Naked at Lunch (11 page)

I don’t know what any of that means, but it certainly sounds impressive.

And the AANR is impressive. Depending on which promotional brochure or press release you read, the organization has 34,000 members, or “now serves over 213,000 individuals,” or is “serving more than 52 million individuals who enjoy skinny-dipping and clothing-optional recreation.” It claims to have more than 250 affiliated clubs, resorts, campgrounds, and related businesses scattered across the United States. Some of these clubs, like the Desert Sun Resort in Palm Springs, are designated “landed clubs” because they have their own property and facilities, while others are called “travel clubs” because they have to move around and find temporary or public places where their members can enjoy nude recreation.

The “passport to fun” that membership in the AANR provides costs about fifty-eight dollars a year or, as it says in the press release, “less than the price of a bathing suit.” In the AANR’s drive to remove any stigma from nudism and recruit new members, it presents a wholesome, reassuring tone; it’s a voice that wants to help people “recapture the freedom and innocence” of their first skinny-dipping experience. All of its marketing is focused on getting its members to visit official AANR clubs.

To further promote the interests of its member clubs, the AANR sponsors the Trade Association for Nude Recreation (TANR), which provides advertising and outreach for member businesses. The TANR also hosts an annual conference that, according to its website, “is especially aimed at improving the viability and marketability of all naturist enterprises in which risk-takers have invested capital, careers and family futures.”

I should note that my attempts to arrange an interview with someone from the AANR were never acknowledged; my e-mails were never replied to; and when I spoke to someone on the phone at its Kissimmee, Florida, headquarters I was advised to “download the press kit.”

Looking at the press materials, it is clear that the AANR isn’t much concerned with the legal issues, civil liberties, or moral imperatives at play in the wider world of nudism. That may be because the resorts and campgrounds it represents are private, for-profit, clothing-optional areas and it doesn’t cost a dime to go to a nude beach or a clothing-optional hiking trail, so why promote something that would be competition for its member businesses.

Although this may be changing. Recent postings on the AANR home page have revealed a schism in the organization, and some members are pushing for a more politically engaged and activist vision.

Today’s AANR began in that meeting at the Michelob Café in 1929, where Kurt Barthel and his friends started the American League for Physical Culture and then did naked jumping jacks in a smelly gym. A few years later, in 1931, a man named Isley Boone—who liked to be called “Uncle Danny” because of some strange fixation with Kentucky frontiersman Daniel Boone—took over the organization from Barthel and jazzed up its image by first calling it the International Nudist League and then the American Sunbathing Association (ASA).

The early ASA grew at a relatively modest pace, gaining converts and earning money through the sale of its lifestyle magazine,
Sunshine & Health
(formerly the
Nudist
). Which is not to say it was always smooth sailing. Boone battled local authorities and religious leaders who tried to close nudist camps; fought with the U.S. Postal Service, which would routinely refuse to deliver his magazine on moral grounds; and basically steamrolled anyone who tried to thwart the growth of his burgeoning nudist empire. Nudist historian Cec Cinder sums up the pre–World War II state of American nudism: “By now Boone had developed a sort of nudist conglomerate which consisted of nine rather mysterious interlocking corporations or companies, with himself the controlling (and perhaps only) officer of most and certainly in control of them all.”
³¹

Boone’s control freak mentality created conflicts, mutinies, and splinter groups. All of which went on hold when World War II broke out. Boone couldn’t have foreseen it, but the war proved to be a turning point for American nudism.

There’s not a lot of privacy in a war zone and soldiers by necessity spent much of their time being naked together. They changed clothes and showered and sometimes skinny-dipped together. I don’t know why the Pentagon thought that it would be a problem. For a long time it was given a pass, maybe something to do with boys being boys, or perhaps ever since George Washington asked German military officer and alleged homosexual Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben to join him at Valley Forge, there’s been homosexuality in the armed forces that the general public isn’t aware of, but whatever the reason, the military brass became concerned that men left in the company of other men for extended periods might turn to homosexuality to relieve the stress of combat. There has always been homosexual activity in the armed forces, but between 1938 and 1941 there had only been thirty-four soldiers convicted of sodomy and related offenses,
³²
a significantly small number when you consider that more than 16 million men and women served during World War II. And while the statistics may not have given cause for alarm, there was anecdotal evidence of soldiers hooking up, or, as Quentin Crisp famously said of cruising American GIs during the London blackouts, “Never in the history of sex was so much offered to so many by so few.”

The Pentagon thought all this man-on-man action would somehow have a negative effect on troop morale. And while it wasn’t willing to sanction supplying actual pornography to the troops, it decided that a nudist magazine like
Sunshine & Health
might be a reasonable compromise. There were ample photographs of naked women to help soldiers do the five-knuckle shuffle, and at the same time, it promoted a vision of a wholesome American lifestyle. Historian and author Brian Hoffman writes, “
Sunshine & Health
contributed to a widespread effort by the military to boost troop morale through a policy that attempted to address the sexual needs of soldiers without resorting to prostitution.”
³³

In other words, it’s better to let soldiers jack off than have them unfit to fight thanks to STDs.

As the popularity of the magazine grew among soldiers, the editors of
Sunshine & Health
responded by amping up the raciness of the photos. As Hoffman says, the magazine “attempted to use the soldiers’ erotic longings to draw new members into the movement.”

To a surprising degree, they succeeded.

But while the military might have seen nudism as a healthier alternative to prostitution and sodomy, the home front didn’t see it that way. The idea that people might be cavorting naked on private property was met with outrage from the religious leaders and morality police of the time.

In 1935 New York State passed the McCall-Dooling Bill. The bill, written under pressure from the New York Archdiocese, amended the penal code to state that “A person who in any place willfully exposes his person, or the private parts thereof, in the presence of two or more persons of the opposite sex whose persons, or private parts thereof, are similarly exposed, or who aids or abets any such act . . .”—it goes on at some length, but you get the point. The law made it a misdemeanor to be a nudist and, perhaps unintentionally, made participating in a ménage à trois a criminal act. A watchdog group called the Legion of Decency
********
was quickly formed to monitor nudist activities and, perhaps, report any suspicious three-ways.

Four years later, on the other side of the country, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance banning nudism. The city of Los Angeles enacted similar legislation and, in 1940, raided a ranch used by a nudist group called Fraternity Elysia. This headline from the May 27, 1940,
Freeport Journal-Standard
gives a good indication of the law enforcement attitude at the time: “Burrs Are Punishment Enough for Hollywood Nudists.” The police are quoted describing the women being “on the fattish side of 40” and openly chuckled at the nudists’ attempt to flee into the surrounding hills: “When they get through picking out the burrs after running through Sagebrush hills, that’ll be penalty enough.” The nudists apparently took off with nothing “but badminton racquets.”

The owner of the ranch and one of the guiding forces of Fraternity Elysia was Lura Glassey, an attractive young woman who sported a pixie haircut and a sly smile. She had previously run a nudist club with her husband, Hobart—photos of Hobart depict an intense young man with a hipster mustache—called Elysian Fields.
********
After a falling-out with their business partner, she and her husband moved their nudist camp to the ranch at La Tuna Canyon, not far from Los Angeles. Hobart died in 1938 in a freak accident when he slipped from the top of a kiln and broke his neck. By all accounts, Lura was intelligent and feisty and not afraid of authority figures; faced with a ban on mixed-sex nudity, she contrived to get around it by having men and women take turns being naked—a whistle would signal the change—but as clever as she was at circumventing the rules, she was ultimately arrested. She appealed this, and several other convictions, taking her case all the way to the Supreme Court, where, in 1947, she argued that “nudism is a social belief, and not legally limited unless there is a danger to society.”
³⁴
The court didn’t see it that way and Lura Glassey became one of the few American citizens to ever serve prison time for nudity.

The history of nonsexual social nudism is littered with similar stories, and as the postwar era turned into a boom time for American nudism, with established clubs getting new members and new clubs and colonies popping up across the country, more and more complaints about immorality and obscenity began making their way to local authorities.

Things began to change when, in 1956, police raided the Sunshine Gardens Nudist Resort in Battle Creek, Michigan, and arrested several nudists. Even though they were on private property, the nudists were convicted of indecent exposure. Which, if you think about it, is bizarre. If you’re naked with a group of other naked people and you are gathering for the express purpose of pursuing group nudity on private property, what’s public and indecent about it?

To their credit, the Michigan nudists fought the charges and, in a verdict that had ramifications across the country, had their convictions overturned by the Michigan Supreme Court. Of his decision, the justice and avid fly fisherman John D. Voelker
********
said he was not going “to burn down the house of constitutional safeguards in order to roast a few nudists.”
³⁵

The Sunshine Gardens verdict came the same year that “Danny” Boone and the American Sunbathing Association won a landmark case in the U.S. Supreme Court, overturning provisions of the Comstock Act.

The Comstock Act was enacted in 1873 during the presidency of noted Old Crow aficionado Ulysses S. Grant. I’m not saying that it was hypocritical for a notorious boozehound to pass a law banning the transportation of obscene material and contraceptive devices through the mail, but I will suggest that he might’ve been drunk at the time he signed it.

The law was named after Anthony Comstock, a postal inspector and founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, the self-appointed morality police who mostly targeted girlie magazines and publications they deemed to be pornographic or that promoted homosexuality. In their zeal to keep New York safe from salaciousness, these vigilantes managed to ban
Ulysses
,
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, and the work of Oscar Wilde, along with scores of other books and magazines. In 1927 they even managed to close a Broadway play called
Sex
starring Mae West.

The Comstock Act empowered the U.S. Postal Inspector to snoop in letters and packages, approving or disapproving the content of various publications. This overreach led to a ten-year legal battle between the postal service and
Sunshine & Health
. The inspector general would, if it suited his whim, declare certain issues of
Sunshine & Health
obscene and undeliverable. The magazine would then go to court and get an injunction forcing the postal service to deliver the publication. The next issue would come under similar scrutiny, be banned, and the process would start again.

As
Sunshine & Health
grew in popularity during the war, the postal service bans became more frequent and the magazine was forced to go to court to stay in business, seeking protection under the First Amendment. The court battle would drag on for years, but on January 13, 1958, Uncle Danny and
Sunshine & Health
prevailed. Now the magazine could be delivered to anyone in the United States with a passing curiosity or interest in the nudist lifestyle. Other nudist magazines quickly sprung up in the wake of this ruling, and the 1950s and 1960s saw publications like
Modern Sunbathing
,
Sundial
,
Nude Living
,
Nudism Today
,
Jaybird Happening
,
and others, including one that wasn’t necessarily about nudism, called
Playboy
.