News of the Nude, Jun. 2026
Volume 42: A record ride, a shrinking shore, and a beach that fences out plovers
Welcome to another News of the Nude. The clocks have officially tipped past the solstice, and now summer nudie season is in full swing. The heat arrived early here (it always does, as I live in the desert) which pretty much makes life nude-mandatory for the next couple months. Is the weather at least nude-friendly wherever you are?
This month in stories of the nude and nude-adjacent: London’s naked ride sets a record (and the predicted catastrophe never shows). Hanlan’s Point, North America’s most storied queer nude beach, is washing into the lake while the city studies the problem. Rhode Island remembers the plovers that closed Moonstone Beach. A Bordeaux heatwave strips a public park down to its swimsuits and raises the same legal question we keep coming back to. A Norfolk club gets lumped in with sex clubs and objects, loudly. Women swim topless in Somerset to fix a problem that gets women killed. Hundreds more strip and dip in Wicklow. A town in the Philippine Cordillera writes a topless ban with a carve-out for tradition—whatever that means. Spain runs a bus to a nude beach. And in Virginia, people run a 5K with nothing on.
Forty-two issues in forty-two months, and the world still has plenty to say about naked people. Here’s what it said this month. 🚀
Before we dive in:
Help Team Planet Nude fund a surgery this Skinny Dip Day
On Saturday, July 11, Team Planet Nude takes the plunge for Skinny Dip Day for the third year running. Last year our readers finished second overall, just $243 behind Gunnison Beach, raising $3,254 for the Fistula Foundation—which provides free surgeries to women living with obstetric fistula, a childbirth injury that causes chronic incontinence and deep social isolation. It’s devastating, it’s curable, and roughly $624 covers one full surgery. For a community built on body freedom, it’s a fitting cause: it cures some of the most severe body shame in the world.
This year we’re going for the top spot, and you don’t have to dip to help. Donate to Team Planet Nude here—every dollar goes to the Fistula Foundation, and gifts of $100 or more earn a free year of paid Planet Nude.
News of the Nude, Vol. 42 🪐
Naked bike ride 2026 in pictures as cyclists take to streets for annual event
More than a thousand cyclists rode through central London on June 14 for the city’s World Naked Bike Ride, with the Evening Standard reporting a record turnout of roughly 1,200 riders—the largest in the event’s London history. For the first time in two decades the ride ran on a Sunday rather than its usual Saturday, a change made to avoid colliding with Trooping the Colour and the capital’s congested calendar of road closures. Riders set out from nine points across the city and merged at Westminster Bridge before finishing near Wellington Arch. In May we covered the Telegraph’s account of a campaigner accusing Mayor Sadiq Khan of “failing to protect children” from this same ride, and the safeguarding charity Project 90/10 has continued to petition for a ban. What actually happened on the 14th was a lawful, peaceful protest about cyclist safety and oil dependency—no arrests, no incident, a record crowd, and the usual handful of clothed bystanders who stripped off and joined mid-route. The predicted harm did not arrive. The ride is built on visibility, and the only reason its message about vulnerable cyclists travels at all is that the bare bodies get it photographed. 🚀
Advocates frustrated with lack of progress addressing severe erosion at Hanlan’s Point Beach
With summer barely underway, Hanlan’s Point Beach—the clothing-optional Toronto Island shoreline recognized as one of North America’s most significant queer gathering spaces—is again losing ground to severe erosion, and advocates say the City of Toronto has been slow to act. Sections of the beach have been fenced off and posted with closure signs as the shoreline retreats, shrinking the usable sand just as the season begins. Hanlan’s holds a particular place in this publication’s coverage: it is the site whose queer-led defense in 2023 became the template for nude-beach fights elsewhere, including Denny Blaine in Seattle. The erosion story draws less attention than a lawsuit but is no less consequential—a space can be protected in principle and still disappear physically while the paperwork moves. Curtis Atkins has tracked the Hanlan’s story for Planet Nude, and we’ll continue following what the city does, or doesn’t do, before the water decides for everyone. 🚀
Read Planet Nude’s report:
Why Moonstone Beach ended its era as Rhode Island’s nude retreat
The Providence Journal’s Will Richmond turns in a clear-eyed history of Moonstone Beach, the stretch of South Kingstown shoreline that served as Rhode Island’s best-known nude beach from the 1970s into the late 1980s—until the federal government fenced it off. In 1988 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service closed the beach to protect the piping plover, a federally listed shorebird that nests in the dunes, and the closure drew protests from nudists who felt the government had overstepped. The New England Naturist Association leased a nearby beach in 1990, but it closed in 1992 over zoning, as did another nearby nude beach three years later. What makes the piece worth reading is its refusal to flatten the story into nudists-versus-birds: the plover protections are real and the loss of a decades-old nude beach is also real, and Richmond lets both stand. It’s a useful reminder that the spaces naturists rely on are vulnerable to more than moral panic—sometimes the thing that closes a beach has feathers. 🚀
Strip and Dip goes back to the record books with 80s-themed Wicklow challenge
Hundreds of women descended on Magheramore Beach in County Wicklow on June 6 for the 13th annual Strip and Dip, a women-only charity skinny dip that paired its traditional plunge into the Irish Sea with an 80s theme and a bid for a third Guinness World Record—this time for the largest gathering of people in 1980s clothing. The event has raised more than €1.4 million since 2012 for Aoibheann’s Pink Tie, a charity supporting families affected by childhood cancer, and helped fund a respite home in Crumlin. It first entered the record books in 2018 with the world’s largest skinny dip, and added a second pandemic-era record for the most photos of people in water within an hour. Organizer Dee Featherstone described it as stepping outside your comfort zone, having a laugh with like-minded women, and doing something meaningful at once. It is a clean reminder that mass nudity, in the right frame, reads to the wider public as joyful rather than threatening—neon legwarmers help. 🚀
Norfolk nudist camp’s furious response to sex club policy
The Broadland Sun Club, a long-running Norfolk naturist club, issued a sharp rebuttal after South Norfolk Council included it in a consultation tied to the regulation of “sex establishments.” The club—whose actual life runs to badminton, towels, and a strict code of conduct—took offense at being approached as though communal nudity were a form of adult entertainment, and said so plainly.
It is the same conflation British naturists have been correcting for decades: a council reaches for a sex-industry framework to manage a place where people simply remove their clothes, and the club has to spend its energy insisting on a distinction that ought to be obvious. Nude is not lewd, to borrow the phrase from a courtroom across the Atlantic. The club’s irritation is well earned; the burden of proof keeps landing on the people who have done nothing but undress. 🚀
This News of the Nude is sponsored by
Naturist Action Committee (NAC)
Dedicated to making naturism an accepted part of society.
Former California State Parks Superintendent Charged with Recording Naked Lifeguards in Bolsa Chica State Beach Locker Room
A former California State Parks superintendent, Kevin Pearsall, 59, was charged on June 24 with secretly filming 23 naked lifeguards and other employees in a men’s locker room at the Bolsa Chica State Beach Lifeguard Headquarters in Huntington Beach, and with sharing nude images of three of them with two other men. Prosecutors say Pearsall—who held a sworn law-enforcement position overseeing the Orange Coast District until he retired in July 2025—placed a USB device with a hidden camera in the staff-only locker room, capturing audio and video over an 11-month period beginning in August 2024, until another parks officer discovered it. He faces five felony eavesdropping counts and 26 misdemeanors, and a maximum of more than 18 years if convicted. This is not a nudism story, and that is exactly why it belongs here. What makes it a crime is not nudity but the violation wrapped around it: covert recording, zero consent, and distribution—the genuine article that anti-nudity panic so often pretends to see in a public beach. Set it beside the Denny Blaine neighbors photographing nude parkgoers from their own windows, and the line draws itself. The harm was never the bare body. It was the camera nobody agreed to. 🚀
Topless open water swim to challenge stigma of giving women CPR
A topless open-water swim called DARE to BARE will take place at Vobster Quay in Somerset on August 23, organized by Dorset and Somerset Air Ambulance to confront a grim and well-documented disparity: women in cardiac arrest are less likely than men to receive bystander CPR, in part because people hesitate to expose or touch a woman’s chest. Critical care practitioner Claire Baker noted that every minute without intervention drops survival odds by as much as ten percent, and that the reluctance to bare a woman’s torso can be fatal. Alongside the swim, participants will train on the charity’s new female mannequins, introduced specifically to normalize performing CPR on women’s bodies. This is body-freedom advocacy arriving from an unexpected direction—not a naturist event at all, but a public-health one that lands on the same truth naturists argue constantly: the cultural reflex to sexualize and conceal the female chest has consequences, and here the consequence is measured in lives. 🚀
“Tant que les gens n’ont pas des comportements pervers”: à Bordeaux, les maillots de bain sont de sortie au Jardin public
During a late-May heatwave, the central lawn of Bordeaux’s Jardin public filled with city dwellers stripping down to swimsuits to sunbathe, and Sud Ouest used the scene to walk through the legal gray zone underneath it. France’s penal code contains no law against wearing a swimsuit or going bare-chested in public; the only applicable statute, article 222-32, punishes sexual exhibition. The young people interviewed framed their sunbathing as ordinary—”the same as at the municipal pool”—and the city confirmed it tolerates the practice so long as public order isn’t disturbed. The recurring catch, as ever, falls on women: French jurisprudence has long treated bare breasts as potential exhibition outside settings like beaches, leaving enforcement to the discretion of officers. The piece is a tidy illustration of the distinction this publication keeps returning to—the law on the books targets sexual conduct, but the gap between that and simple undress gets filled, unevenly, by whoever happens to be policing the lawn. 🚀
Tanudan eyes anti-topless ordinance; cultural practices, use of traditional attire exempted
The municipality of Tanudan, in the Philippines’ Kalinga province, is weighing an ordinance against toplessness and indecent exposure in public—but with an unusually thoughtful set of carve-outs. Prompted by a request from the Department of the Interior and Local Government and discussed at a June 8 public hearing, the measure exempts Indigenous cultural practices protected under the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act, the wearing of traditional attire, sports, medical emergencies, customary activities in rivers and streams, and anything on private property out of public view. Vice Mayor Antonio Basungit Jr. stressed that the point is not to penalize someone merely for being shirtless, but to address intent—nudity meant to be indecent, rather than nudity that simply is. That distinction—between the bare body and the sexual act—is exactly the line so many Western ordinances blur. It is striking to see a small Cordillera town draw it more carefully than a Minnesota city council managed to last month. 🚀
Summer shuttle bus starts to popular Costa Tropical naturist beach Cantarriján
Andalusian authorities have restarted the summer shuttle bus to Cantarriján, the popular naturist beach on Granada’s Costa Tropical, closing the access road to private traffic for the season and running visitors in from two car parks instead. The measure, which handled almost 34,000 users in a recent season, is the unglamorous infrastructure of beach access—the kind of arrangement that determines whether a clothing-optional cove stays usable or chokes on its own parking. It rarely makes news, which is precisely why it’s worth flagging when it works. A naturist beach is only as accessible as the road to it, and a region that invests in getting people there is, in effect, affirming the space. After a run of stories about beaches lost to erosion, bans, and tabloid panic, a working bus to a Spanish nude beach is a small, welcome piece of good municipal sense. 🚀
Virginia nudist resort hosts clothing-optional 5K Run and Walk
White Tail Resort, a clothing-optional resort in Ivor, Virginia, held its annual 5K Run and Walk on June 20, drawing runners of every age and shape to a race where the dress code is, charitably, optional. Local outlets WAVY and the Petersburg Progress-Index both covered it straight—finishers, times, a community event that happens to be run in the nude—without the nudge-and-wink that usually attends this sort of story. That restraint is its own small victory. A nude 5K is, at the end of the day, a 5K: people pin on a bib, run three miles, and feel good afterward, and the fact that they did it without clothes is the least interesting thing about it once you stop clutching anything. We could use more coverage that treats nudity this way—as a detail of the event rather than the entire event. 🚀
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That’s a wrap on Vol. 42.
Enjoy Nude Recreation Week and stay nude. We’ll be here next month and skinny dippin’ until then. See you on the last Friday of July. 🪐