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Asada & Mischa

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Asada never takes off his monster suit. Mischa never wears clothes. They’re best friends and two sides of the same coin, reflecting our own bodily feelings.

New Asada & Mischa strips drop on the 2nd Sunday of every month! 🪐

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Burst Reach

Art, comics, dance, occasional nudity, and other miscellany.

By Brett Marcella

This week on Planet Nude

This week brought three very different attempts to solve problems involving nudity. A Seattle courtroom considered the future of Denny Blaine Beach. British officials proposed software that would block nude images by default on children's devices. Arizona lawmakers advanced a bill intended to address deepfakes and revenge porn. Each begins with a seemingly-legitimate concern. Each also raises questions about what gets swept up when nudity itself becomes the thing being regulated.

Britain’s proposed device-level nudity detection is the most literal version of that problem. The goal is framed as child protection, and the harms it invokes are real. But the proposed mechanism depends on treating “nude images” as a category a device can recognize before any human meaning enters the picture. For naturists, that is the familiar mistake in its purest technical form: a body becomes a warning label first, and only later does anyone ask what the image actually was.

Arizona’s HB 2133 raises a related problem through law rather than software. A bill aimed at deepfakes and nonconsensual sexual imagery now sits on Governor Katie Hobbs’s desk, with AANR urging a veto over concerns that broadly written obligations could sweep lawful nude publishing into a compliance regime built for something else. The pattern is getting hard to miss. Bad actors create a real crisis, lawmakers reach for broad categories, and nonsexual nudity gets dragged into the net.

At Denny Blaine, the question is moving toward judgment. Closing arguments arrived this week in a case that has increasingly asked whether an informal nude beach can be understood as a legitimate public space with history, community, and civic meaning. The plaintiff has tried to frame the park as a nuisance. Friends of Denny Blaine has answered with continuity, culture, safety data, queer belonging, and the basic point that simple nudity remains lawful. That contrast matters. Institutions often recognize a place only after a community learns how to translate itself into institutional language.

With all that news about regulation and interpretation, it’s important to celebrate the good things too, and Skinny Dip Day offers a nice counterweight. Team Planet Nude is back this year and yes, for the next few weeks we are going to repeatedly ask for your support. Sorry in advance, and also thank you eternally for your patience and participation.

Last year, our readers raised more than $3,200 for the Fistula Foundation and finished just $243 behind first-place Gunnison Beach. This year we’re hoping to close the gap. More importantly, we’re hoping to help fund life-changing surgeries for women suffering from obstetric fistula, a devastating childbirth injury that remains entirely treatable.

Whether you join Team Planet Nude, start your own team, grab some merch, or simply make a donation, every dollar goes directly to the cause. It’s one of the easiest opportunities all year to do something fun, distinctly nudist, and genuinely helpful at the same time.

Join Team Planet Nude

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Nudie Cutie Comics

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News of the Nude

Here are a few stories we’re tracking off Planet Nude this week.

Tanudan eyes Anti-Topless Ordinance; Cultural practices, use of traditional attire exempted

A proposed ordinance in the Philippine municipality of Tanudan would prohibit toplessness in public while exempting traditional cultural attire. The distinction highlights something nudists encounter frequently: public nudity laws often depend as much on context and cultural legitimacy as on exposure itself.

Toronto’s annual Naked Bike Ride happens this weekend, championing body resistance and activist causes

Toronto’s ride arrives amid unusually public conversations about inclusion, safety, and who feels welcome in activist spaces. The event itself is familiar. The debate around it reflects broader questions many volunteer-led communities eventually face as they grow.

Strip and Dip Goes Back to the Record Books with 80s-Themed Wicklow Challenge

Ireland’s annual Strip and Dip returns this summer with another world-record attempt and a fundraising mission. It’s a reminder that some of the most successful public nudity events work because they’re equal parts community gathering, media spectacle, and charitable effort.

Discord Dispatch

The server had a distinctly summer feeling this week. New members continued to arrive from across North America, introducing themselves and sharing how they found naturism, while regulars compared nudist bucket-list destinations, hosted visiting friends they'd first met online, and posted snapshots from gardens, bike rides, and everyday life.

Join us at discord.gg/8gt7D6ssMd — or click here to learn more.

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1 Naturist Life

The longest getting dressed of my life

Five weeks ago, I stood in front of my closet at 6:45 in the morning and had what I can only describe as a small, dignified breakdown. Not the crying kind. The standing-very-still-and-staring kind. I needed to find an outfit for my first day back in a corporate retail environment after nearly a year and a half of working freelance from home, where my da…

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20 hours ago · Dustin Cox

After eighteen months of working from home as a naturist, the Dustin returned to corporate retail and discovered that getting dressed again was less a practical challenge than an existential one. The physical discomfort faded within weeks, but what lingered was the exhausting re-emergence of social self-consciousness and the daily work of assembling an image. The essay lands not as a complaint but as an honest inventory of what naturism actually provides: the permission to stop performing.

1 Naturist Life

1 Naturist Life is a blog and community celebrating the freedom, body positivity, and culture of naturism, offering personal stories, travel tips, and insights into living naturally.

By Dustin Cox

The Orbit is Planet Nude’s weekly digest. Published every Saturday. 🪐

Toronto’s World Naked Bike Ride takes to the streets Saturday, June 13, as it has every June since 2004. This year a second clothing-optional ride sets off across town at the same hour, and its organizer says the two events stand for opposite things.

The original ride departs from Coronation Park, part of an international protest movement against oil dependence and a celebration of body freedom that organizers say reaches more than 80 cities. A competing ride leaves from Allan Gardens, organized for queer, transgender, and feminist participants by the activist Abuzar Chaudhary. In an interview with TorontoToday, Chaudhary described the relationship between the two events bluntly: “This is very much in opposition.”

Chaudhary, a transgender woman, told the outlet she helped organize the Toronto ride in its first year but stopped participating and launched her own version in 2022, after the event stopped feeling safe to her and other members of the LGBTQ+ community. She said she experienced harassment and inappropriate touching at past rides, and argued that a leaderless event cannot remove people who make women and trans riders uncomfortable. Her ride, by contrast, sets explicit conduct rules and prioritizes racialized, queer, and trans participants. She framed her aim in stark terms, saying she wants the original ride replaced. In a separate interview with NOW Toronto, she estimated that at least 20 people from her own circle had stopped riding.

Gene Dare, who has organized the original ride since 2008, denied Chaudhary’s harassment allegation when reached by TorontoToday and defended the event as open to everyone. He said a second ride “just creates confusion,” and that Chaudhary’s version “doesn’t hold the values of the World Naked Bike Ride,” though when pressed he did not name a specific value at odds. Dare said he was aware of one sexual assault during the ride’s history, roughly eight years ago in Kensington Market, which he reported to police, along with two occasions when he asked aroused participants to step aside. “It’s not a sexual ride and we make sure we enforce that,” he told the outlet.

The dispute sits on a fault line familiar across organized nudism: whether a deliberately leaderless, everyone-welcome model can protect vulnerable participants, or whether safety requires named organizers empowered to set rules and remove people. Chaudhary’s ride has run in some form since 2022, often under the QTCASE and Body Pride banners, with the same anti-colonial, body-politics framing and the same Allan Gardens staging. Both rides begin Saturday afternoon. 🪐

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David Hockney died Friday at 88. The obituaries in the popular press have the broad strokes: a giant of 20th and 21st century art, the man who turned a Los Angeles swimming pool into one of the most recognizable images in modern painting. A Bigger Splash, the iPad drawings, the Yorkshire landscapes, the late-life refusal to apologize for much of anything, the smoking included.

Less remarked on, though it ran through his work from the start, is what he was actually looking at. For sixty years Hockney painted the naked body in the open air, and he began doing it at a moment when, for a man like him, that look was against the law.

Before the pools there were the magazines. As a student at London’s Royal College of Art in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, Hockney was already working from American physique publications, above all Bob Mizer’s Physique Pictorial and the Athletic Model Guild photographs that filled it. His 1963 painting Domestic Scene, Los Angeles, two men in a shower, came from one of those photographs and was finished before he had ever set foot in California.

The physique magazines were sold as fitness and “artistic reference,” muscular young men in posing straps demonstrating the results of their training, while their real audience understood perfectly well what they were looking at. The classical poses, the bodybuilding pretext, the staging that stopped carefully short of full nudity made up the visual language of a desire that wasn’t permitted to speak plainly, so it spoke in physique instead. Homosexuality was still criminal in Britain, and full-frontal nudity didn’t clear the legal bar in the United States until court precedent shifted at the end of the 1960s, which is roughly when these magazines either turned explicit or disappeared. Hockney took that underground material and did something almost no one else was doing with it. He carried it up into daylight and hung it on a gallery wall, in color, at scale.

Los Angeles in 1964 changed everything. Flying in, he looked down at blue pools scattered across the city, a private luxury back home and an ordinary fact of life here, and the bodies that had been confined to a studio in the physique photographs could step out into actual sun. What he painted there wasn’t pornography and it wasn’t allegory. It was leisure. Men swimming, sunbathing, showering, climbing out of the water, often his own lovers and friends, most famously Peter Schlesinger, whom he met while teaching at UCLA in 1966. Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool shows a nude man from behind, rising out of clear water into the light. Critics at the time saw how easily his attention to the male nude merged with the technical problem he kept chasing, the way hard sun fractures across a moving surface. The body and the lit pool became one subject, fluid and alive and without shame. The same imagery that had to hide behind Alka-Seltzer labels and coded initials in his early London prints could now simply exist: a person, undressed, outdoors, on a good afternoon. He once described his work as a great yes to life, and the unclothed body sat at the center of that yes.

Hockney is easy to file under gay art history, which is true and too small. What he managed was a quiet normalization of the bare body at a time when public nakedness, and the desire it implied, carried real legal and social risk. He took imagery that had survived only by disguising itself as exercise and removed the disguise. No alibi, no apology, no posing strap of plausible deniability, just the human form at home in its own skin in water and sunlight. Advocates for body freedom have spent decades insisting that the unclothed body is not inherently sexual, not inherently shameful, not something to be smuggled past a censor. Hockney painted as though all of that were settled long before the argument reached open air, and he made the rest of the culture look. He outlived the laws that once made his subject dangerous, and he outlived the magazines he learned it from. The pools, and the bodies in them, outlast him too. 🪐

This weekend, June 13 and 14, the 1st International Summer Naturist University convenes in Paris—the inaugural academic seminar I wrote about last month, hosted by INF-FNI and France’s FFN around the theme The Heritage of Naturism: Historical Foundations and Future Directions.

It’s a two-day program spanning the history, philosophy, and culture of naturism—sessions on intangible cultural heritage, naturist architecture, the politics of photographic representation, and the role of archives in naturist thought, with presenters from universities and naturist orgs across Europe and North America.

My own session—which I’ll be giving remotely, live from Nevada—is on the naturist libraries: the small, fragile, volunteer-run collections preserving more than a century of this movement’s history, and the consortium working to keep them alive. I’m telling it through a personal door: my seven-year hunt for the story of Rudolph Johnson, my great-great-grandfather, a Danish immigrant logger who built a cobblestone house, a hundred-foot pool by hand, and went on to lead one of the most consequential reforms in American naturist history. Almost none of it would have been recoverable without these archives.

How to watch (remotely, via Zoom): 🗓 Sunday, June 14 🕙 10:00 Paris · 9:00 London · 4:00 AM ET · 3:00 AM CT · 2:00 AM MT · 1:00 AM PT

Yes, for those of us in North America, that’s the middle of the night—I’ll be presenting live at 1:00 AM Pacific. Register anyway: pre-registration is here, and registering is the best way to catch the session if you’d rather sleep.

I’ll have more to share about the Rudolph research soon. For now, if you’re up at an absurd hour Sunday, come say hello. 🪐

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An Arizona bill that naturist advocates warn could burden lawful nude publishing was transmitted to Governor Katie Hobbs on Friday, setting up a final decision on a measure the American Association for Nude Recreation has spent months working to defeat.

House Bill 2133, titled the Protect Act, cleared its last legislative hurdle this week. The House adopted the conference version Thursday on a 35–20 vote, a day after the Senate signed off 16–12. The bill now awaits Hobbs’s signature or veto. As of press time, she had not acted.

The legislation expands Arizona’s existing law against nonconsensual sexual imagery to cover AI-generated “synthetic depictions,” and it creates new obligations for commercial websites that publish sexual material. Those sites would have to verify that every person depicted consented and was at least 18 when the image was made, retain those records for seven years, and make them available to the attorney general on request. Violations carry civil penalties of up to $10,000 a day, and up to $250,000 plus attorney fees where a minor is involved.

The bill’s sponsor, Representative Nick Kupper, a Republican from Legislative District 25, has framed it as a proactive response to revenge porn and AI-generated sexual abuse material. He has publicly predicted Hobbs will veto it and accused her office of working against the measure.

For naturists, the concern has never been the bill’s intent but its reach. As Planet Nude reported in March, the worry centers on scope and the chilling effect that broadly written internet laws tend to produce. Clubs and publishers that maintain long-term image archives could struggle to document consent years after the fact, and the seven-year recordkeeping requirement is a particular pressure point in communal settings where participation is fluid and records are not always kept.

AANR Executive Director Erich Schuttauf said the bill's scope is a grave concern, pointing to the difficulty of complying years after an image was taken. He offered the example of a photo of nude beach cleanup volunteers standing beside the trash bags they filled on a project seven years earlier, and the near-impossibility of matching signed releases to everyone in that group. Those are the issues for adults, he noted; the bill also provides no mechanism for a parent to consent to a minor child's image. Schuttauf said amendments made later in the legislative process created some protection for older material, which he called evidence of advocates' efforts, though concerns remain.

AANR has been tracking the bill and working with a lobbyist in Arizona. In the organization’s most recent member update, Government Affairs Team chair Tim Mullins wrote that the effort had reached “the final stretch,” adding, “It may advance to the Governor’s office this week, and we are fighting to get the bill vetoed.”

The association continues to press for a veto, working with a broad coalition of First Amendment supporters, but is not at this point calling for members to contact the governor's office. Whether the effort succeeds will be clear within days. 🪐

This story has been updated with comment from AANR. Planet Nude will continue to follow the governor's decision as it develops.

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Strips One-Shots

Strips One-Shots is Planet Nude Strips’ banner for stand-alone comics. It’s where we publish single pieces that don’t belong to an ongoing series, giving artists the freedom to drop in a one-off gag or idea without needing a regular commitment.

Readers can expect an assortment of different artists to rotate through under this banner every 1st and 3rd Friday of the month (and sometimes intermittently). 🪐

Read more Strips One-Shots:

See all 'One Shots'

That’s it for now.

Editor’s note: If you’re an artist and want to submit a one-shot comic strip or panel gag, feel free to message me—we’re always looking for fresh voices to feature.

This is a post about not joining Team Planet Nude.

Well, mostly. Stick around to the end and I’ll happily take your donation. But the real reason I’m writing is to tell you about something bigger than our team, and to maybe nudge a few of you to go start one of your own.

For three years now, Planet Nude has fielded a team for Skinny Dip Day, the annual fundraiser for the Fistula Foundation. It has been, hands down, one of the most rewarding things we do all year. We’ve watched readers dip from lakes and rivers and backyard pools all over the world, and together we’ve funded real surgeries for real women living with obstetric fistula. There is something genuinely moving about a scattered, oddball community deciding to pull in the same direction for a week.

And here’s the thing: you can have that too.

Skinny Dip Day isn’t a closed club. Anyone can start a team, a nudist resort, a beach group, a podcast audience, a circle of friends, a single determined person with a kiddie pool. You set up a page, you rally whoever you can, you take a dip, and every dollar you raise goes straight to curing women of one of the most isolating, shame-inducing conditions on earth. That’s it. The whole thing is run by the relentlessly good-hearted Thomas Francine, and it’s about as low-pressure as fundraising gets.

If you’ve ever read one of our Skinny Dip Day posts and thought “I’d love to be part of something like that,” this is your sign. Don’t join our team. Build your own.

Start a team at SkinnyDipDay.org

It’s not too late to get one going before July 11, but the sooner you start, the more you can raise. Round up your people. Pick your water. Make a little noise.

And yes, okay, if starting a team sounds like more than you’ve got the bandwidth for this year, you’re always welcome to join ours instead. Either way, you’ll be helping. 🪐

Between battles over beaches, changing club cultures, and the closure of longtime naturist spaces, it raises an interesting question:

What actually makes a place feel safe?

Is it rules? The people? Privacy? Something else?

Leave your thoughts in the comments. 🪐

Leave a comment

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The trial over the future of Denny Blaine Park enters its final hours this week. What began on May 27 as a proceeding projected to run through late June has moved at a pace no one anticipated. Closing arguments are expected Thursday afternoon before Judge Samuel Chung. A ruling is possible that same day.

The shift in the courtroom this week is significant. For the first eight days of trial, the floor belonged to the plaintiff and the City. Wednesday that changes. Friends of Denny Blaine begins presenting its affirmative case—the witnesses and evidence that will ask the judge to see the park not as a nuisance to be abated but as a historically recognized public space with a documented role in Seattle’s queer and naturist communities.

Wednesday’s witnesses include Simon Thornton and Colleen Kimseylove, FoDB’s co-founders, who will speak from personal experience about the park’s meaning and its decades of continuous use. Dr. Loren Atherley, Senior Director of Performance Analytics and Research at the Seattle Police Department, will present data on the success of the City’s abatement plan—the first hard numbers from city sources to enter the record.

Thursday, Perkins Coie lead attorney Susan Foster will deliver closing arguments on behalf of FoDB. The core of FoDB’s case, as Perkins Coie attorney Cassandra Carley put it in opening arguments, comes down to this: “This community includes transgender and nonbinary and asexual individuals for whom Denny Blaine Park is one of the safest places that they have. These are neighbors, co-workers, friends, family, citizens of Seattle who deserve respect.”

The plaintiff has asked the court for a permanent injunction prohibiting all nudity at the park, or closing it entirely. FoDB has argued throughout that simple nudity is lawful, historically documented, and constitutionally protected—and that the abatement plan already in place has addressed the conduct the plaintiff actually objects to. One of the plaintiff’s own witnesses, Meghan Harman, conceded under cross-examination that the park should remain open and that nudity is a protected right.

FoDB has invited press and supporters to attend this week, noting that trial coverage has skewed heavily toward the plaintiff’s opening witnesses. “This is an opportunity for balance, fairness, and representing the full picture,” they wrote in a press release Tuesday morning. If you’re in Seattle and want to attend, court is in session Wednesday and Thursday at King County Courthouse, Courtroom E-955, ninth floor, 516 Third Avenue—9am to noon and 1:30 to 4pm. Follow @friendsofdennyblaine for updates.

Planet Nude will have outcome coverage whenever a ruling is issued. 🪐

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Read more coverage on Denny Blaine

Prime Minister Keir Starmer told Apple and Google on Monday that they have until September to build software into phones and tablets that detects and blocks nude images on children’s devices, or face a law that forces them to. Adults could still take and view nude content, but only after an age check unlocks it. Speaking at London Tech Week, he called it a national first and said the goal was to make it “impossible for children to take, share or view nude images.”

The Home Office wants the blocking to run across the whole device by default, including the camera and third-party apps, switched off only by proving you are over 18. Child-protection groups welcomed it. The National Crime Agency, which says it fields roughly 1,700 abuse referrals a week, called device-level blocking a way to stop abuse before it starts.

Whether it can even be built is contested. The director of the Age Verification Providers Association said the government is mandating an outcome “for which the technical and legal infrastructure doesn’t yet exist anywhere in the world.” Privacy groups were blunter: Big Brother Watch called the plans outrageous and warned of “the death of anonymity and internet privacy,” and the Open Rights Group said the approach would turn every phone into a surveillance device. The worry is not idle. Apple proposed on-device scanning for abuse material in 2021 and abandoned it after researchers warned it amounted to a back door in every phone.

None of this requires pretending the harms are not real. Grooming, sextortion, and the coercion of children into producing images of themselves are devastating, and a serious policy response is overdue. The question is what this particular remedy does, and to whom.

Read the government’s own language and you will see three different things treated as one. Starmer’s sentences slide from “nude images” to “sexually explicit images” to “pornography” as if they were synonyms. The mechanism is described over and over as nudity detection. Not abuse detection. Not grooming detection. Nudity.

That is the whole story for anyone who believes the unclothed body is not inherently sexual, which is the founding premise of naturism. The remedy does not target abuse. It targets the naked human body as a category and then sells adults the key. The default state Britain is proposing is one where a body, any body, is something a device refuses to show you until you prove you are old enough to be trusted with it.

It helps to be clear about what this software actually looks for. A nudity detector does not understand context. It cannot tell why a photo was taken, who is in it, or whether anyone was harmed. Its one job is to spot exposed skin and flag it. It has no way to tell a teenager’s coerced image from a toddler on a beach, a breastfeeding mother, a medical photo, or a family at a clothing-optional resort. To the software they are the same thing, because the same body is in the frame.

Now put that filter on a naturist family’s phone. It does not see a healthy family living a way of life that is legal across much of the world. It sees an exposed body and it blocks. The naturist community is, almost by definition, the population a body-detecting filter aimed at minors captures most efficiently. We are collateral the policy’s own framing cannot even register, because in its vocabulary there is no such thing as innocent nudity to begin with.

This is not a slippery slope. It is what the tool does on day one. A system that cannot tell a body from a crime will treat every body as a possible crime, and the only remedy it offers is to prove you are an adult before it will show you a human being.

The conflation goes deeper than the software. The government’s logic runs: abuse images contain nudity, so blocking nudity prevents abuse. But the harm in child sexual abuse material is the abuse, not the presence of skin in a photograph. Build the intervention around nudity instead of exploitation and you quietly move the wrongness from the act to the body. You teach a generation, at the level of the device in their hand, that the unclothed human form is the thing to be detected and switched off. For a movement that has spent a century arguing the opposite, that is not a side effect. That is the message.

A policy genuinely aimed at grooming and extortion would go after the predatory contact, the coercion, the distribution networks, the platform features the NCA itself says offenders exploit. Instead Britain has reached for the bluntest available instrument, made the naked body unrenderable by default, and called it child safety. The first thing is not the second thing. A century of naturist argument rests on the difference, and this week the government built that difference into the operating system. 🪐

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Nudie Cutie Comics

’s Nudie Cutie Comics takes a look at life in a completely absurd world and asks, “Why not be nude for all of this?”

Every 2nd and 4th Wednesdays exclusively on Strips!

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Zaftig’s Pink's Nudie Cutie Substack

A little Substack embracing absurdity and nudity, not necessarily in that order.

By Zaftig Pink

It’s that time again. On Saturday, July 11, Team Planet Nude is taking the plunge for Skinny Dip Day, and we want you with us.

This is our third year fielding a team, and you know the drill by now: dip wherever you are, however you like, and help us raise money for a cause that matters. Last year we went remote and our readers showed up in a big way, dipping from beaches, rivers, backyard pools, and a few places we probably shouldn’t ask about. We finished second overall, just $243 behind Gunnison Beach, and raised $3,254 for the Fistula Foundation. That’s enough to fund more than five life-changing surgeries.

This year, we’re going for the top spot. Donate now!

And we’re doing it in style. The wonderful Zaftig Pink, who created our team art the last two years, has outdone himself with an original piece for 2026 that you’ll be seeing on this year’s merch and all over our coverage this season. Take it in:

Why we dip

Skinny Dip Day is a fundraiser for the Fistula Foundation, which provides free surgeries to women suffering from obstetric fistula, a childbirth injury that causes chronic incontinence and deep social isolation. It’s a devastating condition, and it’s curable. Just $619 covers one full surgery and gives a woman back her health, her dignity, and her place in her community. As SkinnyDipDay.org founder Thomas Francine likes to point out, it’s a cause with a fitting overlap: it cures women of some of the most severe body shame in the world. That’s not a bad thing for a community built on body freedom to get behind.

How you can help

Here’s how you can help Team Planet Nude make it count this year.

Join Team Planet Nude

Donate. This is the most direct way to support the mission, and you don’t need to dip or send a photo to do it. A donation on our team fundraiser page puts you on the team, full stop. Every dollar goes to the Fistula Foundation. And as a thank-you, anyone who gives $100 or more gets a free one-year paid membership to Planet Nude. Just email me from the address you subscribe with to redeem.

Take a dip. On or around July 11, get naked and get in some water. A lake, the ocean, a river, a kiddie pool in the backyard, it all counts. Snap a photo or write up a quick reflection and send it to evan@planetnude.co, and we’ll feature it in our big post-event wrap-up.

Grab some merch. This year’s collection features a brand-new original design by the wonderful Zaftig Pink, on tanks, tees, stickers, mugs, and water bottles. And for the collectors out there, the original designs from 2024 and 2025 are still available too, so you can complete the set. 100% of the proceeds go to the Fistula Foundation. Plus, for every photo we receive of someone wearing this year’s merch while taking their dip, I’ll personally donate an extra $25 to our fundraiser.

Shop the collection

Let’s make it our best year yet

Over the next month you’ll hear from me a few more times about this, and I appreciate you bearing with the noise. It’s a short season and a worthy cause, and our community has proven what a small, joyful group can do when it decides to show up. Three years in, this is becoming a tradition I’m proud of. Let’s make it our best one yet. 🪐

Donate now

One last thing: Start a team!

If you’ve got a club, a beach crew, or a handful of friends who’d be into this, it’s not too late to start your own team and raise funds right alongside ours. The more teams in the water, the more women get cured, and that’s the whole point. Head to SkinnyDipDay.org to set one up and be a part of this.

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Diary of the Astro-Nudes

Inspired by 1960s nudist camp films like “Diary of a Nudist,” and sci-fi shows such as “My Favourite Martian,” Diary of the Astro-Nudes is the story of Ar and Arreya, two inter-dimensional explorers who come from a parallel Earth where clothes don’t exist. They crash-land into an Earth very much like ours circa 1950s, and, living there with a couple named Brad and Janet while they try to fix their ship, they examine our attitudes towards nudity and the human body.

New Astro-Nudes’ come out on the first Sunday of every month!

Check out past Diary of the Astro-Nudes:

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This week on Planet Nude

June begins with Pride Month, and several of this week’s stories arrived from places where queer history, public nudity, and community identity have become difficult to separate. Those connections were often built gradually, through years of use rather than formal recognition, which makes them easy to overlook until something threatens them.

In Seattle, the Denny Blaine trial entered a crucial phase as supporters continue defending a beach that has long served as both a nude recreation site and an important queer gathering place. Across the continent, advocates at Toronto’s Hanlan’s Point are entering Pride Month with a different concern. Severe erosion has swallowed large sections of one of North America’s most historically significant queer and clothing-optional beaches. The circumstances are different, but both stories point toward the same reality: communities are often only as secure as the spaces they can claim and maintain.

Elsewhere, the picture is more mixed. In Brazil’s Chapada dos Veadeiros, a new naturist pool and waterfall area is preparing to open inside an established ecotourism destination, creating fresh room for clothing-optional recreation.

At the same time, Full Tan Sun Club in upstate New York announced it will sit out the entire 2026 season for renovations. One story is about expansion, the other about preservation, but both reflect a reality familiar to naturists almost everywhere: spaces come and go, and maintaining them often requires far more work than creating them.

Curtis Atkins’ history of Arkansas nudism looks back at clubs and communities that once seemed permanent before gradually fading from the map. It's a useful reminder that nudist spaces rarely disappear all at once. More often they are lost through attrition, changing habits, and simple neglect. Preserving a community usually begins with showing up.

Check out these stories and more from this week on Planet Nude.

This week in Culture

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This week on Strips

Strips One-Shots

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News of the Nude

Here are a few stories we’re tracking off Planet Nude this week.

Wim Wenders pulls 1975 film over nude scene with then-13-year-old Nastassja Kinski

The acclaimed director has withdrawn The Wrong Move from distribution while discussions continue over a nude scene involving actor Nastassja Kinski when she was thirteen. The decision raises difficult questions about how archives, filmmakers, and audiences should approach historical works whose production circumstances are viewed very differently today.

Mississippi’s Ship Island named one of America’s best nude beaches

Ship Island’s unofficial clothing-optional section has long occupied an unusual place in American nudism: widely known, frequently visited, but rarely discussed by local institutions. The article treats the beach as a tourism asset rather than a controversy, offering a useful reminder that public attitudes toward nude recreation can look very different depending on where the story is told.

“Tant que les gens n’ont pas des comportements pervers…” : à Bordeaux, avec la canicule, les maillots de bain sont de sortie au Jardin public

A heatwave in Bordeaux has produced a familiar public debate as residents increasingly sunbathe in swimwear throughout city parks. The story is ostensibly about summer weather, but the conversation quickly turns toward decency, public space, and where societies draw the line between comfort and acceptability. Those arguments tend to surface whenever bodies become more visible.

Discord Dispatch

May was a busy month in the Planet Nude Discord. Our recent community events drew strong participation and sparked the kind of thoughtful, wide-ranging conversations that make the community what it is. Membership has now grown to more than 450 people, with new members continuing to arrive each week.

We're already looking ahead to June. A new slate of events is in the works, with details to be announced soon.

Join us at discord.gg/8gt7D6ssMd — or click here to learn more.

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1 Naturist Life

Why naturism doesn't have a Gen Z problem, it has a marketing problem

There’s a photograph that lives rent-free in my head. It’s from a naturist resort brochure, probably printed sometime around 2009 and it features a smiling white heterosexual couple, somewhere in their comfortable fifties, playing a leisurely game of shuffleboard in the nude. The sky is a perfect Florida blue. Their postures are relaxed. They look like …

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13 days ago · 17 likes · 5 comments · Dustin Cox

Dustin’s article argues that naturism's struggle to attract Gen Z is an outdated marketing problem, not a lack of shared values. While the lifestyle is currently branded toward older, straight, white couples, its core principles actually align perfectly with Gen Z's modern push for body neutrality and the rejection of toxic beauty standards.

1 Naturist Life

1 Naturist Life is a blog and community celebrating the freedom, body positivity, and culture of naturism, offering personal stories, travel tips, and insights into living naturally.

By Dustin Cox

The Orbit is Planet Nude’s weekly digest. Published every Saturday. 🪐

Full Tan Sun Club, the family nudist campground near Sprakers, New York, will not open to the public this year. A recording on the club’s phone line tells callers that Full Tan is closed for the 2026 season for property improvements and expects to reopen in spring 2027, with updates to follow on its website and Facebook page.

The closure follows a stretch that had left the club’s status unclear. Full Tan’s website, fulltansunclub.com, currently displays only a placeholder image thanking visitors for their patience while the site is updated, with no schedule, rates, or contact details. In a thread on the subreddit r/UpstateNYNudists, users had been speculating for weeks about a possible closure or sale, with one noting that the club had gone members-only and encouraging others to call the owner directly. A listing on Yelp, meanwhile, has flagged the business as permanently closed—a designation the club’s own recording contradicts, since it points to a temporary pause rather than a permanent end.

Founded in 1968, Full Tan sits on 80 acres in the Mohawk Valley, west of the Capital District, and has long been one of the region’s few coed naturist clubs. It changed hands in 2019, when its current owner took over from the couples who had run it for decades, and it welcomed members of nearby Juniper Woods after that club dropped its clothing-optional status ahead of the 2021 season.

A season devoted to improvements may address concerns that have surfaced in recent visitor reviews, several of which described the grounds and facilities as dated or in need of upkeep. If the work freshens the pool, cabins, and common areas, the pause could leave Full Tan on stronger footing when it reopens—a welcome outcome in a region that has steadily lost naturist space. Split Rock closed in 2020, Abbott’s Glenn in 2021, leaving naturists in the Capital District with fewer nearby options each season.

For now, the club’s recorded message is the only public statement on its plans, and Planet Nude will share further details as they become available. 🪐

The trial over the future of Denny Blaine Park completed its first week in King County Superior Court, and by most accounts it is moving faster than expected. Friends of Denny Blaine tells Planet Nude the proceedings are running four to five days ahead of schedule—meaning the judge could reach a decision well before the late June timeline originally projected.

The first week belonged to the plaintiff. Denny Blaine Park for All called its witnesses, presented photo and video evidence, and made the case that the City’s abatement plan has failed to curb lewd behavior at the park. Spokesperson Lee Keller set the tone in opening arguments: “This is not about nudity per se. It’s about what happens in that park that’s illegal. There is daily masturbation. There’s people having sex.”

The most dramatic moment came on Day Two, when Judge Chung reviewed videos recorded from Stuart Sloan’s property showing sex acts in the park. Sloan’s house manager Carrie Christensen testified that the city’s response has done little to curb indecent exposure, saying she knows of only three arrests out of what she described as hundreds of instances of sexual conduct. Christensen also said she is not opposed to public nudity, which is legal in Seattle, but that at Denny Blaine nudity “invites a darker element.”

FoDB pushed back. Nicole Baich, an FoDB member whose own image appeared as an evidentiary exhibit in court—she was photographed standing naked at a gap in the park’s new fencing, which she described as an act of protest against the city’s changes—told KUOW that what the court was seeing was atypical. “It’s unfair that an entire historic community and culture is collectively being punished for some bad apples,” she said. She also noted that publicity from the lawsuit has drawn more visitors to what was once a little-known space, and that “no other park is surveilled like Denny Blaine.”

A notable concession emerged from the plaintiff’s own witnesses. Meghan Harman, testifying on behalf of Denny Blaine Park for All, agreed with FoDB on the core principles at stake: that the park should stay open, that nudity is a protected right and should be allowed, and that lewd behavior should be separately enforced and prosecuted.

Perkins Coie attorney Cassandra Carley, arguing on behalf of FoDB, framed the stakes plainly in opening arguments: “This community includes transgender and nonbinary and asexual individuals for whom Denny Blaine Park is one of the safest places that they have. These are neighbors, co-workers, friends, family, citizens of Seattle who deserve respect.”

The City presented its case beginning Thursday. With one remaining plaintiff witness still abroad, the plaintiff is expected to resume briefly Monday before the City wraps up. Friends of Denny Blaine is projected to call its first witness as early as Wednesday June 11.

That’s when the trial shifts in character. FoDB’s witnesses include Washington State Architectural Historian Michael Houser, who will testify about the park’s placement on the Heritage Register; Dr. Kevin Delucio, whose expert testimony will address the documented psychological benefits of body-positive spaces for transgender and non-binary people; and Dr. Neil Malamuth, a UCLA psychologist whose testimony will address decades of naturism research and the absence of any causal link between public nudity and sexual misconduct. The week two witnesses are the heart of FoDB’s affirmative case—and the testimony most likely to matter to Planet Nude readers.

Planet Nude will have continuing coverage. 🪐

Editor’s note: The Stranger published a detailed week-one recap on June 5 including testimony from Stuart Sloan and his wife Molly Nordstrom. Recommended reading: Property Owners Around Denny Blaine Took the Stand This Week.

Read more coverage on Denny Blaine

By Jerry King

Jerry King is an award-winning cartoonist whose gag panels have appeared in Playboy, Disney, Better Homes & Gardens, and countless greeting cards, books, and magazines worldwide. Winner of the National Cartoonists Society’s Magazine Gag Cartoon Award, he lives in Ohio with his family and still finds time to lose at golf—clothed, usually.

Strips One-Shots

Strips One-Shots is Planet Nude Strips’ banner for stand-alone comics. It’s where we publish single pieces that don’t belong to an ongoing series, giving artists the freedom to drop in a one-off gag or idea without needing a regular commitment.

Readers can expect an assortment of different artists to rotate through under this banner every 1st and 3rd Friday of the month (and sometimes intermittently). 🪐

Read more Strips One-Shots:

See all 'One Shots'

That’s it for now.

Editor’s note: If you’re an artist and want to submit a one-shot comic strip or panel gag, feel free to message me—we’re always looking for fresh voices to feature.

A couple of years ago I moved from Southern California to back to Las Vegas, the city of my youth. With the move, I went from a fairly robust naturist scene—clubs, beaches, community—to a city with no formal outlet for naturism. No clubs, no beaches. Just desert.

I knew about the Vegas Bares, a nonlanded group I’d heard of vaguely through word of mouth and their website. They seemed mostly dormant after Covid, their events and parties having evaporated along with everyone else’s, but I signed up as a member anyway—to support them, to see if I could make a connection. It did form one connection, by text, with a phone number entered into my contacts simply as “John.”

From time to time I have heard from John—usually in the friendlier weather months which are few and fleeting in Las Vegas. The texts usually serve as short-notice notifications of planned hikes or paddleboarding along the lower Colorado river or Lake Mead. Often, I was interested in joining, intellectually at least. My primary naturist recreation since moving here has largely been solo nude hiking in the deserts around me—but I have generally kept those hikes on the milder side because I am usually alone and don’t want to get stuck anywhere. The desert is deadly; you are taught that when you grow up here, as I did.

So for many of John’s invitations, I either couldn’t make it work or shied away from committing to something where I’d be out-leagued or feel out of place. I’d been mourning the naturist community I left in Southern California for two years, and my practice here had become a solitary thing—protected from falling out of practice entirely, but longing for some community, and some culture.

And then a text from John came with an invitation that I couldn’t reasonably turn down. A “full moon” hike to the Arizona Hot Springs. Saturday night. The trailhead, by car, is not twenty minutes from my house. I really had no excuses.

Well, not none. The desert is brutal, and this is a serious trail for a beginning-to-moderate hiker like I am. It closes from May to September because of extreme heat. Every year people require emergency rescue out there, and it’s not unheard of for people to perish, a fact hikers are reminded of by a memorial at the trailhead for a woman who recently died from exposure. There was also a story in the news last year about a field trip of kids that all had to be rescued from the trail because they hadn’t brought enough water and couldn’t make it back. It’s recommended each person carries at least three liters down to the Springs. These kids had brought a 12 oz bottle each.

I also, being honest with myself, had no idea what to expect from this group. What if it’s just one other guy and we’re halfway down into the canyon before I lose cell signal and he starts talking about his collection of animal teeth? Would I turn back? The nerves started to set in and, like I had many times before, I considered backing out.

I reminded myself that I'd been texting with John for a couple of years—which would be an extraordinary commitment if he was just a creep who wanted to talk about animal teeth. I knew they organized hikes on this trail a few times before, so presumably they were somewhat legitimate, or at least knew it better than I did. The internet told me we were in for a bright full moon, lows around 70, low wind—favorable conditions, notwithstanding the inclines and rock scrambling I'd read about. I decided to face my nerves and go.

I arrive at the trailhead right at 4:30pm. Two men are gearing up by their cars. Greg is a small, extremely tan guy with salt-and-pepper hair and the voice and Appalachian accent of Billy Bob Thornton. He was just out on this trail yesterday, he tells me—it was hotter then, so that’s good for us. Keith has a serious hiking pack, walking sticks, boots he’s still lacing up. I learn he does this hike weekly, sometimes daily, and takes great care to help maintain the trail and springs during the open season. I look down at my string backpack and low-top trail shoes and wonder briefly if I’m in over my head.

Soon John and Mark pull up in a white Tesla. Mark is shorter, a bit barrel-shaped and bald on top with large dark sunglasses—he looks enough like Arizona Senator Mark Kelly that when I hear his first name, I do a double take, but he takes off his sunglasses and I see he has very different eyes. John is thin, athletic, younger than I pictured, maybe early 50s, if I had to guess. Within a few minutes it’s clear that all four of them are regulars on this trail, and that I’ve accidentally assembled the best possible guides for an after-dark excursion through the killer desert.

The sun is still high as we head down the 2.5-mile trail. We don’t get far past the trailhead before we stop and disrobe. Keith suggests we carry wraps just in case, but says if we encounter someone, don’t rush to cover up—just act normal and friendly. The whole way in, the guys track who they see hiking out against how many cars they counted in the lot at the trailhead, apparently noting how many people are still somewhere down the trail. I realize later this isn’t curiosity—it’s an informal safety system. They’re keeping an eye out.

It’s over a mile before we have our first encounter. This trail is popular with day-hikers who come down on a Saturday to hang in the hot springs, jump in the Colorado, and hike back out in the afternoon. The whole way in, the guys are amazed we haven’t seen more people.

The first group we come across includes some young adults and an older woman who looks like the afternoon got longer than she planned. The young adults look a little weirded out to find five naked men in the desert, but the older woman doesn’t bat an eyelash. “Do you know if it’s this hot all the way up?” “It is,” Keith says, “but make sure you go straight at the fork—don’t go left or you’re in for a much more intense climb out. Do you have enough water?” They say they do, thank us and head up.

A few minutes later we pass a couple young guys hiking out who look a little faded—not an unexpected sight on this hike out to the lakeside. A lot of people come to party. Mark asks them if they have enough water. “Yeah we’re good,” they reply. “Thanks, man.” I don’t know if they even noticed we were naked.

As we walk, John fills me in on the Vegas Bares. They’ve been around in various forms for more than twenty years, throwing parties and organizing events under different leaders at different times. Their most recent era has seen a lot of change. Covid took their event spaces and their membership bled out slowly after that. What was left constricted, and the core group found their place and focus around the areas’ hot springs. Not long ago, they lost their charter with the American Association for Nude Recreation because they couldn’t meet the minimum membership requirement of twenty.

The trail descends into a canyon, and I can tell by the mountains ahead that we’re nearing the Colorado—but that could still mean more than a mile from our destination. Some light cloud cover is coming in. The sun is still pretty high but it’s cooling off.

As we wind through the canyon I start seeing messages chalked on the stone walls and on large rocks:

NO GLASS.

FAMILY-FRIENDLY NUDITY IS A TRADITION AT ARIZONA HOT SPRINGS.

YOU MAY ENCOUNTER NUDITY BEYOND THIS POINT.

I soon find out these were written by Keith.

As we hike, he tells me about a confrontation at the springs earlier that week. A female river guide had brought clients up to the pools and insisted everyone should cover up around them. One of the nude moms camping there pushed back immediately. “These springs have always been clothing optional,” Keith recalls her saying. “If your clients want everybody dressed, that’s your problem.”

What really stayed with him, though, was one of the kids asking: “Don’t they like my birthday suit?” I learn Keith’s a dad and we bond over that.

Before long we hit a corner where everyone stops to pee. “After this curve the water all feeds into the pools,” someone says, “so this is your last chance without hiking back up or down a little further.” We shake it out and move on, and within a couple of minutes we’re at the mouth of the first pool. Before us is a spring in the canyon wall providing a constant run of fresh water. Keith points out that you can refill your bottles from this if you need to, though the water runs at about 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

John gives me the rundown. There are three main pools formed from sandbags and the natural canyon walls. The top pool, fed directly from the source, runs around 120 degrees—an uncomfortable temperature to even stand still in for long let alone soak in. You trudge through fast and climb out the other side. Pivot around a canyon corner and you reach the second pool, which usually sits around 105. You can sit in this one for a few minutes but it’s not advised that you push it for long. There’s a story about a guy just last week who wouldn’t get out despite warnings and sure enough, he passed out for ninety minutes before finally coming to, narrowly avoiding an emergency extraction.

The third pool—the Cinderella pool, they call it—runs at a perfect 99 degrees and spills over a 20-foot warm waterfall into the canyon below. The waterfall is straddled by a metal stairway you can take to hike down to the Colorado River, just a few miles downstream from the Hoover Dam.

Some people are in the pools in bathing suits when we arrive. We’re the only nude group. Nobody seems particularly bothered, but one group packs it in quickly and heads down the stairway back to their camp on the cove. We settle into the Cinderella pool, feeling a little like we might have chased them off, but not feeling too too bad about it. I find a wedge of the pool where I can stretch out a little and find I can recline perfectly on a long flat rock so that I’m nicely submerged and also comfortably above full submersion.

The ancient water is just over body temperature and holds me comfortably supine. I look up at the canyon walls above me, stretching maybe eighty or ninety feet before they open to a yellowing sky—the same view people have soaked under here for generations. It’s quiet, and I can hear bats hunting in the evening light. I’m starting to see the appeal of this place.

After an hour or so a few of us decide to take the metal stairway down from the Cinderella pool and follow the canyon to the river. The Colorado here runs cold and clear through Black Canyon, moving semi-naturally—one of the few stretches in this whole system that still does. The dam is a few miles upstream. On the far bank the cliffs rise sheer and dark, volcanic. The canyon walls absorb heat all day and hold it into the evening.

This is land that was once inhabited by Southern Paiute and Hualapai, who lived along this river and throughout this desert for centuries before anyone built anything here. The springs themselves are older still: water working its way down through fault lines in the earth, picking up geothermal heat for thousands of years before finding its way back to the surface in this slot canyon at a reliable 120F. The infrastructure around it—the sandbags, the trail, the chalk on the walls—is seasonal. The spring is not.

There are kayakers pulled up on a gravel bar downstream, a couple of campers with a game of cards going. They wave. Later some of them will make their way up to the pools. It’s that kind of place. It has always drawn people in.

We get back up to the pools and settle in as the sun starts to drop. The conversation loosens the way it does when people are warm and unhurried.

I start to get to know these guys a little. Greg, it turns out, is only here because his wife is out of town. She’s joined him on nude beaches over the years—they’ve been married thirty-five years—but she draws the line at the hot springs, for reasons that seem to genuinely baffle everyone in the pool. Keith has four adult kids and his dad energy extends naturally to these springs. Mark has been a naturist since he was eighteen and makes no secret of the fact that he considers this the pinnacle of the practice. John is mild-mannered and observant, with a boylike humor that surfaces at surprising times.

I also learn about others. There’s a story about a regular named Maintenance Mike, who spent years keeping the pools until the park service banned him—for reasons nobody can quite articulate to my satisfaction, though I come to understand it as the natural politics of any shared space, even an ancient and public one out in the middle of the desert. Maintenance Mike’s absence is still felt, apparently. The pools have more gravel in them than they used to, I’m told.

As the sun drops, a guy named Dan climbs up from the river side. He’s introduced to me as a serious hot springer—someone who has camped at springs all over the world—and his arrival shifts the conversation. They trade destinations the way other people trade restaurants: Deep Creek up in the San Bernardinos, Gold Strike just up the road, a spring in Niger, another in New Zealand, Wyoming. Then the war stories start. Pseudomonas rashes, cercarial dermatitis from parasitic larvae, a cautionary tale involving Naegleria fowleri—the brain-eating amoeba whose name I recognize from the warning signs I’d seen posted in this very canyon on the way in. I sit and listen, a little on the outside of it, trying to absorb the geography and the lore of a subculture I didn’t know had this much territory.

I’m the new guy, so they are sure to remind me that hot water dehydrates you, an unsubtle hint that I should keep drinking. I step out of the pool and squint to find my hike bag in the dark. I take a long refreshing drink. I look back and what I see is group of people in a hot tub in the moonlight, talking and sharing stories, laughter occasionally reverberating up off the canyon walls. As an active nudist I’ve been in my fair share of hot tubs, and this is not an unfamiliar scene.

It’s in this moment, in the dark, that it hits me. I’ve spent two years hiking alone in this desert, wondering where the naturists were. They were here.

On the way back up we don headlamps and climb out of the canyon single file. After a mile or more we’re in open desert again. The moon is full and bright enough that we kill the lamps and walk the rest of the way in moonlight. It’s beautiful, but a significant incline up from the river banks, and my legs are burning more with each step.

Over a hour of walking and it’s nearly midnight by the time we reach the highway. I’m running on fumes, and I assume it will take me at least a day or three to bounce back from both the hike and the late night. But as we’re packing up to say our goodbyes, these guys—all of them at least a decade older than me—are already talking about coming back tomorrow.

As I mentioned, the Vegas Bares lost their AANR charter not long ago. The Bares, at this point, are not twenty people. But the ones who are left have been hiking into this canyon together for years, maintaining these pools, looking out for strangers on the trail. The parties and events that used to define the group never came back after Covid, and what remained evolved. But they didn’t stop being naturists. If anything they became more committed to it than anyone I’d encountered in years. Think about it, when was the last time you hiked over an hour through scorching, craggy rocks and desert to be nude with friends?

I keep thinking about the chalk-written nudity rules on the canyon walls. Every season, sometimes week by week, someone comes back down here and writes the rules again. They shift the sandbags and remove gravel from the pools. These pools change shape. There are no resort pools here, no golf cart tours, no welcome packets. There’s no permanent record, no charter, no minimum membership. You get here by hiking two and a half miles through terrain that can kill you. The people here have earned this. They show up, they maintain it, they look after each other and the strangers they pass on the way out. Keith picks up garbage and chalks notices on canyon walls. The group tracks cars so everyone gets home. This is their practice.

Summer nudist events around the country are just getting started, but here the season is just about to end. Every year, either on May 15th or earlier if the temperature forecast at a nearby weather station hits a threshold for five consecutive days, NPS closes the trail. Keith has been watching the forecast. It could be this week.

You hike every day you can, because you don’t know which day is the last one for a while.

Not a week after my trip, the trail closed until fall arrives. I’m sad I’ll have to wait that long, but after a couple years of feeling alone out in this desert, I’ve finally found what I have been looking for, and you bet I’ll be back. 🪐

A notice on the website of Emerald Lake Resort, the nudist club in Porter, Texas that has billed itself for years as “Houston’s only nude beach,” now asks guests to stay clothed in its common areas.

The statement, posted under the name “Resort Management” and addressed to “Members and Residents,” describes a revised dress code that took effect immediately and remains in place “until further notice.” Guests are asked to keep covered in common areas, with a light wrap, shawl, thin robe, or towel offering “basic coverage of private areas.” Management frames the change as part of a broader set of “improvements” to the facilities, references unspecified “fee adjustments,” and calls the measures temporary, language the notice itself softens further by calling them steps “for now” and part of “this transition.”

The notice does not explain what the improvements are, how long the transition is expected to last, or what prompted it. Reached by phone and email over several days, resort staff said they could not answer questions about the policy, and the resort’s owners did not make themselves available for an interview.

The property dates to the 1980s, but its life as a nudist resort began in 2001, on a spring-fed lake about a half hour north of downtown Houston. It is affiliated with the American Association for Nude Recreation and The Naturist Society, and nudity has been required, weather permitting, with newcomers allowed to stay wrapped only until they grow comfortable. The new notice inverts that arrangement, at least in the common areas, and at least for now.

For most of the past two decades, Emerald Lake has been a fixture of nudist life around Houston, a wooded community of members and RVers built around the lake. In recent years it has leaned more social and event-driven, drawing weekend crowds to a place that bills itself as the only one of its kind in the region. A move away from nude recreation, even a partial one, would mark a real change for a club that has defined itself by it.

What the notice leaves unanswered is whether this is a renovation-period accommodation or the beginning of a more permanent move away from the resort’s nudist identity. The careful, provisional language cuts both ways. A club making temporary changes during construction would write something like this. So would a club managing a longer transition it is not yet ready to announce.

There is reason to watch closely. Development has been pressing in on Emerald Lake for years. As far back as 2019, residents told ABC13 Houston they worried about new construction near the wooded property, as the Grand Parkway extension advanced and an adjacent lot was cleared. Across the country, established clubs from California to Georgia’s Serendipity Park have faced similar pressure from rising land values and encroaching neighbors.

For now, the only confirmed change is the one posted on the resort’s own homepage: at a club that has spent more than two decades asking guests to take everything off, management is asking them to keep something on.

Planet Nude will update this story as more becomes clear. 🪐

Have you been to Emerald Lake, or do you know what’s happening out there? I’d like to hear from you. Send me a note at evan@planetnude.co.

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