News of the Nude, May. 2026
Volume 41: From Boston's pearl-clutchers to Brighton's far-right clash
Welcome to another News of the Nude. Just like *NSYNC predicted, it’s May.
This month: the Boston Globe discovers that people who can handle Botticelli can’t always handle a laughing, living woman walking through the same gallery. A 73-year-old writer performs nude on a Hollywood stage. Rowan Jacobsen visits the last nudist resort in Southern California and ends up in my research library. Brighton's naked bike ride gets postponed when a far-right march lands on the same day. London’s naked ride is on, but it’s already under political fire. Also, Minnesota city council preemptively bans toplessness at a beach where no one had gone topless. British Naturism launches a clothing line. And the tabloids, as ever, find swingers at Cap d’Agde. Lots of news this month!
Forty-one issues in forty-one months and the world still has plenty to say about naked people. Here’s what it said this month. 🚀
News of the Nude, Vol. 41 🪐
Brighton Naked Bike Ride postponed amid protest clashes
The 2026 Brighton Naked Bike Ride has been postponed after organizers determined they could not guarantee rider safety. The cause: a clash with another protest—understood to be a far-right march—and a scheduled counter-protest on the same day. Organizers said the decision was not taken lightly, and they intend to reschedule for late summer or early autumn. In their statement, they reaffirmed the ride’s original political purpose: a protest against fossil fuel culture and oil dependency. What tends to get lost in coverage of the WNBR—and is lost again here, in a brief radio news item that mentions neither the far-right march nor its role in the postponement—is that the ride has always been a political event, not a nudist outing. The naked bodies are the message. When that message gets crowded out by a more overtly confrontational political presence on the same streets, the organizers’ response is to step back and protect their participants. That this is treated as a minor local news item, with no interest in the political context that forced the postponement, is itself a form of editorial framing. 🚀
Check out Planet Nude’s report:
Naked and unafraid at 73, she’s challenging ideas about aging women on a Hollywood stage
Writer and actor Pamela Redmond is 73, and she’s performing a one-woman show—nude—at the Broadwater Theater in Los Angeles. The show, “Old Woman Naked,” takes on what Redmond describes as the invisibility of older women: the cultural tendency to stop seeing them, to stop representing them, and certainly to stop representing their bodies. The LA Times’ Deborah Vankin profiles Redmond with evident warmth, following her to Wi Spa in Koreatown and letting her make her case in her own words. Redmond says she felt “on fire” writing the show and wanted audiences to see what an older woman’s body actually looks like—not idealized, not hidden, just present. This is not covered as spectacle or stunt. Redmond is presented as an artist with a coherent argument, and her nudity is the vehicle for that argument rather than the story itself. In a media landscape where older women’s bodies are most often discussed in terms of decline or irrelevance, that framing alone is worth noting. 🚀
California has some of the last nudists left. I went to see why they’re still there.
Slate contributor Rowan Jacobsen spent time at Glen Eden Sun Club, the last nudist resort in Southern California, and came away with one of the better mainstream pieces on American naturism in recent memory. The article traces the larger pattern—Vermont skinny-dipping holes going textile, clubs closing after 60 and 90 years, Germany’s Freikörperkultur membership down more than fifty percent since 2000—and uses that decline as the lens for an on-the-ground visit. In pursuit of answers, Jacobsen found Planet Nude and the Naked Age podcast, reached out, and eventually tracked me down at Glen Eden during the recent filming of Disrobed. He also met director Troy Peterson and many of the actors and crew, and spent time with the Western Nudist Research Library, which is housed there. The resulting piece is curious and generous rather than mocking—treating nudism as a subculture worth understanding rather than a punchline worth harvesting. It won’t settle every debate about how nudism gets represented in the press, but as mainstream nudist coverage goes, it’s one of the more honest attempts in a while. 🚀
Blaine updates nudity law following Minnesota Supreme Court decision
Following a 2025 Minnesota Supreme Court ruling that female breasts are not inherently sexual and do not constitute indecent exposure on their own, the City of Blaine has passed a municipal ordinance to close what one council member described as a gap in local law. The ordinance formally defines nudity to include female breast exposure below the areola and bans it in public spaces, including Blaine’s public beach. Ward 2 Council Member Leslie Larson, who brought the item forward, said she wanted to make sure nudity was not permitted at what she described as a community and family beach. Larson added that the city had no actual incidents the previous summer, but that it was “good to see that we have it in writing.” The Supreme Court ruling—a significant legal development for topfreedom advocates—produces here its predictable downstream effect: a municipality moves to re-criminalize what the court decriminalized, preemptively, against a problem that by the council member’s own admission had not occurred. Blaine is unlikely to be the last. 🚀
Read Planet Nude’s report:
Khan ‘failing to protect children’ from London’s naked bike ride
The Telegraph runs a textbook example of how a legitimate policy question—should a public nude event require more formal safeguarding measures?—gets transmuted into a political attack. The hook is a campaigner calling Mayor Sadiq Khan out for “failing to protect children” from the London WNBR, set for June 14. The article correctly notes that nudity is legal during the ride under existing interpretation of the Sexual Offences Act, and that organizers describe it as a peaceful, lawful protest. Critics quoted raise concerns about the lack of participant registration, route marshalling, and the involuntary exposure of children to adult nudity. These aren’t inherently unreasonable questions—the WNBR does pass through public streets—but the Telegraph’s framing routes them through the language of child safeguarding in a way that positions the ride primarily as a threat. The piece gives organizers minimal space, and the legal context—that public nudity without intent to cause distress does not constitute indecent exposure—is presented as a loophole rather than a considered legal distinction. The result is less a policy analysis than an editorial position dressed as news. Emma-Jane Taylor, the child safety campaigner quoted at length, has appeared in this same role in multiple UK outlets over the past year. 🚀
This News of the Nude is sponsored by
Naturist Education Foundation (NEF)
Supporting naturist initiatives and preserving naturist history.
Naturists demand that critics ‘leave our members alone’ as they hit back
British Naturism issued a public statement after a wave of tabloid coverage linked naturism to a controversial clothing-optional campsite in Whatlington, East Sussex—Turn a Blind Eye—where local residents had complained about noise, nudity, and alleged sexual activity. Headlines in the Daily Mail and elsewhere had blurred the line between naturism and adult entertainment, and British Naturism responded directly. In a statement titled “The Truth About Naturism,” the organization insisted that naturism is non-sexual and founded on respect for self, others, and the environment. The Daily Star, to its credit, covers the pushback with reasonable straightforwardness, quoting the statement at length rather than leading with the more inflammatory framing. What this cycle illustrates—tabloid conflates naturism with sex, naturist organization responds, tabloid covers the response—is a dynamic British Naturism has had to navigate for decades. The underlying story may have had genuine community planning concerns at its core, but by the time it reached national media, those distinctions had largely dissolved. 🚀
Famed nudist resort is now overrun by globe-trotting swingers
The New York Post, Fox News/OutKick, the Sun, and the Daily Mail all ran versions of the same story this month: Cap d’Agde, the longtime naturist resort in southern France, is being “overrun” by swingers. It is a story the British tabloids have published, in various forms, approximately every two years since the 1990s. The Post’s version leads with the phrase “bum-rushed” and leans in with evident enthusiasm. What the coverage documents—to the extent it documents anything—is a real and ongoing tension at Cap d’Agde: the resort has long had both a family naturist zone and areas with a more libertine culture, and longtime visitors say the balance has shifted considerably. That is a legitimate story about the evolution of a major European naturist destination. What the coverage does instead is flatten the distinction between naturism and sex tourism in ways that serve the tabloid appetite for titillation rather than the reader’s understanding of what’s actually happening. The naturists quoted in the pieces are frustrated. The outlets covering them are delighted. 🚀
Why nude drawing nights are suddenly everywhere at D.C. bars
The Washington Post files a genial cultural dispatch from Capitol Hill, where figure-drawing sessions at bars have seemingly suddenly become a fixture of D.C.’s social calendar. Sketch pads and cocktails, nude models and folding chairs—the scene Sophia Solano describes is relaxed, communal, and notably unsensational. The piece treats the trend as a form of normalization: nudity encountered in an art context, stripped of shock value, becomes a social activity rather than a moral event. What’s notable is what the Post doesn’t do—there’s no hand-wringing, no protective framing, no “but is it appropriate?” The naked body is present; people are drawing it; they seem to be having a fine time. Reader comments got into terminology debates and noted the prevalence of female models, which is its own conversation, but the piece itself reads as a low-key argument that nudity in public life is neither crisis nor cause—just an evening out. 🚀
Response to nude performance is revealing
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, posted photos of performance artist Xandra Ibarra walking partially nude through its galleries as part of the new exhibition “Take Back the Nude: Subvert, Repair, Reclaim,” and the institution’s 500,000 Instagram followers did not respond with quiet contemplation. Globe critic Mark Shanahan documents the reaction: “Wtf is this nonsense,” wrote one commenter. “Seriously? So vulgar,” wrote another. Others found it amusing that viewers who can contemplate centuries of painted female nudes in the same rooms balked at an actual woman’s body. Ibarra’s piece, “Nude Laughing,” had her walking from the Contemporary Art galleries to the Art of Europe galleries, laughing throughout and dragging pantyhose stuffed with totems of white femininity—pearls, a blonde wig, pointe shoes—before appearing to give birth to them inside the nylon. Curator Carmen Hermo noted that the Impressionism galleries are full of painted female nudity that no one objects to. Shanahan’s piece is a useful snapshot of where we are: a museum can hang centuries of nude women as high culture, but the moment a living woman’s body enters the frame—performing, laughing, deliberate—it reads as provocation. 🚀
Naturist organisation launches ‘clothing line for people who don’t like wearing clothes’
British Naturism has launched a clothing line for people who don't like wearing clothes, and the Daily Mail is quite pleased with the paradox. The framing—"the ultimate contradiction in terms"—is exactly the kind of headline that writes itself, and the Mail obliges. What the piece actually describes, stripped of the winking, is a practical product range: cover-ups, wraps, and transitional garments for naturists navigating the clothed world between venues. That's not especially contradictory—naturist clubs have always had to contend with the reality that members live most of their lives outside club boundaries. But BN didn't do itself any favors by promoting the line with an obviously AI-generated lifestyle image: two suspiciously perfect people in matching yellow T-shirts beaming at each other at what appears to be a music festival, the shirts' text slightly garbled in the way AI text tends to be. The image drew some criticism on social media. 🚀
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That’s Vol. 41.
What's the what's the what's the genius of it all? See you on the last Friday of June. 🪐