside it.”112 Gay naturist activities often occurred outside the “bar scene” on beaches or at rustic campgrounds far away from the metropolis. In 1985, Kaufman held one of the first weekend “gatherings” for GLN at the naturist campground Summit Lodge in Ohio, and beginning in 1986, the group held the annual GLN “gathering” in eastern Pennsylvania in the Pocono Mountains. In the early 1990s, OutWeek magazine, an activist gay and lesbian publication that featured articles on politics, AIDS, the arts, and popular culture, profiled the intersectional politics of gay naturism in an article titled “Grin and Bare It.” The article introduced naturism as a “delightfully subversive act” in the “gay male community, fettered as it is by classism, sexism, and body-image oppression.”113 The article explained the increasing need for gay naturists to “politicize their existence” in the face of a “dual suppression” that saw “their own gay community” view them with “suspicion,” while they were “still not readily welcome in the nudist milieu.”114 The act of disrobing in a rustic setting or on a beach as a gay man or lesbian represented a rejection of the heterosexism of organized nudism as well as a rejection of the cosmopolitan consumerism that dominated representations of gay urban life in the late twentieth century.

  Lee Baxandall’s World Guide to Nude Beaches and Recreation helped gay men and lesbians across the United States locate friendly destinations where they could safely and openly socialize while contributing to a tolerant nudist community. (Lee Baxandall, World Guide to Nude Beaches and Recreation [New York: Stonehill, 1980], 88)

  Gay naturism also played a role in challenging the racism of the gay urban lifestyle. “Grin and Bare It” focused on Liddell Jackson, “an activist, a Black gay man and a nudist” who appeared naked on The Phil Donahue Show in 1990 with his white partner, Bill Schilling. With images of the two naked men holding each other illustrating the article, the couple discussed the challenges that faced gay people of color who were interested in naturism. Jackson believed that racial anxieties prevented more people of color from participating in naturism. He asserted, “Nudity reflects a sense of privilege. People of color don’t have a sense of privilege to do what the mainstream does. We have trouble embracing any concept that is not in the mainstream.” The pressure that people of color felt to conform to white mainstream society made it difficult to reject the widespread acceptance of clothing. Kaufman also stated, “Nudism plus gayness is a double whammy for [people of color].” Nevertheless, Jackson maintained that “there is less bigotry in gay nude circles,” and another black gay naturist felt “less racism here [naturism] than in the bar scene.”115 For many people of color, participating in naturism represented a way to encourage experimental behaviors and to challenge the racism of the urban gay lifestyle.

  The political battles over pornography threatened to undo the fragile coalition that had formed under TNS. Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, and Susan Brownmiller led an effort to equate all forms of pornography with rape and sexual violence and called on the women’s movement to advocate for the suppression of these materials.116 Similarly, Nikki Craft found it increasingly difficult to reconcile the way naturists advocated body acceptance with their use of “sexualized photos . . . to promote sales of naturist publications.”117 After Craft began attending naturist conferences in 1982, she quickly observed that the movement “had yet to be touched by feminism,” and she took it upon herself to reform the way naturists treated women and represented the bodies of women and children in their publications.118 She believed that “pornographers had long exploited nud
ists,” since the leadership of the nudist movement had made “little or no attempt to separate themselves and their values from those of pornographers.” Craft set out to “confront the lie repeated by nudists and naturist leaders that ‘nudity has nothing to do with sex.’”119

  As the family faded away as a viable moral constraint within the boundaries of sexual liberalism, a growing concern about child pornography emerged in the late 1970s and informed Craft’s critiques of naturism/nudism. In the past, nudists responded to concerns about the involvement of naked children at nudist clubs and their display in the movement’s magazines by covering up instances of abuse, excluding single men from clubs, and arguing that the enjoyment of children reflected the natural pleasures of going naked. By the mid-1970s, however, moral reformers, child-welfare advocates, and conservative politicians made child pornography a national issue. In the 1960s and 1970s, civil libertarians argued that adult men and women willingly consented to making and consuming pornography and that government suppression violated their right to privacy. Unable to challenge this argument as the heteronormative boundaries of sexual liberalism crumbled and led to a dramatic expansion in pornography, activists and child-welfare advocates argued that children did not have the ability to consent, and any picture featuring a naked child should be considered obscene, capable of influencing adults to commit sexual abuse, and inherently damaging to the child in the photo. The new concern about child pornography led to widespread public support for legal intervention, with few civil libertarians offering opposition. In 1977, New York police closed down many of the bookstores and movie theaters that offered child pornography in Times Square, and the news media, including magazines such as Redbook, Parents, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, Ms., and Time, as well as the television show 60 Minutes, sensationalized the issue of child pornography. A number of books presenting research and analysis on the issue of child pornography and sexual abuse also began to appear between 1978 and 1981. The increased public awareness of child pornography led several states, including Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Missouri, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Wisconsin, to pass laws against making and distributing images of naked children or minors engaged in sexual acts. In addition, in Washington, D.C., several congressional hearings addressed the issue of child pornography, and in the spring of 1977, the House passed the Kildee-Murphy Bill, which prohibited the manufacture, distribution, and possession of child pornography, by a vote of 401–0.