There have long been debates over who should be named the Father of Nudism. Was he from Europe or America? There is controversy over who that individual may have been and what involvement he had with later atrocities or what was considered then deviant behaviors. Would we be proud of our Founding Father in all aspects of his life? Some look back thousands of years to the gymnosophists as a group in 300 BCE in Pakistan or the Greeks for their promotion of athletics and the human form. However, there has been far less attention paid to the Mother of Social Nakedness.

There appears to be some competition in 1900, albeit with her earlier writings on women’s rights and her own behaviors, there appears to be a forerunner, at least from this author’s understanding.

There was the experimental artist community in Switzerland of avant garde, hedonists led by Ida Hoffman, a professional pianist, who set up a vegetarian farm in 1900 where clothing was optional. There was a strong encouragement to be close to nature. This enclave, Monte Verità, or the Mount of Truth, was to become a collection of intellectual artisans. She was a catalyst for moving the 20th century into an age to question social restraints and foster dynamic innovation in the arts. However, this was not the foundation for the average person to engage in the classless act of being socially naked. These were individuals actively pushing the parameters of social engagement and reuniting with nature. Monte Verità was not at all dissimilar to the Carmel Bunch at about the same time in Monterey Bay, California. Artists attempting to reconnect with nature for inspiration to change the world.

While Monte Verità would become synonymous with European life reform, an earlier and more radical experiment in communal freedom had already taken root in America. In 1896, four years before Hofmann established her Swiss enclave, an anarchist community was founded on Joes Bay in Washington and named Home. Lois Waisbrooker moved there in 1900 when there were about 100 residents and twenty-five houses. She was seventy-five years old at the time and moved from San Francisco, California to Home, Washington by herself with some assistance from her son.

Anarchy

Anarchy is a philosophy of living without government and laws specifying individual behaviors. Immanuel Kant, a German idealist put it this way:

Anarchy is law and freedom without force.
Despotism is law and force without freedom.
Barbarism is force without freedom and law.
Republicanism is force with freedom and law.

Thomas Jefferson felt that “a stateless society might lead to greater happiness.” He is quoted as “that government is best which governs least.” In the early days of the 20th century Emma Goldman followed the anarchist philosophy when she was asked to define it and stated “Anarchism is all about thinking for yourself.” She also offered that anarchy is: “The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law.” She visited Home in the early 1900s and claimed Abby and John Russell Coryell, two early nudist pioneers, as her best friends in America, and with whom she went skinny-dipping.

Anarchy took on a more negative tone after Karl Marx and the Communist Revolutions in Asia and during the turbulent 1960s. However, in the early 21st century, anarchy has been identified as what takes place during a natural disaster or emergency. People voluntarily assist others offering food, clothing, physical labor as the need exists. Most religious texts offer guidance for anarchy with simply stating; do good, treat others as you would like them to treat you.

Lois Waisbrooker

Ms. Waisbrooker was born Adeline Eliza Nichols on 21 February 1826 in Catherine, NY. Just as she turned seventeen, and pregnant, she was forced to marry George Fuller on 12 April 1843 in Ohio. She bore a son named Abner Fuller. It was an unpleasant marriage and ended in divorce. She later married Isaac Snell on 9 August 1856 in Ohio. It also ended in divorce.

In 1863, during a spiritualist session, she adopted the name Lois Waisbrooker from a spiritual guide she encountered. She used the name for the balance of her life as a single woman. She was a writer and publisher advancing “assertive womanhood and female sexuality as a positive power.”

She gained notoriety with her 14 December 1873 speech “The Sex Question and the Money Power.” Her point was that the construct of marriage is just legal prostitution. Men with money request a woman and then under the laws of the land and the guidance of the church, the female becomes his property to be done with as he desires. A woman was to wait under her father’s control, until he gave permission to another man to take her hand and body.

Waisbrooker later reported in February 1901 in Vol. 2, No. 1, p 3, of the newspaper she wrote, typeset, produced, and distributed from Home the following:

Do you know?

That in thirty-seven of these United States the married mother has no legal right to her children?

That in sixteen states a wife has no right to her earnings outside the home?

That in eight states a woman has no right to her own property after marriage?

That in seven states there is no law compelling a man to provide for his own family?

Waisbrooker championed for women’s rights decades before the Suffragette movement calling for their right to vote. She was attempting to document the hardships placed on women, especially those single women with children, for whom a man selected and paid for them in some manner, and yet was able to have no responsibility to her or his children.

In 1894, she was arrested in Kansas for publishing a letter about a public person’s affair in the paper “Foundation Principles.” It was felt that printing the salacious story of an extra-marital affair was an affront to the community, no matter how truthful the account even when couched in generalities.

In the 1890s, Waisbrooker moved to San Francisco and changed the name of her publication to “Clothed with the Sun” (CwtS). She reported that the sun is the symbol of direct power or light. Woman has not been allowed to shine by her own light but only by what the moon reflects on to her. This is likely a metaphor for her monthly menstrual cycle, which made men perceive them as weak or lacking in their own power. The image of a woman under the sun and standing on the horns of the moon is taken from the Bible, Revelation 12:1. The first issue of CwtS was produced in San Francisco in February 1900. It had the stated purpose for “The Freedom of Woman.”

Suppression and censorship

CwtS, Vol 1, No 2, p 3, mentioned the “American Inquisition.” In Medieval times the Church punished individuals for “heresy”. In the 1900s the catch phrase was “obscene literature.” Marriage sex manuals, birth control information, basic sex education, Sexually Transmitted Infections (STI) education were all considered topics that just were not discussed in public and even rarely privately. The American Civil Liberties Union was formed in the 1910s to address such concerns.

The lead crusader to suppress vice and unwholesome materials, was Anthony Comstock who was going after anything distributed by the US Postal Service. Bernarr Macfadden published John Russell Coryell’s story “Wild Oats” in his Physical Culture magazine and it was deemed “obscene literature”. It was a fictional story about the tragedy of bringing an STI back to a family and the subsequent health consequences to everyone. The case was argued as the story being health education for the public and went all the way to the Supreme Court, where Macfadden lost, paid a significant fine, and requested and received a Presidential Pardon from William Howard Taft.

Likewise, Albert Arthur Allen, a photographer from Oakland, CA, was repeatedly charged with sending “obscene” images in the 1910s across state lines even by private carriers and won four of the five cases in Federal court by distinguishing that mere nudity was not obscene. In the early 2000s, the literal “catch phrase” is now that a “nude image” will get those who post them on electronic social media censored and censured. Waisbrooker’s “American Inquisition” continues its grudge against openly discussing and portraying the human body.

An incident

In September 1901, CwtS, Vol 2, No 8, p 3, there is an article titled “An Incident”. From the review of most of the available copies of CwtS this article is the only one that has been found that targets clothes free individuals. Other sources have reported that sun-bathing and skinny-dipping occurred regularly in the Home community as people bathed in Joes Bay. Later, court cases appear to be centered on the capacity for Home’s neighbors to “see” naked individuals or groups. However, in Waisbrooker’s writings and publications this is the only account that has been found. In keeping with the underlying anarchist beliefs of the residents of Home, the tone and content appear right on target.

A stranger to Home arrives and goes to the CwtS office in Home. He had walked several miles to learn more about the people and their behaviors in Home. Along the way, he witnessed a man and a woman, not far from the community, sunbathing entirely nude. What should he think about it? He assumed they were residents of Home. When questioned by Waisbrooker about why he thought they might be from Home and not just some people camping in the area. He mentioned the proximity and that he thought the people of Home were into free-love. She then editorializes if being without clothes “as though there was any love in that!”

She then writes about how this man and others like him want to pay to bring women to Home. The sense is that with the freedom to do as one pleases, that sex may be more accessible. This sounds like the accusations made of many nudist clubs throughout the century about what is “actually going on” behind those tall fences: it must be bad, if they are naked they must surely be having orgies. Waisbrooker goes on to write; “Men and women have the right to roll around in the mud if they choose, but is it the better way?” The idea of anarchism was not to delve into debauchery but to seek a better life without dogma and restrictions by doing good for oneself and others. Couples sunning naked or skinny-dipping in Joes Bay had nothing to do with free-love or consensual sexual activities, and whose business is it anyway if the activities are among consenting adults.

In December 1901 CwtS, Waisbrooker wrote that sex between people who were in mutual love was not a sin or a crime. It did not matter if they were married or legally bound by some sanctioning entity. What mattered was that the couple had mutual feelings for each other and consented to the activities. Again, she was charged with sending obscene material via the mail.

Waisbrooker fought to clarify the hypocrisy of the church and government’s positions on how people behave toward each other. She comments that “the teachings of anarchy and love in freedom, is what nine-tenths of Protestant ministers will say ‘That’s what Jesus taught’.” But it was considered against the government’s promotion of the capitalism of marriage and the church’s structural dogma.

Waisbrooker also was concerned about what was happening to women as they age and can no longer bear children to build a husband’s legacy. She even ventured to see a bright future for women. CwtS, Vol 1, No 12, in Jan 1901; “The woman of the future will not be relegated to the ‘chimney’ corner because of her years. She will have less of one man ownership-protection and more LIFE than have most women of today.”

She was also ahead of her times in that her anarchist newspaper article “Discontent: Mother of Progress” she uses the term “comrade” for her peers in 1901. This is decades before the Russian revolution when comrade came into common usage.

Her views on how poverty impacts health and that urban living can be deleterious to one’s well-being were also ahead of their time. Nudist promoters of the 1920s put emphasis on the need to get out to the fresh air and sunshine on the one day a week some people had off from work. In CwtS, Vol. 2, No 1, she writes of the economic value of health and that living in cities can be devoid of sunshine with low-cost rents only available on the shady side of buildings and long hours of indoor work. Likewise, she called for access to proper air.

Waisbrooker also coined a term that was fitting for the role of the church in addressing the practicalities of married life. She wrote in “Sex on the Brain” as a topic that needs to be discussed but “churchianity” is against all sex education and that results in many problems with marriage. Upon reading this Susan Douglass on 19 June 2026 coined her own word—“churchiarchy” as a problem of enforcing dogma and beliefs that have no factual basis.

These comments fit with the publication in CwtS, Vol 1, No 2, p 4, of a letter from a male “I cannot begin to tell you I have suffered in this latter (want of soul companionship) and how I hate the conventional, custom bound tenets of society and the fearful prudery that is maintained!” Waisbrooker was using CwtS to expose these conventional, custom bound tenets. She wanted to break up the strangle hold of religious dogma. She wanted to challenge the government’s laws that inject themselves into personal matters.

A living legacy

It is no surprise that when in 1980 Lee Baxandall, founder of The Naturist Society, and well-known author on socialism and leftist history, set up the magazine to promote social nakedness in public areas that he honored Lois Waisbrooker by naming his magazine Clothed With The Sun. Subsequently he changed the name in 1989 to the now popular N for Nude & Natural.

If there is ever a Nudist Hall of Fame nomination for a founder or a citation for the mother of social nakedness, Lois Waisbrooker should be seriously considered. 🪐

More to explore:

MoonGroove turned six years old this July, and celebrated by moving to a bigger home, packing in a full slate of music, art, yoga, and sports, and surviving two separate rounds of extreme weather in the process. Wildfire smoke blanketed the site for the first couple of days, and a round of severe thunderstorms tore through on Saturday. Neither one stopped the festival from delivering one of the best weekends I have had at a naturist event in years.

My wife Kim, our son Eli, and I flew into Pittsburgh direct from Las Vegas on Wednesday night and spent that first night at a La Quinta near the airport. Thursday morning we Ubered out to Butler to pick up a rental RV, then made our way onto the grounds of White Thorn Lodge that afternoon. This was the festival’s first year at White Thorn, a longtime nudist club in Darlington that has hosted the naked volleyball Superbowl for more than five decades. MoonGroove had outgrown its old home at Penn Sylvan in Mohnton and needed the extra acreage.

The festival itself ran four stages across four days, with more than 50 performers between them. Big Something headlined Friday night, SunSquabi closed out Saturday with direct support from Sneezy, and a rotating lineup of jam bands, funk acts, and DJs filled the hours around them. Beyond the music, there were yoga sessions morning and afternoon, volleyball and pickleball tournaments, bocce and cornhole, guided hikes and trail runs, a full slate of wellness workshops, a dedicated Women’s Moon Lounge, and a kids program called Club Nebula for the younger groovers on site. It is a lot to pull off in one weekend, and even with the weather working against it, the festival mostly delivered on all of it.

At check-in, the first familiar face we ran into was Eli Porr, one of the festival’s five founders and its executive director. I have known Eli for a couple of years now, and he has been on my podcast, New Nudist Podcast, at least three times, but this was the first time we had ever met in person. In addition to being a prolific promoter of exciting nudist projects and a really wonderful human, he is also the reason my son, also named Eli, fielded the same joke all weekend. Sharing a name with the festival’s own organizer never got old for the people who met him.

Planet Nude sponsored MoonGroove last year too, but 2026 was the first year we could actually make it out. We set up a vendor table for the weekend, and I spent a good chunk of my time there rather than out at the stages.

Wildfire smoke from Canada had settled over a wide stretch of the country that week, and Pennsylvania sat right in its path. The haze hung over the site through Thursday and Friday, thick enough to notice and thick enough to change the color of the light.

Those first couple of days were where the festival really delivered for me, though it had little to do with the weather or even the music and events. I met Tom Francine of SkinnyDipDay.org in person for the first time, and we ended up talking for a long stretch in a hot tub late one night. I met Justin and Nikki from Nude Lease on Life, Max and Luke from NAC/NEF, and Sandy and Charlie from AANR East. I had known every one of these people for years online, through Zoom calls, Discord threads, WhatsApp messages, and the occasional collaboration, but had never actually met any of them face to face. It is a strange feature of the modern naturist world that a community this active and this connected can still be scattered across the country and the world, coming together in person only at a handful of gatherings each year. I had the same experience at the INF-FNI Congress in Zipolite back in 2024, and it happened again and again at MoonGroove.

Friday and Saturday, I sat on a pair of nudist Q&A panels that had been built into the festival schedule, alongside representatives from NAC/NEF, AANR, and several other clubs and sponsor organizations in the space. A number of people came up to me afterward, or at other points over the weekend, to say they read Planet Nude or listen to Naked Age or New Nudist Podcast. It is only ever at events like this that people recognize my voice before they recognize my face, and it still catches me off guard every time. The day it happens to me at a grocery store, I do not know what I will do with myself.

Saturday brought the storms. A cold front pushed through with severe thunderstorms that afternoon, and for a few hours the forecast had all of it: damaging wind, hail, even a tornado watch for parts of the state. Rain came down hard enough to pause the festival outright. Watching the sky go that dark and that loud in the middle of a crowd is not entirely comfortable, but it did not feel unwelcome either. It gave the day a kind of danger that made the evening feel more earned once it arrived.

The skies cleared that evening, and the day’s delayed schedule pushed the main stage well into the night. I had spent most of the weekend at our vendor booth and had not caught much live music up to that point, so after the rain let up I went back to our RV in Cosmic Flats, the semi-quiet camping area, and fell asleep for a few hours. I woke up close to midnight to a clear sky and the bass thumping down the hill from the main stage. I walked up and caught SunSquabi headlining, the first time all weekend I saw the fire dancers working the crowd alongside a full light show. After two days of smoke and one dramatic storm, it felt like the release the whole weekend had been building toward, and it turned out to be the peak of the festival. Things wound down from there.

Sunday had a slower, more social pace, and it gave me time to appreciate the people holding the whole thing together. Eli Porr was everywhere all weekend, checking in with people individually, handling smoke and storms and every logistical headache with a level head, and still answering a text about the vendor wifi password in the middle of it all. Nicky, who runs the festival’s Club Nebula kids programming, kept a genuinely watchful eye on the younger crowd the entire time. Jim Dickey and Claude Richards of NAC/NEF showed up as they always do, two of the most dependable advocates and friends our community has. Jim in particular seemed to know everyone, everywhere, and at 72 he was still bouncing around the volleyball court and working the crowd with the energy of someone a third his age.

None of it runs without the crew behind it, and MoonGroove has a big one. A small group of founders started this thing a few years back, and dozens of volunteers have since taken over everything from sound and electrical to site operations, green room and VIP, art installations, and security. Every one of them was still smiling and helpful when I crossed paths with them, even after a weekend of smoke, storms, and very little sleep. That is not a small thing to pull off.

Having Kim and (little) Eli there changed the trip for me. I do a lot of this traveling alone, for work and for the movement both, so doing this one as a family felt like a small kind of catharsis. Eli made fast friends with the other kids there, spent most of his waking hours in the pool playing keepy-uppy with a beach ball, and became something of a mascot for the weekend between the name joke and a small kid running around with an all-over tan. He came home with more high fives, ice pops, and free scoops of ice cream than I could keep track of.

Our own weekend was one small piece of something much bigger. Here are the final stats for this year: MoonGroove pulled 1,246 people through the gate over the weekend, drawing from 29 states and as far away as Canada, Australia, the Bahamas, and France. That included roughly 707 ticketed guests, 93 volunteers, 130 musicians, 32 vendors, and 15 sponsors, all held together by a founding and staff team of about 30 people. Amazing!

We packed up Monday, drove back through Butler, spent one more night at the same La Quinta outside Pittsburgh Airport, then caught an early flight home Tuesday morning. Tired and sunburned in places people don’t usually worry about. But already looking forward to next year. 🪐

Buster Bunne has one goal: to create the next ice cream sensation! In Unsexy Nude Tales From Pretty Beach! The Day the Pool Became Ice Cream!, we follow this ambitious ice cream man on the nude beach as his attempts at coming up with a stellar new flavor turns into calamity when a poorly timed polar vortex sweeps into the nude beach, driving everyone indoors.

For this ambitious comic, Tito Adler established a number of rules for himself, as well as a long list of nudist tropes to avoid, and he shares these at the beginning of the book. I’m not going to list them all here, but some notable tropes include proselytizing the benefits of social nudism, prudish villains, textile allergies, and the age-old Doris Wishman plot device of romance between a nudist and a newcomer. He set up a strict, twelve week schedule to work within, and most daring of all, set to work without any real plotting or structure, making the whole story up as he went along and following the golden improv rule of “yes and.”

The results are absolutely delightful.

Bunne’s great adversary here is Dijon Mustardsen, the local hot dog vendor planning to set up at the indoor rec center where the nude beach residents have retreated. At the same time, surf instructor Sunny has her own conflict thanks to the winter storm, one which leads to her butting heads with the local lifeguard Kai. Seeing as how this is an all-new comic, I don’t want to go too much into detail about the plot or the antics that these characters wind up getting into, but with the way it’s structured like a daily newspaper strip, along with Adler’s clean and energetic art, it makes for a fun, quick read. The improv nature of the storytelling also leads it to some unexpected and very funny places that I just don’t want to spoil!

It’s Adler’s art that brings me so much joy more than any other element. The character designs here are wonderfully cartoony, reminding me of shows I grew up watching in the mid-to-late nineties, all drawn with a wonderful (presumably digital?) brushlike line quality that gives it so much life. Like a daily newspaper strip, the comic is predominantly in black and white, with the first strips and some later ones in full color, along with some fun little illustrations thrown in as little segues. They’re like an extra treat! This one in particular is a personal favorite:

I keep coming back to those nudist tropes and the decision to avoid them altogether, and how that leads to this being such a fun and refreshing read that’s unlike most other nudist media. It’s something I’ve been taking into account when making Asada & Mischa strips, and I’ve joked about it being the least nudist strip on Planet Nude, but the Day the Pool Became Ice Cream! takes this to a whole different level. The nudity here is never once commented on, and none of the jokes have anything to do with it. It’s a story that didn’t need to be set at a nude beach, it simply is. I can’t help but applaud that! It also makes me wonder how it will appeal to those dyed in the wool nudists who crave those tropes, but, you know, not everything is made for everybody.

Unsexy Nude Tales From Pretty Beach! The Day the Pool Became Ice Cream! is available on Amazon’s ComiXology for a mere $3.99 and it is worth every penny of that low price. Check it out for yourself and let us know what you think! I hope to see more from this setting and of these characters in the future. 🪐

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Check out Unsexy Nudie Tales From Pretty Beach! The Day the Pool Became Ice Cream! on Kindle for just $3.99.

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Florida cartoonist Tito Adler set out to solve a problem. After discovering naturist fiction, he found himself wanting stories where nudity wasn’t the central premise, the central joke, or something that needed to be explained. The result is Unsexy Nudie Tales From Pretty Beach! The Day the Pool Became Ice Cream!, a debut e-book that combines the pacing of classic newspaper comics with surreal comedy and an unabashedly naturist setting.

What makes Pretty Beach especially distinctive is that it isn’t really about naturism at all, any more than Duck Tales is about ducks. Instead of treating social nudity as something to explain, defend, or sensationalize, Adler’s characters and world simply accept it as part of everyday life. The result is a comic where the biggest surprises come not from the absence of clothing, but from melting swimming pools, eccentric beachgoers, hotdog vendor beefs, and an escalating whirlpool (literally) of cartoon logic.

The Kindle edition is just $3.99, and I suspect many Planet Nude readers will find themselves wishing there were more stories from Pretty Beach by the time they reach the last page. If you’re looking for something funny, inventive, and unlike just about anything else in the genre, it’s an easy recommendation.

I caught up with Tito to talk about the real Florida beach that inspired Pretty Beach, the cartoonists who shaped his work, and why he wanted to tell a naturist story where the nudity isn’t the point. 🚀

Interview with Tito Adler, Jul. 2026

What first inspired Pretty Beach?

The name comes from Playalinda Beach here in Florida, about an hour or so away from Orlando, where I live. “Playalinda” is Spanish for “pretty beach.”

Many years ago, when I was in my twenties, Playalinda was my first social nudist experience. I expected the most memorable part would naturally be all the nudity. Instead, after the shock of the nude wore off, what stayed with me were the people.

I saw a woman wearing headphones dancing to music only she could hear. I saw a man asleep in a beach chair with three fishing poles planted in the sand and their lines stretched taut into the surf. I saw a naturist casually chatting with a clothed park ranger. I met a man who claimed to work security at NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building. I even saw a gentleman flying a space shuttle kite, which eventually found its way into the book as a pin-up.

What struck me was that every one of those moments would have played out almost exactly the same if everyone had been wearing clothes. It was one of those moments where you encounter someone you think of as “other” and realize that their otherness isn’t actually the most interesting thing about them.

When I started writing, I wanted to recreate that experience for readers. For non-naturists, I wanted the nudity to register immediately, then gradually fade into the background as you got to focus on the characters more. The nudity is still there, but it stops functioning as the spectacle the reader may have expected.

For naturist readers, I wanted something that would reflect the way we experience life, where nudity is something more day-to-day, more mundane.

You mentioned wanting to do something different from most naturist fiction. What were you hoping to create?

When I first started getting into naturist fiction, I lost interest fairly quickly. Enough of it felt self-conscious, almost preoccupied with defending itself. Vaguely salesy. They often follow a familiar structure: an outsider encounters this strange community, discovers they’re ordinary people after all, and is invited to join them.

Which is fine, and I don’t mean to sound like we should stop writing these kinds of stories, because they still have an urgent role.

As of this writing, we continue to live in a culture where naturism is widely misunderstood, so stories that introduce readers to that perspective still serve a purpose. A “guided tour” kind of approach, to add nuance and context to their worldview.

But I still had that itch. I wanted something different. To be able to experience a naturist story where the most salient thing was not the nudity.

So I set out to write a story featuring naturists but not about naturism. A story that was character-driven, like the people I experienced at Playalinda.

Looking back, I realize now I ended up writing my own retelling of the outsider story anyway. The difference is that the outsider never appears inside the comic. Instead, the outsider is the non-naturist reader, who gradually comes to see the characters as ordinary people.

I wonder if that’s becoming a broader direction within contemporary naturist comics, not just something I’m doing.

Nudity isn’t really the joke in your comic. It just feels like part of the world. Was that a conscious decision from the beginning?

Very much so. In my head I like to describe it as “magical nudism,” borrowing from magical realism, the literary movement where extraordinary things are treated as ordinary while ordinary things can become extraordinary.

I wanted to apply that same approach to nudity by presenting it as something ever-present, unremarked upon, yet structurally important. It is not the primary dramatic engine. There are no explanations, no origin stories, or quiet manifestos.

What interests me is the dramatic irony that creates. The characters ignore the nudity, while the reader never entirely does. That difference in perception creates a quiet tension that I think becomes one of the book’s recurring sources of humor.

Your storytelling has a classic newspaper-comic feel. Which cartoonists or comics have influenced your work the most?

When I was a child in the late 1900s, long, LONG ago when gas was $1.20 and Sunday newspapers could still reach one inch in thickness, I would pore over pages and pages of comics. My favorites were Bill Watterson’s Calvin & Hobbes, Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, Greg Evans’ Luann, and Darby Conley’s Get Fuzzy. I would read Paige Braddock’s Jane’s World online. I also read Hergé’s Tintin, and somehow my dad had a book by Scottish writer R. D. Low and artist Dudley D. Watkins called The Broons.

I was born in Colombia and also lived in Brazil, so I grew up reading South American comics as well. Brazilian cartoonist Mauricio de Sousa’s Turma da Mônica (Monica’s Gang/Monica and Friends) and comics like Argentinian artist Quino’s Mafalda and Chilean artist Pepo’s Condorito.

While earning my BFA, I learned about more indie fare like Ben Snakepit’s Snake Pit, Scott Campbell’s Double Fine Action Comics, and Tasha Harris’ Tasha’s Comic. Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware in general. I absolutely love François Boucq, the French comic book artist.

When I later became interested in nudist/naturist comics, I learned about Gene Packwood’s Angel, published in old nudist magazines, and John Dempsey’s work for Playboy. These lean more titillating than truly naturist, as expected, but I still value them for being early examples of comics built around social nudity.

Who else? Hmmm. Oh, speaking of Playboy, Shel Silverstein’s “Shel Silverstein in a Nudist Camp,” illustrated for Playboy and published in August 1963, is one of my favorite examples of humor mixed with nudity.

Pretty Beach already feels like a fully realized place. Do you see yourself returning to it in future stories?

I think so. In a not very subtle way, the first part of the title Unsexy Nudie Tales From Pretty Beach! suggests there are more stories to tell.

I don’t know if I will bring back the characters in this book. I am leaning heavily toward the idea of assembling a new cast every time a new book comes out, but I haven’t decided yet. We’ll see where that goes.

Finally, what do you hope Planet Nude readers take away after spending some time at Pretty Beach?

Hopefully something fresh.

Sometimes that doesn’t feel like preaching to the choir. Naturist stories often carry the burden of explaining, defending, or advocating for naturism before they can say anything else. I wanted something that simply assumes the world and gets on with being funny.

I would like for non-naturists to discover that the most memorable part of the story wasn’t the nudity after all. And if someone finishes the book thinking more about the characters than about nudity, then I feel like I accomplished what I set out to do. 🪐

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We’re just a few days away from MoonGroove⁠. On Wednesday we’ll be boarding a flight to Pennsylvania, and by Thursday the festival will officially be underway at White Thorn Lodge⁠.

It’s one of the weekends I look forward to most each year, and we’re excited to be back as a sponsor for the festival’s first year at its new home.

If you’re joining us, here are a few last-minute reminders and useful links to bookmark before you head out.

It’s a new home for MoonGroove

The biggest change this year is the venue.

After five years at Penn Sylvan, MoonGroove has moved across the state to White Thorn Lodge⁠, longtime home of the Superbowl of Naked Volleyball⁠ and one of the best-known clubs in American naturism. The larger grounds give the festival more room to grow, with expanded camping, additional vendor space, and plenty of room to spread out between stages.

If you’re unfamiliar with White Thorn, take a few minutes to explore while you’re there. It’s a club with a long history, and this will be the first time many attendees have the chance to experience it.

If you missed it, you can also read our earlier preview of MoonGroove 2026⁠ for a closer look at this year’s lineup and the move to White Thorn.

What to look forward to

More than 40 performers will take the stage over four days, with Big Something⁠, SunSquabi⁠, and Sneezy⁠ leading a lineup that spans jam, funk, rock, EDM, bluegrass, and soul. Whether you’re planning to spend your weekend camped out in front of the Main Stage or wandering between sets, there’s live music happening from afternoon well into the night.

Don’t make the mistake of treating MoonGroove as just a concert, though. The schedule is also packed with volleyball, pickleball, cornhole, bocce, yoga, guided hikes, workshops, visual art, and plenty of opportunities to simply relax with friends around camp. It’s that combination of music, recreation, and community that has made MoonGroove one of the most distinctive events on the naturist calendar.

Don’t forget: tickets and camping are separate

If you’re still on the fence, weekend and single-day passes remain available.

One reminder for first-timers: your festival wristband gets you into MoonGroove, but overnight camping requires a separate camping pass. Organizers have also reserved a discounted room block at the nearby Microtel by Wyndham for anyone who prefers a hotel over a tent or RV.

One more tip: MoonGroove tells me current online ticket prices remain in effect through Wednesday night. After that, tickets will still be available at the gate, but they’ll cost more, and you’ll still need to purchase them online from your phone.

• Tickets: https://events.humanitix.com/moongroove-2026

• Festival information: https://www.moongroovefestival.com/2026-info

• Festival FAQ: https://www.moongroovefestival.com/faq

Bringing an RV?

MoonGroove recently sent updated arrival instructions for larger RVs and trailers. If your rig is longer than 25 feet, be sure to follow the alternate approach via PA-168 rather than the main entrance on State Line Road. It’ll make your arrival considerably easier.

Come say hello

Planet Nude is proud to be back as a sponsor this year, and we’ll have a table in Vendor Row throughout the weekend.

Please stop by and introduce yourself. Whether you’ve been reading since the beginning or just subscribed last month, I’d love to put a face to a name. We’ll have Planet Nude stickers and a few other giveaways, and we’ll be recording interviews and collecting stories from around the festival.

If you’re attending as a VIP, keep an eye on your welcome bag. Every VIP will receive an exclusive Planet Nude Sticker Club drop created especially for MoonGroove. We’ll also be spending time in the VIP area throughout the weekend, so don’t hesitate to come say hello there as well.

One of the best parts of these weekends is meeting the people who make this community what it is.

Join me for a workshop

In addition to hanging out at the Planet Nude booth throughout the weekend, I’ll also be joining leaders from the Naturist Action Committee and the Naturist Education Foundation for two “Nudism Q&A” sessions.

Whether you’re brand new to naturism or have been involved for years, it’s a chance to ask questions about the movement, advocacy, clubs, etiquette, or whatever else is on your mind.

• Friday: Noon to 1:00 p.m.

• Saturday: 3:00 to 4:00 p.m.

Follow along in Discord

If you can’t make it to MoonGroove this year, you’re still welcome to tag along.

I’ll be sharing photos and a few updates from the festival in the Planet Nude Discord server as the weekend unfolds. It’s also a great place to chat with other readers, ask questions, and keep up with what’s happening on the grounds in a more informal setting.

If you haven’t joined us yet, you can do that here:

• Join the Planet Nude Discord: https://www.planetnude.co/p/join-our-discord

We’ll have a full MoonGroove recap here on Planet Nude after everyone gets home.

See you at White Thorn. 🪐

I reached out to filmmaker William Bradford after watching it because it’s a rare thing: an animated comedy built around social nudity that understands the event it’s depicting. The film is playful without treating the riders themselves as the joke, and it reflects the atmosphere many participants describe: more laughter than leering.

Bradford was kind enough to answer a few questions about where the idea came from, how his own experiences riding in Vancouver shaped the story, and why it was important that the film never sexualize the event. You can watch the censored version below. If you enjoy it, consider supporting his work by buying the uncensored edition for just two bucks. 🚀

Interview with William Bradford, July 2026

What inspired you to make World Naked Bike Tour?

They always say to draw from your own life experience. Not only was the Naked Bike Ride my favorite summer event in Vancouver, I remember asking my friend/supervisor, Sean Covernton what's a good "Vancouver villain" while trying to come up with other ideas set in the city. He suggested either "Property Salesman"; a creature as a Vancouverite I've seen images of but have never interacted with or expect to see, or a "Beach bible thumper". Hence the idea of an angry maga-esque nutter pursuing the nude cyclists in a Road Runner, Wile E Coyote cutaway cartoon clicked.

Have you ever participated in a World Naked Bike Ride yourself? What drew you to the event?

Yes, every year since 2017. It always felt like my one act of rebellion or protest I was confident performing as it promoted something positive. There are always one or two "Thumpers" in the crowds, but by and large it's mostly cheers and laughter from the community. That made me feel if I struck just the right balance, this could overall be seen as a "cheeky" but ultimately wholesome project. First time I competed in it my wife wouldn't speak to me for hours. To be fair I did tell her I would wear underwear, but because there were a decent number of ladies competing, many of which were brave enough to go fully nude...so I felt the least I could do as a privileged cis straight white male is bare all.

The film has a classic hand-drawn cartoon feel. What inspired that style?

Actually, the artist George Mager did the initial designs and sketches! So the whole film is based visually on his work. I loved his boldly simple and loose style as it lends a very unique charm that is hard to replicate. It also had a lot of art featuring casual nudity, and because of this cute style, it takes a bit of the raw edge off it. Heh it also meant that the large number of crowds that would be needed for the show could be abstractly drawn as amorphous blobs, making it MUCH more manageable in the wide shots.
Check out his work here! https://www.instagram.com/smarty__farty/

After taking the film to festivals, what made you decide it was time to release it online?

I honestly felt two years was a good run time and one of the short film programs offered to put in on Youtube. I was a bit hesitant to release it censored, as I do feel SOME jokes lose their bite from it, most notably the pay off with the leafs at the very beginning. But I also know it's important for the film to have as many eyes on it as possible, and the censoring would make it easier to share across more platforms. The film was always difficult for Festivals to work into a schedule as, but for the nudity, it's not a very risque film at all; too restrictive for general viewings but too tame for the "dark" venues.

The film includes plenty of nudity, but it never feels sexualized. Was that a conscious creative choice?

Two big changes made from my first storyboards in 2019: the foil trying to sabotage the event was a cyclist's prudish father that met a cute lady participant. The first required too much setup, hampered the slapstick as the father wouldn't go straight to violence with his son participating, and the romantic discoveries made the situation very uncomfortable as the event is NOT meant to be sexualized, and flirting or showing interest in someone in said event really felt inappropriate.

By contrast, having the two ambassadors for the male/female coded bodies be a well established power couple gives a sense of mutual support and protection, creating a permission structure for the fun exhibitionism. Two important rules were to have a balance of body types, shapes, ages and sizes on screen at all times, with both male and female "bits" equally represented and to try to avoid any deliberately sexy or seductive "posing" of the characters as much as possible. The fact you and others have commented on how the short feels free of sexualization is gratifying, thank you.

What’s next for you, and where can readers support your work?

This is my first proper short film, and the best way to see it is to watch it on Gumroad in its uncensored cut! Every little bit helps! A digital art book featuring the works of all the amazing artists who helped on it is also available there. I'm currently working on a proof of concept for my next project, a classic chase cartoon featuring Sinbad mythological creatures! A mighty Roc bird tries to catch a normal elephant: think Tom and Jerry at a Kaiju scale. I wanted to try something more all ages for my next idea, PLUS something more classically solid in drawing style. Any support for it on my Patreon would make a huge difference! patreon.com/RokandRoland. 🪐

My dad passed away on June 25, 2026, surrounded by his three adult kids. He was 72. He was throughout his life many things; a lawyer, a city councilman, a retired state official, an avid cyclist, a devoted dog owner, and a larger-than-life presence in every room he ever walked into. He was gregarious and generous. He was funny. He was a good cook. He was known to friends as “Buyin’ Bryan” for his habit of always picking up the check.

He was not a nudist. At least, he never professed to be one. But I think he made me one.

My dad was constitutionally opposed to blind compliance. He didn’t follow rules he couldn’t find the value of. He followed them when they made sense and questioned them loudly when they didn’t. He taught his kids, by example more than instruction, that social norms are often arbitrary, that conformity is usually laziness dressed up as virtue, and that there is nothing more worth protecting than your own sense of self. He was fiercely proud of his uniqueness. And crucially, he never used any of that as cover for dishonesty. He wasn’t a cheater. His skepticism of authority came from a genuine belief in fairness, not from a desire to be exempt from it.

Despite a penchant for flouting authority, he was an authority, never an anarchist. He was a lawyer. A city councilman. A state official for 32 years. He believed in systems and institutions, and partook in good faith in the slow and sometimes maddening work of changing things from the inside. His skepticism wasn’t about tearing systems down. It was about holding them accountable and using them for the people they were supposed to serve.

I think about that a lot in the context of how I engage with nudism, not just as a writer, publisher, but as an advocate who believes in working through legitimate channels even when the progress is slow. I don’t think I arrived at that approach on my own; he modeled it.

He was also, I should admit in the interest of historical accuracy, not entirely opposed to a little social nudity in his younger days. I’ll just leave it at that.

Ever since I started Planet Nude in 2023, he read it. My dad was politically conservative in his older years, and I suspect he didn’t always agree with my theses. I can get pretty progressive in my views, and he knew it. But he showed up for the writing. Every email. He engaged with it, asked about it, took pride in it. He may have raised an eyebrow at some of my takes, but he never missed one. I think he looked forward to it as a way to get me talking with him about something or anything.

Naturism, at its core, asks you to look at one of the most deeply ingrained social rules we have—the idea that the unclothed human body is inherently shameful—and question whether it holds up. For most people, that question never gets asked. The norm is so ambient, so old, so reflexively enforced that it doesn’t even register as a choice. Some naturists might say they were predisposed to question clothing norms from birth, but I don’t believe that’s true for me. I believe he gave me the habit of examining assumptions before accepting them. Not because he ever said anything about nudism or clothing at all, but because he modeled a way of moving through the world that treated social convention as something to be scrutinized rather than automatically obeyed; a habit of resisting certainly-held-absurdities. When I eventually encountered naturism as an adult, I think the philosophical groundwork was already there for me to align with its ideas.

My dad had a rough few years at the end, with medical issues and hospital stays and old injuries compounding on him, but he met all of it on his own terms, with more humor and optimism than the situation probably warranted. I moved in with my family to be his caretaker the last couple of years, and I’m glad I got to do that for him. It let us grow a new bond, one between two adults instead of a parent and a kid, and it let him build a real relationship with his grandson. It also gave him a surprising amount of optimism about the future, despite his increasing challenges. In the end, he died the way he lived, still making plans.

That’s the man. I’ll miss him every day. What I want to carry forward from him is to question what deserves to be questioned, work within the systems worth working in, be generous, be honest, show up with good humor.

I’m writing this from his house, my home, on Independence Day. That was my dad’s holiday. He always hosted here every year, and he’d already started making plans for this year, calling family and putting it out there, when he went into the hospital for the last time. It is for him, truly, that his family is together for this day. He’d be mad that he didn’t make the party. But of course, he did. 🪐

I am a big baseball fan and historian. When I play trivia, I rarely miss a baseball question. I still collect cards and watch the “Twinks,” my usually pathetic excuse for a team, the Minnesota Twins. My first baseball memory was watching the 1973 World Series at age seven—the same year the American League instituted the designated hitter, which I have resented ever since. I still believe AL pitchers should bat.

I caught a baseball thrown by Bert Blyleven, a legendary Twin and Pirate with two World Series rings and a Hall of Fame plaque. I heard stories about the greats of the Thirties and Forties from my grandfather, who met many of them while working for the Forest Service and training as a teacher down the road from Hall of Famer Burleigh Grimes’ cabin in the Wisconsin Northwoods—Pie Traynor, Dizzy and Daffy Dean, and Frankie Frisch. I even wrote a chapter in a book about Grimes, the last legal spitballer in major league history. Grimes was a nice man in person and a deeply imperfect one otherwise: married five times, reputed to have a woman waiting in every National League city, suspended a year as a Dodgers manager for spitting on an umpire, and happy to throw at hitters, managers, umpires, and the occasional fan in the stands. Such was his schtick. Pete Rose, whom I loved to watch and once saw hit the first home run in the Metrodome, is barred from Cooperstown for betting on his own team. The greats, it turns out, are rarely simple. This essay, however, is not about baseball.

As of this writing, there are fifty-six members of the AANR-sponsored “Nudist Hall of Fame.” As a historian, I know most of the first half of the inductees and, sadly, have not heard of many of the recent ones. The recognition—I am not sure one should call it an “award”—was first given in 1964. That inaugural class included three people: Kurt Barthel, Ilsley Boone, and Alois Knapp. Both Boone and Knapp had, within twelve years of their enshrinement, snubbed their noses at the A.S.A. (now AANR) and given up their membership. Barthel had by then moved to California and joined Oakdale Guest Ranch, which was not an A.S.A. club; I am not sure he ever joined the American Sunbathing Association at all. As the founder of organized nudism in America, he surely deserved to be enshrined regardless. The other two are an essay for another time.

The fourth inductee, in 1965, was Rudolph Johnson—the great-great-grandfather of the publisher of Planet Nude—and I will defer his biography to him.

Like the baseball greats, many of the “greats” of nudism are imperfect people, and in some cases deeply imperfect people. The founders of American nudism include a Soviet agent, eugenicists, and a few men looking to make a fast buck. Even the inductees, supposedly the best of the best, are deeply flawed. Some are so flawed I cannot get my head around why they were elected. One inductee had between nine and thirteen wives (estimates vary, depending on which friend you ask), killed a woman, and appears to have defrauded some investors. Many had disowned the very organization—the ASA/AANR—that would later honor them.

One of these men is Norval “Pack” Packwood. Pack was the executive director of the American Sunbathing Association from 1950 to 1962. He succeeded Ilsley Boone, who did not go away willingly. When Packwood took over, the post itself was renamed: “Executive Secretary” became “Executive Director,” and Boone was made “Executive Secretary Emeritus” for life. So Pack was the first to hold the directorship, stepping into the role Boone had built and guarded for two decades.

Uncle Danny’s iron grip on the organization caused the 1951 convention turmoil, where two presidents and two boards of directors were elected at an infamous gathering in Pennsylvania. The two sides ended up in court—the A.S.A. versus the A.S.A., the organization suing itself. The judge excoriated Boone for the shoddy structure he had drafted, put the organization into receivership, and forced a special master to run a 1952 convention that elected new officers, a new board, and new bylaws. Packwood led the side that won. The Boone group—Alois Knapp, Edith Church, and others—took their ball and went home, splitting away into the National Nudist Council. Mervin Mounce was elected ASA president at that court-supervised meeting, 1,457 votes to 432.

The Packwoods were living at Sunshine Park in New Jersey, which Boone owned, so Pack and Myra were forced to move a few miles down the road, where they bought a piece of land and developed it into a new venue they called Pine Forest. When Packwood began as director, the A.S.A. had about two thousand members; by 1962, it had ten thousand. One reason was Packwood’s push to have the A.S.A. sponsor the film Garden of Eden, shot at Lake Como, as a way of marketing nudism to the outside world. It worked—and, for many at Lake Como, probably worked too well. He also convinced Mounce to set up Outdoor Publishing in Spokane to expand the available nudist titles, after Boone persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court in 1958 to allow nudist magazines into the mail.

When Mounce flew home from the 1961 ASA convention, he decided a new national organization was needed. He and Pack began writing letters and editorials, mostly about the A.S.A.’s lack of a financial cushion to support affiliated clubs in legal fights. In 1961, Lake Como had largely fought alone to keep Pasco County from licensing nudists. Art Cotterill (“Cot”) had even been arrested for practicing nudism without a license—a deliberate test case meant to carry the law to the Florida Supreme Court. The case was overturned at great expense, but it also made Cot something of a hero. That, plus Lake Como’s size, made him the new kingmaker in the ASA, controlling the biggest block of votes.

Stating their intention to form a democratic organization (a pointed knock against Cot) with the financial means to support its members’ legal needs, in February 1963 both Packwood and his club Pine Forest, and Mounce’s Sunshine Country Club near Spokane, became the first two charter members of the new American Health Alliance, breaking with the A.S.A.

There were now three national nudist governing organizations. Every A.H.A. member club was a privately owned operation, and—true to their word—$25,000 was set aside as a mutual defense fund. (Mounce, for one, would later denounce co-op clubs in his writing, though he never fully explained his objection.) Temporarily, before the N.N.C. moved to Ohio, all three national groups were based in New Jersey. The A.H.A. admitted only privately owned camps and resorts.

It took the pair just ten years to come full circle. Just as in 1952, when a past A.S.A. president (Knapp) and a recently deposed executive director (Boone) denounced the A.S.A. and pulled their two camps, Zoro and Sunshine Park, out to form the N.N.C., Packwood and Mounce now did the same thing. Like Boone, Mounce had built a significant publishing empire—Nudist Leader, Eden, Paradise, The Naturist, Nude World, and others, largely overlapping one another. Eden was produced in concert with Ed Lange of California. Mounce’s publications were now sponsored by the new A.H.A.

It is hard to put a flattering spin on the A.H.A. Mounce’s plan to market nudism to the masses through his publishing house did happen—and just after the A.H.A. started, Boone’s Sunshine Publishing went bankrupt in 1963 and liquidated in 1964. Sunshine & Health ended after its April 1963 issue, but it was hardly missed, given the proliferation of titles that—tacitly sponsored by the NNC, AHA, or ASA—pushed the norms of nudist decency.

After censorship loosened in 1968, Playboy, Hustler, and Penthouse soon outcompeted these low-budget productions for newsstand space. Since most of the readers were never true nudists, and there was a glut of material, demand for the nudist issues collapsed under far too much supply. When the nudist-magazine craze ended around 1970, the publishers stopped nearly all of them. Packwood wrote that Mounce’s Outdoor Publishing refused to print the sexualized material the buyers craved—though later issues of Eden and the other Lange-assisted titles look plenty sexualized to me. Packwood believed one of the leading on-ramps into nudism had closed, and worried that nude beauty contests and wet T-shirt nights would take its place, since there was no longer an easy way to market a club. The A.S.A. kept publishing The Bulletin to its existing members, but it was a black-and-white newsletter. About the only way converts now found their way to a camp was through newspaper classifieds or big events like the Miss Nude pageants—which, he wrote, tended to draw the wrong sort of crowd.

Disgruntled, Packwood sold Pine Forest in 1971 and retired, complaining to Alois Knapp about the state of nudism. He also published the last Nudist Newsletter for the A.H.A. membership at the end of 1971, effectively abandoning them at year’s end. Over its nine-year run—though many members never seemed to realize their national organization was functionally dead—the A.H.A. never lived up to its billing as a democratic body with deep pockets. Mervin Mounce was its only president and Norval Packwood its only secretary-treasurer. Mel Hacker, of Oakdale, was the only director ever added. Many of the clubs that had joined quietly rejoined the A.S.A. or the N.N.C.

The last mention of the American Health Alliance anywhere is in a La Crosse, Wisconsin newspaper article from 1973, about a mysterious club to the north in Galesville called the Sol Vista Recreation Club. The piece opens: “This is not a sex or wife-swapping club as some people think … you should see the letters we get.” The founders of nudism had spent forty years trying to distance the movement from sexuality, and it took only a few years for that work to be thoroughly muddled. That is an essay for another day—but Packwood and Mounce certainly did not help the devolution, whatever revisionist history they offered later, or whatever an apologist might write on their behalf.

Did Pack do good things for nudism in America? Yes. Did he seek to enrich himself while leading a non-profit? Yes. Did he save the A.S.A. in 1951–52? Yes. Did he try to destroy it after 1962? Also yes. Does he deserve to remain in the AANR Hall of Fame? Well—at least he never killed anyone. It is hard for me to get my head around Norval Packwood, and harder still to understand why, in 1983, the people of the A.S.A. chose to honor him so soon after an organization he had built tried to subvert and possibly eliminate theirs. Curiously, Mounce was never selected for the Hall of Fame, while Ed Lange was, in 1987. One cannot really separate the two men’s accomplishments—or their detractions—except that Mounce lived in Spokane and Lange in California.

Dave Bancroft was a .280-hitting shortstop who played for five major league teams over fifteen years, and he is in the Baseball Hall of Fame. In my opinion—and I am not alone—he did nothing to earn it. He owned a cabin next to Burleigh Grimes’ on Yellow Lake in northwestern Wisconsin (the same lake whose nearby swamp nearly killed a young Bud Grant, the future Vikings coach, during the Armistice Day Blizzard of 1940). Bancroft was also a buddy of Frankie Frisch, the Fordham Flash, who spent his years on Cooperstown’s Veterans Committee making sure his friends got enshrined. Maybe the Nudist Hall of Fame is, or has been, a similar effort.

Later in life, both Pack and Mounce were asked to write a history of the A.H.A. Pack refused; Mounce said he would get around to it, and never apparently did. Maybe the two men recognized their error and felt guilty. Maybe Pack was embarrassed to write the truth years after being enshrined by the A.S.A. Mounce was said to be a quiet man, but he was a voracious writer, which makes his silence on his own history seem odd. I do not know.

I once doubted that my grandfather really used to hang around baseball greats. I assumed it was revisionist memory—until I confirmed that in 1935 he had indeed spent a fall and spring teaching in a two-room school a baseball throw from the cabins of two future Hall of Famers, in a year when the entire Cardinals team came up to visit. Did Dizzy Dean show him a changeup grip, and Grimes a spitter? It is easy, after all, to remember only what you want to.

Men and women like Boone, Church, Mounce, Packwood, and Knapp wanted it both ways. Their resorts, camps, and publishing empires were never intended to be non-profits, yet they complained about the lack of money in the non-profits meant to help them—while resisting any higher fees. Packwood, writing to Knapp in 1971, blamed the A.S.A.’s tolerance of alcohol at its affiliates as a major cause of the decline. I think approving the use of the A.S.A.’s name — and later the A.H.A.’s—on some rather sexploitative magazines was a much bigger issue. And I think setting up a competing voice in nudist governance was bigger still. Don’t get me started about Alois Knapp. 🪐

More by Olaf:

It is with a heavy heart that I share the news that Billy Grinstead, one of the founding members and long-time co-organizer of Rocky Mountain Naturist Club in Colorado, passed away yesterday morning following respiratory failure.

Billy had lived with breathing challenges for much of his adult life, and his health became increasingly fragile over the past two years after multiple bouts of pneumonia and COVID-19. While his health limited his ability to participate in club activities during the past year, his impact on our organization—and on the people who knew him—will be felt for many years to come.

I first met Billy in 2014 when he was the organizer of Mile High Nudists, a Denver-area Meetup group that introduced countless people to social nudism, including myself. Later, he became the leader of 5280 Nudists, another successful group that continued to grow until he decided to conclude the organization in 2019.

That same year, Billy and I decided to create something new together. In May 2019, we co-founded Rocky Mountain Naturist Club with the goal of building a welcoming, inclusive community where people could experience the joy of naturism in a friendly, respectful environment. Billy served as my co-organizer from the very beginning and remained in that role until declining health forced him to step back about a year ago.

Many of the traditions our members look forward to each year exist because of Billy’s creativity and enthusiasm. He introduced our annual Call-In-Sick-to-Work Pool Day celebration at Mountain Air Ranch each June, started our beloved Soup Party held each January, and was the driving force behind our Nude Bowling events. From securing the venue to organizing every detail, Billy made those gatherings possible, and they remain among our most popular events today.

But Billy was far more than an organizer.

He was someone who genuinely loved people. Whether you met him at one of our events or at Mountain Air Ranch, you were likely greeted with a warm smile and an easy conversation. Billy had a remarkable ability to make everyone feel welcome. He loved cooking, baking, sharing his famous pizzelle cookies with friends, and could happily spend hours talking about his favorite classic cars—especially his beloved 1962 Chevy Impala.

For me personally, Billy was much more than a co-founder. He was a trusted partner, a sounding board, and a dear friend. Together we dreamed about what Rocky Mountain Naturist Club could become, and we worked side by side to make those dreams a reality. Much of what our club is today was shaped by his ideas, his generosity, and his unwavering belief in building a community where everyone felt they belonged.

Although Billy is no longer with us, his legacy lives on every time members gather for one of the traditions he created, every time a new member is welcomed into our community, and every time friendships are formed at one of our events.

Thank you, Billy, for your friendship, your generosity, and everything you gave to Rocky Mountain Naturist Club. You helped build something truly special, and your memory will always be a part of our community.

You will be deeply missed, but never forgotten. 🪐

The history of organized naturism has long been tied to a distinct philosophical premise: that stripping away clothing removes the artificial social structures, class distinctions, and commercial vanities that divide humanity. Yet, for much of the 20th century, the mainstream nudist movement harbored a blind spot (more than one actually, but that’s a subject for another article).

In its desperate bid for social acceptance amid mid-century puritanism, mainstream nudism aggressively marketed itself as a sanctuary for the traditional, heteronormative nuclear family. For gay men, who already moved through a world of hyper-vigilance and hidden identities, this meant entering a standard nudist park required stepping into yet another closet—that is, if they could even find a park that would accept an unmarried man.

The birth of Gay Naturists International (GNI) disrupted this dynamic. Emerging from a fragile network of local groups and formalizing out of a mainstream affinity group in the early 1980s, GNI grew into an established institution of the nudist movement.

It provided a space where gay men could experience the liberating vulnerability of social nudity in a more organized way without hiding their identities. GNI’s story is the tale of how a marginalized group within a counterculture carved out its own sanctuary, establishing a global legacy of body acceptance and freedom that is still growing and developing today.

Gay nudism pre-Stonewall

Long before any official organization carried the “gay naturist” banner, gay men were seeking out the liberating joy of bare skin in nature. In the pre-Stonewall era, public space was heavily policed, and homosexual assembly was criminalized. Consequently, gay men sought out geographical margins—isolated beaches, riverbanks, and coastal dunes—where they could strip down and build clandestine communities of their own.

As early as the 1940s, Hanlan’s Point Beach on Toronto Island became a legendary refuge. Hidden behind shifting sand dunes, gay men and lesbians alike sunbathed naked, creating an oasis of freedom despite the persistent threat of police arrests and social stigma.1 By the 1950s and ’60s, a similar culture took deep root on the east coast of the United States, specifically within the secluded dunes of Cherry Grove and Fire Island Pines off Long Island, New York.2

These early spaces were entirely informal, sustained through word-of-mouth networks. They provided a sharp contrast to the dark, urban, and heavily monitored spaces—like underground bars and bathhouses—to which gay life was mostly confined. Out on the sand, the light was bright, the air was clean, and the nudity was recreational, peaceful, and communal—though always vigilant, as well.

Parallel to these physical spaces was a powerful visual precursor: mid-century physique photography. Spearheaded by pioneers like Bob Mizer and his Athletic Model Guild (AMG), from the 1940s through the 1960s, magazines like Physique Pictorial circulated images of minimally clad (and eventually nude) men under the legally necessary guise of “artistic posing,” bodybuilding, and health promotion.3 These publications frequently utilized outdoor backdrops—forests, rivers, and beaches—subtly intertwining the concept of male homoerotic appreciation with the clean, uninhibited freedom of the natural world.

They also helped bring artists like “Tom of Finland,” who specialized in the exaggerated and hyper-masculine nude male form, to a global audience. The nudity and sexuality that was so abundantly on display in his work has been called “the most effective propaganda for a gay utopia produced to date.”4 Though dismissed by some as mere pornography (it was often that, but not only), his drawings—which frequently featured naturist and nudist themes—depicted confidence and encouraged gay men to find affirmation in their own naked bodies.

In the 1960s and ’70s, gay male nudism also found expression in various “skin” magazines of the era, including Mr. Nudist, Mr. Sun, M.A.N. (Male Athletic Nudist), International Nudist Sun, MAN (Male and Nudism), Male Nudist Portfolio, and others. Some were simply venues for nude male photography, but several expressed an earnest commitment to forging a space for gay naturism.

An editorial in the first issue of Mr. Nudist in January 1968 expressed the frustration that “the single male nudist” (gay was a word the publishers still did not dare to use) felt when facing “the prejudice against groups of single men at nudist parks”:

“The single male nudist is certainly no new phenomenon, but what is new is the fact that the single man is no longer waiting at nudist park gates until park owners ‘have room for them.’ The single male nudist is joining the growing numbers of casual nudists who, begrudging the time and energy it takes to get to a nudist park, begin to practice nudism at home and in isolated outdoor areas of their own choosing.”5

Similarly, the editors of Mr. Sun predicted that the days of the “family nudist park” would be numbered if operators stuck to their “sheltered atmosphere,” forcing interested people who didn’t meet their strict standards to find other outlets for nude recreation and socializing. “Anything as beneficial as nudism just could not be limited to the formal grounds of a nudist park,” they said as they surveyed the previous few years. “What was good for a weekend was soon found to be enjoyable at home, off in the mountains, or down at the beach. And thus, the quite revolution towards a broader scope of nudism was born.”6

Gays on the frontlines of the Free Beach Movement

Despite the unwelcoming attitude of the parks and resorts, mainstream nudism ironically gained greater traction with the public in the 1970s thanks in large part to the efforts of gay nudists. The free beach movement of that time relied heavily on gay men to secure its most critical victories: public, clothing-optional beaches. With the establishment of nude beaches, nudism secured a greater degree of legitimacy in the public eye and shed at least a bit of the stigma which it carried.

Lee Baxandall, the straight founder of The Naturist Society (TNS) and a leader in the fight for free beaches, frequently gave explicit, public credit to the gay community for doing the heavy lifting in early free-beach activism.

“Gays on the nude beach have often led because of more experience at defying intimidation on behalf of values too central to abandon,” Baxandall wrote in an editorial in the November 1981 issue of Clothed With the Sun.7

While heteronormative families often feared the public exposure or legal risks of protesting on beaches, gay activists—already seasoned by the post-Stonewall gay liberation movement—understood how to organize, face down police harassment, and fight for public space. From the shores of Cape Cod to the dunes of California, gay men were often the shock troops of the free beach movement, establishing public beachheads that benefitted all naturists.

Despite taking the lead in fights that brought wins for the broader naturist movement and enabled wider access to nude recreation for all, gay men continued to be ostracized by much of mainstream nudism. The magazines and newsletters of the movement could be counted on in this era to periodically remind readers of homosexuality’s unacceptability and its supposed incompatibility with wholesome family nudism.

Some writers focused on religious and moralistic reasons for rejecting gays, though plenty of other rationales were also offered. One author, Michael Sands, M.D., argued that raising children as nudists, giving them plenty of visual exposure to both male and female bodies from a young age, would keep them from becoming “inverted.” He wrote that “nudism may offer a path to a normal, heterosexual way of life,” in Nudist Newsfront.8

Another adherent of the movement, a person named Michael Stanley, declared “homosexual nudism” the “plague of America,” pinning blame on it for alcoholism, narcotics addiction, paranoid schizophrenia, “psychopathic states,” and crime generally.9

“There is nothing finer” to fix these problems, he wrote, “than adult, well-adjusted, satisfying heterosexuality” combined with “public acceptance of the nudist idea,” as if the latter were an easy thing to achieve. Ironically, the same author felt it appropriate to include in his article the statement that “Nudists are egalitarian in their outlook, accepting that all men are equal.”

Baxandall would later make opposition to such nonsense a key point of distinction between TNS and the rest of mainstream nudism and its landed clubs. “‘Family nudism’ (the rigid ideology, not the practical experience) generally clings to the most bankrupt of patriarchal standards,” he said, “and to the nuclear family, which is a creation of 20th Century industrial society and statistically is on the way out.”10

The Naturist Society and the birth of GLN

By the late 1970s, the post-Stonewall explosion of gay liberation collided with the growing countercultural interest in nudism. Small, local, and explicitly non-sexual gay nudist collectives began to coalesce independently. Groups like the Gay Bares of Philadelphia, the Everglade Rawhides in Miami, Key West Naturists, and Lambda Soleil near Washington, D.C., emerged as regional safe havens.

The newspapers and magazines that popped up around the United States as part of the wave of gay liberation movements became places where nudist groups started to advertise and recruit members. However, these groups operated in isolation, lacking a unified national framework.

The turning point arrived in 1980 when Baxandall founded TNS. Unlike its predecessor, the American Sunbathing Association (ASA, later renamed AANR), which leaned culturally conservative and strictly policed family dynamics, TNS was built on a foundation of free expression and diversity. Baxandall welcomed the formation of “special interest groups” (SIGs) within TNS’s structure, and essentially from the first days of TNS, a gay naturists SIG was in the works.

From the organization’s founding, Baxandall received an influx of inquiries from gay men looking for a dedicated space within the movement. Recognizing the need, Baxandall approached Murray Kaufman, a gay New Yorker who had been organizing private nude socials for gay men on the sidelines of the mainstream group he led, the Tri-State Metro Naturists.11 Kaufman was known among fellow gay New York nudists, but he was generally still closeted to the other Tri-State members. Baxandall urged him to “come out” and take the lead on mobilizing a gay and lesbian group within TNS.

At the TNS Solair Conference in 1983, a group of gay and lesbian naturists met face-to-face and concluded that they needed an explicit, recognized presence to counter the heteronormative dominance of mainstream resorts. In the spring of 1984, Kaufman, alongside Cheryl Auger of New England Naturists, went public, formally founding Gay and Lesbian Naturists (GLN) as an official Special Interest Group under TNS.

Using $75.00 of start-up money provided by TNS, a list of 30 names and addresses given to him by Baxandall, and a little extra cash of his own, Kaufman and three other associates published Volume 1, Number 1 of Gay and Lesbian Naturists, an eight-page newsletter that included the announcement of the SIG’s founding, a list of gay nudist groups, and articles on a variety of topics.12

Tragically, Sheldon Seidman, a brilliant young activist who was slated to co-coordinate GLN with Kaufman and who passionately advocated for absolute equal rights for gay naturists, passed away from Hodgkin’s Disease at age 31 just weeks after the group’s formation. His vision, however, infused the early movement with a profound sense of urgency.

A tribute in that first newsletter pledged to stick to the lessons he taught: “To be open about what we are and to fight for acceptance on our own terms,” and “to be loving and caring and to treat all others as real human beings worthy of respect.”

GLN adopted its primary statement of purpose from the Everglade Rawhides, a group based in Miami: “Our basic purpose is to provide an atmosphere of social, nonsexual nudity for gay men and lesbians in a variety of outdoor and indoor settings…. There is no screening process, and we do not practice discrimination….”

One member named Blake expressed the optimism of those early days of organized gay naturism, writing in the newsletter: “The Gay and Lesbian Naturists organization will provide options…. Twenty years from now, all of the corners [of this country] may be filled with the laughter of sunkissed men and women of all persuasions joined in community. It is up to us to create that reality.”

From interest group to independence

In 1985, GLN hosted its first national gathering at the country’s best-known gay nudist resort at the time, Summit Lodge, in Rockbridge, Ohio. Approximately 60 members attended—all of them men. Over the subsequent years, these annual gatherings grew rapidly, with hundreds of individuals converging for a week of nude communing.

The rising popularity of the group exposed a structural reality, however. While founded as a co-gender space, GLN had quickly become a de facto all-male environment, as lesbian naturists predominantly chose to organize within separate, lesbian-feminist collectives.

By 1992, the group stood at a crossroads. It had outgrown its status as a mere subsidiary affinity group of TNS and required autonomous legal and financial control. The organization restructured, officially splitting from TNS to become an independent entity. In what was both a recognition of its evolving demographic and an acceptance of reality, the organization dropped “Lesbian” from its title and rebranded as Gay Naturists International (GNI), a name that also reflected its growing reach beyond U.S. borders.13

GNI established itself as the central hub for gay nudists and as a clearinghouse for gay naturist news, publishing GNI Quarterly, Gay Naturist Informer, GNI E-former, and other titles over the years. It also acted as an umbrella organization, networking local clubs in the U.S. and around the globe. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, boosted by the dawn of the internet, GNI’s registry swelled to include well over 100 affiliated groups, spanning major metropolitan areas across North America, Europe, and Australia.

The Gatherings: Sanctuary in an age of crisis

The crown jewel of GNI’s operation has always been The Gatherings—massive, multi-day annual events that draw hundreds of men from all over the planet. Starting out as tent-and-trailer affairs, over the decades these events shifted to commercial gay-owned clothing-optional campgrounds, eventually finding a long-term home in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania.

To understand the astronomical growth of GNI’s Gatherings in the late 1980s and 1990s, they must be viewed through the devastating lens of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. During an era when the media, the government, and the medical establishment demonized gay male bodies as vectors of disease and corruption, the Gatherings offered a radical counter-narrative.

On the grounds of a GNI Gathering, the gay male body was restored to a state of innocent, natural beauty. Men of all ages, sizes, and abilities—including those bearing the physical scars of illness—walked together in equality. The nudity was social and non-sexual in the public and common areas, a parameter protected by organizers. This distinction was critical; it allowed men to experience physical intimacy, touch, and deep emotional bonding without the performance anxieties or sexual expectations of the bathhouses or bar scenes. It was a space of profound communal healing.

Dan Smith, an attendee from Sydney, Australia, recounted his first Gathering in an issue of The Gay Naturist Informer: “I felt a real camaraderie. It’s amazing how being naked breaks down so many barriers. It’s been over a month now since I’ve been home, and I’m still carrying the acceptance and happiness I experienced at the Gathering with me. I am so glad I overcame my hesitations.”14

The Gatherings also represented the first time that many gay nudists were able to enjoy the social atmosphere and large group recreation that had already been the norm for straight nudists for decades—a problem already highlighted in the “single male nudist” magazines of the sixties and seventies. Leslie Rollins explained the issue, again, in Nude and Natural in late 1992:

“Gay men don’t often have the opportunity to visit well-equipped nudist camps and resorts because of the widespread ‘single man’ policy. Fearing harassment of female guests, most clubs severely restrict or outright prohibit single men.”15

Murray Kaufman was always irate about such policies. “This effectively excludes gay men and is discriminatory,” he told Rollins. “Even male couples are not admitted.” The few clubs which in those days did admit gay men were still places of prejudice.

“Gay men are often singled out as being promiscuous,” Kaufman said, even though, he said, he had witnessed overt heterosexual public sex at a resort being allowed with no response from management while the mere sight of two pairs of men’s legs behind a shower stall curtain brought complaints about “the behavior of Murray’s boys.”

Navigating social nudity and sexuality

While GNI has always protected the “social, non-sexual” parameter of its official events to keep them relaxed, safe, and accessible to men who want to sunbathe or swim without the pressure to perform, gay naturism as a broader movement does not shy away from sexuality. For gay men, sex and nature have long been intertwined through the historical necessity of cruising—which meant for a long time that beaches and parks were the only places gay men could find one another.

The magic of gay naturism lies in its ability to hold space for both. In designated social zones—the pool, the volleyball court, the dining hall—nudity is an equalizer, completely decoupled from sexual intent. This allows men to look each other in the eye without an immediate sexual agenda, fostering platonic brotherhood.

However, gay naturists also acknowledge that a gathering of naked gay men will naturally involve attraction, flirtation, and sexual desire. Rather than adopting the puritanical anti-sex attitudes of early mainstream nudist resorts, the gay naturist community embraces a healthy pragmatism. In appropriate times and private or designated adult spaces—such as certain trails, workshops, or resort cabins—cruising and sexual expression are accepted as natural, healthy extensions of body freedom.

Tom Scott, a member of the group Gay Male Nudists in San Francisco, summarized the philosophy in Clothed With the Sun back in November 1981: “We feel that the entire body is a marvelous creation to be enjoyed all over, not with the straight pretense that it does not exist below the waist. We don’t believe in putting constraints on each other, as long as no person feels coerced into doing what he does not really care to do.” If one or more men at one of their local gatherings felt like sex, he said, they “fragment into groups.”16

The meetings, Scott said, “are not orgies, though on the other hand they could not be mistaken for church socials. We do photography, yoga, drink wine, and share food and talk…. We enjoy being gay and being together, and we delight in nudity and being open. And the group, despite its wide range of interests and ages, is perhaps the most congenial I’ve ever experienced. We can smile, and share, and feel refreshed, as if we have touched on our essential humanity.”

As for GNI, it codified its position on the subject in simple terms:

“GNI acknowledges that sex is natural, but sex is not equated with naturism. GNI respects all its members for their individuality, whether or not they choose to express their sexuality, and shall endeavor to respect individual sensibilities as may be appropriate, and encourages its members to do the same.”17

Putting the “International” into Gay Naturists International

While GNI remains a U.S.-based anchor of the organized gay nudist movement, it has also developed deep philosophical and structural connections to global expressions of queer naturism.

In Europe, where public nudity enjoys a far higher degree of societal acceptance, gay naturism evolved along a slightly different track. To a significant degree, European gay naturists seamlessly integrated into the continent’s vast network of public Freikörperkultur (FKK) beaches, even if they could not always do so openly.

But today, from the sun-baked shores of Mykonos in Greece and Ibiza in Spain to designated sections of the English coast, European networks like France’s Naturistes Gays function alongside GNI, sharing resources and cross-promoting international travel.

In Canada, gay naturists took the fight out of the woods and directly into urban environments, leading to landmark legal battles. In 1997, a Toronto-based non-profit organization called TNT!MEN (Totally Naked Toronto! Men Enjoying Nudity) began hosting naked dances at a local gay club, The Barn & Stables.

The group—which started off in 1995 as Toronto Canada Area Nudists (TCAN)—had GNI connections. “When I heard about GNI Gatherings,” founding member Peter Gray said in an interview for a previous Planet Nude article, “I couldn’t get there fast enough.”18

In August 1992, he and another gay Toronto nudist, David Drascic, spent a week with 600 others at the GNI summer camp in the Pennsylvania woods. The experience proved galvanizing. The two men, by now partners, started hosting naked parties at their home in Toronto the following summer, filling the guest list largely through contacts accumulated at GNI.

Eventually, TCAN became TNT!MEN and dedicated itself to “fostering the growth of gay-positive social nudism” and “amending the Criminal Code of Canada provisions related to being nude in a public place.”19

A short time later, Toronto police forces launched a wave of targeted raids against the group’s indoor events. TNT!MEN refused to retreat into the shadows, however. They enlisted local attorney Peter Simm—the same lawyer who successfully restored the official clothing-optional designation at Hanlan’s Point Beach in 1999—to fight the charges.

In a historic legal victory in the year 2000, Simm successfully defended TNT!MEN and won the decriminalization of indoor naked bar events in Canada. This monumental case proved that social nudity among consenting adults in an adult space was entirely lawful. The legal momentum generated by TNT!MEN directly paved the way for the City of Toronto to permanently carve out and legally protect the clothing-optional beach at Hanlan’s Point in 2002 and opened the way for legal nudity at events like Toronto Pride and the annual World Naked Bike Ride.

Why gay men choose naturism

The enduring, passionate interest of gay men in naturism is rooted in a unique psychological reality. Growing up gay in a world built for straight people means learning to live behind protective layers; the “closet” isn’t just an abstract concept. From adolescence, gay men learn to guard their posture, mask their voice, and police how they present their bodies out of shame and a fear of rejection.

Stripping off your clothes at a gay naturist gathering or even just among a group of friends at a beach becomes something deeper than simply enjoying the comfort of the open air and sun. It echoes, physically, the act of coming out.

When you take off your clothes, you shed—at least to some degree—the societal labels, social classes, and textile camouflage that a closeted life demands. In a group setting, this can create a feeling akin to collective liberation. Walking, swimming, and simply socializing with other men in your most natural state creates a kind of healing.

It totally turns the tables on the image of the gay male body that mainstream society created—a body that carried stigma, shame, and guilt. Social naturism thus offers a freedom for gay men, a place where the exhausting job of trying to “fit in” eases somewhat and where they can step out of the shadows.

Decades after Murray Kaufman and Lee Baxandall mapped out the blueprint for GLN, Gay Naturists International remains a vital force.20 While the proliferation of digital apps and shifting societal acceptance have changed how gay men find community, the physical experience of outdoor communal freedom cannot be replicated on a screen.

GNI did something profoundly subversive: It took the concept of the naked gay man—a concept that a puritanical society had thoroughly sexualized, criminalized, and shamed—and placed it back into the hands of nature. In doing so, it proved that when you take off your clothes among friends, you don’t just lose your garments. You lose your defenses, your shame, and your isolation, stepping out into the bright, healing light of self-acceptance. 🪐

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.

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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3 months 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. 🪐

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