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. 🪐

More info:

Arkansas has long marketed itself as “The Natural State,” a nod to the rugged hills, shimmering lakes, meandering river valleys, and pristine pine forests that make it an outdoorsman’s paradise. But for a small and determined group of Arkansans in the middle of the last century, going “natural” meant something more literal. They were nudists, and they wanted what nudists everywhere wanted: a place of their own, outdoors, in the sun, free from the encumbrances of clothing and the judgments of the world.

The lost history of organized nudism in Arkansas is, in the end, a story of thwarted ambition. It begins with the Ozarcadians, a discreet club meeting in Fayetteville in the early years of World War II and dreaming of a park in the Ozarks. It runs through the Oz’Arkansans, a group that found itself in the crosshairs of a crusading preacher before it ever had a chance to turn its undeveloped camp into the dream resort its leaders envisioned. And it reaches its fullest expression in the remarkable story of Gordon Satterfield, a Fort Smith nudist who actually did build a park—carving it by hand out of an overgrown Arkansas cotton farm—only to watch it be destroyed by a law passed without debate or hearings in a matter of minutes.

And looming large in the story is the figure of Rev. Braxton Sawyer, a Fort Smith radio evangelist who made the eradication of nudism a national crusade. He largely failed, except in his own backyard. Thanks to his machinations, Arkansas became, and remains to this day, the only state in the country where nudism is explicitly outlawed as both practice and idea.1

Pioneers: The Ozarcadians

Though the dramatic showdown of Sawyer vs. Satterfield marked a crescendo of the battle over nakedness in Arkansas, the history of organized nudism here doesn’t start with them. Surprisingly, for a rural state in the old Confederacy, the movement had put down tentative roots well before Sawyer took to the airwaves, before Satterfield broke ground in the Mississippi Delta of eastern Arkansas.

With the appearance of the first national nudist magazines in the 1930s, curious Americans in far-flung regions away from urban centers were exposed to positive portrayals of nudism for the first time—a departure from the moralizing and ridicule with which the mainstream newspapers treated the topic in those days.

By the early ’40s, organizations like the American Sunbathing Association (ASA) were attracting interest across the South as publications like Sunshine and Health trickled down to Bible Belt newsstands. Correspondence from Arkansas, for instance, frequently littered the “Letters” page of such magazines in that period, with messages from isolated and aspiring nudists in towns like Piggott, Marianna, or Mena searching for other free spirits.

Some, however, wanted to do more than just make a few nudist friends. On Aug. 19, 1942, the Southwest American, the main newspaper in the city of Fort Smith, reported that “a national nudist organization is contemplating establishment of a nudist colony in the Ozark mountains of North Arkansas.” Asked by a reporter what he thought of the matter, Deputy Land Commissioner H.P. Merritt laughed it off, advising against it “because of the fierce Arkansas chiggers.”2

The paper didn’t name the individual or group planning the supposed “colony,” but readers of the nudist press were getting regular updates. In September 1943, a nascent nudist organization called the Ozarcadians—a name blending “Ozark” and “Arcadians,” a classical allusion to pastoral paradise—started meeting in Fayetteville, according to a report in S&H.3

A member named Angus Hart wrote that a “group of sunshiners” had been congregating in the Ozark Mountains at the homestead of Carl Buick and his wife, Dorothy. It was Carl who had been working on the unnamed “colony” discussed in the Southwest American the year prior. Local reporters in Arkansas didn’t know it, but they were actually dealing with the monarchs of nudity in America.

Carl and Dorothy Buick were the reigning Nudist King and Queen at the time, having been crowned at the ASA’s annual meeting at Zoro Nature Park in Indiana in August 1942. Actually, the first time the couple met one another was the moment they ascended the throne together. Their tale was told by ASA President Alois S. Knapp in 1943 in an S&H article entitled, “A True Romance of Nudist Royalty.”4

Dorothy Ahrens, 19, of Oklahoma, was a regular at Zoro, together with her parents and older sister. The family came to soak up the sun in hopes of improving Dorothy’s poor health. Carl Buick, 44—born Carl Buich in Agram, Croatia (modern-day Zagreb), in 1898—was a boxer who’d grown up in poverty before immigrating to America. “We had rarely enough to eat,” he said of his childhood. “Generally, we went to bed hungry.” But he got an education, moved half-way around the world, and became a “highly skilled artisan.”

Eventually settling in Detroit, Buick happened to attend a lecture by Dr. Benedict Lust, a medical quack known today as one of the founders of naturopathy. Convinced by what he’d heard, though, Carl apparently converted to vegetarianism, “clean living,” and nudism. He was a member of the Ar-U-Tan Club and its successor, The Bruins, and started submitting photos to S&H in the early 1940s.

His “physical prowess” and “superb body” won over the voters at Zoro in the summer of 1942, while Dorothy similarly impressed with her youthful and tan figure.5 After receiving their crowns, Carl was apparently so taken by the young woman that he proposed on the spot, sort of. “You really got my goat,” he told her that day. “I like you; perhaps we could marry.”6

Dorothy said they didn’t know each other well enough yet, so he went back to Detroit, and she returned home with her family. Six letters and two months later, however, Carl was on his way to Oklahoma City, where the two were married in October 1942. She moved with him to Detroit, but soon enough, the Buick family was back down South, purchasing a large parcel of land in northwest Arkansas and setting about establishing a new ASA affiliate group.

With King Carl and Queen Dorothy at their head, it’s easy to see why optimism abounded for the newly-formed Ozarcadians. But their enthusiasm was soon enough dampened by legal disappointment. “Immediately after our first meeting, we were opposed by the courts,” Hart told the ASA, “and the opposition was given much space in the news.”7

Within days of the Ozarcadians’ inaugural get-together, Buick’s plans for a 200-acre camp called Alpine Haven were sunk. Buick had approached Secretary of State Crip Hall for permission to establish a nudist park on his property, located in the unincorporated Larue area just outside the town of Rogers. Unsure what to tell Buick, Hall consulted with Attorney General Guy Williams, who gave the thumbs-down.

Such a camp would constitute a “public nuisance,” the A.G. concluded, citing a state law that made being unclothed “with the intention of making a public exhibition of nudity” a misdemeanor. Williams found Buick’s claim that he and Dorothy were “exponents of sunshine for health and clean living” unconvincing, arguing that nude sunbathing in mixed company was “a question that the average person cannot understand and accept.”8

Despite their loss, the Ozarcadians seemed undeterred. “We have established a bridgehead on the shores of sunland, and now our eyes are forward, looking for the shape of better things to come,” member Hart boasted in January 1944. “We want to pave the way to the gates of accepted nudism.”

His positivity was premature, though. By the time Sunshine and Health subscribers next heard from the Arkansas nudists, their situation had worsened. In the February 1946 issue of the magazine, Ozarcadian Ralph Shreve wrote that the group, which had been founded under the pressures of World War II, had “barely held on and have only met when and where we could.”9

He said travel difficulties and the moves of members had scattered the group. But they had apparently not given up on the dream, for Shreve listed out what read like a list of tasks for establishing a nudist camp: “Carl has water piped from a mountain spring to a drinking water fountain and shower in the valley and plans a pool and a play field for this coming season.”

Alpine Haven, however, was never to be. Dispatches on the group’s progress stopped abruptly, leaving one to conclude that the state’s 1943 refusal to approve a camp proved to be too high a hurdle. There is no record of the formal establishment of any resort or park, and the Ozarcadians were never heard from again.

Carl and Dorothy, however, didn’t disappear from the scene. His work as a nude photographer carried on, and hers was an image occasionally seen in national nudist magazines afterward. The two of them even appeared together on the August 1947 cover of S&H. Their trail goes cold in subsequent issues of the nudist press, though, so whether or for how long the two remained a part of the movement is unknown. Carl died in 1977, Dorothy in 1996. They are buried together at Wellston Cemetery in Lincoln County, Oklahoma, not far from where she grew up.

The royal couple may have been the first people to put Arkansas on the nudist map, but they weren’t the last.

Dream chasers: The Oz’Arkansans

By 1951, another club had formed about an hour south in the city of Fort Smith headed by auto mechanic and postal worker Preston Alexander Dunn and his mother, Linnie Alberta Dunn. Known as the Oz’Arkansans—another play on the Ozarks—this group grabbed the baton from the Buicks and set about establishing a landed presence. Whether they were aware of the Ozarcadians’ travails is unclear, but it quickly became apparent that the Dunns underestimated the extent to which nudism was still a taboo subject among the conservatives of their region.

In January 1951, Preston Dunn purchased 150 acres of wilderness 35 miles north of Fort Smith near the Oklahoma state line in the Boston Mountain Range. It was in an unincorporated area called Evansville, where his father, Alexander Dunn, and later Linnie had been postmaster. It was tax-forfeited land that was had for less than $5 an acre, Preston told the Christian nudist journal Natural Living in a dispatch summarized in its August issue that year.10

The Dunns and the other families who made up the Oz’Arkansans were ambitious, setting about transforming the untamed landscape into a nude sanctuary. An article in the November 1951 edition of Modern Sunbathing told of the abundant resources it offered and the dreams of that first summer:

“The natural resources of this wild and relatively isolated region make it a beautiful site…. Cool, sparkling mountain water bubbles from four large springs…. Layers of rock lace the area and outcroppings form lovely natural grottos. A waterfall pours over a series of rocky ledges. The abundance of stone will be a valuable resource in the building of terraces, walks, and cabin foundations. One hundred and fifty thousand feet of fine hardwood lumber is just waiting to be turned into planks and wallboards. The nudist who fancies hunting can have his choice of rabbit, coon, possum, or fox…. And the park is a paradise for the amateur botanist…”11

The magazine forecast a lot of hard work would be required to turn the vision into a reality, but the Dunns had no shortage of plans. They’d already drafted schemes for tennis and volleyball courts and even a “projected airplane landing strip” to accommodate all the guests whom they were sure would soon be swarming in. The progress was so swift and the promises so attractive that the Oz’Arkansans were quickly awarded official status as an ASA affiliate—Group No. 460.12

By July of the next summer, the ASA Bulletin was encouraging nudists coast to coast to rush down and see what was rising in Arkansas, which the editors said “has all the makings of a paradise on earth.”13 But before Preston and Linnie Dunn could finish building their nudist heaven, they were put through hell by a rabble-rousing preacher who used them as props in a campaign for fame.

Crusader: Rev. Braxton Sawyer

Braxton Bragg Sawyer was born in rural Alabama in 1911 and eventually landed in Fort Smith, Arkansas, where in 1948 he was appointed pastor of the Immanuel Baptist Church. He turned out to be a natural showman more interested in the spotlight than the sanctuary.

After barely three years leading his flock, he quit the pastorate and founded “Radio Pulpit,” an over-the-airwaves ministry broadcast five days a week, first throughout the region and eventually across the nation. The donations that kept it going required an audience, and an audience required an enemy. In 1953, browsing an Oklahoma City bookstore, the reverend found one.

Spotting teenagers ogling nudist magazines on a newsstand, Sawyer rushed back to Fort Smith and alerted his listeners to the naked menace in their midst.14 “I had preached for 20 years without ever using the word nudist,” he later told Time magazine.15 He quickly made up for lost time.

His first target was a hometown one: Preston Dunn. Having heard Sawyer’s radio ravings about nudism, Dunn—himself a Christian—made the catastrophic error of writing to the reverend in hopes of politely correcting his misconceptions.16 He had naively and mistakenly provided Sawyer the perfect gift. Armed with Dunn’s name and address from the return envelope, he went on the warpath, using his weekly program to demand authorities keep Dunn’s kids from mingling with “decent” children in the local school.

Sawyer then filed a complaint with Washington County Sheriff Bruce Crider in December 1953, alleging Dunn was operating a “nudist colony.” The sheriff investigated but reported that he found no nudists on the Evansville property, only a “rundown” four-room house, a barn near collapse, a stone spring, and a sign reading, “Dunn Springs: Home of Oz’Arkansans.”17 The next day, it was reported that Dunn and Sawyer had both been subpoenaed for questioning by prosecutors to “determine if a violation of law was involved.” The front page of the Southwest American also revealed that “an attorney for a national sunbathers’ organization was on the way.”18

At the hearing, held on a Saturday afternoon in Fayetteville, Prosecutor Ted Coxsey concluded after listening to Sawyer’s accusations and Dunn’s defenses for three hours that nothing dirty was going on and that no statute had been broken (a finding contrary to what Carl Buick had been told years earlier). During the questioning, Dunn said that the Oz’Arkansans met monthly at the camp, averaging 20 to 30 per get-together. They swam, sunbathed, and worked on the land. “Everybody knows,” Dunn declared, “that sunshine, fresh air, and outdoor health in limited amounts are healthful, and no law has been violated.”19

As for Sawyer, he took the opportunity to hand out tape recordings of Radio Pulpit episodes and copies of nudist magazines while announcing that even if there was not yet a law banning nudist parks and activities he’d make sure there soon was. He alleged, without evidence, that “some of the biggest names in Fort Smith are affiliated with the colony,” though he refused to say who. Dunn, feeling relieved by the prosecutor’s assessment, told the press afterward, “I’m happy this has been brought out into the open. I’m glad to have it called to the attention of the people.”

Losing out with the sheriff, Sawyer called up friends at the State Capitol in Little Rock. On Monday morning, immediately after the hearing in Fayetteville, State Sen. Wiley W. Bean, prompted by Sawyer, dispatched a letter to the Oz’Arkansans, grilling the organization on its purpose.20 Bean peppered them with questions: Do your members go absolutely nude, or “do they wear a fig-leaf as in olden times?” Do both sexes mingle indiscriminately? Does sex enter the picture? How many members do you have?

And, appalled at the possibility of naked race-mingling, Bean demonstrated his fealty to the segregationist norms of the time and demanded to know: “Is your membership composed of all white people?” The senator then informed the Oz’Arkansans that a bill would be introduced to “outlaw your organization,” which he assumed was “a religious cult of some kind.”

National Nudist Council leader Edith Church came across a news clipping detailing Preston Dunn’s persecution and rushed to Arkansas to help, only to find that the stress of the ordeal had put the man in the state hospital, leaving his mother, Linnie, as Sawyer’s target. Hearing that a “big-shot nudist” had come to town, Sawyer arranged a mass meeting at a local church where he promised to expose secret recordings of nudists.

Edith Church slipped in, hoping to see for herself what Sawyer was all about. When he spotted Church from the pulpit, Sawyer stretched out his hand, parting the crowd like the Red Sea. Pointing an accusatory finger in her direction, he thundered: “She DARES to come into the House of God! There she is, that woman in the red hat!” The assembled faithful roared in response. Church later said she “did not expect to escape with my life.”21

The Oz’Arkansans, rattled and harassed, never really recovered as an organization. Even though state officials never said they had broken any existing laws and didn’t outright ban their camp, as had happened to the Ozarcadians, the Dunns lay low after the incident. They quietly continued working on their camp in Evansville, and ASA officials touring clubs around the country visited in June 1956, noting that “Mother and Preston Dunn as well as the rest of the Dunns are wonderful people” with big plans.22 Dunn Springs never managed to open as a full-fledged nudist park, however.

Comments left by a family member on a genealogy page for Linnie Dunn after her death in 1998 suggested that bringing the camp to life was her passion and that work on the site only stopped when nudism became illegal. The relative also provided an insight into Linnie’s tenacity and commitment, even though her son Preston often got most of the press coverage.

“Aunt Linnie is our wild woman of the family because she ran a nudist colony at Evansville,” wrote an unnamed relation on the Luginbuel Funeral Home website. “She pushed the limits on everything. It took the Arkansas State Legislature to close her nudist colony down. Once she needed more water for the camp and no one would help her, so she threw a stick of dynamite down the well and knocked out water all over the mountain.”

As for Preston, he remained a part of the movement, though the experience of negative publicity appears to have scarred him. In 1958, he proposed an idea which he said would “greatly improve the whole nudist movement and their relations with the non-nudist public”—merging nudism with Christianity. Ditch the word “nudist” and replace it with “Christian naturopathist,” he said, to “get rid of the mental block which the word nudism sets up in the minds of many non-nudists.” If the naked way of life becomes a church, of sorts, he reasoned, it would be protected by the First Amendment’s freedom of religion clause. Needless to say, the initiative never went anywhere.23

He kept the Oz’Arkansans post office box address listed in the nudist club directories that appeared on the back pages of magazines until at least the early 1970s, but how frequently the group continued to meet after the 1953 fight with Sawyer is unknown.24

But for the reverend, the skirmish with the Dunns was merely a warm-up. He took his show on the road, staging rallies across Oklahoma and promising to outlaw nudism state by state, appealing constantly to Radio Pulpit listeners to send “a little increase in their offerings” to fund his campaign.25

The anti-nudism crusade reached its most theatrical—and humiliating—peak on Aug. 4, 1954, when Sawyer traveled to Battle Creek, Michigan, determined to storm the annual convention of the ASA, movie camera in hand. A group of men blocked his rush at the gate, and the next morning newspapers across the country ran photographs of the reverend picking himself up from the dirt in front of Sunshine Gardens.26

The media was almost uniformly unkind, with the Detroit Free Press declaring itself “tired of people—crusaders, evangelists, or otherwise—constantly seeking publicity for themselves via nudist camps.”27 Despite the embarrassment, Sawyer departed Michigan having persuaded a state lawmaker to introduce anti-nudist legislation. He also left behind a freshly-organized committee of local ministers who pledged to carry on the war against nudism.28

His attempts to outlaw nudism in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Michigan, and Kansas all came to nothing, though. Nudist newsletters kept a running tally, scoring it five to zero against him.29 “The taste of victory is sweet on nudists’ tongues,” declared Kurt Barthel, the so-called “founding father” of American nudism. “Waging defensive war against Rev. Braxton Sawyer’s anti-nudism crusade, nudists won a million dollars’ worth of favorable publicity and a bright outlook for 1956—the spoils of a good fight.” So optimistic was Barthel that he exclaimed: “The best thing that could have happened to American nudism was the crusade of the preacher from Arkansas.”30

The nudist world thus largely wrote off Sawyer, thinking him vanquished for good. They were wrong to do so. Radio Pulpit remained on the air, Sawyer’s legislative allies were still in the statehouse in Little Rock, and a new nudist park near Forrest City, Arkansas, was about to hand him the opening he needed to revive his flagging campaign.

Gordon Satterfield and the building of Wildwood Lodge

Gordon Hughes Satterfield was born in 1911 in the unincorporated Western Arkansas community of Hon, near Waldron. A Fort Smith man by the time the 1950s rolled around, he and his wife Beulah were members of the Oz’Arkansans and spent winters at the renowned Lake Como nudist resort in Florida. He knew what a well-run nudist park looked like and wanted to build one of his own. A few years had passed since the fiasco in Fort Smith with Sawyer, whose star appeared to have faded, so Satterfield thought it was time to try again—but on the other side of the state, away from the reverend’s prying eyes.31

The origin story of Wildwood Lodge, as recounted in a February 1957 article by Gordon himself in Sunshine and Health and corroborated by a companion piece written by Jim Hadley in the April 1957 issue of Modern Sunbathing, begins with two Memphis couples who had no idea the other existed.32 Jim and Betty Lane had visited Lake Como in 1954 and come home to Tennessee fired up about starting an ASA affiliate near Memphis. Separately, Cecil and Wilma were entertaining the same idea. In July 1955, Jim and Cecil finally connected. By August, they had begun reaching out to nudist families in nearby states to gauge interest and scout locations.

One couple who were members of their group offered temporary use of their farm for sunbathing, but something more permanent was desired. They found a potential site a few miles west of Memphis, but a change in land ownership that September killed the plan before it could get started.

At the October 1955 club meeting, two key figures entered the picture: Gordon and Beulah Satterfield. Having been members of the Oz’Arkansans and familiar with the nudist world, they argued that the club needed a physical home if it was ever going to amount to anything.

Gordon and Beulah acted decisively, purchasing 66 acres of land in St. Francis County, near Forrest City, Arkansas—entered as a loan to the club, to be repaid collectively by members over time. “The park site had not been cultivated in years except for a few small areas in cotton,” Gordon wrote. “There were no buildings or well on it. It had 32 acres in woods, the rest was covered with weeds and sprouts so tall and dense it was almost impossible to walk.”

What followed was a remarkable grassroots construction project. Beginning in March 1956—described in Hadley’s article as a “cold and windy day,” with members huddled around a bonfire—the Wildwood community began building their park from the ground up. By April, electricity had arrived, a well had been drilled and fitted with a pump, a road had been graded, and Gordon and Beulah had moved a trailer onto the property. Cecil and Wilma pitched two tents. The land was edged with rose bushes, but heavy sisal paper nailed to the roadside fence would serve as screening until the roses grew tall enough.

By the end of that first building season—just seven and a half months after the first shovel hit the ground—Wildwood Lodge boasted a modern concrete-block clubhouse measuring 24 by 36 feet, complete with a kitchen, tile floors, a dorm room with eight bunk beds, a full bathroom with shower, and a combined recreation and dining room. A club member donated a 550-gallon tank converted into an outdoor shower.

Another couple contributed 50 trees, which were planted to create some shade. Game courts were constructed, picnic tables and grills installed, a gravel road laid, a tractor acquired, and a phone line run to the property. Gordon and Beulah built their own cabin with a bathroom on their lot.

The entire effort was a communal affair. “The club, a cooperative organization, is selling life memberships to obtain working capital,” Hadley said. “Life members are entitled to a cabin-site and automatically become trustees holding the assets of the group.” The enthusiasm among the members was boundless. “It seems as if potential nudists have been around this area for so long that when someone finally set off the spark, the club blossomed forth like an atomic cloud,” Adam and Betty Lanning, a couple who’d become life members, said.33

Satterfield’s Sunshine and Health article glowed with pride. Membership stood at 30 adults and 15 children by the end of 1956, with more prospects on the way and expectations of doubling by the following season, with visions of becoming a year-round nudist park thanks to Arkansas’ favorable climate. Plans were already drawn up for a swimming pool, three private rentable cabins, and an outdoor shuffleboard court.

“We are a happy group and invite all who would like to join or visit us to write today,” Satterfield said. “Plan now for the summer months ahead; come play, relax, and rest in the friendly, congenial atmosphere of Wildwood Lodge.”

Hadley’s Modern Sunbathing article opened with a quote from 17th century English poet John Dryden that captured the spirit of the group: “I am as free as nature first made man, Ere the base laws of servitude began, When wild in the woods the noble savage ran.” Wildwood Lodge had, by any measure, the makings of a functioning naturist paradise—what Gordon described as the “fastest-growing nudist park in the southeastern United States.”

And it was located in Forrest City, Arkansas—a town named, in a bitter footnote of irony, after Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and architect of the Fort Pillow massacre, which saw the mass murder of Union troops in April 1864, most of them Black. Of course, even Wildwood was still a product of its time and place; there are no records of there being a single Black member, despite more than half of St. Francis County’s population being African American. The region’s history of racial violence thus formed a backdrop for a community trying, however imperfectly, to practice a philosophy of openness, equality, and freedom from social convention. It was, in retrospect, a precarious place to try building utopia.

Though it had such bright beginnings, the situation did indeed start to go south for Wildwood Lodge pretty quickly. Nudists in other locales making plans for an Arkansas summer holiday after reading Satterfield and Hadley’s glowing reports in the spring of 1957 were unaware, but the truth was that things in Forrest City were already falling apart. The articles, written in 1956, didn’t make it to press until months later—long after the crusades had descended on St. Francis County.

Sawyer’s revenge

Though his efforts to outlaw nudism in state after state had come to naught and he’d been humiliated at Battle Creek, Rev. Sawyer never stopped working the local angles. In November 1956, rumors began circulating in Memphis newspapers and eastern Arkansas that a nudist camp was operating. Returning to his usual M.O., Sawyer hammered away at Wildwood Lodge on his Radio Pulpit broadcasts and pestered the local sheriff to investigate.

Having witnessed first-hand the experience of the Dunns and the Oz’Arkansans when they battled Sawyer, Satterfield wanted to get ahead of the curve. He knew about Edith Church’s intervention in the Fort Smith fight, so he contacted the National Nudist Council for advice. Church counseled a strategy of transparency and immediately headed to Arkansas to help.

“I…advised them to ‘sit tight’ for the time being…and talk with the local sheriff, hoping that, by enlightening him as to the purpose, ideals, and practices of a bona fide nudist club, we would forestall any trouble,” Church later recalled. She said the practice had proved successful in other places.34

On Nov. 28, 1956, she and Satterfield visited Sheriff Carl Campbell in person, explained the philosophy of nudism, and invited him to come see the park for himself. They gave him a copy of Wildwood’s by-laws, an issue of Sunshine and Health, and a membership application.

Satterfield believed he was protected in any case by a legal opinion from Attorney General Jack Holt from many years prior which had held that Arkansas’s indecent exposure statute did not apply to social nudism conducted on private property, and he told the sheriff so. Campbell indicated he had no desire to cause trouble for Wildwood, and Gordon and Edith took him at his word. They drove back to the camp “jubilant,” Church said, and she caught the next flight home.

But on Dec. 3, 1956, Sheriff Campbell wrote to new Attorney General Bruce Bennett asking for his opinion on Wildwood’s operation.35 On Jan. 21, 1957, Bennett rendered his verdict: nudism, he concluded—drawing on case law from 1859, 1934, and 1943—constituted a violation of Arkansas’ indecent exposure laws.36 He acknowledged there was no statute specifically banning social nudism or “nudist colonies,” but he ruled that the indecent exposure regulation was enough to shut down Wildwood. “I don’t know whether you would call it an anti-nudist law,” Bennett’s spokesman told the press, “it is a question of interpretation.”37

Five days later, on Jan. 26, Satterfield was arrested and charged with indecent exposure. He posted a $1,000 cash bond. In desperate need of legal help, he contacted both major national nudist organizations, the National Nudist Council and the American Sunbathing Association, as Wildwood held a dual affiliation. Edith Church was traveling on the West Coast, however, and didn’t receive his messages until days later. The ASA also didn’t respond right away, so Satterfield hired his own attorney and tried to prepare for his hastily-arranged trial, which unfolded in pieces.

The hearing opened on Jan. 30, 1957, and Municipal Judge O.H. Hardgraves heard testimony from several witnesses, but then prosecutors announced they were now also charging Satterfield with “possessing and distributing obscene pictures,” in addition to indecent exposure.38 The judge reserved his decision on the first charge, then reopened proceedings a week later to admit as evidence the issue of Sunshine and Health which featured Satterfield’s own article and photographs taken of nude people at Wildwood Lodge—the same piece that had been written to celebrate the park’s remarkable growth.

Confident that the law was on his side, Satterfield acknowledged everything he had written about Wildwood and said the activities that went on there were not inappropriate in any way. “The story is all factual,” he told news reporters. He said the law he was accused of violating was “passed in an era when even the show of an ankle was considered indecent.”39

On Feb. 4, Hardgraves issued his ruling: Satterfield was guilty on both charges.40 He was fined $250 on the indecent exposure conviction and $100 for the obscene pictures. His lawyer appealed the case to the St. Francis County Circuit Court, which scheduled a hearing for May. By now, the NNC had received his pleas for help. It put up the $750 cost of an appeal and also reimbursed Satterfield for his fines. Edith Church said the organization was “determined to clear Gordon of these ridiculous charges, even if necessary to carry them to the U.S. Supreme Court.”41

The law that killed the dream

While Gordon’s case was still working through the courts, however, the legislative hammer fell. On Feb. 13, 1957, seemingly out of the blue, the legislature passed and Gov. Orval Faubus (of segregation infamy) signed Senate Bill No. 95, completely outlawing nudism in the state of Arkansas.42

There were no hearings, no investigations, no testimony. The matter was treated with nonchalance—“a bit of comic relief,” some called it—at the end of a long day of debate on an unrelated tax law.

The measure was different than the litany of indecent exposure and censorship laws that had long been used to prosecute nudists.43 This one explicitly outlawed not just social nudity, nude recreation, or publishing nude photos—it also criminalized supporting nudism as an idea. It stated: “It shall be unlawful for any person, club, camp, corporation, partnership, association, or organization to advocate, demonstrate, or promote nudism.”44

The General Assembly determined that there had “grown up in various parts of the nation and in the State of Arkansas a form of recreation or participation known as nudism which entails such practices as sunbathing, hiking, swimming, and other activities in the nude and in the presence of persons of the opposite sex.”

Such practices, lawmakers decided, “constitute a clear and present danger to the public peace, health, welfare, safety, and morals.” They declared the situation an “emergency” requiring stiff legal sanctions—a fine of $2,500 and up to a year in prison.45

Though the law came as a surprise to national nudist leaders, it hadn’t actually emerged out of thin air. Sawyer, of course, was behind the whole affair. The anti-nudism bill he had tried but failed to get passed in 1955 had been hastily resurrected by an ally, State Sen. C.E. Bell, who represented the district where Wildwood Lodge was located.

Satterfield knew what Sawyer had been up to and tried to warn his allies. In the letter dispatched to ASA Executive Director Norval Packwood before his trial, he said that Sawyer “was broadcasting some of his lies…harassing my employees by threatening to give their names” and saying “that he has another anti-nudist bill introduced in the legislature.”46

Rather than protecting the morals of the people of Arkansas, Satterfield said the preacher had one goal: “Same old Sawyer racket, anything to get money.” He asked the ASA for “financial help, moral support, and a good nudist lawyer.” Before his letter even made it to Packwood’s desk, though, Sawyer’s bill was already law.

Just before Satterfield’s appeal was set to be heard, the ASA jumped into the ring, providing another attorney, Gene Williams, to supplement the legal team.47 With a rival group stepping on the NNC’s turf, Edith Church would not even acknowledge it was ASA who sent the new lawyer, simply referring to them as “another organization” in her later account of the case. The addition of a new attorney meant the hearing would have to be postponed.

The case wound its way through continuances and delays. The circuit court kept pushing the date—at one point because the county was reportedly too broke to hold court—until the appeal was finally heard in October 1957. Church flew back to Arkansas to support Satterfield, while his new lawyer from the ASA, Williams, came armed with a brief that ripped the prosecutors’ arguments to shreds.

But the clock kept ticking. Too many cases were on the docket, and the Wildwood file was repeatedly pushed back on the schedule, day after day. It was starting to look like it would be put off to the next court session, whenever that might be. That’s when Williams started huddling with the county’s lawyers.

“There was talk along the line of not carrying Gordon’s cases to the higher courts,” Church said, “because the Michigan case and several magazine cases, already appealed, were considered more important…. To this, neither Gordon nor I could agree.”48

At the same moment Gordon’s case was working through the Arkansas courts, a legal battle was already unfolding at a higher level in Michigan. In People v. Hildabridle, the state had prosecuted the owners of Sunshine Gardens—the very resort where Sawyer had made his infamous charge at the gates—on obscenity and indecency charges that, if upheld, could have set a devastating national precedent against organized nudism. The case was related to the earlier anti-nudist effort Sawyer had waged in Michigan, which had been taken up by local disciples.

With limited resources and legal attention to go around, nudist movement attorneys concluded that a definitive ruling in Michigan, striking down the state’s ability to prosecute a well-established nudist resort, would do far more for the cause than a misdemeanor fight in a cash-strapped Arkansas county court.

Church and Satterfield were adamant, though: “No deals.” She said the cases “would stand or fall on their own merits” and “if necessary, we would carry them to the highest court in the land.” But in the end, Satterfield’s attorneys struck a deal with prosecutors. The indecent exposure charge was dropped for lack of evidence, and Church and Gordon were promised that the obscene literature charge would also eventually be quietly dropped. It was not; the charge was upheld, and Gordon was fined $100 plus fees.

Hinting again at the NNC-ASA rivalry, Church later implied the lawyers provided by ASA caved prematurely. “Were we sold out?” she asked. “NNC was ready and willing to fight it out all the way, and Gordon was with us on our stand.”

Satterfield seemed less interested in the nudist civil war, at least for the moment.49 Writing to ASA President Maria Park in early 1958, he was philosophical but unbowed: “Until the Arkansas anti-nudist laws are disposed of in some manner and nudism made safe here, we cannot count this a victory, and we have a fight ahead yet.” He thanked both the ASA and NNC for their “financial, moral, and legal support,” but with nudism now explicitly outlawed in Arkansas and no national organization eager to fight a drawn-out appeals process, Wildwood Lodge didn’t last much longer.50

Membership cards were still being issued for 1958, and a report in Sunbathing Review in the spring of that year said the camp had surprisingly not closed and still had sites for cabins, trailers, and tents. The same piece also trashed Arkansas Gov. Faubus for adding the anti-nudism law to the list of things already embarrassing the state, primarily “the question of school integration.”51

Soon enough, though, Satterfield was done with Arkansas. He continued to be a part of the nudist movement, however. By 1960, he’d moved to Dade City, Florida, a hub of Southern U.S. nudism.52 Two years later, he represented NNC at an event hosted by the Floritans and Sunny Acres Lodge.53 He’d been elected to the NNC board of directors the previous year.54

But in 1964, the newsletter of the American Nudist Association, The ANA Essay, said “former NNC Board member” Gordon Satterfield was chosen as the organization’s Man of the Year.55 The article suggests that Satterfield was so honored because he had broken with NNC and joined the new upstart nudist group. The ANA itself was a breakaway from the Eastern Sunbathing Association, which in turn was a division of the American Sunbathing Association.

So, it appears that Satterfield did eventually get caught up in the turf wars, personality battles, and sectarian splits that plagued American nudism in that era, but the full details of his role in it all remain to be uncovered. He died in Florida in August 1968.

What remains

Which brings us to the present. The Ozarcadians are gone, the Oz-Arkansans dissolved long ago, and Wildwood exists only in the pages of old nudist magazines. The state that was once home to the country’s “fastest-growing nudist park” has for almost 70 years been the most anti-nudist jurisdiction in the U.S.A.

The law that ended those early experiments was born in bad faith, passed without debate, and has never been meaningfully challenged in the courts. Amended around the edges over the years, it is today designated as “Arkansas Code § 5-68-204: Nudism.” It stands as the most stringent legal restriction of social nudity in the country, forbidding any two (or more) persons of the opposite sex from being nude in each other’s presence unless they are married or one of them is a medical professional engaged in a procedure or examination.

Most observers at the time the law was passed in 1957 expected it to be quickly struck down, with one jurist comparing it to Tennessee’s law forbidding the teaching of evolution—the Scopes “monkey trial” law.56 An advocacy group called Unconstitutional Arkansas has pushed repeal for years, arguing the statute contravenes the First Amendment’s guarantees of freedom of thought, speech, and association, but the campaign has yet to gain much traction.57

The only entities that have found a workable niche within the law’s restrictions are those operating clothing-optional spaces exclusively for members of a single sex. Magnetic Valley Resort in Eureka Springs is an all-male clothing-optional retreat nestled in the Ozark hills catering to gay, bisexual, and straight men that stays within the narrow lane of what the law permits.58 It strictly follows Arkansas restrictions regarding its clothing-optional areas, which allows such spaces so long as they are not public and members of the opposite sex are not present.

The Boar’s Rut Men’s Campground in southern Arkansas functions on a similar basis—males only. No doubt Rev. Sawyer and the conservative lawmakers of the 1950s would be appalled to learn that, though they managed to squash “mainstream” social nudism, they inadvertently left a loophole in state law allowing gay nudist recreation to flourish.

These are thin threads of continuity to what came before—a couple of clothing-optional men’s retreats—in an otherwise nude-free state. Of course, it would be foolish to think Arkansans aren’t getting naked outdoors. With its vast stretches of Ozark wilderness, its hidden swimming holes and isolated trails, the Natural State undoubtedly harbors more outdoor nudity than its legislators would care to acknowledge. But none of it is organized or protected.

So, until the legislature is someday moved to act or a court finally weighs in, the Natural State will remain, in one specific sense, profoundly unnatural—the only state in America where taking off your clothes and advocating social nudism are both not just taboo, but illegal. 🪐

Special thanks to the American Nudist Research Library and the Western Nudist Research Library for access to the archival nudist publications referenced in this article.

Let me paint you a picture. It’s late on a Tuesday and you’re scrolling HBO Max looking for something, anything, to turn your brain off after a long day. You stumble onto a show where six people are standing in colored pods, completely naked, while a single person slowly eliminates them one by one. The pods lift from the feet up. First the legs, then the torso, then the face. And somehow, improbably, you are absolutely riveted.

That’s Naked Attraction for you. The British Channel 4 dating show launched in 2016, landed on HBO Max in 2023 without so much as a trailer, and has been causing exactly the kind of pearl-clutching hand-wringing it deserves ever since. The Parents Television Council reportedly called for its removal, critics at The Telegraph asked “how low can this dating show go?”, and conservative watchdog groups lost their collective minds. Meanwhile, the rest of us have been watching it in our living rooms, alternating between laughing, gasping, and learning something genuinely new about ourselves and our bodies.

I’m here to tell you that the pearl-clutchers got this one wrong.

Here’s what critics keep misrepresenting: Naked Attraction is not pornography. It’s not even close. Host Anna Richardson — a clergyman’s daughter who also hosted Channel 4’s The Sex Education Show for years — presides over the whole thing with the matter-of-fact cheerfulness of someone who has genuinely made peace with the human body in all its strange and varied glory. The nudity is frank, yes. But it’s treated as a natural state, and different body types are celebrated throughout. If that sounds familiar to anyone who’s spent time in naturist spaces, it should.

The format is simple: a contestant picks from six prospective dates standing on a soundstage in individual color-coded pods. Their bottom halves are revealed first. One person is eliminated. The dividers rise further, revealing torsos, then faces and voices, until only two of the six prospects remain. For the finale, the original contestant strips bare in front of those two before choosing one person to date. There is something almost refreshingly utilitarian about the whole exercise. No one is performing a personality yet. No one is running a hustle. It’s just bodies, honestly present, waiting to be seen.

Those of us who’ve been clothes-free in communal spaces for years have always known something that mainstream culture is still slowly arriving at: when you remove clothing from an environment, you also remove a massive amount of social performance. What remains is something much more honest. And surprisingly, much less sexual than most people assume. The bodies on screen are real bodies — stretch marks, asymmetries, surgical scars, amputations, all the textures of a life actually lived in a physical form. More than one contestant lineup includes an amputee or person with some other disability. From a virgin to a polyamorous couple looking for a third, the show runs the gamut in representing different experiences with intimacy and attraction. Compare that to every other dating show on television, where everyone has apparently just stepped out of a fashion ad. The contrast is not subtle.

I want to be precise about the body positivity question because that phrase gets thrown around so casually now it’s lost half its meaning. What Naked Attraction does is something more specific and arguably more useful. The show treats its diverse cast as naturally chill — inclusive of sexualities, ages, skin colors, body types, and people with medical issues — and it doesn’t make any of that feel forced. That restraint matters. Performed wokeness on television tends to be more alienating than affirming. This show just puts real bodies on screen and lets that be enough. Woven into each episode are factoids, statistics, and taboo-breaking bits of information about anatomy, the history of certain sexual practices, trends in grooming and body hair, and tips for intimacy. That sex education component is earnest and if you go in without defensiveness, actually kind of delightful. Richardson delivers these facts with the tone of a slightly bawdy favorite aunt, and it works.

Honesty compels me to acknowledge that the show is not without its contradictions. If the concept is to normalize regular bodies and lead with physical attraction, the casting process complicates that somewhat. Producers still hand-select candidates, and there are patterns that suggest some degree of conventional TV logic at work behind the scenes. The show is imperfect. Television is a commercial product, and it can’t fully escape that gravity, even when it’s trying to push against it.

The show can also feel rather jaw-droppingly brutal at times, with contestants being dismissed for every superficial reason imaginable. Rejection is part of any dating show, but watching someone walk off a stage naked after being eliminated because of the shape of their ankles is a particular flavor of uncomfortable that even the most body-confident among us might wince at. Still, contestants are required to take a psychological evaluation during the audition process to ensure they can handle public response afterward. That’s more care than most reality formats bother with.

The real reason Naked Attraction makes Americans so uncomfortable has nothing to do with the nudity itself. America’s deep discomfort with the unclothed body — a legacy of Puritanism — has always treated nudity as inherently shameful or sexual. The show is a direct challenge to that framework, and the discomfort people feel watching it is actually quite diagnostic. It’s telling you something about how thoroughly you’ve been trained to fear your own body.

Naturists have been pushing back against that framework for generations. The idea that a naked body is not automatically a sexual body — that flesh can simply exist without being either sanitized or eroticized, that seeing diversity in bodies makes you more comfortable in your own skin rather than less. Naked Attraction gets there sideways, through the vehicle of a dating format, but it gets there.

There’s real courage in what the contestants do. Stepping into that pod, whatever your reasons, whatever your confidence level, takes something. The show honors that, mostly, and if it sends even a handful of viewers to bed a little more at peace with what they see in the mirror, then it’s doing something worth defending.

Put it this way: I’ve heard far worse arguments for keeping your clothes on. 🪐

Check out Dustin’s personal Substack, :

1 Naturist Life

What Dating Naked teaches us about how not to represent naturism

The show promised to strip away pretense. Instead, it revealed how little mainstream media understands about clothes-free living…

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a month ago · 40 likes · 5 comments · Dustin Cox

VALIE EXPORT made nudity into confrontation—and confrontation into politics. The Austrian performance artist and filmmaker died May 14 in Vienna, three days before what would have been her 86th birthday. She was 85. Her gallerist, Thaddaeus Ropac, said the cause was complications from a fall at her home.

Born Waltraud Lehner in Linz, Austria, EXPORT spent much of her early life rejecting identities imposed on her by family, religion, and the expectations placed on women in postwar Europe. Around 1967 she adopted a new name, styled entirely in capitals: VALIE EXPORT. Part nickname, part appropriation of an Austrian cigarette brand, the name itself was already an act of refusal.

She became internationally known for two performances staged in 1968. In Action Pants: Genital Panic, she walked through a Munich movie theater wearing crotchless pants, confronting seated audiences with the body they had come to consume at a safe remove. In Tap and Touch Cinema, she walked city streets with a curtained box strapped over her chest, inviting strangers to reach inside and touch her bare breasts—for no more than 33 seconds—while holding eye contact throughout. The response was not gentle: her work drew hate mail, death threats, and court charges of indecency. She was undeterred.

Her use of nudity was always precise—never incidental. In 1970 she had a garter belt tattooed onto her thigh before a live audience, a permanent inscription of patriarchal expectation onto her own skin. In 1971 she rolled naked on shards of glass, forcing a confrontation between the idealized nude of the male gaze and its painful reality. EXPORT understood nudity not as decoration but as a site of power, projection, shame, and control—a place where the politics of looking itself could be exposed and contested.

That tension remains strikingly contemporary. Long before social media, surveillance culture, and AI-generated imagery transformed the politics of representation, EXPORT was already asking who controls the image of the body and what happens when the body refuses passive consumption.

Her work existed in a different tradition than organized naturism, but it moved through the same cultural fault lines: censorship, bodily autonomy, public nudity, and the assumption that the unclothed body is inherently obscene. Where naturism often seeks normalization, EXPORT sought confrontation—though for her, confrontation was never separate from liberation.

Her career extended far beyond her most famous performances. She published “Women’s Art: A Manifesto” in 1972, co-founded the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative, and represented Austria at the Venice Biennale alongside Maria Lassnig in 1980. In 2017 she opened the VALIE EXPORT Center Linz, dedicated to media and performance art archives. Near the end of her life she reflected that her work would face even greater suppression today—that the struggle for an authentic representation of women’s bodies was far from finished. 🪐

The American Association for Nude Recreation cites its beginning with the formation of the International Nudist Conference in 1931. Their centennial is approaching in five years. But that history was largely written through the perspective of Rev. Ilsley Boone, not Kurt Barthel.

New information suggests the beginning may be considerably earlier than the familiar 1931 story.

Between Cec Cinder’s The Nudist Idea and the recent first-ever English translation of Gui Hong’s Birthright Bodily Freedom—along with Gui Hong’s preface to his translation of two French authors’ accounts of Germany in 1928, Portrayal of the New Life in Germany—there is fresh material to consider. It changes the picture somewhat.

But first, what do we even mean by “the beginning” in this context? Should it be the incorporation of an entity that has changed its name multiple times, or the moment a group of people first agreed on the concept and went out and actually did it? Is the policy what is written in the book that is on the shelf, or what is actually done in practice? Perhaps going backward is a way to approach this conundrum.

AANR was named in 1995. Its structure didn’t change, so it’s really the American Sunbathing Association—new set of clothes? Oh no, not that comparison. New haircut. The ASA was named in 1937. Its purpose didn’t change, so it’s really the International Nudist Conference with a new haircut. The INC formed in 1931 under Rev. Ilsley Boone, who came out of the American League of Physical Culture—and that’s where AANR currently plants its flag, making the organization 95 years old.

You get the pattern. And in 1931 it does get confusing.

The INC wasn’t the only thing that came out of the ALPC in 1931. Kurt Barthel—German-born, where Boone was American—led a parallel organization out of the same parent group: the International Nudist League (note: not Conference), which was actually international at the time, through its direct connection to Leipzig, Germany — unlike the INC, which was not international despite its name. Note the use of “League” as we go back.

There does appear to have been a catalyst for this split. At the time, Bernarr Macfadden was publishing the widely read Physical Culture magazine out of New York City. Macfadden had been writing favorably about air baths and nude exercise since 1900, with a clear description of social mixed-sex nudist activity by 1904—but his definition of physical culture encompassed serious exercise, wholesome diet, abstention from alcohol, avoidance of stimulants including coffee and tobacco, and no consumption of any dead flesh. When Macfadden challenged the ALPC, the group reorganized under two of its members—Barthel and Boone—producing both the INC and the INL almost simultaneously. It is logical that rather than using the 1931 formation of the INC, AANR could look to the organization to which Boone belonged, the ALPC, and continue going back.

So where did the ALPC itself come from? You have to go back further still.

The ALPC was primarily a group of German-Americans, formed in December 1929 under Barthel’s leadership. Boone joined later. And the ALPC had grown out of something earlier—Barthel’s efforts organizing people who had already been gathering in the Hudson River Valley near Peekskill, about 35 miles north of New York City. They had permission to use remote land for nude activities, built small cabins for overnight stays, and called themselves the League of Free Construction of Life—or, depending on the translator, the League for Free Lifestyle, Local Group New York (LFL-LGNY).

Barthel had placed announcements in German-language publications and used his employer’s address—Room 1401, 39 Broadway—as a mailing address for the Local Group. He was offering a familiar experience from the homeland for immigrants. Per Cinder, the first inquiry reportedly came from people in Texas who had spotted Barthel’s announcement. Whatever name we attach to it, Barthel was evidently organizing real activities years before the INC existed.

The connection to Germany appears to have been fairly direct. Barthel had been in contact with Robert Laurer, who published two nudist magazines in Germany for the League for Free Lifestyle: Lachendes Leben (Laughing Life) and Lichtland (Land of Light). Those magazines were circulating in the United States. Barthel reached out to a Leipzig nudist group, and they offered him the chance to establish an American branch—the Free Body Culture Association, or Free Body Culture League, depending on translation. Whether that Leipzig group was based in the city of Egestorf or in the Engelsdorf district of Leipzig—more likely the latter, given its listing in Gui Hong’s Appendix II under the Ost subsection of Leipzig known as Engelsdorf—remains unclear across sources. Gui Hong’s preface states the New York branch was founded out of Leipzig, while the associated publications are listed as coming from Egestorf. There is genuine room for confusion here, and the record may never be fully resolved.

The new documentation comes from two books written in Chinese by Gui Hong in 1930 and published in Shanghai in 1931, translated into English for the first time in 2025. In the preface to the first book, Gui Hong writes plainly: “An association of Leipzig even established a branch in New York five years ago.” Written in 1930, that places the first documented nudist activities in America at approximately 1925.

Birthright Bodily Freedom—the second book, now available in English—fills in the picture further. Gui Hong uses “New Life” as his translation for nudism:

In the United States, the principles of the New Life were utterly unknown three or four years ago. With the increasing development of the New Life movement in Germany, it was introduced to the United States. Over the past three years, the headquarters of the League of Construction of Free Life were established at Room 1401, 39 Broadway, in New York City’s financial center. The leading figure of the League was a German named Kurt Barthel. Although the name was in English, the organization was in fact a branch of the League for the Regeneration of Free Life in Egestorf, Germany. Its initial goal was to offer convenience to German New Life practitioners residing in the United States, including facilities such as a gymnasium.

In summer, members would go to the Hudson Highlands near New York City for sunbathing or sporting games. The Hudson Highlands, a plateau between New York City and Albany, were rarely frequented and geographically remote. The League built many small lodges there for members’ accommodation. Though originally established for Germans, the New Life movement—as a novel introduction to the United States—attracted many Americans who joined enthusiastically, as they were by nature a freedom-loving and curious people. Today, most members of the League are American, with a small proportion being German.

By 1930, the movement appears to have already become mostly American, despite its origins in a German immigrant community.

What was the beginning, then? Was it a German-language effort starting in 1925? The LFL-LGNY existed. It had regular outings. It had permission to use land and built cabins on it. It predates the ALPC, which predates the INC. And a December 1934 issue of The Nudist includes a piece by William Calhoun Walker noting organized activities going back to nearly 1900. The documentation for a fully continuous chain to the present remains incomplete—that research continues.

There appears to be well over a century of organized nudism in America, with roots that run considerably deeper than the familiar 1931 story. It is wonderful to know that new information can still appear at any moment from a dusty corner of an antique bookstore. 🪐

Editor’s Note: Carl Hild, PhD is a historian of early nudism. The research behind this piece draws on his recent translation and expanded edition Birthright Bodily Freedom: Portrayal of the New Life of Europeans, available by calling Bookshop Santa Cruz at 831-423-0900 and requesting the local author book by Gui Hong ($25.95 plus shipping).

Forest Emerson, a former president of the American Sunbathing Association, described Rod Swenson in a 1975 letter to Oui Magazine as one of nudism’s newer and less experienced promoters—though with regards to the Ms. All-Bare America contest held at Circle H Ranch on September 9, 1974, he felt Swenson was doing quite well.1 As it would turn out, however, Rod would soon leave mainstream naturism far in the rearview mirror. Living naked, it seems, would not be radical enough for him.

Rod Swenson’s road into the seventies was not unlike many artists of the day. To say he is a controversial figure in nudist circles is an understatement—assuming he is even remembered at all. Born in New York City in 1945, he developed an early passion for painting, earning a scholarship to the Brooklyn Museum and studying at the Art Students League as a teenager, before heading to Colorado to earn a BFA in painting from the University of Denver in 1967.

He then traded painting for conceptual, performance, and neo-Dadaist art, enrolling at Yale University, where he managed to irritate the faculty with his avant-garde ideas but was still awarded a Master’s degree in 1969. His interests also ran toward packaging consumer goods. “I was doing a mass-produced thing,” he has said. “I built a plastic vacuum-forming machine in my studio, which wasn’t too popular.”2

After graduation, Rod kicked around in a few jobs before discovering, of all things, granola on a trip to the West Coast. He had tired of making plastic multiples for their own sake, but now saw an opportunity to combine his packaging know-how with large-scale granola production. In 1971, he founded The Good Shepherd Cereal Company with his brother to mass-produce the first granola stocked in East Coast supermarkets. It was a sensation, expanding rapidly: New York Magazine called it the “patriarch” of granolas and credited the company with commercializing the cereal. Suddenly Rod was president of a large, successful company — though he saw it differently. “For me, it was sculpture, not food. I didn’t call it art, but that’s what it was.”

A rich man at 22, he was written up in business features as a “hippie capitalist.” He could have stayed with it, but he sold the business to Sovex Foods in 1973 and decided to do something completely different. He joined Sunshine Park nudist club in New Jersey and turned his attention to the health aspects of nudism.

To outsiders, Rod looked every inch the young nudist: a lithe body, a golden perma-tan, a receding hairline, and a small satyr’s beard. But he was a natural entrepreneur. In 1974, he was commissioned to set up and run a natural foods restaurant at Cypress Cove Resort in Florida, and that same year he published a guide to naturist resorts. His most high-profile venture, however, was the creation of All-Bare Entertainment Corporation, whose principal activity was staging the Ms. All Bare contest — “America’s Honest Beauty Pageant.”

Ms. All-Bare America | Circle H Ranch 1974

By 1974, the energy crisis was hitting nudist clubs where it hurt. Earl and Lucille Hansen, who ran Circle H Ranch in Glen Gardner, New Jersey, were finding that fewer people could afford the gas to drive out and get naked. Earl also complained that his winter electricity bill for the heated pool had tripled to nearly $600 a week. The typical weekend winter crowd of 100–150 guests in 1972–1973 had dropped to between twenty and fifty. In 1974, to save electricity, he kept the building temperatures down in the sixties — which, especially for nudists, did not work too well. Even at the fully attended New Year’s Eve party, few guests were willing to be nude with the heat so low.

Besides the summer theatrical productions (a long-running series called Barely Proper), the resort tried other ways to generate revenue — at least a few of which look more questionable through the lens of 2025. Miss Nude Metro, a regional event of the Miss Nude World pageant, was held at Circle H and open to the public for $10 tickets, with attendance capped at 1,000. The contest ran at the resort at least in 1972, 1973, and 1974, with advertisements casting wide for contestants. Jacqueline Kong won the 1973 event at Circle H and went on to take the 1973 Miss Nude Galaxy title in Quebec. That same year, Circle H hosted the first-ever Mr. Nude Metropolitan contest.3

Apparently willing to try anything to keep the pool warm and the lights on, Lucille and Earl partnered with Rod Swenson. In August 1974, he trademarked the name and organized the Ms. All-Bare America Pageant for September, held after that year's Barely Proper run. It was marketed as a bona fide nudist pageant sponsored by the national organization. Don Imus served as master of ceremonies. Some 2,000 spectators attended, and the contest was won by 21-year-old Wendy Blodgett, an aspiring actress from Vermont then living in New York. The third runner-up was a Black woman from South Carolina — something that would have been unheard of a few years earlier. Although that may have improved the organizers' social responsibility score, the exploitative nature of this particular “beauty pageant” seems even more questionable than most, especially in the two later years of production. After 1974, the event moved to a burlesque theater in New York. Blodgett parlayed her win into a Penthouse Pet of the Year title in 1975.4

Done as a potential marketing bonanza, it seems doubtful many of those ticket-buyers ever returned to Circle H as members.

A few weeks later, at Sardi’s restaurant in New York City, Blodgett appeared at a press conference wearing nothing but red platform shoes. She said the event was a plea for “accepting our own bodies and each other's bodies without fear, shame, or disgust.”5

The Ms. All-Bare America ran for three years, from 1974 to 1976, and received substantial coverage from mainstream news outlets, including lengthy interviews with the earnest, deep-thinking man behind the enterprise. The second pageant was held at the Beacon Theater in New York in September 1975, and Rod insisted it would be no tacky throwaway, no peep show — it was to be a fantasia. He had big plans: closed-circuit broadcast to venues across the country, major sponsorship, a winner rocketed to stardom. The 1975 and 1976 shows were, by most accounts, even tackier than the one held in New Jersey.

New York’s Captain Kink’s Sex Fantasy Theater

Rod, however, had already seen greater potential for outrageous performance, and the Ms. All-Bare Pageant was nothing compared to what came next. He called his new show Captain Kink’s Sex Fantasy Theater. Despite its content, it was a hit from the start. “The deal started on a week-by-week basis but soon drew solid crowds,” he recalled. “It seated about 150 people, and we ended up running five shows a day beginning at lunchtime seven days a week.” The press dubbed him the Barnum of Beaver. One of the young women performing on stage was Wendy O. Williams. Swenson recognized her potential almost immediately — and then the city started making arrests, including Williams herself.

The Plasmatics invade Sunshine Park

Convinced that Wendy would make an extraordinary front woman for a band, Swenson developed the punk rock group the Plasmatics in 1977 and managed them throughout their run. They quickly became a sensation around New York City. Williams performed nearly naked, typically with electrician’s tape over her nipples and a dominatrix aesthetic. The band built a reputation for chaotic, destructive live shows: chain-sawing guitars, sledgehammering television sets, destroying speaker cabinets, blowing up automobiles on stage. Billboard Magazine called the Plasmatics “the absolute limit of what can be accomplished in rock and roll theatrics.”6

It is hard to put this band in perspective forty-some years later. Wendy was a charismatic figure — screaming insurrectionist lyrics with shredded clothes barely covering her body, demolishing stacks of televisions with sledgehammers. One song, “Butcher Baby,” featured a chainsaw through a guitar in place of a solo. Here was a vegetarian who didn’t drink or smoke and ran six miles a day, appearing nearly naked on stage as a muscular, mohawked woman, gleefully destroying the beloved symbols of American middle-class complacency. The band emerged during a time of rampant materialism and Wendy was in the business of symbolic destruction — consumerism, conformity, complacency. This wasn’t just entertainment; this was warfare. And the ringmaster behind it was Rod Swenson.

Since he knew the owner, Swenson brought the band to Sunshine Park nudist club in Cape May, New Jersey for a live performance on June 18, 1980. By then, Sunshine Park was a failing enterprise, in frequent fights with local officials over zoning and health codes. While the band was there, they shot the video for the lead single from their debut album — the Monkey Suit video, which includes the band submerging a Cadillac into the pool.

The Plasmatics went on to make five studio albums and broke real ground in the genre. Both Wendy and Rod were beaten and arrested by Milwaukee police in 1981. The band broke up in 1987. Swenson went on to teach at the University of Connecticut, and after a period focused largely on caring for animals, Wendy O. Williams died by suicide a decade after the band's end.

Swenson rarely held press conferences during the Plasmatics years — Wendy handled that well enough on her own. Afterward, he became a somewhat reclusive figure who almost never discussed his past with the band. In yet another turn, and in keeping with a lifelong interest in science, he became a fellow at the University of Connecticut's Center for the Ecological Study of Perception and Action, publishing research on the laws of evolution, thermodynamics, and entropy. As far as anyone knows, the weekend at Sunshine Park was his last foray into nudism. 🪐

On Wednesday, May 13, composer-conductor Leonard Lehrman and soprano Helene Williams join host Mark Storey for The Naturist Society Foundation’s Exploring Nudist Culture series, the members-only monthly Zoom program. This month’s topic: nudity in opera.

The session begins at 6 p.m. Pacific / 8 p.m. Central / 9 p.m. Eastern. TNSF members can register here: https://naturistsociety.com/event/enc-202605/

Lehrman and Williams co-founded The Naturist Society’s Opera/Musical Theatre Special Interest Group in 1989 after organizing what is believed to be the first Naturist Opera Workshop at Domaine de Bélézy in France, and have performed at TNS gatherings ever since. Lehrman has composed more than 270 works, including 12 operas, served as assistant chorus master at the Metropolitan Opera, and is among the leading scholars of Marc Blitzstein’s work. Williams is a soprano and actress who has performed with Lehrman in more than 700 concerts across four continents.

Naked Age listeners: Leonard and Helene are subjects of an upcoming episode. Consider this your overture. 🎭

Not yet a TNSF member? Sign up. 🪐

Editor’s Note: Planet Nude has previously published a review of Diary of a Nudist (1961)—Brett Marcella’s close reading of Doris Wishman’s filmography, written as a fan and critic. This piece by Dustin comes at the same film from somewhere else entirely, part cultural argument, part queer history, and part personal essay. A film this strange can hold more than one reading.

Haven’t seen it? We’re screening Diary of a Nudist live on Discord next Friday, May 15th. Doors open with trivia at 7:15pm (Eastern Time / 4:15pm Pacific); film starts at 7:30pm. Watch a nude movie in the nude, with other nudists. There are worse ways to spend a Friday.

Sixty-five years ago, a low-budget film shot at a Florida nudist resort was considered so dangerous it required elaborate legal cover just to be screened. A 1957 New York Appeals Court ruling had loosened restrictions enough to allow films depicting nudism in theaters — but only if they carried implied educational merit. Doris Wishman, a recently widowed New Yorker who had borrowed money from her sister to start making movies, understood exactly how to use that loophole. The result was Diary of a Nudist, a 72-minute argument dressed up as a scandal.

Watching it now, as a gay naturist, is a disorienting experience. Not because it’s shocking — but because it is so thoroughly, almost defiantly, not.

The plot is simple: a newspaper editor stumbles upon a nudist club and assigns his best reporter, Stacy Taylor, to infiltrate it and write a damning exposé. Stacy becomes convinced of the sincerity of the nudist philosophy, refuses to file a negative report, and the editor eventually joins the club himself. Two skeptics walk in and come out converts. It will not surprise you.

But the predictability is almost the point. Beneath its creaky mechanics and post-dubbed dialogue, Diary of a Nudist is making a sustained, deadpan case for the radical normalcy of the human body. The film opens with a figure reciting the credo of the American Sunbathing Association — asserting that sunshine and fresh air produce genuine physical and mental benefits. Film historian Elizabeth Purchell has described this as a deliberate legal maneuver, a classic exploitation-era “square-up” designed to give censors an educational justification for what follows. It worked. Watching it today, it also reads as a thesis statement.

As Wishman biographer Michael Bowen has noted, nudism at the time was, in some ways, a sexually conservative ideology. People at nudist clubs weren’t supposed to become aroused. They were there to reconnect with their bodies as a natural fact rather than a charged one. That framing sits oddly against the film’s reputation as a skin flick — but it’s also exactly what the film depicts. People play shuffleboard. They drink coffee. They throw pebbles into a stream. In one of the film’s most telling scenes, two men relaxing poolside are approached by an attractive woman. They give her a few polite words and go back to discussing the Dodgers. Wishman plays it for a gentle laugh. The subtext is the whole argument: in a naturist space, a body stops being a distraction.

As a gay man, that argument lands differently than it might for others. The gay male body has spent decades being weaponized in the culture — alternately hypersexualized and criminalized, held up as evidence of deviance or desire depending on who was doing the framing. Naturism, for me, has always been a corrective to that. A space where the body is neither spectacle nor accusation. Watching Diary of a Nudist, even through its considerable limitations, I felt a kinship with its central insistence: that undress is not inherently erotic, and that the conflation of the two is a cultural choice, not a biological fact.

Wishman’s wide-shot cinematography keeps a respectful distance from her subjects. The approach invites you to look without leering — less titillation than observation, almost ethnographic in its patience. There’s something genuinely generous in that, even now.

The technical limitations are real. Since the cast were amateurs, all dialogue was post-dubbed at Titra Sound Studio in New York, producing a dreamlike remove — not unlike a Godzilla picture where the mouths and the words have stopped cooperating. Censorship laws meant the camera was in constant negotiation with the human body, resorting to strategic shrubbery and elaborate angles to keep certain anatomy perpetually off-frame. There is a volleyball game between clothed and unclothed players that becomes almost avant-garde in its commitment to filming everyone exclusively from behind.

And yet. There’s something genuinely moving about a film that had to fight this hard just to say that a naked body in the sun is not a moral failing. In 2026, naturist content still gets flagged and removed from social media platforms that happily host far worse. Nudist venues still fight zoning battles with neighbors who have never set foot on the property. The argument Diary of a Nudist was making in 1961 has not been won. It has just moved to different platforms.

Wishman succeeded repeatedly in a male-dominated film industry at a time when almost no women were permitted to produce or direct at all. She didn’t wait for permission. She borrowed money from her sister and started making movies. That fact gives the film an additional layer when viewed today. A woman director, using the only genre available to her, made a film arguing that ordinary human bodies deserve to be seen without shame. The exploitation context was real. So was the argument.

Diary of a Nudist is not a great film. It is a curious, cozy, occasionally absurd film with a jazz-lounge soundtrack and a plot you can summarize in a sentence. But it is also a document of something that still matters: the long, slow, unfinished project of convincing a culture that bodies are not inherently dangerous. For a gay naturist watching in 2026, that feels less like history and more like homework. 🪐

We’re hosting a live screening of Diary of a Nudist on our Discord next Friday, May 15th (doors at 7:15pm ET / 4:15pm PT with trivia; film at 7:30).

A restored 35mm print is also available on the Vinegar Syndrome/AGFA Blu-ray set The Films of Doris Wishman: The Daylight Years. It’s also available to stream for free at archive.org

Notes

• Purchell, Elizabeth. Commentary track on Diary of a Nudist. AGFA/Vinegar Syndrome, The Films of Doris Wishman: The Daylight Years, 2022.

• Bowen, Michael. Interview with Terry Gross. Fresh Air, NPR, March 25, 1998. Archived at freshairarchive.org.

• “Remembering Doris Wishman, a pornographer 60 years ahead of her time.” InsideHook, February 24, 2021.

• “The female gaze of Doris Wishman.” Crooked Marquee, March 3, 2024.

• “Wishman, Doris.” Senses of Cinema, Great Directors series, 2002.

• Diary of a Nudist (1961). Directed by Doris Wishman. IMDb.

• Wikipedia contributors. “Doris Wishman.” Wikipedia, last updated February 2026.

• Wikipedia contributors. “Nudity in film.” Wikipedia, last updated April 2026.

For years, naturists at Praia do Pinho asked the city of Balneário Camboriú for help. The trails leading to Brazil’s first officially recognized naturist beach had become a problem—sexual activity, harassment, behavior that had nothing to do with naturism. The requests went unanswered. There wasn’t enough personnel, they were told. Then, in December 2025, the city banned naturism entirely. Enforcement appeared almost overnight. Paula Duarte Silveira, president of the Federação Brasileira de Naturismo (FBrN), noticed. “Before, there was no effective policing to curb sexual acts on the trails,” she said. “Now there is a strong police presence both on the trails and on the stretch of sand. It’s surprising how quickly enforcement resources increased after the law banning naturism was approved.”

That sequence—neglect, chaos, criminalization—is the story of naturism in Brazil right now. And it is playing out, simultaneously and in opposite directions, on two beaches in the state of Santa Catarina.

Brazil is a country that has never been shy about the body. Carnival puts that on display for the world every year—the costumed and commercially broadcast body, celebrated as national identity. What Brazil has always been less comfortable with is the body that just exists. No performance, no product, no point. That body—the naturist body, the one standing on a beach meaning absolutely nothing by it—keeps running into trouble.

In Santa Catarina, that trouble has a shape and an address. Balneário Camboriú sits about 90 minutes north of Florianópolis along the coast. The two cities share a state and a shoreline. They do not share a policy. While Balneário Camboriú was banning naturism at Pinho in December, Florianópolis was moving, however slowly, toward re-legalizing it at Praia da Galheta. Same coastline. Opposite directions.

At Pinho, FBrN moved fast. Days after police detained a nude man at a campground adjacent to the beach following the ban, the federation filed a collective habeas corpus arguing that nonsexual nudity at a historically naturist beach does not constitute an obscene act under Brazil’s Penal Code. A court agreed. A second ruling in January expanded those protections, issuing a collective safe-conduct order that blocked arrests on the sand and in the sea while the broader case proceeded.

Those rulings did not overturn the city’s ban. The ban still stands. What the courts did was draw a line between municipal regulation and criminal law—a city can restrict land use, but it cannot automatically treat a nude naturist as a criminal. That distinction matters.

It matters even more now. In the past few weeks, a Santa Catarina court denied FBrN’s request to suspend the municipal ban outright, and as a result the safe-conduct protections have lapsed, meaning effectively that police can once again enforce the prohibition at Pinho.

FBrN has vowed to appeal. The federation’s lawyer has argued that the underlying law was passed improperly and will ultimately be struck down. For now, the beach that started it all—the one where organized Brazilian naturism took root—is legally closed to nudity.

Balneário Camboriú, for its part, has the most expensive real estate per square meter in Brazil. Seven of the country’s ten tallest residential buildings have risen there. The city has been called, without irony, the Dubai of Brazil. Praia do Pinho sits inside a protected coastal zone. The city denies any development plans for the area, but given the circumstances, skeptics draw different conclusions.

Ninety minutes south, the fight looks different. Galheta is not fighting a ban. It is fighting for formal recognition of something that has existed informally for decades. Naturism has been practiced there since the late 1970s. It was legally recognized in 1997. A 2016 reclassification of the area as a protected natural monument quietly removed that authorization without explicitly prohibiting anything—leaving the beach in a gray zone that has persisted ever since. That ambiguity deepened when Complementary Law 130/25 invalidated earlier injunctions that had offered some informal protection, leaving naturists there without any legal footing until the courts intervened.

The organization holding that ground is AGAL, the Associação Amigos da Galheta. Where FBrN is a national federation with legal standing and institutional weight, AGAL is a local nonprofit whose mission is narrower and more rooted: protect the beach, preserve the environment, defend the right to be there. The two jobs have always been the same job at Galheta, where naturists have long functioned as the beach’s most consistent stewards, cleaning up, monitoring the space, reporting problems to a city that rarely responded.

In March 2026, a Santa Catarina court issued a preventive collective habeas corpus protecting Galheta naturists from arrest based solely on nonsexual nudity on the sand and in the sea. The ruling—which AGAL brought—does not authorize naturism, but prevents criminalization of it while the city continues to debate formal regulation.

In the Florianópolis city council, a bill introduced by vereadora Carla Ayres that would re-legalize naturism at Galheta has cleared its first committee and is still moving. The bill’s structure reflects something naturist groups have said consistently: they are not asking for the absence of rules. They are asking for honest ones.

It’s notable that these two fights over naturist use of public space are unfolding so close to one another. What links them is the argument at the center of each challenge. Both beaches have experienced a kind of yo-yo effect, with ordinances and enforcement shifting back and forth in response to pressure on the status quo, the result of diligent work from local advocates. Their argument is consistent: nonsexual nudity, particularly in historically naturist settings, is not a crime. The problems cited by authorities may be real, but they are not caused by naturism itself, and the choice is not as binary as total freedom or total prohibition. Naturist spaces have always operated with rules. The question is whether public authorities are willing to engage with those norms, or whether they will continue to use disorder at the margins as justification for something else entirely.

It seems, perhaps, that the courts in Santa Catarina are beginning to listen, but these fights are not over. That didn’t happen because attitudes changed. It happened because FBrN and AGAL built records, filed petitions, showed up, and gave judges a framework for understanding these beaches as more than convenient problems to manage. That’s what it looks like to fight for naturism. 🪐

More reading:

Naturally (2002)

Directed by Christophe Le Masne

No English subtitles for this French one, I’m afraid. There are Russian subs, which I personally also cannot read, but don’t let that stop you from watching! This one is about a middle-aged couple who share a vacation home with a younger group of friends who practice nudism. The wife, Sandra, is especially made uncomfortable by this, but learns to be more accepting of herself and her own body during their stay. It’s quite cute!

Watch on Youtube

Root Five Nude (1976

Directed by Derek Bailey

A TV documentary following the painter Euan Uglow as he works on the titular painting with a nude model in his studio over the course of several months. It’s wild to see how slow he works, especially given how deceptively simplistic his paintings look. Everything is meticulously marked and measured. Another painting of his, the Diagonal, is shown in progress and it’s mentioned that the model for that had been coming to pose for over a year! Considering how social media has altered things to where artists are now expected to crank out new work at a factory level, the pressures to be constantly productive and always posting, I’d rather go for a slower, more methodical approach like this myself.

Watch on Youtube

Textiles (2001)

Directed by Jérôme Brière

Surrealism is one of the most striking and original art movements of the 20th century, born from the Dada movement and inspired predominantly by Freudian dream logic. People tend to use it as an excuse for nonsensical work all the time, and this feels similar to that, as we watch a nude couple walk along the beach discussing surrealism. It feels like something I might have made up in college, and Michel here really reminds me of people I spent time with back then. What do you think?

Watch on Youtube

Best Day Ever (2017)

Directed by the Nix Brothers

There’s something super notable about this one, as it was co-directed by our very own Evan Nicks (Nix), founder of Planet Nude! And he made this years before getting into nudism himself! Have you ever foreshadowed your own life like this? Weirdly, I know I have. But anyways: a man wakes up to find that work has been canceled, so he goes and spends his day frolicking alone on the beach, deciding to undress when no one is around…or so he suspects. The ending punchline to this made me laugh so hard.

The Galaxy (1973)

Directed by Sabin Bălașa

Surrealism returns with this strange, gorgeous animated short by Romanian painter and animator Sabin Bălașa. This film follows the unfolding of life, as a child is born from star stuff and grows into a man, encountering nature. It’s humanity’s history as cosmic mythmaking and pure visual storytelling!

What do you think? Which one was your favorite?

Leave a comment

What the wheel is, where it came from, and how it ended up in a nudist club in New Jersey is a history worth knowing.

Otto Feick was a locksmith and railway worker, a union man, born in 1890 in the Palatinate. In 1921, French occupation forces imprisoned him in Mainz for passive resistance. Sitting in his cell, he remembered something from childhood: two iron hoops his grandfather had made, connected with crossbars, down which the young Feick had rolled himself down a hill. He began working out the geometry of a gymnastic version in his head. After his release, he moved to Schönau an der Brend in the Rhön Mountains, set up a metalworking shop, and built what he had been imagining in prison. He named it for his new home. The patent was issued on 8 November 1925.

From the start the Rhönrad had two lives running in parallel. In schools and gymnastics clubs it became a training apparatus, valued for building coordination, strength, and spatial awareness. In variety theatres and public exhibitions it was spectacle. Feick toured a performance troupe through German variety venues, including the Berliner Wintergarten, and brought the wheel to London in 1927, France in 1928, and New York in 1929. A women’s Rhönrad race appeared in a 1929 MGM film. At the 1936 Berlin Olympics, 120 performers gave a demonstration before a global audience. By then, some 20,000 wheels had been manufactured.

All of that was clothed. The Rhönrad was a mainstream German gymnastic apparatus with an active public life well before it ever appeared at a naturist gathering.

Feick’s personal story ended badly. His son Fritz was killed in the war. Feick sold his patent and spent his final years in poor health and poor circumstances in Schönau. The sport was officially recognized by the German gymnastics federation in 1959. Feick died that October, before the first German championship was held.

The wheel outlasted him.

The Lebensreform movement from which FKK grew was a response to industrial modernity—to the sedentary, unhealthy body that factory life and urban crowding had produced. For working-class Germans especially, access to fresh air, sunlight, and physical movement was not an aesthetic preference but a genuine health reform, aimed at bodies made sick by poverty and grueling labor conditions. Nudism was one expression of that impulse, and physical culture—gymnastics, hiking, outdoor exercise—was central to FKK practice from the beginning.

Adolf Koch was the most influential figure in early nude gymnastics. He came from the socialist left, and his schools were explicitly working-class institutions, holding nude gymnastics sessions across thirteen branches in Germany by the late 1920s and enrolling thousands. In 1929, his Berlin school hosted the first International Conference on Free Body Culture, drawing 200 delegates from 23 countries. The Rhönrad, already well established in German gymnastics culture, was adopted into this world—performed at FKK gatherings, youth camps, and INF congresses through the postwar decades, documented in publications like Licht und Schönheit and Die Neue Zeit.

But the Lebensreform tradition Koch drew from was ideologically wide. The vocabulary of the healthy, active, unencumbered body was shared across a political spectrum that ranged from working-class health reformers to völkisch nationalists for whom physical culture was inseparable from ideas about racial fitness. These were not the same project, but they used overlapping language, and that overlap proved consequential. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they banned Koch’s schools as Marxist. Under pressure, he rebranded and published language about racial hygiene in a failed bid for tolerance. The regime shut him down anyway. He was cleared after the war. The episode is a reminder of how contested the body was as a site of political meaning in that era—and how the same ideas about health and physical freedom could be put to very different ends.

In 1929, the same year Feick brought the Rhönrad to New York, a German immigrant named Kurt Barthel founded the American League for Physical Culture, advertising first in Berlin nudist magazines and later in American newspapers. On Labor Day of that year, Barthel led the first organized nudist outing in the United States—seven people in the Hudson Highlands in upstate New York. In 1932, he purchased property in Liberty Corner, New Jersey, and founded Sky Farm.

The steel wheel on those grounds is part of that migration. Whether Barthel brought it himself or it arrived through some other early channel, it belongs to the same movement of people and ideas that carried FKK practice westward—the gymnastics, the philosophy, the physical culture, and the objects that went with them. Most visitors walk past it without knowing any of this. 🪐

There are so many borders and boundaries in our lives, both physical and psychological. Navigating them is always tricky, and there’s always a question of just how necessary many of these boundaries are. In the 2016 film A Decent Woman, directed by Lukas Valenta Rinner and written by Rinner, Ana Godoy, Ariel Gurevich, and Martin Shanley, a woman discovers a new life for herself as she crosses physical and personal borders herself, with some unusual results.

Thirty two year old Belén gets a job as a maid in a fancy, gated community outside of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The woman who owns the home she’s hired to clean follows her around, nitpicking as she works. The woman’s athletic son mostly ignores her. While trimming the hedges outside, Belen discovers something that will change her life: a nudist resort lies next door!

The film solely follows Iride Mockert as Belén, who seems largely unaffected by her surroundings. It’s clear she needs this maid job, but there’s no explanation as to how she landed here and no emotion in her. Even as she goes out on a carnival date with the neighborhood’s gatekeeper, she seems like she’s somewhere else. She seems to be humoring him more than anything, there’s no chemistry between the two even when they go to a love hotel together. When she finally works up the courage to enter the nudist resort, it’s peaceful and idyllic in a way that the gated neighborhood is not. Belén finally undresses and joins the community there at the film’s halfway mark, where she is welcomed with open arms. It’s here that we see her openly smile for the first time.

At first, it feels like this may not be the community for her either: the members here are certainly nudists, but they are openly sexual swingers, holding tantric sex lessons and erotic poetry sessions outdoors, with Belén later running across a man masturbating alone. Definitely not what real naturist clubs are like and more of what outside people suspect goes on, which made me feel a little uneasy. Despite the discomfort this initially causes in her, she returns whenever the family she works for goes off on an athletic trip. We see her truly happy here, and she becomes more and more distant from those on the other side of the fence.

There’s obviously a stark contrast between the two communities, with the electrified fence that stands between them being uniquely emphasized and made into a plot point. The gated community itself already stands in contrast from its surroundings, especially when we see Belén walking through poorer neighborhoods, while the nudist resort is shown as a true paradise. There is the old, false statement that nudity is a great equalizer, but that very much seems to be the case in the community here, with boundaries between its members dissipating. The scenes here are so quiet and serene, despite complaints of noise from the gated community. We see young and old bodies of different shapes, sizes, and color, all sharing the space together happily. The sex stuff is a little weird, sure, but it’s all consensual, it’s far from the only thing the community here does, and it truly feels like Belén has found her place. It’s hard not to feel good for her, and it’s a perfect escape from the doting socialite Diana and her angry son. There is an emptiness in the gated community, no connection between anyone, whereas in the nudist resort everyone is connected and close with each other regardless of physical differences.

The problem lies in the movie’s finale: tragedy strikes, and things turn violent between the two communities quite suddenly. It feels out of nowhere. It doesn’t quite work, as it’s so tonally different from the rest of the movie. The satirical elements and darker humor are there from the beginning, sure, along with foreshadowing from the hunter who is always out shooting the nearby parrots, but I don’t think it’s enough to pull that big swing off, and the actual ending itself doesn’t hit the mark either, feeling inconclusive. It feels like a different movie got tacked on at the end. I understand this movie had a fairly small budget, and maybe that meant a lot had to be cut or simply couldn’t be filmed due to different constraints, but it’s hard to ignore the jarring effect it has. I have to say that this swerve does make it interesting and keeps it from entirely following the bog standard nudist movie formula of “outsider discovers and falls in love with nudism,” as well as making it yet another example of nudist fiction that gets really weird with things.

Despite that, the film is absolutely still worth watching. The filmmaking is subtle and simple, with typically very little camera movement, long takes, and music used sparingly. All of the nudist resort scenes are gorgeous, with painterly compositions adding a dreamy quality to the movie, and the chill vibes there remind me of Doris Wishman’s own nudist films. The sexuality on display is all shot tastefully, on top of being brief when shown. The movie is available to stream on Kanopy under its original Spanish title of Los Decentes, and can be rented on Prime Video as well. Kanopy’s subtitles have some misspellings and issues, but nothing that could truly disrupt the viewing experience. 🪐

More to explore:

Tonight, Planet Nude contributor joins Mark Storey for The Naturist Society Foundation’s ongoing Exploring Nudist Culture series, a members-only Zoom program focused on nudist history, culture, and ideas. Storey, a longtime N magazine editor and TNSF consulting editor, hosts the series.

The session begins at 6 p.m. Pacific / 9 p.m. Eastern. TNSF members can request the Zoom invite here: https://naturistsociety.com/event/enc-202604/

Dr. Hild’s talk centers on New Life in Europe (1931), a rare Chinese-language book by diplomat Timothy M. Wang that Hild has had translated into English for the first time—and expanded into a new edition titled Birthright Bodily Freedom: Portrayal of the New Life of Europeans, alongside new research on social nakedness in Asia and the deeper prehistory of nudism before the German movement’s well-documented rise.

This work reflects Hild’s broader focus as a historian of early nudism, tracing overlooked origins and global threads that reshape how the movement is understood. The translation and accompanying research have been several years in the making, and this presentation offers one of the first public looks at that effort. If you’re interested in nudist history, Carl’s work—and especially this new book—is one to watch.

And if you’re not already a TNSF member, sign up! This event alone is probably worth joining, though the organization is well worth supporting for many other reasons. 🪐

Storm Clouds was originally serialized in Czech by Bureš from 2013 to 2014, and was translated into English by Juří Bernášek, with the English lettering done by Cor Van De Sande. A French translation also exists on the website. The comic is set a few years after what is known as the Naturist Revolution: people no longer wear clothes, and clothing itself is now outlawed contraband. At Castle Weaver, it is rumored that hidden away somewhere in the building is a tomb filled with these forbidden textiles, and there are folks out there who would like to get their hands on it. The castle’s former owner was a textile baron called Count Krakomar, who had died shortly after the revolution by hanging himself.

The story opens with the castle’s manager Adam Nilsky picking up a hitchhiker calling herself Eve, who states that she’s a student at the university and missed the bus to Castle Weaver. Both are on their way to a seminar about the growth of trees being held there. When they get there, Adam introduces Eve to everyone, gives a little talk about the castle, and warns everyone not to leave the castle grounds in the evening and to stay in their dormitories.

When night falls, a storm begins to approach and people start acting weird. Renata, one of the students, gets up to find a bathroom and is followed by a strange, clothed and masked figure. She finds a dress and puts it on before she screams and goes missing. In her room, Professor Triest withdraws some carefully hidden lingerie and puts it on. We also learn that Eve has brought a gun with her, but for what purpose, we don’t know.

There are so many questions set up in this opening, and I was expecting this to turn into a kind of locked door mystery with a killer on the loose, but I was very wrong, and the story took a surprising twist that really surprised me. The mysteries unfold at a rapid pace. If you wish to read for yourself without being spoiled, I recommend you do so now, as it’s a pretty big deal that drives the rest of the comic.

The spoiler is this: After the two run into each other while snooping around the castle, Eve reveals to Adam that she is actually an alien from the planet Naturn in Galaxy NUO35. She reveals the history of her home, which had its own naturist revolution. However, the leader of an underground resistance, Textyran (you’ll notice none of the names here are subtle), escaped the planet and came to Earth! Eve suspects he is plotting to undo Earth’s own revolution and reintroduce clothes to the population and has followed him to Earth to stop him. Okay, no more spoilers from here on in.

From there, more twists keep coming as the comic barrels towards a surprisingly downbeat, yet thoughtful conclusion. It definitely feels like it tried something different, and I appreciate it for that.

The art is a really big draw for this comic: heavy ink outlines, sometimes too heavy, over top some lovely watercolor paints that I can’t help but smile at. Castle Weaver itself is beautifully illustrated, packed with detail and history and very much a character itself. Unfortunately, the regular cast is rather bland, which dampened the impact of some of the story’s twists. An issue I had was trying to tell most of the characters apart: everyone is nude, but of similar build and their faces and hairstyles just weren’t quite unique enough for me to be able to easily differentiate between everyone. The English translation has its weaknesses, and the lettering isn’t a very professional job, but none of that is enough to make this a difficult or frustrating read. My other big issue, regarding the story is that I’d like to know more about the naturist revolution, how it took place.

It was refreshing that not once does anybody in the comic mention anything about the joys and benefits of nudism, which is something that gets crammed into almost all other nudist media. Everyone here is nude, there’s no need to explain it because, frankly, nobody who isn’t at least interested in nudism in general is going to read this. Within the history of the world in this comic, we’re past that point. To that end, there was something that caught my interest when I browsed the comments beneath the final page, and it was this particular critique by an unnamed user in 2019:

The commenter points out how the comic is just preaching to the choir, and I was reminded of a quote from the most popular Letterboxd review of the movie Act Naturally, which has stuck with me for years ever since I first read it: “If Act Naturally is any indication, Christian movies and nudist movies have something in common: they both suck. This is not to set up a dichotomy between Christianity and naturism, as one philosophy need not exclude the other. Rather, it’s to opine that adherents of either are likely to find that movies made primarily as a mouthpiece for a lifestyle or ideology fail as works of dramatic fiction.”

There’s also been some recent discussion in the Planet Nude Discord about naturist fiction in general that has been about the same thing, and I think we’re all quickly realizing how limited creators are when it comes to the subject as well as trying to reach an audience outside of nudist communities. So many nudist films of the 1960s have the same plot, where an outsider finds their way into nudism (usually by visiting a camp or resort) and falls in love with it. Act Naturally itself built off of that. There aren’t really any dramatic stakes to dig into, and as much as I enjoy these films, it’s rarely been for the story and more for the weird elements thrown on top: the criminals in Hideout in the Sun, the bizarre editing of Educating Julie, virtually everything about the Monster of Camp Sunshine, all of which I’ve reviewed for this blog. The naturist elements themselves are hardly what makes these things worth looking at, it’s everything else. I guess it’s also why I struggle paying attention to nudist social media in general because so much of it is just about the same thing over and over: yes, being nude is great! Especially when with other people! But I never get to learn about other aspects of people’s lives that AREN’T about being naked.

I think about these things a lot with Asada & Mischa too. I feel like I’m making the least nudist comic strip for this nudist blog, trying to make it about more than just nudity. You just have to make the thing you want to make and hope it finds an audience, I guess.

Were it not for the crazy twists in Storm Clouds, I don’t think I would’ve read the whole thing at all. In that respect I don’t think that anonymous commenter was right about this comic, because Bureš threw so many zany elements into it, possibly because he himself realized how boring it would be otherwise. It is a comic about naturism, yes, but also introduces an existential threat to naturism in a way I’ve never seen done anywhere else.

Looking at the creator’s website is a delight too: Bureš plays with so many different materials and styles. There’s photography, graphic design, realistically painted landscapes and portraits, and so much of it is naturist in theme. I highly recommend clicking around. There’s also an untranslated comic there called Dragonfly that I’m curious about. Looking at the pages, seeing soldiers chasing and shooting at naked people, I wonder if this may connect with Storm Clouds and be about the beginnings of the naturist revolution itself? I’m just guessing though! What do you think? 🪐

More from Brett

Editor's note: Filming on Disrobed has wrapped, but the film is not yet finished. This independent project was made possible by strong support from the naturist community, and that support is still needed. We are currently raising finishing funds for editing, sound, and festival delivery. Contributors who give $100 or more will receive a limited early-edition DVD of the completed film (shipping in 2027).

If you’d like to help bring Disrobed to completion, please consider making a donation.

Donate now

There are not many behind-the-scenes photos from the set of Disrobed. That was intentional.

We were making a feature film in a clothing-optional environment, on closed sets, with a cast that spent much of the shoot nude. Glen Eden has its own no-photography culture, and our production had its own rules as well. Together those boundaries helped protect the cast, respect the location, and build trust. They also left a strange absence once the shoot was over. Filmmaking is always temporary. You build a small world, live inside it intensely for a short time, then strike it and move on. Ideally there’s a dedicated behind-the-scenes documentarian, but even on smaller productions there are usually a few candid photos that help preserve the experience.

This time there were only a handful, and even those required careful clearance. So I decided to write things down instead. A kind of diary of the shoot.

For ten days, split between a rainy house in Altadena and the sunny grounds of Glen Eden Sun Club, Disrobed brought together several parts of my life that had mostly stayed separate before now. I was there as a camera operator, an executive producer, and an investor in the film. I was also there as a cultural liaison from the nudist world helping newbie crew members navigate that space. Usually these roles exist in separate contexts. On this project they didn’t.

Day 1: Figuring out the rhythm

We start at Arroyo Del Sol in Altadena, which serves in the script as the Schmidt family home for the first half of the movie. It’s cold, cloudy, and wetter than we hoped, though not unusual for mid-February in Southern California.

Arroyo Del Sol is the home of Cynthia and Rolf Holbach. Cynthia is the president of the Naturist Society Foundation, and she and Rolf are both founders of Southern California Naturist Association. This is not the first nudist film that has been produced in part in their home. By my count, it’s the third or fourth. They seem surprisingly accustomed to the business of a film set whirring all around their living room and kitchen.

Day one focuses on porch and bathroom scenes. The morning mostly consists of everyone getting used to each other and finding a flow. Most of our crew are non-nudists. Most of today’s scenes are clothed. But the production has a clothing-optional policy that was made clear before anyone was hired, and much of the cast is lodging on the site of our shoot. That means the crew is getting used to seeing a naked actor moving through the house between takes. It could be awkward. Instead it becomes normal surprisingly fast.

Once the work begins it’s just coverage, blocking, timing, weather, continuity, performance, and all the usual moving parts of filmmaking.

Day one I show up wearing a green felt Stetson I brought mostly to infuse a little whimsy. I always like to infuse a little whimsy on set for morale—a lesson I learned from a filmmaker mentor years ago. The hat turns out to be useful. When we’re shooting outside it helps block the sun so I can see my LCD monitor, and between takes I hang it on the camera.

A kissing scene on the porch results in the director and lead actor Troy’s lip bleeding. It was a kinetic scene. Luckily, he’s okay and no medic is needed — just makeup — and if this is the worst injury sustained on set we’ll do just fine.

The bathroom scene itself takes place in a very tight space. One of our goals is to shoot as much as possible with two cameras, but the room doesn’t allow it. Our DP, Autumn Palen, works inside the bathroom as A-camera while I spend most of the scene outside the closed door listening and preparing the next setups.

We make our day. That always feels like a victory on a first shoot day.

That night I go out to dinner with a few cast members staying on site. It feels like we’re actually doing this.

Day 2: Shooting in the rain

Back at Arroyo Del Sol. Most of the day takes place on the porch, in the hallway, and inside Axel’s room.

Arianna Evangelia joins the shoot today as Kat. She shows up wearing a bright red hat in one of her first scenes. When the shot wraps the hat migrates over to B-camera. By the end of the day both cameras have developed personalities. A-camera has the green Stetson. B-camera has Arianna’s red hat. It’s a small detail, but people laugh about it and the hat becomes a feature of the shoot. (It does.)

Light rain comes and goes, creating continuity headaches for scenes meant to happen during the same story day. We keep chasing dry windows and trying to keep the porch looking consistent from shot to shot.

One moment stands out. Ian Hayes has a scene that requires him to get into the pool. We don’t have time to warm it.

The water is freezing. Ian gets in anyway. Multiple takes. No complaints. Everyone notices that kind of professionalism.

Autumn and I are starting to develop a shorthand. There aren’t big debates about coverage. Instead we fall into a practical rhythm. Move fast. Get the angles. Stay out of each other’s way. “Hose it down,” we say. Two or three actors at a time. Quick setups. Stay ahead of the weather.

By the end of the day the crew is relaxed. Two days in, the movie feels possible.

Day 3: The day it gets hard

The weather is worse today, and we’re shooting our first major ensemble scene inside the house.

Up until now most scenes involve two or three actors. Suddenly we’re dealing with five or six people in a long interior scene adapted from a play.

To complicate things further, Autumn has a pre-existing commitment and we’re temporarily down a crew member. The problems don’t arrive as one disaster. They accumulate.

Rain complicates interior lighting against the windows. The director and actors want to maintain chronology, so we bounce around the house instead of shooting out each room. That means relighting spaces we already lit earlier. The schedule begins slipping. Small delays stack together. We lose time. We lose light. Some of the material will have to be redone.

It’s frustrating, but also familiar. Every production has days like this.

By the time we wrap, everyone knows we have work to recover. It’s gotten dark and we aren’t happy with what we’ve gotten for the day. Still, we also know Autumn will be back tomorrow and we can reset.

Day 4: Getting above it again

The day begins on the roof with Dave McClain and Karen Lasater.

After yesterday’s pressure, the rooftop feels like a reset button. The view stretches across Altadena toward Pasadena and the hills around JPL. The air is clear and the scene is simple. Everyone breathes a little easier.

Later we move to the pool.

I’ve been looking forward to this setup because we’re shooting underwater material. We’re using an underwater camera housing (and camera) from Light Forge Studios in Las Vegas, run by a longtime friend. I promised this friend I would personally operate the camera while it’s sealed inside the housing.

This becomes the first time I actually work nude on the production.

For a moment it feels slightly surreal. I’m used to being nude around other nudists, but doing it on a film set surrounded by mostly clothed crew gives me a few nerves. Then the feeling disappears. It’s just another technical setup.

While we’re shooting by the pool, Troy’s director chair — a gag gift from the writer Steven Vlasak that reads “Troy Peterson — multi-hyphenate” — suddenly tips backward while he’s watching the scene. Troy jumps out just before it collapses into a large rock positioned exactly where his head would have landed. Crisis averted again, though Troy seems determined to injure himself before the movie is finished.

Later we wait on the roof for sunset so we can shoot the field scene. Waiting for the sun to set creates one of those rare pauses during production. People start chatting and laughing while we watch the light change over the city.

When the sun finally drops we grab the shot and call it a good day.

Day 5: The redo and the field

Today we redo the material that defeated us on day three.

With the full crew back and better preparation, the difference is obvious. The performances are stronger. The coverage works. The scene flows the way it should have before.

Sometimes filmmaking really is that simple. You try again and do it better.

Later we shoot a large dolly shot in the field with several extras, and I strip down to jump into the frame for a cameo.

The moment feels oddly meaningful. It’s playful, but it also feels like a small collision between my filmmaking life and my nudist life.

One of the extras is Linda Weber, president of AANR. She didn’t realize I was actively producing and shooting the film. Seeing me working on set seems to surprise her. I notice similar reactions from others in the nudist community. I’ve been a filmmaker much longer than I’ve been a nudist advocate, but those worlds rarely intersect. Today they do.

With Linda and Rolf and Cynthia all there, a real chunk of the nudist community has turned out to watch.

After wrap we load all of our gear into my van for the move. It’s sweaty work at the end of a long day.

Tomorrow we move to Glen Eden.

Day 6: A different movie in a different climate

The shift to Glen Eden changes everything.

The weather turns hot and sunny. The space opens up. Instead of cramped interiors we’re shooting short montage moments across the resort.

The movie suddenly feels bigger.

Because I know Glen Eden well and many locals know me, the crew naturally looks to me to understand the space. I mostly stay focused on the camera work, but I also find myself quietly helping bridge the production and the location.

Later I learn the crew is uncomfortable with their offsite hotel.

After wrap we all go to Chili’s, and hearing the stories about shouting and security problems there, I decide to buy dinner for everyone. It doesn’t solve the bigger issue, but it lifts morale for the night.

Back on set we shoot the café scene, another long dialogue sequence with a large cast. Actor-heavy scenes always bring tension, but the performers handle it well.

By now the production simply feels like moviemaking.

Day 7: Solving a real problem

The morning begins with an early email from our AD about problems at the hotel.

There were security issues overnight and shouting in the hallways. The crew wants to move somewhere else. I agree immediately and offer to help cover the cost if needed.

Morale improves quickly once people know the situation is being taken seriously, but it creates a new producer problem to solve during the day. Between setups we search for replacement lodging and coordinate moving everyone’s belongings.

Meanwhile the temperature climbs.

The tent scene that morning is short and funny. Then we move to the art class and the gardens, both of which are visually playful scenes.

By now the crew feels noticeably closer. During downtime we toss a ball around with Mason from sound.

At some point the camera crew decides that if we’re waiting on actors or makeup we should jump ahead and grab material from upcoming days. It keeps us moving and helps the schedule. More importantly, it gives everyone a sense of momentum again.

Day 8: Running all over Glen Eden

The day begins at Riverside Municipal Airport.

It was tricky to secure during prep but turns out to be easy in practice. The airport is small and quiet. We get the shots quickly and move on.

From there the day becomes a marathon across Glen Eden.

We film Skye running through different parts of the property, emotional scenes in the woods, and later small interior setups for the motel and apartment.

The challenge is distance. Glen Eden covers a lot of ground, and even short montage beats require hauling equipment across the resort.

By now the crew is tired. Still, the field material we capture late in the day is strong. Ian does an incredible barrel roll on the ground in one scene — acrobatic, electric, and so funny it lights up the cast and crew to finish the day strong.

That night we all go out to dinner again. It feels like the last real hangout before the finish line.

Day 9: The ending

Because it’s a night shoot, the day begins slowly.

I sleep in and go on a hike with Ian Hayes before call. The break helps. The evening ahead feels like a finale.

This is my last day on set and the wrap day for most of the principal cast.

We’re shooting the film’s climax in Piper Hall, including a large audience scene and backstage material around the community stage.

The energy feels different from the moment we begin.

We shoot the crowd first, then spend the late hours working through the stage scenes. At one point I look around and realize the room is full of nude performers, a few crew members, and a couple dozen extras, and the atmosphere feels completely ordinary.

For a stretch I work nude myself and barely think about it. The internal logic of the production has fully settled in.

Near the end of the night the slate becomes a little artifact of the shoot, covered in drawings, jokes, and inside references.

We end the night with a playful green-screen setup where each actor gets a brief farewell moment.

It’s around three in the morning when we finally call the martini shot.

Someone surfaces a case of Modelo Especial. People cheer. Some people cry. A few of these folks have been with this project for the better part of a decade.

Then we break down the gear and say goodbye.

After

Two days later production returns for a final half-day of pickups at Glen Eden, but I’m not there for that. Instead I spend two quiet days packing gear, relaxing around the resort, and slowly easing back into normal life before heading to another job in San Diego.

I keep thinking about the lack of behind-the-scenes photos.

The no-photo rule served a purpose. It respected the location, protected the cast, and helped maintain trust. But moviemaking is a lightning-in-a-bottle experience, and once it ends, it ends.

Without images, much of it survives only in memory.

Maybe that’s why writing it down matters.

The film itself will remain. That’s the real artifact. But the experience of making it deserves a record too. Not because it was scandalous or wild. In many ways the most interesting thing about making Disrobed was how normal it became.

Once everyone settled in, it was simply a film set. A place full of problem-solving, jokes, stress, creative decisions, long days, quick resets, tired dinners, and the fragile chemistry that develops when a group of people commits to making something together.

For me personally, it also brought together parts of my life that had long stayed separate. On this shoot I didn’t feel like I was switching between filmmaker and nudist advocate depending on who was in front of me. Those roles were simply present at the same time.

For the nudists, I was a window into the filmmaking process. For the filmmakers, I helped translate the nudist world.

For me, it finally felt like everything fit together. 🪐

Donate $100 to help bring Disrobed over the finish line (and get a limited edition DVD when the film is complete):

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Jonathan Norman started Hiking Without a Stitch with a clear question: what actually happens when you take off your clothes and all the expectations that come with them and step onto the trail in your natural state?

Launched in the fall of 2025, the podcast has already grown into something more layered than its premise suggests. Over eleven episodes, Norman has moved through the full terrain of naturism, the legal landscape of public lands, the conversations with his wife and his mom who both had real questions he had to answer honestly, a therapist who found personal healing through nudity, and a men's hiking community in North Texas built on the idea that brotherhood belongs outdoors, unencumbered.

His most recent episode takes a different angle entirely, sitting down with Edward, the artist behind The Nudist Diaries, to explore how drawing the human body in everyday, non-sexual contexts can quietly dismantle the cultural reflex to treat nudity as inherently provocative. It's a conversation about art, stigma, nude beaches, and what it looks like to simply let the human body be what it is. That thread, naturism as something honest and human rather than scandalous, runs through everything Jonathan has built here, and it's exactly why we wanted to sit down with him.

Interview with Jonathan Norman March 2026

What was the moment you knew you had to start this podcast?

When I first was exploring and getting into naturism and figuring out how it all fit into my life, I knew I liked being naked and I also liked hiking. After hiking out to a local nude beach and stripping off for the first time to skinny dip and walk around. I found out that I loved the feeling of freedom and how much lighter I felt. I soon started looking for more media and representation for outdoor nude recreation.

I couldn’t find much dedicated information in audio or video format but I did find people that had blogs or shared openly on socials about their nude outdoor adventures. I realized that I could do a podcast myself and talk to these people and share their stories, to show that non sexual nudity is fun and can be done in the outdoors safely and respectfully. I feel that we need good representation if we are going to keep enjoying nudes activities out in wild places.

You say the podcast “isn’t just about nudity it’s about connection, authenticity, and living free.” What does that actually look like on the trail for you?

The nudity is a component of the bigger experience. On a trail it looks like being more aware of my surroundings and intentionally slowing down. Being more connected the smaller details around me. It’s showing a respect for the land that you’re on and the other people you may encounter.

It’s being thoughtful with when, where and how you are showing up in the view of the public. For me I want to be seen as someone who’s passionate about this way of life and the activities I’m involved in. But doing so in a respectful manner and to show that we are out hear doing this but we are doing it the rite way.

You’ve had some really vulnerable guests, your mom, your wife, a therapist. What has surprised you most about bringing the people closest to you into this conversation?

How open and curious the people closest to me have been about nudity and the benefits and how it’s changed me. It’s shown me that it’s better to be authentic and step into your truth. Even if you have to have some harder conversations or be misunderstood. It’s just better and what I’ve found is most people are actually a lot more open and understanding than we think.

For someone in the Planet Nude community who’s comfortable with social nudism but has never tried nude hiking, what’s your pitch for getting out on the trail?

If you already enjoy being naked and want to try a some what immersive experience, find a secluded area and be intentional with where you’re stripping off. There is almost endless tracks of public lands and secluded wilderness areas that present the opportunity to enjoy nature in a way that connects you back to everything around you. There is something different about it the way the sun warms your skin the and how the air shifts around parts of your body that are normally covered.

You sweat and it drips off of you instead of sitting on your shirt and shorts. Then the moment happens and you forget that you’re naked. Your thoughts and worries start to fade into the background of your mind. As you take in the sensations of being naked in nature. It’s pretty bad ass to stand naked at the top of a mountain overlooking the valley below.

You’ve talked about navigating encounters with clothed hikers and the legality of nude recreation on public lands. What’s the one thing you wish more naturists understood before heading out?

As a user group we are stewards of public lands and we aren’t the only people out on these multi-use spaces. We need to be intentional and thoughtful about the way we are showing up in these spaces. Choosing correct times, picking trails and areas that are low traffic and carrying a cover up to quickly cover up if need be. We also need to be good representation of what non sexual nudity looks like in these spaces.

Don’t act weird or like your doing something wrong. Your energy carries over to what others perceive when they encounter you. We are the face of nude recreation to a world that is uncertain about nudity. And if we don’t take care of what we already have it can be taken away and we will loose the opportunities.

What do you want someone to feel after listening to an episode of Hiking Without a Stitch for the first time?

I want someone to feel empowered to explore their own journey into non sexual nudity. I hope it gives someone the tools and the permission to go try it out themselves—whether that’s sunbathing in your backyard, hiking naked on a trail, or skinny dipping in a lake or river. We are just regular people—we just like to do it clothes-free. 🪐

🎧 Listen to Hiking without a stitch:

Nova Unbound follows a lone astronaut stranded on a distant world orbiting three suns. With her spacecraft destroyed and her mission over, Nova must learn to survive in an environment unlike anything she has known. What begins as disaster gradually becomes something else: a story of adaptation, discovery, and the strange beauty of starting over.

The series comes from illustrator Alfie, a French artist who has spent years working across illustration, animation, and comics. Under the moniker A Life Doodler, he has developed a body of work centered on the human form, with a particular focus on the female figure. His drawings explore artistic nudity, romance, and emotional storytelling through expressive line work that blends realism with a gentle, cartoon-inflected style.

With Nova Unbound, Alfie brings those interests into a science-fiction setting, combining visual storytelling with a tale about survival, transformation, and freedom on an unfamiliar world.

Ahead of the comic’s launch on Strips, we asked Alfie a few questions about his artistic path, his fascination with the human body, and the world he’s created for Nova.

Interview with Alfie, March 2026

How did your art journey begin, and what paths led you to creating Nova Unbound?

I like to say that I am simply a child who never stopped drawing. As a kid, holding a pencil was always more captivating than playing with a ball. For a long time, I didn’t think I could make a living out of it; it felt like a dream. After working in completely different fields, I finally started my freelance career, which has now spanned nearly twenty years.

My path has been diverse: I’ve illustrated children’s books, created comics for magazines, and worked on corporate communication. I also have a strong background in animation, ranging from short animated sequences to educational explanatory videos. This long experience in storytelling and movement is what led me to Nova Unbound. I wanted to combine my professional background in narrative design with my personal artistic exploration as Alfie, creating a world where the visual flow tells as much as the plot itself.

What keeps bringing you back to the human body as a subject?

It started with life drawing, the essential discipline of learning anatomy. But I quickly became fascinated by the subject itself. To me, the human body is like an open book that can tell a thousand stories.

In our society, nudity is almost always linked to erotica or pornography. While a body can be erotic, I am deeply interested in dissociating nudity from sex. I want to represent the body and specifically the female form, which is so often over-sexualized, as an embodiment of purity, innocence, and honesty. I don’t think I’ll ever tire of this subject because the body’s ability to express spontaneity and truth is infinite. Whether my style is realistic or a bit more “cartoonized,” I strive to capture that timeless elegance.

Who is Nova, and what is Nova Unbound about?

Nova is a highly skilled solo astronaut who finds herself stranded on a mysterious, unexplored planet after a catastrophic crash. With her ship destroyed beyond repair, she is forced to abandon her past life and mission.

Nova Unbound is not a story about a “damsel in distress” trying to go home; it is a narrative of adaptation and rebirth. It follows her journey as she discovers a vibrant, organic world lit by three suns. The series explores her physical and sensory awakening as she sheds the layers of her civilization to survive and eventually thrive alongside the planet’s colorful, diverse inhabitants. It’s a story about finding beauty and freedom in a place where humanity was never meant to exist.

What does “unbound” mean in this story?

In this story, “Unbound” carries a triple meaning:

1- Physical Liberation: Literally shedding the “bonds” of her heavy, high-tech spacesuit. Because of the extreme heat of the three suns and the atmospheric reaction that causes Earth fabrics to smolder, Nova must remain nude to survive. She is literally unbound from clothing.

2- Freedom from Convention: She is no longer bound by the rigid protocols, social shames, or expectations of Earth. In this new world, she is free to redefine herself. Her nudity becomes a state of pure, natural existence.

3- Organic Integration: It signals the transition from a mechanical life (bound to machines and ships) to an organic one. Like a star (a Nova) releasing its energy, she is “unbound” from her old shell, allowing her to connect deeply with the planet’s nature and its people.

What do you hope Planet Nude readers take away from this comic?

Above all: Escape. I feel that art today is often overly politicized or tied to specific ideologies. I prefer to offer a moment of relaxation, joy, and light. Even if Nova’s journey has its dark moments, there will always be a positive outcome.

I also hope to bring a sense of freshness through contemplative imagery. When I draw, I create what I would want to read myself; I am my own first reader. My approach is perhaps a bit personal in that way, but I hope that what resonates in my heart will also resonate in the hearts of those who follow Nova’s adventures. I want them to feel the suns of this new world and the beauty of a life rediscovered.

Anything else you’d like to share?

I would add that my years of professional experience have turned me into a “translator of ideas.” I love the challenge of taking a complex feeling or a sci-fi concept and turning it into a clear, evocative image.

Also, because I have spent so much of my career illustrating for younger audiences, I have kept a certain softness and benevolence in my line work. Even in a series for adults like Nova Unbound, I bring that same gentle eye. My goal is never to be aggressive or provocative for the sake of it, but to show the human form with the utmost respect and poetic sensibility. 🪐

The movie is shot in a very unique manner: the sauna is always dark, and the camera is intimately close to the women as they sweat, scrub, and speak in close proximity to each other. You hardly see the faces of whoever’s speaking throughout. More often you see the others listening and reacting. Body language is sometimes all you have to indicate who is talking with who, and yet even with faces cropped out, it never feels objectifying towards these women. Their bodies occasionally feel more abstract, especially in how they overlap in close quarters. Shots are long, with only a little bit of handheld movement, but never voyeuristic or creeping. You’re in the sauna with them, listening as they tell their stories. There are times where you can’t tell if a drop on someone’s face is sweat, water that’s been poured over them, or tears. It could well be a combination of any of them, considering the emotional intensity coinciding with the sauna’s heat and humidity.

Within this small, dark space, these women discuss their roles in society, the expectations placed upon their families, the men who desire them, their own body issues brought about by society and surgery. They discuss how difficult it is for their family members, particularly parents, to express any kind of emotion, to show that they care. In doing so, completely exposed to one another, embracing vulnerability, they are breaking this cycle.

One woman talks about how she realized she was a lesbian. Another speaks about how breast cancer has changed her. Another tells stories about her abusive mother. Two admit to having had an abortion. The cruel beating of one’s grandmother by her grandfather is discussed. Another openly details about how she was raped by more than one man, and how her mother didn’t believe her. It’s very heavy, sobering stuff, but there’s still this incredible feeling of a weight being lifted from these women’s shoulders in the time they spend together. It’s therapeutic, and the trust between them, both physical and emotional, is incredible and genuine.

And of course, it’s not all so heavy: there are plenty of smaller, lighter moments, and the women’s laughter is delightful to hear. Seeing them dance and sing together, drumming on their bellies for percussion, are some of my favorite moments.

These gatherings are a recurring ritual for these women, as we see the landscape outside of the sauna change with the seasons. Outside the small, wooden building, we see them step out into the snow together nude to quickly hop into a frozen lake, where one of them had earlier cracked open a spot in the ice. The plunge is a refreshing break from the heat indoors. We also see them chopping meat to smoke within the sauna, which they enjoy together later in the year. At one point the women dance together clothed while one plays an accordian. Later, when it’s warmer and everything is green, we see them lay outside in the grass, singing together nude in the sunshine.

We never see them outside of this location. We do not see them in their daily lives, we do not know what their jobs or hobbies are, nothing of that sort. We never see them dress or undress. When we see them clothed, it’s always in winter wear. Smoke constantly obscures things in shots, and there are strange, dreamlike moments here and there where we see the smoke superimposed over the image of an older woman who doesn’t appear anywhere else as far as I can tell. There’s also a shot of smoke receding from the trees outside, what I take to be a reverse shot, and something about it has stuck with me. It serves to drive home the cultural importance of the sauna: text at the end of the documentary expresses how this tradition is part of the UNESCO lists of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. It’s a tradition that should be universal.

The intimate sisterhood on display here is something I personally find myself craving as I transition, but have been afraid of admitting that I desire. I see female friends doing group activities together, nothing like this of course, but going out together for spa days and things like that, and wish I could be invited. I don’t know if I’d be able to go, if I’d feel comfortable. I know I’m not a woman, even as I’ve doubled my estrogen to change my body further. I know I’m nonbinary, I know I will never experience anything in ways these women have. It feels wrong to even admit to wishing for this level of feminine connection. But I have to mention it all the same. Identity is often more complicated and stranger than you expect. If nothing else, I can be vulnerable myself as these women are in whatever ways I can.

Smoke Sauna Sisterhood is currently available to stream on MUBI, and can be rented digitally in several other places. Whatever you pay to watch it, it is worth every penny. Director Anna Hints also released a short film after this called Sauna Day. This one actually follows a group of men in a sauna together. While I haven’t been able to find it yet, I really would like to see how it compares to this incredible work. 🪐

In the mid-1800s China was seeking ways to build steel steam ships. During that process a marine architect and shipbuilder, Miers Coryell, who was from the USA, went to China and took along his young adult son, John Russell. Along the way, in 1869, that young man visited Japan and had an eye-opening, mind-altering experience – social nakedness.

Social bathing was still taking place in Japan at the time, and he was able to witness it first-hand during its waning days of common practice. That young man was John Russell Coryell, who soon would become a prolific and influential author back in the USA.

Born in 1851, in 1869 as a young man, John Russell Coryell visited Japan with friend Horace Fletcher, who would become a future natural health advocate. Coryell experienced social nakedness through mixed-sex bathing and common observance, then brought the idea home with him.

In the 1890s he wrote:

I went there in 1869. I had never until then seen a naked woman in my life. When, on my way there, I was told that in Japan I would see nude women to my heart’s content, I did not believe it. I mean that I did not believe I would ever be contented with so delectable a sight. Woman was the one mystery to me. I had been educated to long to know the one thing I must not know. Nature bade me learn and our system said, “it is shamefulness, it is lust, it is sin, vice - oh everything but natural.”

Will not any one say I was primed to plunge headlong and eagerly into the bottomless pit that yawned and waited for me? What happened? I saw hundreds, perhaps thousands, of naked women. For a little while I tried to look at each one, then nudity became commonplace, and I no longer looked for that, but, in growing delight, sought for beauty.

Ah! as long as I live, I shall not forget one dewy morning in the summer, walking the streets of Nagasaki. The city is built upon the sides of chains of hills, so that one street looks down upon the house-tops of the street below, as well as into the back gardens. I stopped again and again to drink in with my eyes the beauty of the landscape which is without a superior. Then I saw a sight that drove landscape quite out of my mind.

In a spacious back garden was a stone-curbed well; by its side stood a girl, about eighteen years old, quite nude, and holding above her a wooden pail from which the clear sparkling water was pouring upon her firm breasts. She caught sight of me as I looked, laughed gayly and called up to me a cheery good morning. I asked her if the water was not cold, and she answered joyously, “Yes, but so good.” I watched her draw up and pour two more pails of water over her glistening body. Then, with a pleasant, bright “syonara” she ran into the house.

I had never seen her before and I never saw her again. She did not scream with terror and shame at having me see her lovely body, and no vile or shameful thought entered my brain at the sight of her. She was as frank and modest and innocent as our baby girls, who have not yet been told that their persons are shameful. I dare to say the question of sex was not present in my mind when I looked at her, and I know that the remembrance of her pure unconcern under my eyes has gone far toward effacing the impurities forced into my young brain by the systems of education that I, with my fellows, was subjected to.

Coryell lived in China 1870–1875, where his father was building ships. John Russell served as a magistrate, U.S. Vice-consul in the Shanghai and Canton civil courts. He returned to San Francisco, California and worked as a newspaper journalist. He then worked at the Santa Barbara Press newspaper until 1882, after which he moved to Brooklyn, New York. He later lived in Orange County, New York and had a summer home in Readfield, Maine, where he and his family and friends engaged in social nakedness.

John Russell Coryell was called by later advocates the first American nudist. He wrote articles and books starting in the 1890s and then between 1899 and 1924 for Bernarr Macfadden’s rapidly growing and successful magazine Physical Culture and thus was able to get his message out to a very large audience through that publication as well as other Macfadden publishing house books and magazines.

In his 1893 boys’ adventure novel Diccon the Bold – A Story of the Days of Columbus, Coryell writes about the first impressions of the just discovered land in the Indies dubbed San Salvador.

The Spaniards, on their part, found everything beautiful and alluring – the mild and balmy air, the luxuriant and graceful foliage, the transparent waters teeming with strange forms of animal life, and the primitive innocence of the inhabitants, who knew nothing of the trammels of clothing, and who feared the very looks of their visitors.

The short phrase “the trammels of clothing” speaks volumes for what he will write on the topic of social nakedness over the next 30 years. His various books often make use of moral or social misidentifications due to what is being worn, and how opposite the character’s personality such assumptions turn out to be.

In April 1900, a little after the first anniversary of the production of Physical Culture magazine, an editorial likely written by John Russell Coryell was the reply salvo to a reader and those of like mind who were asking that nudes not be used in the publication.

In the reply to the letter from the Physical Director of the Y.M.C.A. (Young Men’s Christian Association) in Easton, Pennsylvania, which included 92 signatures and called for Physical Culture to stop publishing nude photos, the elegant two-page response was a very clear “no.”

The editor most sincerely appreciates the spirit which has prompted this criticism. He believes that it is made solely in the interest of the future welfare of PHYSICAL CULTURE. But, dear friends, with all due respect to you and your opinions, the writer believes most emphatically that no magazine which is designed to grow big and broad, and to be of mighty influence, dares to follow narrow policies. One of the principal causes of physical weakness and ugliness at the present time is lack of respect for the human body – is the idea that it is something vulgar to be hid and despised. Why should we be ashamed of our bodies? Are we so much inferior to other animals that we must hide every part of our own physical proportions?

The writer ventures the assertion that not a single one of our friendly critics would acknowledge that the nude to them, if beautifully proportioned, is a vulgar display. Their principal complaint is that it excites the baser passions of others. If this be the case, then is it not evidence of the necessity for reformation in those thus affected, and not of the necessity for despising, degrading and vulgarizing the human form divine?

If a corrupted, immoral mind, festered with sores of vice and sin, sees in a beautiful, wholesome human body that which excites the lasciviousness and vulgarity of his nature, is that the slightest excuse for branding this beautiful figure with the words, “Vulgar display?” If some continually gormandize and thus deprave their bodies, is that an excuse for depriving all of food? Would it not be far better to raise the standard of the human mind until it can appreciate the nude – until there is developed at least the same respect and admiration for a beautiful human body as is extended to dogs, horses and other animals when beautifully formed?

The letter goes on, but the message is clear. If your mind perceives the human form as vile, then you need to be educated about how a fine healthy specimen looks and behaves. Physical Culture had as its mission to educate the public not only about the fine qualities of the human form, but how each person could take action to achieve such a healthy form and be mentally strong.

This reply is not unlike Michelangelo’s response to Pope Julius III’s comment about the nudes painted in The Last Judgment within the Sistine Chapel. The Pope requested that Michelangelo make the art more “suitable.” The reported reply from the artist was: “Tell the Pope this is a small matter and can easily be made suitable; let him make the world a suitable place and painting will follow suit.”

The objection to nudity is in the mind of the beholder. It is not the nudes themselves, but how the public chooses to perceive them. All the Pope had to do was change people’s attitudes about nudes. It is no wonder that Michelangelo had his nose severely broken as a young man when he made such cutting commentary to others who questioned his art. His reply was similar, even if it was the Pope who was paying for and questioning his art.

In June 1900, Coryell wrote “Nudity and Purity” for Physical Culture. His September 1902 “Purulent Prudes” for the magazine focused on the foibles of wearing clothing and restricting practical education about the body.

In February 1903 the Physical Culture editorial was of the same tone. While Macfadden has often been cited as promoting a healthy physical body and doing exercises with minimal clothing and sleeping in the nude, it was Coryell who was writing the articles defending healthy nudity for children, advocating sex education, and promoting social nakedness.

In 1904, Marguerite Macfadden and her husband Bernarr Macfadden wrote the book Physical Culture for Babies. Chapter XX is “Air Baths and Sun Baths.” In it there is a discussion about the joy a baby has when allowed to be without any coverings in the sun. There are recommendations that daily air and sun baths should be offered from infancy through childhood. It is recommended that this should become a lifelong habit and that grown people should do it too.

While this is all very body positive and health promoting, the practice is only mentioned as being supervised by the mother at first, and it is hinted that later the child could take the bath by herself or himself, or with a dog for good exercise. However, there is no mention of sharing such baths with other children or in family groups.

Also in 1904, Macfadden as “Author and Editor” produced Building of Vital Power: Deep Breathing and a Complete System for Strengthening the Heart, Lungs, Stomach and All the Great Vital Organs. Early in the text he clearly states that everything written in this book as advice to the individual is equally true for men and women. As Editor he selected materials from Physical Culture, some of which were likely written by Coryell.

Chapter XVII is “Sun and Air Baths Vitalize Body.” It includes a very important statement, which it appears from its style that Coryell may have written:

Take off every article of clothing. Don’t retain the smallest kind of garment, for if you do, you are getting but a partial air bath. Partial air baths give but partial benefits.

If the temperature is mild enough, and you don’t care to take some active exercise, sit down and read. If there is any task about the room that you would like to perform, do it. The bath will go on while you are attending to other things. Two enthusiastic friends can even play cards, checkers, chess, or some similar game, and all the while the body is benefiting greatly and grandly by the bath.

This was truly expressing social nakedness in 1904. While doing non-sexual activities, one could be naked and socialize for purposes that were not based on religious practice, physical exercise, or for the purpose of cleansing the body or hygiene.

This was modern social nudity or nudism defined in 1904 and had been developed by Coryell from his experiences with social bathing in Japan in 1869. It was an activity that was a conscious decision to remove all clothing, inhibitions, and shame, to foster body acceptance and self-awareness, building self-confidence.

This definition is quite different from what was and would be promoted in Europe. The Europeans appeared to be focused on justifying going naked as the body needed full exposure to the sun to be healthy. Such nudity required rigorous physical exercise and the absence of tobacco, alcohol, and meat.

The idea of social nakedness indoors was an anathema to the Europeans and rightly so – there was no direct sunshine inside or even clean air if gas or oil lamps were in use, as well as a wood or coal stove.

However, Coryell, and subsequent Americans and later others as well, appeared to be focused on self-esteem and understanding the human form. This attitude is much more prevalent in 2025 than the European idea of the primary importance of exposure to full sun.

The research of the early 21st century and therapeutic practices of the late 20th century provide support for Coryell’s ideas and practices that can and do promote well-being through social nakedness.

The other aspect of Coryell’s ideas that were vehemently opposed was that if social nakedness were allowed indoors, what would keep it from being just a sexual romp?

The Europeans appeared to feel that being out of doors and being active in exercise was the only way of keeping those sexual energies from flooding the body and overwhelming any possible innocent intentions. However, Coryell’s indoor activities were not to be a distraction from appreciating one’s body, but an opportunity to engage with others without the constraints of clothing or excessive physical practices.

Body acceptance is a mental process of deciding to be socially naked.

The 1904 Macfadden publication also wrote of encouraging nude recreation or living in a state of nakedness as a daily practice as well as advancing the idea of free beaches:

Take one [an air bath] as often as you can; two or three every day will do you no harm. In addition to the bath in the morning, it is a first-class plan to acquire the habit of taking one whenever you are reading, or moving about the room.

Those of my readers who are camping in lonely spots, or who are living on farms where it is possible to roam about without clothing, can experience a new sense of delight and increased health….

From Chapter XXIII, “Importance of Frequent Bathing”:

Surf bathing is both a remedial agent and a tonic…. A great advantage in bathing of this kind is the fact that one gets the added benefit of sun and air.

These 1904 comments set the stage for the 20th century practices of nude camping, bare hiking, and free beach activities that became popular in the last quarter.

Coryell had taken the accepted practice of nude social bathing from Japan and combined it with his own ideas on health education as well as fostering self-esteem and body-acceptance for overall well-being. He wrote that removing one’s clothing with others offered the opportunity for healthy self-improvement. 🪐

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