Decriminalizing nudity in California
Exposing injustice around exposure laws as a tool for criminalizing homelessness in the 31st state
In the eight years I have called Los Angeles home, I have encountered probably a half dozen nude or semi nude individuals in public, on city streets. Before you go asking for the juicy details, understand that in zero of these cases was the nude person a famous model or Hollywood starlet. Exactly none of them were porn actors who had wandered south from the San Fernando valley. Not once was it a scandalous, lewd, or sexual encounter. In fact, every one of them was an unhomed individual, apparently lacking the basic privacy and space to be nude behind the comfort of a wall. The majority of these sightings were women. About half of them appeared to be suffering from mental illness or addiction. Most were downtown where I worked for multiple years just a few blocks from Skid Row, “one of the largest stable populations (about 9,200–15,000) of homeless people in the United States”1 where scenes of this nature are actually not all that uncommon. In fact…
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