Naked at Lunch (10 page)

He nodded. “Despite what some people say, this legislation wasn’t about cock rings, but that was just an example of them getting more extreme.”

Naked men love wearing cock rings.
********
It makes their penises look bigger and, well, men like it when their penises look big. There was a bit of controversy over cock rings and some of the Castro nudists claimed that a San Francisco police “cock ring patrol” was targeting them. For the police, wearing a cock ring constitutes lewd behavior, but for nudists like Lloyd Fishback, it wasn’t about being sexual: “You shrivel up in the cold. It kinda helps you stand out a little more, make you look a little bigger.”
²⁶

“The Castro Theater was just apoplectic because that theater is . . . we’re lucky that it’s still open. One of the areas where they are able to make money so they stay open is they do the sing-alongs. Sing-alongs to
The Sound of Music
, sing-along to
The Little Mermaid
, and those are extremely popular, with lines of families and kids around the theater. Some of the naked guys would just walk up and down those lines and then people would say they’re not coming back. It was just a combination of things that were just bringing it to a boiling point. That’s what led me to introduce the legislation.”

The idea of a cock ring parade in front of little kids waiting in line to go see a Disney movie baffled me. Even if you buy into the idea that nudity is okay in any context, they must’ve known they were pushing the envelope with this behavior. Why be so provocative?

Wiener nodded. “Right? The sense I got . . . it was marking territory. There was an attitude of ‘this is our neighborhood,’ whatever that means, and keep in mind there have always been a lot of straight people in the Castro. There have always been children in the Castro. There’s elementary schools, three of them, within a few blocks of Castro market that predated all of us. But it was sort of ‘This is our neighborhood and we can be as edgy as we want and do whatever we want and we don’t want you here.’”

Wiener leaned forward and fixed his eyes on me. “A woman contacted me. She had brought a troop of Girl Scouts to sell Girl Scout cookies at Eighteenth and Castro on a Saturday afternoon, and there was a naked guy who walked by. Fine, he walks by, and she said in a fifteen-minute period he walked back and forth past the girls five times. It was very obvious to her what he was doing. It sort of went above and beyond.”

According to an editorial in the
Bay Area Reporter Online
, an LGBT newspaper, the Castro nudists would “shake their dicks at oncoming traffic.” I don’t know why, but I find the image of a dozen or more naked men shaking their penises at traffic kind of funny. But I can also see where the joke might wear thin after a while.

Normally, city supervisors deal with more mundane issues. Look at some of the legislation that Wiener has passed recently and you’ll find he’s been behind the move to license professional dog walkers, revise restaurant codes to help small businesses, regulate food trucks, help janitors earn a living wage, and all the typical street resurfacing and park beautification you’d expect from a locally elected official.

But feeling pressured to do something, Wiener proposed a stiff ban—and now I think you see why he didn’t really want to be associated with this. In addition to the local coverage of his proposed legislation, the ban was noted in articles in the
Wall Street Journal
,
USA Today
,
Guardian
,
Daily Mail
, and other national and international media outlets such as CNN and BBC.

“I knew when I introduced the ban that it would get a lot of press. I still underestimated the sheer volume. The fact that the whole process around the legislation straddled Thanksgiving, and the number of people who went to various parts of the country home for Thanksgiving and then came back and told me that’s the only thing that anyone wanted to talk about at the Thanksgiving dinner table.”

Wiener’s legislation wasn’t exactly popular with his fellow city officials. Supervisor Christina Olague was opposed and was quoted as saying, “When it comes to priorities, this seems absurd to me.” Supervisor David Campos, who represents the Mission District, thought the ban was a misuse of police and city resources, and Supervisor John Avalos said, “I will not put on this fig leaf. I just can’t do it.”
²⁷

But other members of the board of supervisors, notably from tourist-heavy districts like Fisherman’s Wharf, supported the ban and it ended up squeaking by 6 to 5.

When the vote was announced, a number of spectators in the gallery immediately took off their clothes and began haranguing the board. Deputies showed foresight, and an understanding of San Francisco politics, and appeared with blankets to cover the naked protestors seconds after they disrobed. One of the nude protestors was a man named Stardust who was quoted in the
San Francisco Chronicle
saying,
“It’s telling people they should be ashamed to be naked, and that’s totally wrong.”
²⁸

The response from nudist groups in the city was predictably virulent. England’s
Daily Mail
ran a headline that said “Naked Fury: Protestors Strip Off and Storm San Francisco City Hall as Officials Approve Legal Crackdown on Nudity.” Wiener was called, among other things, a “fascist,” a “Republican clone,” a “whore,” and “the only wiener that doesn’t belong in San Francisco.” Whenever Wiener made a public appearance, nudists would show up shouting and taking their clothes off.

Wiener was surprisingly philosophical about the reaction.

“Locally I actually think it was a really fascinating, and frankly an important debate that happened. Particularly within the gay community, but I think more broadly. I do truly believe that the legislation had strong majority support generally and within the gay community. But there was definitely a very passionate minority, which I always respected. There are a lot of people, particularly LGBT people, who came to San Francisco—and I include myself in this category—we all came here because you can be who you are in San Francisco. People won’t judge you. A lot of people growing up were perceived to be ‘freaks’ or not normal, and they come to San Francisco and they are accepted for who they are. For a lot of people they would say, ‘Listen, I don’t get naked in public. I don’t really like it, but that’s who they are and I don’t want to tell them what to do.’ We see that in San Francisco in particular. There’s this strain of hesitancy to tell other people what to do. If you want to take your clothes off, if you want to lay down in your vomit on the sidewalk, if you want to camp out anywhere you want. Someone might say I’m conservative if I tell you you can’t do that. It was a very fascinating debate.”

A group of nude activists continued the debate and challenged the ban in federal court. They believed that the ban violated their First Amendment rights. But in his opinion U.S. District Court judge Edward Chen refused to block the ban and wrote, “In spite of what plaintiffs argue, nudity in and of itself is not inherently expressive.”
²⁹

For the time being, Wiener has won.

But doesn’t this ban have consequences beyond San Francisco? Isn’t there some kind of core human impulse that should be honored?

Wiener smiled at me. “Well, we can have a broadsided philosophical debate about whether it should be okay for people to be naked in public and if society accepts that, that’s fine. Here we’re trying to address a particular situation that arose in a particular neighborhood that most people weren’t okay with. We try to strike that balance about where you . . . there are places where people can be naked. Whether you have . . . I mean, I don’t know, is there an impulse to be naked? Maybe on some level, but the fact that most people really would never even think about being naked makes me question that.”

I reminded him that, from the nudists’ point of view, he’d taken away their constitutional rights.

He nodded. “Their arguments are not illegitimate. Again, this is a difference of opinion for when it’s appropriate to let your stuff hang out. I actually—I was at an event right after I introduced the legislation and I started talking to these three guys. They were from Oakland and one of them said to me, ‘Oh, we’re nudists,’ and I thought, ‘Uh-oh, here it comes, they’re going to yell at me . . .’”

“Or take off their clothes.”

“. . . Or just be mad at me and tell me how awful I am. He said, ‘We’re nudists and we support your legislation because that’s not nudism. We go to gatherings in people’s backyards or we’ll rent out a campsite, or whatever. We all gather together and we’re naked together and everyone there consents to that and that’s what we want and that’s what we do.’ He said, ‘Nudism is not about walking on the sidewalk naked by people who have no desire whatsoever to see me.’ It was interesting . . .

“The other interesting thing, and this is just a quirk of San Francisco, in the early eighties the city banned nudity in parks. Before I passed this legislation it was illegal to be naked in a park, but legal everywhere else, and that always struck me as backwards. If you are going to allow people to be naked anywhere, it probably should be in parks. You see that in Europe and they kept making the European comparison. This is very European where in Europe they don’t walk down the street naked. If you get . . . like in Germany and I think elsewhere, there’s parks where they will sunbathe.”

I wondered about the “slippery slope” argument that nudist activist Mitch Hightower posited in the
Wall Street Journal.
He said, “Today it is naked people, and next week it will be drag queens, and then the week after that it will be people who wear leather.”
³⁰

Wiener took a sip of his soda.

“The legislation is actually much more narrow than the city’s other nudity bans in parks and on court property. It basically only applies to genitals. It doesn’t cover women’s breasts and it doesn’t cover buttocks. I actually removed buttocks in the legislation after meeting with the folks from Folsom and they said, ‘We’re not thrilled about the legislation but we understand why you’re doing it. We just would like you to remove buttocks because of the people who want to wear assless chaps.’”

Only in San Francisco would you find this kind of sensitivity to people who wear assless chaps.

“They kept saying that this is no different than banning gay people from kissing in public, banning drag queens, requiring women to wear burkas. If you ban anything you may as well ban everything, so therefore ban nothing. I don’t buy that argument. We make distinctions all the time in society.”

And with that he looked at his watch and gave me a friendly nod. I realized that our time was up. I thanked him; he had been more forthcoming than I expected, and he seemed genuine and sincere about trying to balance San Francisco’s radical instincts with what I’d call a more gentrified point of view.

I walked out of the building and stepped into the sunshine. I was meeting my son for lunch at Zuni Café, so I strolled down Market Street and wondered how we, and by “we” I mean us as a society, got to the point where our own bodies and the bodies of our fellow human beings cause so much commotion. I mean, seriously, we all have bodies and for the most part they are all the same. Why does seeing someone naked cause offense? And why do some people insist on showing their genitals to other people? Is a nude painting offensive? Probably not if it’s hanging in an art museum. Is a grown man waving his dick at a car offensive? Maybe. Maybe not. In some states that would be called “flashing” and bring criminal penalties. But flashing by definition is not nudity; it is done to shock, for sexual gratification. Flashing is lewd. But even if flashing is lewd, do we really want to spend our tax dollars keeping wienie waggers incarcerated? Is that the kind of world we want to live in?

********
Not to be confused with an Arab strap, which, though similar, is a different thing entirely.

The Rise of Nudist Clubs
in America

N
udism has become a big business. It seems that there are more people than you’d think who’ll plunk down their hard-earned dollars and pay for the privilege of being naked around other naked people. There are so many of them that the nakation business is, according to the American Association for Nude Recreation (AANR), “conservatively estimated a $440 million industry.” That’s a big chunk of change and one that could, with the wave of a wand of oppressive legislation, disappear in the blink of an eye. Which is where the AANR comes in. Like the local tourist board or chamber of commerce, the AANR’s job is to protect and promote the business of nonsexual social nudism, particularly as it pertains to its member clubs.

The AANR is a nonprofit organization that calls itself “the credible voice of reason on issues relevant to nude recreation and Nakationing in appropriate settings.” Which seems like it’s claiming ownership of the topic while backing away as quickly as it can. The “in appropriate settings” is a hedge against naked people running amok, say, in the mall or on the golf course, and keeps the AANR positioned as a respectable entity and not some organization promoting anarchy. The AANR PR material boasts that it is “a gold and silver award-winning member of the American Society of Association Executives” and has won “four Golden Bell communications awards from the Hospitality Marketing and Sales Association International (HMSAI), two Silver Mercury Awards and an SATW Cushman Award in recent years.”