Getting to the root of things

Could a lesser-known rural subculture offer a lesson for naturists?

Radical Faeries gather at a maypole. Photo by author.

The winding road is littered with old motels with peeling paint, empty swimming pools, and rusty neon signs that burned out long ago.  Some rent rooms by the month, some by the hour.  Between long stretches of farmland and woodlands, there is a meat-and-three, a gas station, a liquor store, and a mobile home or two.  Faded billboards warn of damnation and advertise salvation, as there is not much else to sell in these parts.  It is the kind of community decimated by the construction of the interstate highway system in the 1960s, which circumvented many of the two-lane roads and took out-of-state travelers (and their dollars) with them.  A sleepy town like this is not where you would expect to find a clothing-optional gathering of an international movement called the Radical Faeries. However, as I learned long ago, you never know what you might find when exploring the backroads of the rural south.  

The gathering is held atop a mountain and is only accessible by a treacherous dirt road barely wider than a bike trail, riddled with potholes large enough to swallow a tire. Turning around or letting another car pass is virtually impossible. The road circles around and around for several miles, and I encounter a number of hikers asking for a ride.  Most introduce themselves using their "faerie names," recycled summer of love monickers like Willow or Moon, or quirky drag-inspired names like Disarray or Miss Behave.  I feel car sick after watching loose rocks tumble down the steep embankments as I make my way up the mountain.  My ears are popping.  I hear thunder in the distance and can see black clouds behind me.  A cool breeze suddenly cuts through the humid spring air, suggesting a storm is approaching.  I am already anxious and ready to call off the adventure when I round a corner and encounter a man on horseback.  It is immediately apparent that he is no ally of the Faeries.  "You lost?"  he asks menacingly before slowly moving past me, brushing so close to my car that I can smell his sweat and cigarette-tinged breath through the open window.  Looking into the rearview mirror, I see him glaring at me. There is no cell reception or GPS, which leaves no option but to follow the small, faded pink triangles discreetly painted on tree trunks and rocks.  I am told these discrete pink arrows have led countless travelers to the sanctuary for decades.  Some claim that Will Geer, Grandpa Walton himself, was once a visitor, as he had been involved with Radical Faeries founder Harry Hay.  Others say the farm the sanctuary sits on was once a hideout for Civil War soldiers who evaded capture by dressing in women's clothing.  These stories are almost certainly untrue (Geer died two years before the sanctuary was founded), but perhaps every culture needs its myths.

At last, I arrive at the gathering.  I hear drumming, laughter, and singing.  Curious goats and chickens wander up to me, as does a man wearing a homemade tunic. "You just getting here?"  He asks.  "It's a big one this year!  There's 400 or more people up here, from all over the world, some of 'em in costumes, some of 'em as nekkid as the day they were born!"  

The fellow is not exaggerating.  As I walk past a giant barn and to the meadow where a 30-foot maypole has been erected, I see someone dressed as a golden bull, a genie on stilts, a man in an elaborate exotic flower costume, and countless people partially or fully naked.  A young man is lying in a hammock strung between a pair of trees, and his friend is gently swinging him back and forth, barely controlling his laughter as he sings a mildly bawdy version of My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean.

My brother lies over the ocean,
My sister lies over the sea,
My father lies over my mother
And that's how they got little me.

In the middle of the meadow, a lone, wiry, naked man is slow-motion dancing next to a boom box playing someone's cover of Whole Lotta Love. The scene is both psychedelic and carnivalesque, a sea of shimmering fabrics, naked flesh, and unabashed individuality.

A body acceptance movement

In his 2010 essay in The Gay & Lesbian Review, Radical Faerie cofounder Donald Kilhefner writes, "Etymologically, the word 'radical' comes from the Latin word for 'root.' To be 'radical' is to get to the root of things, which is what we were trying to do."  Kilhefner goes on to explain, 

Radical Faerie gatherings represent the kind of larger and healthier gay community Faeries want to create and live in: being visibly and openly "gay" in the widest sense of that word; valuing the gifts of each person, and weaving those gifts into the fabric of community life; feeding each other literally and spiritually; recognizing that a healthy community honors ancestors, requires elders, depends on adults, and invites youth; acknowledging and assuming our responsibilities not only to the gay community but to the larger community of beings; being environmentally conscious and working to protect and heal the planet; performing the necessary rituals and ceremonies that keep a community healthy and sane; valuing charity and generosity over hoarding and self-centeredness; being culturally aware, imaginatively engaged, and creatively expressive; and, finally, singing, dancing, playing, dressing up, and having fun. 

In a July 31, 2016 article in The Guardian, columnist Steven Thrasher describes the atmosphere of body acceptance at a northern California Radical Faerie gathering:

Clothed and walking around in the world, I usually hate my body: the size of my belly and my butt; the lack of hair on my head; and the abundance of hair on my back and backside. But here, I felt less self-conscious than ever. It was not like being at Fire Island or a gay pride march, where buff, hypermasculine white men are centered, and everyone else compares themselves to them. Here, whiteness was absent; there were bodies with lots of body hair and none, bodies with big asses and big boobs and both (and neither), with genitals of all varieties, with no one around to pathologize them.

Thrasher's description of his body-positive experience at the Radical Faerie gathering likely sounds very familiar to the seasoned naturist.

Social nudity in LGBTQ communities

While the first Radical Faerie gathering occurred in Arizona in 1979, LGBTQ communities have long been tolerant of nudity in their spaces, most notably at the 1970 Pride events organized a year after the Stonewall Riots in New York.  Documentaries like We Were There and Gay USA: Snapshots of 1970s LGBT Resistance capture images of several topfree and nude participants in the pride celebrations throughout the United States during the 1970s.  For a minority group whose members have traditionally been compelled to conceal their true selves, social or public nudity is often seen as a symbolic rejection of oppression and an exhilarating reclamation of one's authentic identity.  

Although many nudists vehemently object to drawing connections between the gay and nudist cultures, it is undeniable that the nudist movement has always included a strong LGBTQ influence, and the two movements have intersected many times throughout history. Havelock Ellis, who wrote the first affirming medical textbook on homosexuality in 1897, also penned the introduction to Maurice Parmelee's 1927 book The New Gymnosophy: The Philosophy of Nudity As Applied in Modern Life.  Lesbian author and activist Jan Gay published On Going Naked, an overview of the nudist movement, in 1932, wrote the screenplay for the nudist documentary This Naked Age that same year and operated an early nudist community in Highlands, New York, called the Out-of-Doors Club. Pioneering nudist leader Zelda Suplee, who owned and managed Pennsylvania's Sunny Rest Resort, also managed the Erickson Educational Foundation, a transgender resource organization funded by a transgender man named Reed Erickson. Lee Baxandall, arguably the first leader of the American free beach movement, repeatedly credited the LGBTQ community for establishing the nation's first clothing-optional beaches on both the East and West coasts and hinted that the nation's nudist movement had several closeted lesbians and gays in prominent leadership positions.  

Nudists and LGBTQ activists often shared the same legal challenges. In 1958, the Supreme Court decided a pair of cases (Sunshine Book Co. v. Summerfield and One, Inc. v. Olesen) which lifted a Post Office ban on two nudist magazines (Sunshine and Health and Sun Magazine) and an LGBTQ periodical (One: The Homosexual Magazine) on grounds the publications were not obscene. The Rochester Topfree Seven, a group of primarily lesbian activists, won a pivotal 1992 legal battle over the right to bare their breasts in New York, which has been used as a precedent for similar initiatives in other states. A prominent feminist activist, Karla Jay, wrote of the lesbians who introduced topfree sunbathing to Venice Beach and who subsequently endured persecution and arrest.

A comparison of two movements

The Radical Faerie movement and the nudist movement each emerged from a similar desire to create an alternative to the dehumanizing effects of modern urban and suburban life by forming communities closer to nature and encouraging people to live more healthily, honestly, and simply.  Each sought to create dedicated spaces where individuals could be their authentic selves.  Social nudity – a symbolic defiance of irrational taboos and societal absolutes – was intended to be a starting point for a more enlightened and open-minded society.  

The Radical Faerie movement has expanded far beyond its original conception as a predominantly gay male subculture into one that is largely indifferent to the gender or sexual orientation of its participants. Radical individuality is a core value of the movement, so such distinctions have become irrelevant. At gatherings, the naked body is no more or less intriguing than the body clad in a costume, drag, or street clothes.  The community has never sought to profit or become a business. Nor has it altered its values in the blind pursuit of mainstream acceptance, which generally requires a degree of assimilation and adaptation of the predominant culture's values. 

Conversely, the nudist movement has a lengthy and well-documented history of exclusivity – and even outright discrimination against prospective participants –  based on gender, marital status, skin color, sexual orientation, and gender identity. While many nudist leaders have been committed to a form of nudism rooted in values and a meaningful philosophy, others recognized the potential for profit by strictly confining nudism to private spaces with hefty admission fees or by the subtle eroticization of nudism.  Objectively examine the movement's undeniably problematic history – the decades of exploitative "nudist" magazines that mainly were photo essays of young women (sometimes paid models), the nude pageants that were once a popular feature of many nudist camps (sometimes open to the paying, non-nudist public), the events like the lingerie dances or the "leather and lace" and "naughty schoolgirl" costume parties held at some highly-esteemed, so-called "family-oriented" nudist resorts, and the large number of nudist resorts that have almost effortlessly transitioned into swinger resorts with little if any protest from their longtime residents and members – and it becomes difficult to deny that the nudist movement has been grossly inconsistent in holding to its founding values and altogether too focused on appealing to the prospective consumers of its products.

The frequent assertion that organized nudism has aggressively avoided any sexual connotations – particularly when used as an argument against forging alliances with the LGBTQ communities –  is historically uninformed at best and blatantly disingenuous at worst. Many leaders in the nudist movement have shamelessly blurred the line between simple nudity and sexual nudity to sell magazines, books, videos, and resort admissions. Ignoring or denying this reality only heightens the suspicions of an already skeptical public and deters prospective participants.

While the Radical Faerie movement has undoubtedly experienced its challenges and controversies, the absence of a profit motive and subsequent need to constantly reorient to the whims of the consumer has allowed it to remain mostly true to its original principles. Too often, the nudist movement has been content to sell itself as whatever the public is interested in buying.

Lessons for nudists

So what might the Radical Faeries teach us?

Perhaps the most noteworthy evolution of the Radical Faerie movement has been its growing inclusion of heterosexual participants.  At some point, its organizers recognized that the movement should be defined by its participants' commitment to a shared set of values, not on arbitrary distinctions such as gender or sexual orientation. Nudists might similarly do well to eliminate its gatekeeping tendencies once and for all and acknowledge that quotas or restrictions based on gender, marital status, sexual orientation, and other demographic variances are meaningless and ineffective in establishing or preserving the desired atmosphere of a community. Can we legitimately argue that nudism has nothing to do with sex if we are informing newcomers that admission into our spaces may solely depend on what kind of genitals they have and what they have chosen to do with them? Instead, we should focus on promoting and sustaining the core philosophical values of naturism in our spaces. We should welcome everyone who shares or demonstrates an interest in these core values. We should also recognize that great care must be taken when monetizing nudism, as commodifying the movement and prioritizing profits over principles to steer consumers into our organizations and businesses exposes the movement to potential exploitation and misunderstanding.

Conclusions

A few years after I attended the Radical Faerie gathering, I found myself sitting by the pool of a dreary, faded nudist park on what should have been a busy holiday weekend. I observed the four or five guests – all somewhat intoxicated men in mirrored sunglasses – wander like curious cattle to the rusty chain link fence each time an unfamiliar car pulled through the gate, sigh in collective disappointment when they realized it was just another man, and return to their lounge chairs and beers.  "Used to be more women." I imagined this was the atmosphere inside the rural taverns my mother used to warn me against visiting, cinder block buildings with neon beer signs hanging behind barred windows and sad country ballads emanating from the dimly lit, smoky interiors each time a patron walked in or stumbled out.  Places where the four or five lonely men at the bar turned each time the door opened, hoping it might be a woman.  Places where certain kinds of people are not welcome. I had already concluded that the Radical Faeries community – with its intense commitment to intentional rusticity –  was not for me. I may not be an urban dweller, but I am far too spoiled by modern conveniences to urinate in an outhouse or drink from a creek. And while I may not mind sitting quietly in an aging nudist campground, I do recognize when I am not wanted.

And yet, each movement offers something incredibly elusive in our contemporary lives: the possibility of radical individuality. We live in a society that is increasingly hostile to free personal expression, one in which far too many legislative proposals are focused on stifling divergent voices and expressions. A tremendous opportunity exists for a movement that encourages and empowers people to express who they are unabashedly, unashamedly, and without fear of criticism or judgment. This was, in essence, the inspiration behind both the Radical Faerie movement and the nudist movement – allowing people to feel both safe and empowered in their own skin in spaces and situations where age, gender, wealth, and appearance might become irrelevant for a while, where individuality might be celebrated. Radical Faerie cofounder Donald Kilhefner defined the word radical as getting “to the root of things.”  Naturist leader Lee Baxandall, in his introduction to the 1972 book Radical Perspectives in the Arts, offered a similar interpretation of the word: “Radical does not mean extremist or way-out and marginal. It would be more accurate to regard ‘fundamental’ as the proper synonym.” 

Maybe it is time for nudists and naturists to “get radical,” to get back to our roots, to get back to the fundamentals of our movement, to revisit our founding values, and to examine how we might apply them to the betterment of our diverse, ever-evolving modern society. 🪐