Naked at Lunch (2 page)

Some clutched their daily drink specials in fluorescent plastic cocktail glasses, some relaxed in chairs, others danced to the thumping sound system, a few cavorted in the hot tub, but most of them were just talking and laughing and being extremely friendly with one another.

And no one wore clothes.

What would make seemingly ordinary people spend thousands of dollars for the opportunity to waggle their penises around other waggling penises? What were they thinking? What’s the appeal? Were they getting some kind of exhibitionistic thrill? Or were they voyeurs? Did the topless women playing blackjack feel empowered? What was happening?

That’s what I was here to find out. The idea of eating a slice of pizza and drinking a beer naked on the deck of a cruise ship with hundreds of other naked people seemed bizarre to me. At the very least it made me uncomfortable; and I really like pizza and beer. But if I wanted to experience the culture of nudism, if I wanted to understand what made someone risk their job or their freedom or even their reputation to do this, well, I had to get naked like everybody else.

*
“Nakation” is a portmanteau of “naked” and “vacation,” but you probably figured that out on your own.

**
He had an alarming obsession with photographing women’s vulvas. To his credit, he always asked for permission.

Interview with a Nudist

A
pparently, there are rules for being a nudist. It’s not enough to drop trou and waggle your genitals in the sunshine. That might be fun—or, depending where you are, get you arrested—but it’s not nudism. You can take off your clothes and run across a football field, but that’s not nudism, that’s streaking. Jump in a lake and frolic naked with several of your friends? That’s skinny-dipping. Fun, but not nudism. Even bathing in a Japanese
onsen
isn’t nudism. Sure you’re naked and with a bunch of other naked people in a hot spring, but after you’ve cleaned and soaked and refreshed in the cold plunge, you get dressed and go out for ramen. A nudist would eat noodles naked, with other naked people.

I am not a nudist. Except for a few occasions of teenage skinny-dipping, I have mostly kept my genitals covered. At least when I’m in public. I don’t practice “social nudism” or “backyard naturism” or any kind of nudism, really, but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy being naked. I sleep in the nude, I take baths and showers in the nude, and I happily cavort au naturel in the privacy of my own bedroom. I’m not a prude; I just don’t hang around with other people without wearing some kind of clothing. Except for with my wife, but she’s used to me.

I have never felt an impulse to shed my clothes in public. In fact, I feel a strong compulsion to keep my clothes on and to be around other people who also keep their clothes on. I even try to wear a combination of clothing that approximates something I think of as
style.
You can blame it on social conditioning, but I know I’m not alone in this. The body image issues that advertising and media inoculated me with from an early age—those feelings of inadequacy, the fears of being ridiculed for being pudgy or hairy or circumcised or just, you know, uncool—are deeply embedded in my consciousness and shared by most of the people I know.

So what is a nudist? In his eccentric omnibus
The Nudist Idea
,
historian Cec Cinder provides a kind of kitchen sink definition:
“the nudist idea is the foundation of a distinct, entire and wholesome philosophy, one much, much larger in scope than simple collective nakedness, one that embraces sexual sanity, anti-militarism, good health, robust conditioning, inter-gender respect, political libertarianism, religious tolerance, animal rights, First Amendment political freedoms, population reduction and shrinking government and bureaucracies.”
¹

I’m not sure that nudism is about animal rights or population reduction or shrinking the size of the government—those sound like an author tacking on some political talking points—but then again, I’m just getting started looking at nudism; maybe it is all those things.

Social nudism came to the United States from Germany in 1929, and since that time various nudists and nudist groups have struggled to define what constitutes nudism. For some it’s a lifestyle choice that includes healthy eating habits, exercise, and an appreciation of nature. Others take a more philosophical view and look at nudism as a political stance against a repressive “textile-centric” society that promotes consumerism and rapacious capitalist growth at the expense of our environment and mental health. Some nudists like the fact that their bodies are accepted for how they really are and not what fashion and advertising say they should look like. Some folks just like the way it feels to relax in the sun without any clothes on.

But while various groups have different agendas and interpretations, they all pretty much agree that nudism is a social activity. If you’re alone without any clothes on, you’re just naked, but if you are in a mixed group of men and women engaged in the conscious practice of standing around in the buff, then you are a nudist practicing nudism.
²

So why do some people like to get naked and hang out with other naked people? What’s the attraction? Is it some kind of primal urge? If society didn’t tell us we had to wear clothes, would we all just strip down and frolic in the fields?

My son Jules, when he was a toddler, used to race around the house wearing nothing but a small superhero cape made out of a counterfeit Hermès scarf. I would tie it around his neck and it seemed to propel him, like it gave him actual superpowers. He’d splutter rocket sounds as he ran, trying to go fast enough to make the scarf billow in his slipstream like a proper superhero’s cape. Sometimes he would turn his head to admire his cape as he ran, which was not always sensible, but the occasional collisions with furniture or walls or trees only seemed to make him more determined.

Naturally the cape was the only thing he wore and he refused to wear clothes when he was home. No shoes, no diaper, no T-shirt. It was hard to argue with him. We lived in Southern California and it wasn’t like he needed clothing to stay warm. So he ran and played and terrorized his older sister’s playdates and watched television wearing nothing more than his faux Hermès scarf. Was he just pretending to be a superhero? Or is it deeper than that? Is there some kind of innate impulse to be naked that society has shamed out of us?
***
Even in the
Bible
it says that Adam and Eve “were both naked, yet they felt no shame.” So, like, what happened? When did hanging out in the nude become illegal? When did it become something that only weirdos and hippies did?

I decided that a good place to start was to talk to a real red-blooded card-carrying American nudist, so I arranged an interview with prominent American naturist Mark Storey and bought a ticket to Seattle. Not only is Mark Storey a board member of the Naturist Action Committee and founding member of the Body Freedom Collaborative, a group that advocates for clothing-optional beaches and started World Naked Gardening Day, but he’s also an editor at
N,
The Magazine of Naturist Living
,
and author of the book
Cinema Au Naturel: A History of Nudist Film
and editor of
Theatre au Naturel: A Collection of Naturist Plays.
In addition to that, he’s written prolifically on the history of nudism, civil disobedience, and legal issues involving public nudity.

In other words: he’s a nudist’s nudist.

…

Seattle is, on a good day, a cool and drippy climate; a place where lichen grows abundantly, the flora is lush and verdant, and the light is tinged with a soft gray quality—one of those subtle, almost institutional colors, like something you might find on the walls of the Swedish Institute for Depression Studies. I used to live in Seattle so I came prepared for a certain amount of moisture. But an unusual cold front had moved in and temperatures had dropped to near freezing. I tightened my scarf and pulled my beanie down over my ears as I stood shivering in the drizzle at a bus stop, wondering how many days a nudist in the Pacific Northwest gets to be outdoors without developing hypothermia.

Storey had agreed to meet me at Bauhaus Books and Coffee, a groovy espresso bar stuck in a kind of no-man’s-land between Seattle’s downtown and the hip Capitol Hill neighborhood. To be honest, I didn’t know what to expect from this meeting. Would he be some kind of freaky evangelist for nudism? The Johnny Appleseed of skinny-dipping, the Che Guevara of weenie wagging? Would he be wearing clothes? Worse, would he insist I take my clothes off to interview him? It was way too cold for that.

I found the coffee shop without a problem; in fact I used to live a couple of blocks away, but that was years ago, when the word “barista” was just a twinkle in some marketing executive’s eye. Bauhaus has large windows that face the street and let in enough light to keep you from feeling that you’re going to get seasonal affective disorder and a wall of shelves that give the place a Goth library vibe. It also has a second floor, a loftlike space, which is where I found Mark Storey sitting at a table, surrounded by stylish young people sipping coffee and staring intently at digital devices.

Storey has a handsome, expressive face, and he shifts easily between open laughter and thoughtful introspection. He is also tall, six foot three, which makes him a large nudist. And for someone whose day job is teaching philosophy at a local college, he looks like he’s pretty athletic.

“I got into the cliché nudist volleyball, and started touring western states doing the nudist volleyball tournaments. That was fun.”

Apparently the bump, set, and spike used to be quite popular among nudists.

“Oh yeah. I have gotten to referee the National Nudist Women’s Volleyball Tournament. That is something no one can take away from me. That was an amazing thing.”

I can’t tell if he’s joking or serious, until I realize he’s both. Although being a nude volleyball player is not without perils, as illustrated when Storey described the hiring process for his current teaching position.

“The very week that I’m going through the interview process, getting my first full-time job at a school I really wanted to teach at, the magazine I work for decided at that time to put me on the cover, full frontal, blocking the volleyball. It was the volleyball issue. I thought, ‘Oh, this is going to screw me up so bad.’”

“Maybe they didn’t look at your face,” I suggested.

He shrugged. “Later, I’m chair of the department and I’m having to deal with an adjunct instructor. I take him out to lunch, we’re chatting. He tells me his tale of woe or whatever. It was all academic stuff. And then he said, ‘Well, it’s nothing like your story.’ I go, ‘What are you talking about?’ And he said, ‘Well, the magazine. You with the volleyball cover.’ I said, ‘You know about that?’ And he says, ‘Everybody knew about that!’”

“Maybe that kind of thing is expected from philosophers.”

He smiled. “I work with some cool people.”

We paused and sipped our coffees. I had to admit that Bauhaus made a pretty good cup. Fortified with a jolt of caffeine, I cut to the chase.

“So how did you get into naturism? I’m assuming you didn’t wake up one morning and decide to stop wearing clothes.”

Storey laughed. “Everybody’s got their own story, but for me, my dad would take my brother and me fishing in the Sierra mountains. My dad was totally cheap. If we hooked a lure on a log in the stream, we had to go get it. For the first few years, I would do it, but I’d be all wet the rest of the day.” He paused and took another sip of coffee. “We were out in the boondocks, there was nobody around. And one time I decided I’m going to take my jeans and shirt off to go in. As soon as I got in the water, because I’m in sixth, seventh grade, I’m thinking, ‘This is the coolest thing in the world.’ I started hooking lures like crazy thereafter, just so I could go in there and go capture them. My dad could not figure out why I was snagging lures all the time. Then, of course, I got to sit out and dry off. ‘While I’m sitting here drying off, might as well go explore the forest.’” He sipped his coffee. “This is as a teenager.”

“You just did it because it felt good?”

He nodded. “Then I think when I was about twenty, I remember this vividly. I was laying in bed on a Saturday morning, thinking, ‘I want to do something I’ve never done before.’ Don’t have a clue what it would be. Wash the dishes, anything. Then I thought, ‘I’ll go to a nudist camp.’”

His early lure retrieval sounds a lot like my son’s cape wearing. “Do you think there’s kind of an innate impulse in people to be naked?” I asked.

He paused, shifting in his seat before answering. “I do, but I haven’t seen it written anywhere and I haven’t written it myself yet. But I do. I have come to believe this. This just comes out of my Aristotelian totalism, if you will. I just love Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Confucius. These guys would say that we’re fundamentally, essentially social beings. Natural beings. I think once people start skinny-dipping, particularly with others—I’m not talking about sexual situations, but particularly with nonsexualized social nudity—I think people are opening themselves to each other in a way that is incredibly, almost lifesaving for some.”