The Orbit: July 25
This week on Planet Nude: Two beach fights end in nudism's favor, and a 44-year-old naturist swim gets cut short
This week on Planet Nude
Two of nudism’s long-running beach fights ended this week, and both ended in the beach’s favor. In Toronto, the federal government blocked an airport expansion that had threatened Hanlan’s Point, and named the beach specifically in a policy statement, an unusually direct move from a government body that typically prefers vague language when nudity enters the conversation.
In Maui, the planning commission approved a scaled-back state park project at Mākena after officials agreed to drop the new asphalt, cut the exterior lighting from six fixtures to one, and abandon any plan resembling the fencing that alarmed Little Beach regulars back in 2021. Neither fight is fully over. Ontario’s transportation minister says the province intends to keep pushing for the airport expansion regardless, and Maui’s commission has given the state until 2029 to produce the carrying capacity study that will shape what comes next.
Not every institutional story this week moved in nudism’s direction. Buffalo’s organizers canceled this year’s World Naked Bike Ride after receiving threats specific enough to name: projectiles, cars, and worse, born out of a social media pile-on that racked up roughly 500,000 engagements in 48 hours. It’s the ride’s first cancellation in eleven years, and the organizers’ own statement draws a useful distinction that gets lost in these controversies again and again, the one between nudity and the sexualized, criminalized version of it that critics keep insisting is the same thing.
That endurance shows up differently in this week’s Waypoints feature on Sunny Chinooks Camping Association, a club near Sundre, Alberta that has been chased off rented farmland, flooded off its own acreage, and evicted from a ranch it held for twenty-five years, and kept reconstituting itself anyway. More than seventy years on, members still drive out for summer camping and still gather for a winter swim in a rented Calgary pool. It’s a useful reminder that the institutional wins in Toronto and Maui didn’t happen on their own timeline. They happened because clubs and organizers kept showing up through decades when nobody in government was paying attention at all.
Check out these stories and more from this week on Planet Nude.
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News of the Nude
Naturists banned from swimming naked after 44 years at Northampton leisure centre.
A monthly closed swim that had run at Mounts Baths since 1982 has been shut down after new leisure operator Everyone Active took over the pool and cited its swimwear policy. The club’s roughly 190 members call it discrimination; the operator says it simply couldn’t secure the staffing agreements the sessions required. British Naturism’s president has called on the company to reconsider. It’s a familiar pattern, a long-running arrangement undone not by a rule change but by new management applying an old rule for the first time.
Spencer Tunick returns to collective nude art with Gran Canaria project backing LGTBIQA+ rights.
Tunick’s next mass installation, staged in the Canary Islands as part of Culture & Business Pride 2026, arranges hundreds of volunteers into the colors of the Pride flag. What stands out is his read on where the pressure on nude expression actually comes from now. He points less at governments than at social media platforms, whose moderation policies he says force artists to self-censor just to stay visible, a concern specific enough that he co-founded a platform devoted to fighting it.
A citizen reports: “On Nurapolis beach, sex and nudism are taking place in the open air.”
A resident’s complaint to a Sardinian mayor blurs public nudism together with indecent conduct and unauthorized filming, and asks for signage and stricter enforcement. The mayor’s response is notable mostly for what it declines to do: no new signage, no promise of surveillance, and a suggestion that people ought to simply behave respectfully toward each other. It’s a small story, but the conflation at its center, treating nudism and sexual misconduct as one complaint, is the same one Buffalo’s organizers were pushing back on this week.
Discord Dispatch
The Discord settled into a summer rhythm this week. Members checked in from naked hikes, bike rides, and club events, while new faces continued to join the conversation and plan summer meetups.
Join us at discord.gg/8gt7D6ssMd — or click here to learn more.
Featured: 1 Naturist Life
This is a personal essay tracing how the shame Dustin absorbed growing up in a conservative Christian household, around both body and sexuality, didn’t lift just because he left the church or came out. He draws on writers and a clinical psychologist to show that intellectual deconstruction doesn’t undo somatic shame, then describes how naturism, unlike politics or theology, gave him a space where a body seen “without agenda” is just a body, no audience, no moral inventory. He’s careful not to tie it up too neatly: old shame still surfaces sometimes, but he no longer treats it as true, framing naturism as the place he’s actually practiced living out the belief that he gets to decide what’s shameful, not the systems that used to answer for him.
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