Denny Blaine stays nude
A judge refused to close Seattle’s historic clothing-optional beach or ban nudity, ordering the city to tighten how the park is managed instead.
In a ruling signed July 15, King County Superior Court Judge Samuel Chung declined to close Denny Blaine Park and declined to ban nudity there, rejecting the two things a coalition of waterfront neighbors had sued to win. Seattle’s only historically recognized clothing-optional beach stays open, and nude use remains lawful. Check out the full ruling here.
Chung did find that lewd sexual conduct at the park amounts to a public nuisance, and he granted the neighbors a permanent injunction ordering the city to do more to control it. But the remedy he ordered is management, not closure—and nowhere does it prohibit simple nudity. The plaintiffs asked the court to shutter the park or ban nudity outright. They got neither.
In a statement, Friends of Denny Blaine said the ruling delivered what it had fought for. “The park remains open to everyone. Nudity remains lawful and permitted on the lower beach, and toplessness remains permitted throughout the park, including the upper area,” the group said. “These have been our core goals from the day we intervened in this case.” It pledged to support the city in carrying out the court-ordered measures, pointing to its own community guidelines, volunteer stewardship, and outreach.
But the group also signaled it was not done. It said it disagreed with parts of Chung’s findings, arguing the ruling “gives substantial weight to conditions that predate the abatement measures now in place” and “does not fully reflect the significant improvements at the park over the past year.” Friends of Denny Blaine said it believes the evidence shows the park “is not currently a nuisance” and should ultimately be “restored to its full historical status as a fully clothing optional Park.” The group said it was reviewing the order and evaluating its next steps.
“Denny Blaine is open,” the statement closed. “We’ll see you at the beach.”
The ruling closes a chapter Planet Nude readers have followed since 2023, when the fight was about stopping a children’s playground on the park’s edge. It became a fight over documenting that the park’s queer and nude history was real enough to earn a place on the Washington Heritage Register, which it did in 2025. This year it became a trial.
In Denny Blaine Park for All v. City of Seattle, the plaintiffs argued the park had become a site of lewd conduct the city failed to control, and asked Chung to close it or prohibit nudity. Closing the park, Chung wrote, “is not an appropriate remedy at this time.” He drew a clear line between nudity and lewd conduct, and located the nuisance in the latter.
On the central question, Chung drew the distinction Friends of Denny Blaine and the city pressed across three weeks of trial: he located the nuisance in the lewd conduct, not in nudity itself, and ordered the city to police that conduct rather than banning lawful nude use. He did not hold that nudity is beyond the city’s reach—in a footnote, he noted that the claim that legal nudity “cannot be regulated” would require “much greater scrutiny”—but he declined to make a ban the remedy. He also rejected the plaintiffs’ “nuisance per se” theory, finding that a violation of the parks code of conduct or the Shoreline Management Act does not, by itself, make the park a nuisance. And he agreed with the city’s policing expert that closing the park would offer only short-term relief without lasting change—both sides’ experts, he noted, agreed that clearer boundaries and limits on hours and access would do more.
What the court ordered instead is further abatement: the city must develop a park-specific user plan and code of conduct, staff the park adequately to monitor and report conduct, maintain the grounds to discourage lewd behavior, establish buffers between the park and bordering homes, and post clearer signage. Chung framed the park as “a limited natural resource that must be shared by the residents of the neighborhood and the Park’s visitors.” It is a continuation of the path he set in July 2025 and affirmed that October, when he ordered abatement rather than closure—not a reversal.
Closings ran June 11. Susan Foster, a Perkins Coie partner, delivered FoDB’s closing across 45 minutes and 56 slides, addressing the plaintiffs’ claims point by point, walking through expert testimony that the abatement plan had reduced incidents, and returning to the park’s history as a longstanding LGBTQ+ space. Public parks, she argued, belong to everyone.
FoDB’s trial brief put the distinction in four words: “Nude is not lewd.”
Planet Nude will have continuing coverage. 🪐
