A massive wildfire sweeping through the maritime pine forests of the Gironde department forced the complete emergency evacuation of La Jenny, one of France’s best-known naturist residential villages, during the night of July 22–23, 2026. Thousands of residents and guests were moved out under darkness and ordered not to return.

The blaze ignited in Saumos and drove southward on sea winds toward the Arcachon coast, burning more than 3,400 hectares (about 8,400 acres, roughly ten times the size of Central Park) within its first 24 hours. By July 24 it had consumed an estimated 12,500 hectares and was still spreading, prompting French President Emmanuel Macron to mobilize 1,000 military personnel alongside some 700 firefighters and aerial units.

La Jenny, formally the Domaine Résidentiel Naturiste de la Jenny on Route de la Jenny in Le Porge, was among the first properties named in the evacuation order, issued by the prefect of Nouvelle-Aquitaine. At least eight camping areas and holiday centers in the Lège-Le Porge-Cap-Ferret corridor were cleared simultaneously. Local authorities estimated at least 12,000 people were displaced in the initial overnight operation, with more than 44,000 evacuated in total as the fire spread to engulf the Cap-Ferret peninsula itself. Roughly 2,000 of those evacuees escaped by boat when road access was cut. Emergency shelters were set up in Hourtin, Lacanau, and nearby towns, though reports noted that camp beds were in short supply for the volume of naturists arriving from Le Porge.

As of July 25, the municipality of Le Porge is maintaining a total access ban on the coastal and forest sectors, including La Jenny and adjacent camping areas. Authorities are asking the public to check official updates from the Le Porge town hall and La Jenny’s own communications before attempting to travel to the area.

What is La Jenny

The fire struck a place with deep roots in the French naturist world. La Jenny opened in July 1983 in a 120-hectare maritime pine forest 48 kilometers west of Bordeaux, conceived from the start as a freehold residential village, with buyers purchasing plots and wooden chalets on private parcels rather than booking seasonal pitches. By the mid-1980s it had 270 chalets; by the 1990s, some 400. Today it boasts over 750. In 1993 it inaugurated what remains, by its own account, the world’s only naturist golf course, a compact six-hole layout threaded through its dunes and pines. La Jenny is a founding member of the France 4 Naturisme consortium alongside Euronat, Arnaoutchot, and CHM Montalivet, the quartet of flagship Aquitaine naturist domains that have anchored French naturism on the Atlantic coast for four decades.

The forest was always the resort’s defining feature. Every advertisement for 40 years led with the same line: a pine forest of 120 hectares, an immense fine-sand naturist beach, no road to cross. The Landes de Gascogne pine forest surrounding Le Porge is the same landscape now burning.

Broader fire context

The Gironde has seen catastrophic wildfire seasons before, notably in 2022 when more than 20,000 hectares burned near Landiras and La Teste-de-Buch, but observers are calling the 2026 event historically severe. In addition to La Jenny and the surrounding camps, the upmarket Cap-Ferret peninsula was ordered fully evacuated on July 24, a measure affecting tens of thousands of summer visitors. Firefighters from the Paris region were deployed to reinforce local forces battling the fire across dense Landes forest in ongoing extreme dry conditions.

There is no current public assessment of damage to La Jenny itself. The official posture from both the municipality and the resort is clear: do not travel to Le Porge. Anyone with property or a booking at La Jenny should follow the resort’s official communications for updates on when and whether return will be permitted. 🪐

The fight is over, for now.

On July 24, the same day Canada’s federal consultation on Billy Bishop Airport closed, Transport Minister Steven MacKinnon announced the federal government would not support Ontario’s expansion plan. The consultation drew more than 87,000 responses, with public opinion reported as solidly opposed.

MacKinnon was explicit about what the government was protecting. “We will not pursue any plans that infringe on treasured public spaces like Little Norway Park or Hanlan’s Point Beach,” he said.

Hanlan’s Point Beach is named in a federal policy statement. The beach is the world’s oldest legally designated nude beach and the only officially designated clothing-optional beach in eastern Canada. That kind of recognition in a federal policy document is new.

Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow welcomed the decision and immediately called on the province to return the city’s land, seized earlier this year under Bill 110. Ontario Transportation Minister Prabmeet Sarkaria said the province intends to keep pushing for expansion regardless.

So the threat isn’t permanently dead. Ford hasn’t conceded, and Bill 110 remains on the books. But the federal government has drawn a line, and Hanlan’s Point is on the right side of it.

Planet Nude covered the expansion threat two weeks ago, when the consultation was still open. The 87,000 responses suggest a lot of people were paying attention. 🪐

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The Maui Planning Commission approved the state’s Special Management Area permit for the Mākena State Park Improvements project on July 14, voting 6-1. The June 23 hearing ran more than seven hours, drew roughly 50 testifiers, and ended without a vote. Commissioners continued it three weeks and sent the state away with eight questions.

The state came back having given ground. Acting State Parks Administrator Alan Carpenter opened the July meeting by dropping the new asphalt. “The biggest compromise we’re going to offer is we see no need to add any asphalt at all to this park,” he said. Only the ADA stalls will be paved. Exterior lighting was cut from six fixtures to one, on a timer that shuts off at 8 p.m., after testimony about hawksbill turtles nesting at Oneloa. What remains is two comfort stations, two outdoor showers, and water service to a park that has never had any.

None of the elements that alarmed Little Beach regulars were in the permit. No perimeter fence, no single point of entry, no reservation system, no hotel shuttles. In June, Carpenter named the beach directly in his opening remarks to the commission. “We have no intention of impeding access through fences in any way,” he said. “The gate and fence that was installed during COVID to deal with overuse of Puʻu Olaʻi, also known as Little Beach, that’s been removed, and it’s not part of any plan to ever put it back.”

That is the clearest statement anyone at State Parks has made on the record about the gate that closed Little Beach in 2021. It carries no legal force, but it is in the hearing record.

Bill Watts of Friends of Little Beach told commissioners the state was describing only part of the project. “The DLNR has told you and the media this project is just about restrooms and parking improvements,” he said. “That is one-eighth of the truth.” He read from what he identified as DLNR’s own Mākena plan, describing a single point of entry, a booth to control access, and hotel shuttles, all contingent on parking or entry fees. He cited 2023 written testimony he attributed to the DLNR chair describing an exterior fence, a park-wide limit of 246 cars, and a reservation system. Planet Nude has not independently reviewed those documents.

The condition the commission attached matters more than the project it approved. Commissioners required a quantitative carrying capacity study covering environmental, ecological, cultural, social, and physical components, due by July 31, 2029. State Parks proposed the study itself as a condition on July 14, a notable reversal: in 2023, testifying against a bill that would have required exactly such a study at Mākena, then-DLNR chair Dawn Chang wrote that the department "respectfully does not believe the study is necessary." Vice Chair Andrea Kealoha, who has published one of the few quantitative carrying capacity studies done in Hawaiʻi, had pressed the point at the June hearing.

The study's importance is less about the document than what tends to follow it. Hawaiʻi's managed-access parks, Hāʻena and Waiʻānapanapa among them, now run on reservations, timed entry, and paid shuttles. By DLNR's own account, none of those three parks was preceded by a carrying capacity study; the reservation systems came without them. What a study adds is a formal basis for setting a capacity number, and a capacity number is the pivot on which managed entry turns.

Better facilities draw more people. More people produce a crowding finding. A crowding finding justifies managed entry. Each step is defensible on its own terms, and none of them requires anyone to take a position on nudity.

Little Beach has never been formally designated clothing-optional, and nudity remains illegal throughout Hawaiʻi’s state parks. Local coverage describes Puʻu Ōlaʻi as a longtime hotspot for nude sunbathers. What has protected it for five decades is friction: a rocky scramble, informal parking, and enough spontaneity that no one has had to decide anything. Managed entry removes that friction.

Nudity came up once in the proceeding, on June 23. A representative of the American Association for Nude Recreation, whose western region voted in late May to fund opposition to access restrictions at Little Beach, testified that the beach “has been known as a beach for nude recreation for over 30 years” and that DLNR “has accepted its operation for a long time and has done no harm to the community.” That changed in 2020, he said, when the department increased its footprint and began “without any warning enforcing an administrative rule around no nudity.” A larger DLNR presence would mean more citations and people “not feeling very welcome at the beach practicing things they’ve been doing for over 30 years.” AANR “is not opposed to doing great things for the park,” he added.

Two others mentioned it. Tiare Lawrence, supporting the project, said keeping Mākena “wild” should not mean “allowing invasive species to take over, human waste and toilet paper to accumulate in the bushes, or illegal activities like nudity to continue unchecked.” Albert Perez of Maui Tomorrow called nudity “irrelevant to this discussion.”

No commissioner asked a question about any of it. On July 14, across four and a half hours of staff presentations, deliberation, and the vote, the words “Little Beach” and “nudity” do not appear in the record.

Construction is expected to begin in roughly a year. The study lands in 2029. 🪐

Editor's note: This article was updated on July 24, 2026. An earlier version stated that Hawaiʻi's managed-access parks adopted reservation systems following carrying capacity studies. Written testimony from then-DLNR chair Dawn Chang shows State Parks has never performed such a study for the three parks that currently have advanced reservations; that passage has been corrected. The description of the July 14 study condition has also been revised to note that State Parks proposed it.

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The World Naked Bike Ride Buffalo, scheduled for August 1, has been canceled after organizers received threats of violence and death directed at riders and organizers.

“With the outpouring of overwhelming disapproval from concerned community members, and the threats of violence and death towards organizers and riders, it is unrealistic to ensure the safety of our wonderful supporters,” organizers wrote in a statement posted to Instagram on July 20.

The threats were specific. Enough people said they would seek riders out to throw projectiles, hit them with cars, and use other deadly weapons that calling off the ride was the safer course, the statement said.

The opposition came entirely from social media, an organizer told Planet Nude in an email. A few prominent Facebook accounts posted about the ride and went viral locally. Once the group began promoting the August event, it drew roughly 500,000 post engagements in 48 hours and more than a thousand comments, shares, and subposts, most of them negative, according to the organizer. Recurring themes included accusations of pedophilia, frustrations over race relations in Buffalo, and direct threats of violence.

In their Instagram statement, organizers said the ride’s message had been lost in the oversexualization of nudity and in false claims about participants, and drew a line between the nudity and the conduct the ride actually polices. “Nudity is not inherently sexual,” they wrote. “Nudity in the context of protesting is federally protected under freedom of speech.” The ride bars sexual behavior, harassment, and conduct that makes others uncomfortable, they said, and anyone who violates those rules is removed and banned.

Organizers also addressed claims tying the ride to predatory behavior, calling them false and harmful. “This event is not about children, and children do not participate in the ride,” they wrote. The organizer who wrote to Planet Nude returned to that point. “What is frustrating to me is that something so harmless as simply being scantily clad on a bike can be weaponized and used to vilify an entire group of people just trying to bring attention to an issue that affects everyone on the planet. To me, I think it takes away from actual victims of that heinous crime and cheapens the word to mean something less than it actually is.”

It’s the first time organizers have called off the Buffalo ride over safety concerns. They described the canceled event as the ride’s 11th year. The first ride was held in 2015, with Buffalo Rising billing the following summer’s as the second annual. Last year’s, on August 2, was the tenth.

The ride typically covers 10 to 13 miles through the city, with the route unannounced in advance. Participants arrive clothed at a check-in point, then are directed to a departure location where they hear the ride’s mission and safety rules before undressing. Nudity is optional. The 2025 event description had already signaled awareness of hostility: organizers refused to disclose the check-in location until days before the ride, saying they wanted to limit “crowding of the creepy variety.”

Organizers did not report any of the threats to Buffalo police, and said they would not. “We have never and will never collaborate with local police as that goes against the ethos of protesting,” the organizer wrote. They said the Buffalo Police Department has grown less tolerant of the ride in recent years, and that participants have had insults hurled at them, been threatened with violence, and been detained. “I do not trust them to keep us safe.”

In place of the ride, organizers said they will collect donations for local organizations serving what they called the most vulnerable members of the community. They said they have distributed more than $3,000 to East Side organizations over the past three years.

Rides in other cities have been called off this year for unrelated reasons. Cape Town’s ended after 18 years when the city demanded a fully clothed event, and Brighton postponed its 20th edition after two opposing political demonstrations were scheduled for the same day. Los Angeles moved its 2025 ride from June to September, citing safety concerns following ICE raids and protests downtown. The rides are organized independently city by city, sharing a name and a set of themes rather than a common organization.

Violence against riders is not unprecedented. Riders have been attacked during rides in Coventry, Colchester, and Chelmsford, in England. The man who punched a rider off his bicycle in Colchester last August, and who told the court he considered the cyclists perverts, received a suspended sentence in December.

Whether the ride returns is undecided. The organizing team has not determined whether to continue, the organizer said, and if it does, it will need to find a way to promote the event without social media. 🪐

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San Gregorio Ranch, the 238-acre San Mateo County property that has served as one of California’s oldest and best-known nude beaches since the 1960s, will open to the public on July 29 as an extension of San Gregorio State Beach, and clothing will be required.

State Parks confirmed this week that the Peninsula Open Space Trust, which purchased the property for $10 million in April, plans to donate it to California State Parks later this year. The ranch opens July 29 under a new agreement between POST, State Parks, and Friends of Santa Cruz State Parks, which will handle day-to-day operations. A State Parks spokesperson told Coastside News that “regulations for state beaches are intended to provide safe and inclusive recreation opportunities for all visitors and do not include clothing-optional recreation.” KQED confirmed that Friends of Santa Cruz State Parks executive director Bonny Hawley said the parks system will “educate the public about the rule change.”

That language is unequivocal. What San Gregorio has been for sixty years, it will no longer be. Rangers retain enforcement discretion, and what actually happens on the sand remains to be seen. But the structural condition that made the tradition possible (private land, tolerant owners, no state oversight) is gone.

To understand what that means, it helps to know what San Gregorio actually was, not just as a nude beach, but as a place in the history of American body freedom. The beach’s clothing-optional use dates to at least the mid-1960s, when San Francisco activist Jeff Poland began practicing nude sunbathing there as an act of civil disobedience, defying California’s indecent exposure laws. The beach gained wider notoriety when Darrell Tarver, a 28-year-old Air Force veteran and student at San Francisco State College, formed the Committee for Free Beaches and circularized campuses across San Francisco and Berkeley. According to a Time magazine account from the era, more than 500 nudists were making their way to San Gregorio each Sunday. Poland was later arrested at the beach. His case reached the California Supreme Court, which ruled in 1972 that nudity alone is not illegal unless accompanied by lewdness, a decision that quietly undergirded the legal tolerance naturists enjoyed there for the next half-century. The beach became one of the most consistently attended nude beaches in the state and developed particular significance for Bay Area LGBTQ+ residents, especially in the 1970s and ’80s, when other public spaces felt less welcoming. As Jesse Monteagudo wrote in Out South Florida, “San Gregorio Beach is America’s oldest nude beach… It is also the gayest, especially the northern end.”

What made San Gregorio work was its precarious arrangement: the beach itself was always public, but access ran through private land, and the landowners tolerated nude use. That arrangement held for decades, through multiple ownership transitions, through the decline of most of California’s naturist clubs, through the formalization of almost every other comparable space. It survived by flying under the radar, which is precisely the quality that state park status eliminates.

Planet Nude has covered this story since April 2025, when POST first announced the acquisition agreement. When we asked POST directly about clothing-optional use, Senior Manager of Media & Communications Marti Tedesco told us the organization is “committed to a future where public parking and access to this property and its beach remain available,” notably sidestepping nude use entirely. That careful language now looks like what it probably was: a preview of this outcome. “I’m not happy about it,” longtime naturist activist Bob Morton, from the American Association for Nude Recreation’s Government Affairs Team, told the Los Angeles Times. “The state park system has decided that all their parks are going to be clothed because God intended you to wear swimming trunks at the beach? It seems counterintuitive. You go there to be one with nature.”

The Press Democrat and others have framed this week’s news as a conservation win: more public access, more coastline protected from development, a milestone in Newsom’s park expansion goals. All of that is true. The price of that conservation, for naturists, is the end of a sixty-year tradition that helped define California’s role in the American body freedom movement.

A public planning process for the property’s long-term management is still ahead. State Parks is required to conduct community outreach before establishing formal policies, and those comment periods are where organized voices can have real impact. No formal advocacy group exists to represent nude beachgoers at San Gregorio. That gap has never cost more than it costs right now. 🪐

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In a ruling signed July 15, King County Superior Court Judge Samuel Chung declined to close Denny Blaine Park and declined to ban nudity there, rejecting the two things a coalition of waterfront neighbors had sued to win. Seattle’s only historically recognized clothing-optional beach stays open, and nude use remains lawful. Check out the full ruling here.

Chung did find that lewd sexual conduct at the park amounts to a public nuisance, and he granted the neighbors a permanent injunction ordering the city to do more to control it. But the remedy he ordered is management, not closure—and nowhere does it prohibit simple nudity. The plaintiffs asked the court to shutter the park or ban nudity outright. They got neither.

In a statement, Friends of Denny Blaine said the ruling delivered what it had fought for. “The park remains open to everyone. Nudity remains lawful and permitted on the lower beach, and toplessness remains permitted throughout the park, including the upper area,” the group said. “These have been our core goals from the day we intervened in this case.” It pledged to support the city in carrying out the court-ordered measures, pointing to its own community guidelines, volunteer stewardship, and outreach.

But the group also signaled it was not done. It said it disagreed with parts of Chung’s findings, arguing the ruling “gives substantial weight to conditions that predate the abatement measures now in place” and “does not fully reflect the significant improvements at the park over the past year.” Friends of Denny Blaine said it believes the evidence shows the park “is not currently a nuisance” and should ultimately be “restored to its full historical status as a fully clothing optional Park.” The group said it was reviewing the order and evaluating its next steps.

“Denny Blaine is open,” the statement closed. “We’ll see you at the beach.”

The city also claimed the ruling as a victory. Seattle City Attorney Erika Evans called the ruling “a great win” in an Instagram video. Her office had argued the park should stay open because conditions had “materially improved” under the abatement plan; in closing, city attorney Joseph Groshong told the court that calls to the park had dropped 39 percent in the ten months since the plan took effect. As of press time, Denny Blaine Park for All, the neighbors’ group that brought the suit, had not issued a statement on the ruling.

The ruling closes a chapter Planet Nude readers have followed since 2023, when the fight was about stopping a children’s playground on the park’s edge. It became a fight over documenting that the park’s queer and nude history was real enough to earn a place on the Washington Heritage Register, which it did in 2025. This year it became a trial.

In Denny Blaine Park for All v. City of Seattle, the plaintiffs argued the park had become a site of lewd conduct the city failed to control, and asked Chung to close it or prohibit nudity. Closing the park, Chung wrote, “is not an appropriate remedy at this time.” He drew a clear line between nudity and lewd conduct, and located the nuisance in the latter.

On the central question, Chung drew the distinction Friends of Denny Blaine and the city pressed across three weeks of trial: he located the nuisance in the lewd conduct, not in nudity itself, and ordered the city to police that conduct rather than banning lawful nude use. He did not hold that nudity is beyond the city’s reach—in a footnote, he noted that the claim that legal nudity “cannot be regulated” would require “much greater scrutiny”—but he declined to make a ban the remedy. He also rejected the plaintiffs’ “nuisance per se” theory, finding that a violation of the parks code of conduct or the Shoreline Management Act does not, by itself, make the park a nuisance. And he agreed with the city’s policing expert that closing the park would offer only short-term relief without lasting change—both sides’ experts, he noted, agreed that clearer boundaries and limits on hours and access would do more.

What the court ordered instead is further abatement: the city must develop a park-specific user plan and code of conduct, staff the park adequately to monitor and report conduct, maintain the grounds to discourage lewd behavior, establish buffers between the park and bordering homes, and post clearer signage. Chung framed the park as “a limited natural resource that must be shared by the residents of the neighborhood and the Park’s visitors.” It is a continuation of the path he set in July 2025 and affirmed that October, when he ordered abatement rather than closure—not a reversal.

Closings ran June 11. Susan Foster, a Perkins Coie partner, delivered FoDB’s closing across 45 minutes and 56 slides, addressing the plaintiffs’ claims point by point, walking through expert testimony that the abatement plan had reduced incidents, and returning to the park’s history as a longstanding LGBTQ+ space. Public parks, she argued, belong to everyone.

FoDB’s trial brief put the distinction in four words: “Nude is not lewd.”

Planet Nude will have continuing coverage. 🪐

Update, July 15, 11 p.m. PT: This story has been updated to include the City of Seattle’s response to the ruling, including City Attorney Erika Evans calling it “a great win,” and to note that the plaintiffs had not yet issued a statement.

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Participants at this year’s Skinny Dip Day gathering at Bates Beach spent the event in swimsuits.

The July 11 event, organized jointly by Friends of Bates Beach and the Southern California Naturist Association, was interrupted when Santa Barbara County sheriff’s deputies arrived at the beach’s north end and asked participants to dress. Deputies made contact with the group after someone on the beach raised the presence of nude beachgoers. No citations were issued.

As it happened, the deputies encountered a group that included the presidents of both major American naturist membership organizations. Linda Weber, president of the American Association for Nude Recreation, and Cynthia Holbach, president of the Naturist Society Foundation, were both at the beach that day, along with Rolf Holbach, who shares leadership roles across the organizing groups. Weber and the Holbachs spoke with the officers directly. “The Sheriffs were very professional,” Weber said. “It was a respectful dialog.”

The group photo from the event shows everyone in swimsuits.

The disruption was not a complete surprise to beachgoers. Enforcement at Bates has been escalating since at least late June.

On June 20, a member of the Friends of Bates Beach community reported on the group’s Meetup Page that deputies had come to the north end and verbally warned everyone present, telling them there had been “misinformation about the beach” and that anyone caught nude would face a $500 citation. By early July, members were asking one another in the comments whether deputies had resumed ticketing, and whether the Skinny Dip Day event would proceed at all. On the day itself, patrol cars were spotted in the parking lot before the event began.

That $500 figure does not reflect the current penalty. Under Santa Barbara County Code Sec. 24-15(c), a violation is an infraction punishable by a fine of fifty dollars for a first offense, one hundred dollars for a second offense within a year, and two hundred fifty dollars for each additional offense thereafter. A $500 fine and the possibility of jail time appear in an earlier version of the ordinance that has since been amended.

Bates Beach has operated for decades as an unofficial nude beach. Weber notes that FOBB and others previously worked with the County Board of Supervisors and other agencies to designate a portion of the beach, well down from the main stretch, as a place where nude use was understood to be tolerated. That understanding appears to be under pressure.

Weber attributes the renewed enforcement not to a change in county policy but to behavior by people outside the naturist community. “It appears it is a few bad actors who aren’t nudists who are causing the issue,” she said, describing recent conduct at the beach by exhibitionists unaffiliated with the organized groups.

Weber and Rolf Holbach are seeking meetings with the agencies involved. Their approach, she said, is to identify the individuals responsible for the complaints rather than treat the deputies as adversaries. “The Sheriffs understood, but they have a job to do,” Weber said. “The advocacy and fight never ends to normalize naturism.”

She frames the broader stakes plainly. “These are nude privileges and not rights,” Weber said, “and how easily we can lose them without AANR and other groups consistently working with local officials to foster good relationships.”

If you’re going

Anyone planning to visit Bates Beach should understand that nudity there is not currently protected, and deputies have said they will issue citations. Under the county ordinance, a violation is an infraction carrying a fifty dollar fine for a first offense, rising to one hundred dollars for a second within a year and two hundred fifty dollars for each one after that.

Planet Nude will follow this story as organizers meet with county agencies. 🪐

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Hanlan’s Point Beach in Toronto is Canada’s oldest surviving queer space, the site of the country’s first Pride gathering in 1971, and the only officially designated clothing-optional beach in eastern Canada. It has survived police raids, development schemes, and a decade of shoreline erosion. Now it faces a different kind of threat: an airport expansion plan backed by the Ontario provincial government, enabled by legislation that gives the province power to seize virtually all of the Toronto Islands, and driven in part by a Wall Street investment fund with a financial stake in the outcome.

The federal government is currently accepting public input on the future of Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport through an online consultation, with a direct survey link here. The consultation closes July 24, 2026—less than two weeks from now. Any Canadian citizen can submit.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford has been pushing since early 2026 to extend the runway at Billy Bishop, which sits just north of Hanlan’s Point Beach, to accommodate commercial jets and grow annual passengers from roughly 2 million to 10 million. The Toronto Port Authority, which operates the airport, has put the cost at $4–5 billion over 25 years. To make that happen, the province passed Bill 110, the Building Billy Bishop Airport Act, on May 28. The legislation removes the City of Toronto from the Tripartite Agreement governing the airport and allows the province to seize City-owned lands in the area. At the bottom of the nine-page bill, the province listed eight Property Identification Numbers corresponding to the parcels it could expropriate. Those parcels cover virtually the entire landmass of the Toronto Islands, including Hanlan’s Point, Centreville, Ward’s Island, the Island School, and the Gibraltar Point Centre for the Arts.

The province says it won’t take all of that land. The promise isn’t legally binding. Bill 110 explicitly exempts itself from Ontario’s Expropriations Act, which would otherwise limit the province to taking only what’s necessary and guarantee the City certain rights. Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow called the legislation a “pure power grab” and has promised legal challenges. Chris Glover, a New Democratic Party (NDP) Member of Provincial Parliament who represents the area at Queen’s Park, said in a press release, “The island beaches, Hanlan’s Point, Centreville and the Island School are now all at risk.”

The runway extension would push 900 metres of new land mass westward into Lake Ontario, directly toward Hanlan’s Point. A 2015 study commissioned for Air Canada by consulting firm Oliver Wyman concluded there isn’t enough space between the current terminal and runway to dock jets, meaning the new runway would have to be located further south, with hangars and infrastructure at the southern end of the airport lands. That configuration, the study found, could eliminate Hanlan’s Point’s ferry dock and much of the beach itself. The airport’s own environmental assessment, commissioned in 2017, withheld from the public, and only released in March 2026 following a freedom-of-information request, found that allowing jets would increase air pollution at levels raising the risk of heart disease, lung cancer, and respiratory illness for nearby residents, and would double the time required to flush sewage from the central waterfront. Norm Di Pasquale, chair of the anti-expansion group NoJetsTO, told Xtra Magazine: “There will be unbearable construction noise on our central waterfront for 25 years.”

Then there’s who’s driving it. The passenger terminal at Billy Bishop has been operated by Nieuport Aviation since 2015, and by 2019 was fully owned by institutional investors advised by J.P. Morgan Asset Management, the largest bank in the United States, via a fund registered in the Cayman Islands. Lobbying records show Nieuport has retained lobbyists to engage both the Ford government and the federal government. NDP leader Marit Stiles has called the expansion “all for Wall Street.”

In 1894, Toronto City Council passed a by-law designating a section of Hanlan’s Point for nude sunbathing and swimming “at all times”, a designation the International Naturist Federation (INF-FNI) has since confirmed predates any other known official nude beach by more than 30 years, making it the world's oldest legally designated nude beach. The city repealed that designation in 1930 during a wave of moral backlash, but nude use of the beach never really stopped. By the 1980s, Hanlan’s was listed in the World Guide to Nude Beaches and Recreation. Official clothing-optional status was restored in 1999 and made permanent in 2002. In 2023, following a successful community campaign, Toronto City Council expanded the clothing-optional zone to the full two-kilometer beach, installed cultural signage, and formally recognized Hanlan’s as a historic queer space. Canada Post issued a commemorative stamp in May 2025. All of that applies to a beach that, under the proposed expansion footprint, may not exist in its current form in the near future. Hanlan’s is the only officially designated clothing-optional beach in eastern Canada. There is no fallback.

Travis Myers, co-founder of Friends of Hanlan’s, told Xtra: “What makes Hanlan’s so special is that it’s a no-cost, barrier-free place for the queer community to gather as a whole. At a time when a lot of our spaces are disappearing, the places that are left are paid-access. Hanlan’s isn’t that. It’s a place where people without cottages can just go and exist. There’s very few places like that globally.” It took over 130 years of recognition, revocation, and restoration to get Hanlan’s to where it is today. The provincial government now wants the land.

The federal government, not the province, holds ultimate authority over whether this expansion proceeds. The Toronto Port Authority is a federal agency, and any runway changes require federal approval. That’s where the leverage is.

What you can do

Submit to the federal consultation before July 24. Transport Canada is accepting public input via the direct survey link here. Critics have called the survey questions skewed toward expansion. Submit anyway. A low response from opponents is worse than an imperfect instrument. More information about the public consultation can be found here.

Beyond the survey, direct contact with your MP carries more weight. If you’re in the Toronto area, MP Chi Nguyen (Spadina–Harbourfront), whose constituency includes Hanlan’s Point, is already on record in opposition. And if you’re in Toronto on July 26, No Jets T.O. is organizing a march and rally at nojets.to.

Planet Nude has covered Hanlan’s Point since 2023, when the beach successfully defeated a plan to build a permanent concert venue on its shores. That fight was won through documentation, coalition-building, and making noise. This one is bigger, and the window is shorter. 🪐

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It was a warm, sunny Saturday morning in Mexico City.

On May 30, 2026, outside the Auditorio Nacional, one of the city’s most recognizable cultural landmarks, participants gradually began arriving from different parts of the country. Some greeted old friends they only see once a year. Others were attending Día al Desnudo for the first time. Cameras, banners, conversations, and nervous smiles filled the steps as the group prepared for the official photograph.

After the photo, the crowd began a peaceful march toward Parque de la Amistad México-Azerbaiyán, where the day’s main public activities would take place. Along the way, passersby reacted with curiosity, surprise, and, in many cases, smiles. The atmosphere was calm and respectful, closer to a civic celebration than a provocation.

Although naturism has a long history in Mexico, including Zipolite, the country’s only officially recognized nude beach, and several established naturist communities, the organized movement known as Día al Desnudo is relatively recent.

It began in Guadalajara, the capital of the western Mexican state of Jalisco, in 2022 as a public initiative promoting body acceptance and the normalization of social nudity. The following year, the movement expanded to Mexico City. Since then, it has continued to develop in both cities through public gatherings and related naturist activities. By 2026, more than 1,000 participants took part across the broader Día al Desnudo program, making it the largest edition so far.

Throughout the program, Día al Desnudo unfolded across different settings, from urban public spaces to dedicated naturist venues such as Desnudo Café in Guadalajara, a nude café and restaurant promoted by its organizers as unique in Mexico. Yoga, wellness sessions, guided breathing exercises, sauna and ice baths, massage therapy, photography, social gatherings, public demonstrations, and other community activities formed part of a program that blended recreation, education, and body acceptance.

Rather than presenting nudity as an end in itself, the event illustrated how naturism in Mexico continues to evolve as a culture of health, inclusion, and community. In doing so, it showed that social nudity is increasingly finding a place not only on beaches or in private clubs, but also within everyday public and social life.

Perhaps most striking was the diversity of those attending. In many ways, the gathering reflected the breadth of Mexico’s contemporary naturist movement.

Experienced naturists mixed naturally with first-time participants. Young adults, older generations, couples, photographers, wellness practitioners, activists, and people simply curious about naturism shared the same spaces. Although many arrived through different communities, the atmosphere quickly became one of a single gathering rather than separate groups.

This collaborative character is perhaps what distinguishes Día al Desnudo most clearly.

Rather than belonging to a single club or organization, Día al Desnudo is the result of a collective effort. Communities such as NudistasMx, NudTopía, Chaknüul, PoliNudismo, Forza High Sports & Nude Wellness, Colores Nudistas, Grupo Alfa, and many others each contribute their own events, perspectives, and volunteers, creating a movement that feels genuinely national.

The event has also been shaped by dedicated organizers, activists, and public voices within Mexican naturism. Figures such as Héctor Martínez, Mon Picazo, Fabiola Silva, and Raúl Ruiz, together with many other organizers, community leaders, and volunteers, have helped give the movement continuity, visibility, and a stronger public presence. Their collective work reflects an important part of Día al Desnudo’s identity: presenting naturism not as spectacle, but as a practice rooted in body acceptance, education, respect, and community.

The march from the Auditorio Nacional to Parque de la Amistad México-Azerbaiyán brought together more than 1,000 participants carrying messages in support of body acceptance, personal freedom, and respect for the human body. Conducted peacefully and respectfully, it reflected one of the movement’s defining characteristics: presenting naturism in public not as provocation, but as an expression of confidence, equality, and mutual respect.

Throughout the week’s activities, it became evident that Día al Desnudo is about much more than being nude in public.

It creates opportunities for people to meet, exchange ideas, discover naturism for the first time, reconnect with friends, and participate in activities that encourage confidence, well-being, and community. For many attendees, the experience extends beyond a single week, strengthening relationships between communities that continue collaborating throughout the year.

As the final activities came to an end and participants gradually said their goodbyes, there was a quiet sense that Día al Desnudo represented something larger than any individual event. It reflected a movement that continues to grow while remaining grounded in respect, inclusion, cooperation, and body acceptance, offering a hopeful glimpse of the future of Mexican naturism.

For anyone seeking to understand the current state of naturism in Mexico, Día al Desnudo offers a unique window into a community that continues to grow, diversify, and define its own identity, one shaped by body acceptance, cooperation, and respect. 🪐

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Three hundred seventeen people gathered nude at Plaza de Bolívar on June 14, some of them staying through rain to finish the day’s activities. The event, organized through the Naturismo Nudismo Colombia and Al Natural and promoted as the first festival of its kind at the plaza, drew participants from other Colombian cities and abroad. Organizers plan a follow-up: the 11th National Naturism Gathering, set for August 6–9 in Anapoima.

Plaza de Bolívar houses Colombia’s Congress, the Palace of Justice, the Cathedral, and City Hall. In June 2016, photographer Spencer Tunick gathered more than 6,000 people nude in the same square for his first Bogotá installation, staged as a statement on peace as the government closed in on its accord with the FARC. The June festival was organized by the naturist community itself, without an outside artist attached, a decade later.

Colombia’s Constitutional Court ruled in 2023, in Sentencia C-069, that police can no longer treat nudity itself as “exhibicionismo.” The case tested Article 33 of the national police and coexistence code (Ley 1801 of 2016). The court struck the code’s standard, nudity that “generates discomfort in the community,” as unconstitutionally vague, and narrowed what remains punishable to exposing genitals in order to harass or commit sexual violence. Protest, cultural expression, and everyday nude living fall outside the sanction.

The distinction the court drew, between nudity and sexual conduct, is the one that recurs in nudity law across the United States and Europe, where it is usually decided against non-sexual nudity. Colombia’s high court decided the other way. Three years later, the naturist community held a 317-person event in the country’s most prominent public square, seemingly without incident.

Nudismo Colombia describes its work as non-sexual, built around art, education, philosophy, and literature. That framing matches the standard the court set. Whether police and the public treat the next gathering at Plaza de Bolívar the same way is untested. 🪐

Governor Katie Hobbs has vetoed Arizona House Bill 2133, the deepfake and revenge-porn measure that naturist advocates warned could burden lawful nude publishing, ending a months-long legislative fight that the American Association for Nude Recreation had worked to defeat.

Hobbs vetoed the bill, known as the Protect Act, on June 19, the same day she signed the state budget and rejected dozens of other measures sent to her at the end of the session. In her veto letter to House Speaker Steve Montenegro, she wrote that the bill “has a chilling effect on free speech and would violate First Amendment rights to engage in satirical discourse about elected officials.” She added that her office had tried to work with the bill’s sponsor “on ways to further protect victims without shielding politicians from criticism.”

HB 2133 would have expanded Arizona’s existing law against nonconsensual sexual imagery to cover AI-generated “synthetic depictions,” and it would have required commercial websites publishing sexual material to verify that every person depicted consented and was at least 18, retain those records for seven years, and make them available to the attorney general. Violations carried civil penalties of up to $10,000 a day, and up to $250,000 where a minor was involved.

Hobbs argued the bill was also unnecessary, writing that existing state law covers AI-generated revenge porn and that the federal Take It Down Act, which requires platforms to remove nonconsensual intimate images on a victim’s request, already protects Arizonans.

The bill’s sponsor, Representative Nick Kupper, a Republican from Legislative District 25, called the veto disheartening and disputed the governor’s reasoning.

The veto resolves a concern Planet Nude first reported in March, when naturist and free-speech advocates warned that the bill’s broad language could sweep in lawful, nonsexual material. AANR Executive Director Erich Schuttauf described the bill’s scope as a grave concern, pointing to the difficulty of documenting consent 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 a group shot. The bill also provided no mechanism, he noted, for a parent to consent to a minor child’s image.

Hobbs reached the same overbreadth conclusion by a different route, grounding her objection in political satire rather than the recordkeeping burden on publishers. One wrinkle complicates the free-speech framing on both sides: Meta, Google, and the Free Speech Coalition did not oppose the final version of the bill.

Because Republicans hold majorities in both chambers but lack the two-thirds needed to override a veto, HB 2133 is dead for the 2026 session. Kupper’s sharp disagreement with the outcome suggests a revised version could return next year. Hobbs, for her part, said in her veto letter that she remains committed to finding bipartisan ways to protect victims. 🪐

Planet Nude reported on HB 2133 as it moved to the governor’s desk earlier this month. This story follows that coverage.

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Linda Weber has been re-elected president of the American Association for Nude Recreation, defeating challenger Joe Rives 66.7% to 33.3%. Weber, who first took office in 2024, will serve a second two-year term. Total participation was 3,472 voters, representing 13.7% of eligible members.

BG Parkes of Suwannee Valley Resort was elected vice president, defeating Patty Faber of Shangri La Ranch 62.4% to 37.6%. Mitch London was returned to the secretary/treasurer role uncontested.

The ballot’s sole bylaw proposition—moving the public-facing portions of the annual convention from Wednesday and Thursday mornings to Friday evening and Saturday—passed by a wide margin, with 90.2% approval.

In the regional trustee races, Janine Siegfried won the AANR-Southwest seat in the ballot’s most competitive contest, taking 43.9% in a three-way race over Bill Hobbs (35.6%) and Bob Redoutey (20.6%). Cyndi Faber narrowly defeated Kathy Watzel for the AANR-West seat, 55.5% to 44.5%. Bradley McDonald won the AANR-Midwest race 79.8% to 20.2% over David Levine. Sandra Cordell, Ralph Collinson, and Jenny Agee were returned to their respective AANR-East, AANR-Florida, and AANR-Northwest seats uncontested.

In a post on Bluesky following the announcement, Weber wrote that she was “honored to be re-elected to a second term,” thanking members who “again placed their trust” in her and expressing her commitment to serving members and advancing AANR over the next two years. In a separate message to Planet Nude, she noted that Rives had reached out to congratulate her and expressed his excitement to work together. “I thought that was classy,” she said.

Full results were released by AANR on June 22. 🪐

Editor’s note: The author currently serves as PR Committee chair for AANR, a role I will not be continuing into the next term. This piece was reported independently and was not coordinated with AANR leadership. Congratulations to Linda Weber on her re-election—wishing her and the incoming board every success.

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Nearly nine years after Hurricane Irma flattened Club Orient, ground has been broken on its replacement. Developers, Collectivité officials, and former Club Orient staff gathered last week on the old property for a ceremonial groundbreaking—the first visible work at a site that has sat in ruins since 2017.

Club Orient opened in the 1980s on the French side of Saint Martin, developed by Reint Brink and his family into a family naturist resort. It grew into one of the best-known clothing-optional destinations anywhere: red pine chalets imported from Finland, paths that wandered between the units, a beach you could walk onto the moment you arrived and never dress again until you left. For decades it was a fixture of Caribbean naturist travel.

That ended in September 2017, when Irma tore across Saint Martin. The resort was destroyed and never reopened. The debris, by most accounts, is still there.

In the years since, redevelopment plans surfaced, stalled, and changed hands. The beach stayed busy with nudists, and a stripped-down beach bar kept the spot running, but the resort itself went nowhere.

The pieces moved this spring. Last year the Collectivité put out a call for expressions of interest on the two public parcels where Club Orient stood; two companies bid, and in April the executive council selected SAS Griselle, authorizing a 60-year lease. The project now styles itself La Griselle, though the Daily Herald reported at the groundbreaking that the hotel’s name had not been finalized. Its principals know the ground: president Steven Patrick, a former Collectivité vice president; Christine Page, once a waitress and later assistant manager at Club Orient’s Papagayo restaurant, now on as consultant and coordinator; and US government representative Lloyd Tackling, tasked with bringing in investors. The figure behind it all is Stephen Payne, an experienced hotelier and former director of the neighboring Orient Beach Club, who arrived on the island in 1985 and has spent the eight years since Irma trying to rebuild. “I’ve been working on this for seven years,” Payne told the Daily Herald. The post-storm Natural Risk Prevention Plan (PPRN), which came in while he was still on the island, was the wall he kept hitting.

The new resort won’t be a copy of the old Club Orient. The PPRN regulations reshaped what’s allowed along the shoreline, including a mandatory setback from the water, so the chalet village is gone for good. “The chalets concept offered a real sense of community but with the PPRN we can’t do that anymore,” Payne said. In its place: a five-star naturist hotel of three or four buildings with oversized balconies and sea views. The €41 million Griselle committed in its bid is what won over the Collectivité; Tackling put the full project cost at €49 to €55 million. Collectivité President Louis Mussington framed the case for rebuilding plainly—an exclusive niche drawing guests from around the world, and what he called the only legitimate family naturist resort in the Caribbean.

The site still has to be demolished and cleared before real construction starts, and the projected timeline puts an opening roughly three years out. But for the first time since Irma, there’s work happening on the ground at Club Orient. 🪐

A Maui Planning Commission hearing that could shape the future of Mākena State Park—and Little Beach, the clothing-optional cove tucked behind its headland—is now less than two weeks out, and the window for public comment is closing with it.

The commission is expected to consider a Special Management Area permit for the state’s “Mākena State Park Improvements” project on June 23. For anyone who wants a say, written testimony submitted ahead of the hearing is the most direct way in—and it doesn’t require being in Hawaiʻi, or a resident, to weigh in.

The state has spent recent weeks framing the project as routine. In a May news release, the Department of Land and Natural Resources described comfort stations to replace existing portable toilets, new outdoor showers, and expanded paved parking in areas where overflow currently spills onto the shoulder of Makena Road. Acting State Parks Administrator Alan Carpenter said the improvements would have “no impact on access for the public” and would simply provide quality infrastructure. Taken at face value, it’s hard to argue with better bathrooms.

But Little Beach regulars have learned to read past the face value. The cove has operated as a clothing-optional space for more than five decades despite nudity being technically illegal throughout Hawaiʻi’s state parks—a status resting entirely on informal tolerance. That tolerance collapsed in late 2020, when enforcement sweeps resumed and the state installed a gate and signage to close the beach. The lesson advocates drew from that period is that you don’t need a new rule about nudity to squeeze out an informal space. You just have to change how people enter and move through the park. Parking and infrastructure are how access gets controlled.

The deeper concern is that the current project clears the way for a managed-access model like the one at Hāʻena State Park on Kauaʻi, where entry now runs through advance reservations, timed slots, and paid shuttles. None of the public documents for the Mākena project describe a reservation system, and Carpenter has said residents have no reason to worry. But the concern isn’t invented. As Honolulu Civil Beat has reported, then-DLNR Chair Dawn Chang told state lawmakers in 2023 that the agency was considering a reservation system at Mākena, and that it planned to install a fence around the park to “restrict the people who access from outside the park boundary and to further ensure that capacity is regulated” by discouraging street parking.

That testimony sits uneasily beside this year’s assurances—and the official who gave it is on her way out. Chang has been on medical leave since December 2025 and will retire July 1; Ryan Kanakaʻole, who has served as acting chair during the Mākena debate, becomes permanent chair the same day—a transition already reflected on the DLNR release itself, which lists Kanakaʻole as acting chairperson. The hearing falls just days before the handoff.

The departure of one official doesn’t resolve the underlying question, and the people closest to the beach aren’t reading an all-clear. The American Association for Nude Recreation, through its West Region, is funding professionals to work the access question ahead of the hearing—an effort its leadership has described as aimed at heading off registration requirements, hourly time limits, and fees at Mākena. In its weekly report, AANR Government Affairs Chair Tim Mullins characterized the project bluntly: it “purports to be an access improvement plan, but a closer look shows it is a cash cow” that limits access to both sides of Mākena. For a national organization to put paid resources behind a single Maui beach is its own signal of how the stakes are being read.

None of which is settled by a reassuring press release. The hearing is where it gets decided, and testimony submitted now becomes part of that record.

So what can you do? Submit written comment to the Maui Planning Commission at mauicounty.gov/191/Maui-Planning-Commission. You don’t have to live in Hawaiʻi, or even visit, to weigh in.

What should you say? Keep it about access. Nudity isn’t legal at Mākena to begin with, so a defense of clothing-optional use carries no weight with the commission—and raising it only narrows a fight that works better wide. The arguments gaining traction concern parking, public entry, and the preservation of the park’s wilderness character. A broad coalition defending open access to a beloved park is far harder to dismiss than a narrow stand over one cove. The most effective way to protect Little Beach right now is to not make it about Little Beach.

The hearing is set for June 23. Comments submitted before then are part of the record that shapes it. 🪐

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Serendipity Park, the family nudist resort in the north Georgia mountains near Cleveland, has been sold and rebranded under new ownership as Serendipity Sun Club & RV Park.

The new owners are Tanya Parker and Roger Johnson, a California couple who closed on the purchase June 8. In a phone interview, Parker told Planet Nude the two are committed to keeping the park a family nudist resort, and to honoring the legacy of founder Paul Jones. They announced the change June 5 on a new Facebook page for the club. A new website, serendipitysunclub.com, is now live, with online booking for day passes and overnight stays.

Parker and Johnson come to Georgia from Southern California, where both were active in organized nudism. They were members of Olive Dell Ranch, the longtime Colton resort that went textile in 2024, and belong to the Southern California Naturist Association. Parker, who grew up a nudist, said she found Serendipity almost by accident, searching online for a nudist RV resort for sale. “We dumped our retirement in and made it happen,” she said. Johnson, a working musician, will remain based in California for now, while Parker runs the park day to day with the support of its resident community.

The sale settles a question that had been open for nearly two years. Serendipity went on the market in 2024 at an asking price of $1.8 million, and the listing drew coverage well beyond the naturist press, along with concern among naturists about what would become of one of the last family nudist parks in the South.

That concern was not unfounded. When long-running nudist resorts in the region change hands, they have a history of not staying nudist. Serendipity’s sale was structured against that outcome. According to listing broker Brittany Hall of Southern Landmark Realty, who spoke to several outlets when the property was listed, the sale carried a deed restriction requiring the park to continue operating as a nudist resort for 10 years. Parker confirmed the restriction and said she and Johnson intend to go well past it, describing themselves as committed to family nudism “for 10 years and beyond.” The commitment to keep Serendipity naturist, in other words, is not only a promise from its new owners. It is written into the terms of the sale.

Serendipity was founded in 1995 by Paul Jones, a U.S. Army veteran who served two tours in Vietnam and who, before turning to nude recreation, had a varied career in business that included writing code for the first ATM machines. Jones opened the park in 1996 and built it, over the following decades, into a resort known across the movement for its friendliness, winning AANR’s visitor-appreciation award for hospitality repeatedly over the years. He ran the club until his death in March 2023, at 76.

After Jones died, the park passed to his life partner, Patti Reagin, and to longtime manager Stuart Antrim, who had helped run Serendipity since the early 2000s. They listed it the following year, telling Planet Nude at the time that they were determined to find a buyer who would keep the park naturist rather than sell to a developer. Reagin is stepping back, with plans to travel, Parker said, while Antrim is staying on to help run events and the office through the transition. “He's been a blessing,” she said. “He knows everything.”

A new ownership group operating as SOBO Hospitality Holdings, Inc., registered in Georgia this spring, has taken over the park. It sits on roughly 42 wooded acres along Blue Creek, with a clubhouse, pool, sauna, hot tub, cabins, RV sites and tent camping, and full-time residents who lease lots and live there year-round.

Parker said the essentials will stay the same: the Serendipity name carries forward in the new title, and the park remains a family nudist resort. She also pointed to additions aimed at bringing new people in, including first-timer discounts and a women-in-nudism event in the fall. A midweek “bare as you dare” day, she said, is meant to give visitors “that aren’t necessarily ready to completely disrobe” a low-pressure way to “come, hang out, get comfortable.”

The timing lines up with a milestone: the park marks its 30th anniversary over the Fourth of July, and Parker and Johnson are using the weekend as their kickoff under the new name, with live music on the grounds. A year ago, with the park on the market and its future uncertain, that anniversary was not guaranteed to arrive with the gates open and the park still nudist. 🪐

Update, July 1, 2026: This piece has been updated to reflect that Serendipity Sun Club's new website, serendipitysunclub.com, is now live with online booking for day passes and overnight stays.

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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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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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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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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. 🪐