Naked at Lunch (24 page)

It’s easy to imagine Baxandall settling into a job as a theater critic or tenured college professor, but career trajectories don’t always go smoothly. When local authorities on Cape Cod decided to close the beaches to skinny-dipping, Baxandall suddenly found a cause that was close to his Boy Scout heart.

As nudist historian Cec Cinder writes, “Nude sunbathing and swimming in the ocean seemed to him a heritage from, and extension of, his fondly-remembered, idyllic, Wisconsin boyhood.”
⁶⁵

The neosocialist former Eagle Scout channeled his revolutionary zeal into something more concrete than liberation theory; he wanted to skinny-dip, and to continue to do that, he’d have to fight the powers that be.

Baxandall formed the Free the Free Beach Committee, collected signatures for a petition, and wrote letters to the editor, and when all of these efforts failed to persuade local officials, he had the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts file a lawsuit.

He lost.

I’m not sure it’s that unusual for a socialist activist to become a naturist activist. If you think about it, Marx’s critique of capitalism is not so different from the early naturist’s desire to live naked and free from the demands of bourgeois society, to take control of the means of production. They may not be the same thing, but they are connected by a similar impulse for a better life removed from the stresses of capitalism and the conformity demanded by consumer culture.

Like many of the nudist movements throughout history, there was a serendipitous synchronicity unfolding among nudists in the late 1960s and early 1970s, only this time it was in the United States. At the same time Baxandall was fighting to “Free the Free Beaches” in Massachusetts, Bay Area nudists in California were forming the Committee for Free Beaches. Their goal was to “establish a number of beach sites along the Pacific Coast that will be free from irrational restrictions.” Or as they declared so eloquently, “Our point of view is that the most logical and wholesome way to enjoy swimming and sunbathing is in the nude.”
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By 1967 they had turned San Gregorio beach, south of San Francisco, into an informal nude beach just by showing up in numbers and enjoying themselves.

It’s interesting to note that Baxandall and the Free Beachers weren’t members of the American Sunbathing Association (later the AANR) or any organized nudist group; these were freelancers, people who just liked to frolic on the beach without any official affiliation to anything other than surf, sun, and textile-free fun. I’m guessing that most of the participants were less radical socialists and more just young people imbued with the groovy spirit of the times.

The 1970s brought on acts of civil disobedience by nudists, most notably Chad Merrill Smith’s arrest for lying naked on a beach near San Diego. Smith was violating section 314 of the California Penal Code: “Every person who willfully and lewdly, either 1. Exposes his person, or private parts thereof, in any public place, or in any place where there are present other persons to be offended or annoyed thereby.”
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Smith was found guilty, fined $100, and put on probation. But he soon discovered that this conviction would force him to “register as a sex offender pursuant to Penal Code section 290.” Smith didn’t think he was a sex offender; he hadn’t been lewd, he didn’t draw attention to his nakedness, and he didn’t have an erection. So he appealed, eventually taking the case to the California Supreme Court, where, on June 13, 1972, he won.

In an opinion that expressed a unanimous decision by the California Supreme Court, Justice Stanley Mosk wrote, “By parity of reasoning, we cannot attribute to the Legislature a belief that persons found to be sunbathing in the nude on an isolated beach ‘require constant police surveillance’ to prevent them from committing such ‘crimes against society’ in the future. Lacking that belief, the Legislature could not reasonably have intended that section 314, subdivision 1, apply to the conduct here in issue.”

The court decided that being naked didn’t constitute lewdness; if you wanted to be lewd, you had to make an effort.

It was a crucial decision for skinny-dippers and brought more people to the beach, which, paradoxically given Smith’s acquittal, brought more police to the beach to write citations for indecent exposure. In fact the decision brought a negative backlash from law enforcement and local authorities, and in Malibu, Santa Barbara, and farther up the coast, traditionally informal nude beaches were faced with closure.

Nudists in California realized that, despite the supreme court ruling, they needed to organize to protect their right to swim in the buff, so in 1973 a group of like-minded individuals created BeachFront USA with Cec Cinder as acting president.

One of the first battles for the Free Beachers was over the Los Angeles City Council’s decision to close Venice Beach to nude swimmers. As in most beach closures in the United States, the city council was pressured by a combination of the moneyed interests of real estate developers; the outrage from concerned citizens and religious figures like Cardinal Timothy Manning, the archbishop of the Los Angeles Roman Catholic Archdiocese; LAPD chief of police Ed Davis’s concerns about public morality; and vote-pandering by members of the council itself. Church groups organized a letter-writing campaign to put pressure on local politicians and the public debate grew contentious. In a letter to the
Los Angeles Times
on August 20, 1975,
Chief Davis announced he was canceling his subscription to the paper because “You are the Paul Revere of the oncoming avalanche of libertine behavior.”
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Which, considering he was complaining about the
Times’
“constantly attempting to condition us to a dramatic new set of moral values,” including “strong editorial support of homosexuality, marijuana and many, many other forms of behavior recently socially proscribed in our country,” shows a strange understanding of what Paul Revere was actually up to.

The city didn’t even consider a compromise that would have made a small section of Venice Beach clothing optional. Not long after that, the county board of supervisors followed and nudity in Los Angeles was banned, including “any portion of the breast at or below the upper edge of the areola thereof of any female person.” Which made openly breast-feeding babies a misdemeanor.

Over the years there have been dozens and dozens of battles fought for the right to skinny-dip on an American beach. The popular Mazo Beach on the Wisconsin River, just northwest of Madison, was the only legal nude beach in that state and was closed to nude recreation on weekdays by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources in March 2013. That means you can still be nude on the weekends, although that too appears under threat. The shutdown was due to complaints of drug use and sexual activity at the beach and in the nearby forest, which is kind of ironic, as nudists also complained about drug use and sexual activity at the beach and in the nearby forest.

Another example of encroachment on nude beaches happened just north of Santa Cruz, California, in 2010 when park rangers put up signs at the traditionally clothing-optional Bonny Doon Beach saying
NUDITY IN THE STATE PARK SYSTEM IS PROHIBITED.
Which doesn’t mean local nudists put their clothes on. As Rich Pasco of the Bay Area Naturists said, “A fifty-year tradition cannot be extinguished by a simple sign.”
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And in 2013, Lighthouse Beach on Fire Island in New York was closed to nude swimmers after having been an unofficial clothing-optional beach for decades.

Most of the time, the nudists ended up on the losing side, but that’s not always the case. There are some success stories.

When the Travel Channel did a roundup of the world’s best nude beaches, Haulover Beach in Miami was ranked alongside nude beaches in Brazil, Crete, Australia, and Jamaica as the world’s best. But, for the most part, those other beaches are off the beaten path, in isolated areas. What makes Haulover Beach unique is that it is in an urban park, a public clothing-optional beach that was approved by local authorities in 1991 and is administered by the Miami-Dade County Parks, Recreation and Open Spaces Department. According to the Lifeguard Ocean Rescue Service the beach attracts approximately 1.4 million visitors annually.

I wanted to see this fabled stretch of sand, so I booked a flight to Miami.

I have to admit that I’d never really been to Miami. I usually end up changing planes there to get to the Dominican Republic or Nassau or some place like that and I was curious about the city. I wondered if a typical Miami resident would go to Haulover Beach or if they even knew about Haulover. So I arranged to meet the journalist and longtime Miami resident Juan Carlos Pérez-Duthie for lunch at Versailles, a restaurant that calls itself “The World’s Most Famous Cuban Restaurant.” Famous or not, it’s probably the biggest Cuban restaurant in the United States and it is a rite of passage for presidential candidates from both parties to come here and meet with Miami’s influential Cuban community. The dining room is massive and airy, with plush green curtains and ornate mirrors that give the place a Las Vegas vibe. Yet the mosaic tile floors and the tables and chairs are pretty much the same as you’d find in any diner anywhere in America. All of which lends the restaurant a funky charm. I instantly liked the place.

Juan Carlos is lean and lanky. With a handsome face framed by meticulously trimmed facial hair and red rectangular glasses, he looks like a tropical hipster intellectual, which I suppose is exactly what he is. Today he looks slightly sunburned, as befits someone of Puerto Rican–Scottish descent. Perhaps we are related.

I ordered a Midnight Sandwich,
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some mashed fried plantains—because I love plantains—and a guanabana shake while Juan Carlos ate the oddly named
vaca frita de pollo
,
or “cow fried chicken,” and recounted his early days visiting Haulover Beach.

“A good friend of mine used to live nearby, so it was convenient for us to go. I remember Haulover had two sections, one straight, one gay, divided only by a lifeguard’s booth. People walked back and forth.”

I wondered if it was a cruising place. He nodded. “People were checking each other out, but no more than on a regular beach where you’re supposed to keep your pants on.”

Remembering it, Juan Carlos laughed. “But after the sun set and the lifeguards and the families left”—he raised an eyebrow—“things could get frisky in the water.”

“What was the straight side like?”

“On the straight side . . . the first thing that struck me was the number of families and the elderly people naked, going into the water, hanging out while speaking different languages, sunbathing. Many burned to a crisp.”

He shook his head as he said it, as if the biggest tragedy of coming to the tropics was getting an overdose of sunshine and burning your skin.

As I ate my sandwich I became alarmed that they had forgotten the pickle and for me, someone who likes pickled vegetables of all kinds, the pickle in a
media noche
is the best part, but before I could ask the waitress, Juan Carlos continued. “On the gay side . . . strangely, those with the best bodies did not take their clothes off. They wore skimpy briefs.”

“Were you a nudist or were you going for the gay scene?”

“I usually kept my bathing suit on, though swimming au naturel felt really good. Better for me was talking to the people gathered there.”

Haulover Beach has a reputation for being a friendly, sociable place. I watched as Juan Carlos speared a plantain and popped it in his mouth.

“Like two middle-aged men who had been dancers at Cuba’s famous Tropicana club. And they had pictures to prove it. They visited every week, always bringing a sun umbrella, chairs, and coolers filled with refreshments. They also came equipped with big pots holding food. More surprising to me than seeing them naked was the amount of food that they brought . . . a big chunk of roasted pork, black beans and rice, yucca, bread. They always offered us something.” He took a sip of his Coca-Cola and then laughed. “Once they brought a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. We may have had a few thighs.”

After a
cortadito
, Juan Carlos and I said good-bye, and I headed off to find this urban oasis of nudity and handsome Cuban men with pots of roast pork.

Whenever I think of the words “Miami Beach” my brain almost always follows it up with the “chicks with dicks” line from the Cornershop song “Lessons Learned from
Rocky I
to
Rocky III.
”
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But I didn’t notice any signs of overt transvestite fetishism as I drove up Collins Avenue and made my way past the art deco hotels and hip and happening hot spots that give way to a charming small-town main street mixed with surreal canyons of ritzy high-rise condominiums. I motored through North Shore and Surfside, until I crossed over a bridge and found myself turning left into the parking lot at Haulover Beach Park.

Haulover Beach is one and a half miles long but only the final quarter mile is designated as clothing optional. I parked in the parking lot and walked through a tunnel under the road toward the beach.