Naked at Lunch (25 page)

The beach was hidden behind a tall hedge of scrubby sea grape with entry paths cut every thirty or forty yards. The sea grape acts as a screen between the city, the busy street that runs alongside the park, and the relative tranquillity of the beach itself. I found a cut in the hedge and walked out onto the beach. I don’t want to oversell it, but the beach is beautiful. Classic postcard pretty. Coarse white sand that appears to be made out of trillions of tiny broken seashells stretches out to turquoise-colored water that shifts to a deeper blue green before it hits the horizon and a deeper blue, the blue of the sky, takes over. Look to the right and the high-rises of Bal Harbour and North Shore smoosh together like they’re in a crowded elevator. Turn to the left and there are even more high-rise apartments and hotels. You can feel the money-grubbing encroachment of real estate developers pressing in on the park like the sharks that I’m guessing aren’t far offshore. That the city of Miami chose to save this pristine urban beach from development is nothing short of a minor miracle in this day and age.

I crunched along the sand until I reached a sign warning me that
BEYOND THIS POINT YOU MAY ENCOUNTER NUDE BATHERS.
I did encounter a few, but they weren’t bathing. Mostly people were sitting under umbrellas enjoying the breeze. A family was having a picnic. Kids were kicking a soccer ball around. An old man stood naked in ankle-deep water looking out at the horizon.

I sat down in the shade of the lifeguard station—I couldn’t see any divide between gay and straight but I wasn’t there to take sides. The air was cool and smelled fresh, the sun was warm, and that combined with the sound of the surf put me into a kind of meditative trance. No wonder people come to Florida and take off their clothes. No wonder they never want to leave. They’ve been hypnotized by the sheer hedonistic pleasure of being here. When the air and sun and sea feel this good, why wouldn’t you want to experience it with every inch of skin you’ve got? And why should Miami residents have to drive hundreds of miles or hike into some out-of-the-way spot just so they can take off their clothes and swim?

…

Equally beautiful, but on the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of accessibility, is Black’s Beach near San Diego, California.

On May 31, 1979, Russell Cahill, the director of the California Department of Parks and Recreation, wrote a memorandum that stated that the official policy of the department would be that “enforcement of nude sunbathing regulations within the State Park System shall be made only upon the complaint of a private citizen” and even then “citations or arrests shall be made only after attempts are made to elicit voluntary compliance with the regulations.” This memorandum made Black’s Beach, in the Torrey Pines State Park just north of San Diego, one of the first quasi-legal nude beaches in the country. It’s a law similar to Amsterdam’s tolerance for cannabis. It’s not exactly legal, but it’s not necessarily illegal either. It all just depends on the situation.

I wanted to visit Black’s Beach, so I grabbed a beach towel and hit the road.

Black’s Beach isn’t easy to get to. I tuned my GPS to the coordinates provided on the website of the Black’s Beach Bares, a volunteer organization that promotes clothing-optional recreation on the beach, and, a few mind-numbing hours of freeway driving later, made my way past the campus of the University of California at San Diego to the Torrey Pines Gliderport at the top of a three-hundred-foot cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

A gliderport is just what you think it is. A strong breeze blows in from the ocean and up the cliff face, creating the lift that keeps paragliders from making human-shaped craters on the beach below. I guess it’s as good a place as any to jump off a cliff, and there were numerous people hurtling themselves into space with billowy parachute-wing contraptions strapped to their bodies. The gliderport isn’t fancy, but it does house a snack bar, a gift shop, and an office with—I’m guessing here—body bags and tools for scraping people off the rocks below. There are windsocks and wind speed gauges arrayed to help the “pilots” figure out if it’s safe to jump off the cliff. And a cluster of Porta Pottis stood at the ready in case the thought of plummeting to your death caused any would-be pilots an unexpected movement of the bowels.

The trail to the beach is posted with several warning signs. Unlike Haulover Beach where the signs warn you that you might encounter nude sunbathers beyond this point, these signs warn that the cliff is unstable and that you shouldn’t get close to the edge. The warning is no joke: in 2010 a fifty-seven-year-old man leaned against the base of the cliff to take off his shoes and was killed by falling rocks.

The path to the beach, which
Surfer
magazine accurately calls a “danger sign–spiked goat trail,” is steep and consists of a series of irregular and rough-hewn steps that switch back and forth at random intervals as you descend the crumbling cliff. As I negotiated the slippery sand and loose gravel on my descent, I couldn’t help but notice that the people passing me on their way up were panting, sweating, and not looking all that happy about what amounts to a thirty-two-story trudge back to the top. Not that I blamed them. Just last year a friend of mine, a man who seemed to be in peak condition, had a heart attack climbing up this trail.

I made it to the bottom and walked out onto a seriously beautiful beach.

Black’s Beach is big and open, almost two miles of soft sand, and that Saturday afternoon was one of those triumphant days that make California the envy of the world. The sky was blue, golden sunlight reflected off the waves, a fresh breeze was blowing in off the ocean; there were surfers riding waves in the distance, paragliders drifting along the cliffs above, and right there on the beach, three naked women—the lithe and blond California girls celebrated in song—doing cartwheels on the sand.

It was awesome.

I started walking up the beach, reconnoitering, looking for a suitable spot to lay my towel. Unlike the anxiety I sometimes felt at nudist resorts, I was happy to be here. It was simply too pretty to be nervous about being naked.

Even though there were a lot of people at the beach, it was big enough that it didn’t feel crowded. I stopped to watch as a young man, wearing only dreadlocks, swirled an unlit fire torch around his head like a drunk majorette in a Fourth of July parade. He was lucky that it wasn’t lit because I don’t think he’d have any hair left if it had been. Next to him, his topless girlfriend practiced her hooping routine. They both seemed serious, focused on what they were doing, as if they’d tried to join the circus but had been rejected because they lacked the requisite circusing skills and were desperately working on their act.

There were naked people being active everywhere I looked, swimming in the ocean, tossing a Frisbee, throwing footballs; there was even a nude volleyball game in progress. Of course there were a few older nudists sitting under umbrellas or lying on towels, but mostly it was all very young and Naktiv. Not only were the majority of the naked people younger, but it was a mixed-race crowd, the typical melting pot you’d find in any public space in California. Perhaps Black’s Beach skews that way because it’s just not that easy, or that safe, to get here.

I sat on a towel, stripped down, and began applying layers of spray-on sunblock. While I might be getting more comfortable with being naked in public, I am still terrified of getting sunburned. Fully protected from solar radiation, I walked out into the surf. As the frigid water slammed against my naked body, I thought of an episode of the television show
Seinfeld.
It’s the one where Jerry’s buddy George Costanza tries to explain to his girlfriend that his penis looks small because he’d just been swimming. Take a dunk in the freezing Pacific and, trust me, if you have a penis, you will have empathy for George.

I sat back on my towel and let the sun warm my body. It was then that I noticed something unusual. Unlike nudist resorts with their rules about public displays of affection and sexual activity, there didn’t seem to be any such restriction on Black’s Beach. There were couples making out on the sand, embracing in the surf, flirting along the shore; naked people were cavorting everywhere I looked. A man with a fantastic Mohawk and pharaonic goatee combo lay on a blanket with his girlfriend and looked to be practicing sexual positions. They weren’t actually having sexual intercourse, not in the way a Kinsey researcher might define it, but, seriously, do you have to rehearse doing it doggie style on the beach?

There was also a decent amount of gay cruising, buff young men walking back and forth on the beach chatting with other buff young men who were walking back and forth on the beach. Instead of feeling uncomfortable witnessing naked people express themselves in a sexual way, I felt relief. I find the ultrarestrained nonsexual social nude interactions of people at nudist resorts to be somewhat unnerving.

Which is not to say that it’s always harmless romantic fun. The Black’s Beach Bares website has posted warnings about a few weirdos who frequent the area. According to the website, the modus operandi of the creepy is to set their towel near a young couple and pretend to read a book. What the French would call a
voyeur
. There are also, apparently, some exhibitionists who just like to walk around and let people see them in all their naked resplendence. These things seem like a kind of normal level of creepiness, if there is such a thing as a normal level of creepiness, but the website singled out one man in particular, a “Robert Goulet look-alike,” who apparently “has some sort of penile implant that he pumps up.” He then waggles his faux boner while standing in the surf. And, lucky me, he was there on Saturday, flailing his pumped-up dick in the air. Although to be honest, he looks more like Elliott Gould.

But ultimately, the beach was refreshing. The lack of nudist dogma, the freedom to actually kiss your wife or husband or girlfriend or boyfriend, the idea that a couple could make out or a weird dude could pump up his dick, made it seem human. No wonder Baxandall and his Free Beach comrades were so passionate about setting sections of beaches aside for nude recreation.

Baxandall returned to Oshkosh to run his family’s printing business and used it as the base for his continued activism. In 1980 he published
Lee Baxandall’s World Guide to Nude Beaches and Recreation
and he founded the Naturist Society (TNS), an organization that welcomes anyone interested in preserving nude recreation in the United States. For years the AANR had been the sole organized voice for nudists. Baxandall saw TNS as an antidote to AANR’s private club mentality and its conservative politics. He published a magazine with the terrible name
Clothed with the Sun
, later renaming it
Nude & Natural.
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Baxandall created an organization that was inclusive of all sexual orientations, races, and religions. Mark Storey, a member of TNS, summed it up: “In the Naturist Society they tend to be left-leaning. Lee wasn’t a full-blown Marxist, but he had that kind of leaning. It was a grassroots, change-the-world kind of thing.”

One way of changing the world is to get people to change their perception of their own bodies. In other words, to accept themselves as they really are. In 1997 TNS offered up this definition of naturism: “A way of living in greater fidelity to nature, with a norm of full nudity in social life, the genitals included, when possible and appropriate. We aim to enhance acceptance and respect for one’s self, other persons, and the biosphere.”

TNS continues this riff in its official literature: “The Naturist Society views clothing-optional recreation as essential to body acceptance. Through clothing-optional recreation, participants, be they individuals, couples or families, learn to appreciate the diversity of body types and gain a better understanding and acceptance of their own bodies.”

You start accepting diversity of body types, you’ll start accepting diversity of races and sexual orientation, and soon you’re breaking the conformist mold that corporate capitalism tries to put you in. Baxandall had a lot in common with the French anarchist Émile Armand; they both believed you could change the world by taking off your clothes.

Baxandall decided that the naturists couldn’t just sit back and wait until beaches got closed, they needed to be proactive, they needed to talk to lawmakers and get some public land set aside for nude recreation. To that end, he founded a spin-off of TNS, a nonprofit, all-volunteer political action organization called the Naturist Action Committee (NAC).

That the NAC can boast a 90 percent success rate against anti-nudity ordinances around the country is kind of astounding. Especially given its adversaries.

Take, for example, a case in Wharton County, Texas. In December 2003, the county commissioners considered a ban on strip clubs and other types of “sexually oriented businesses.” To craft these laws, local governments often turn to templates provided to them by right-wing Christian groups like the Community Defense Council
********
and the Alliance Defending Freedom.
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In the Wharton County case, lawmakers would have made it illegal for any business to allow “activities between male and female persons and/or persons of the same sex when one or more of the persons is totally nude, semi-nude or in a state of nudity.” Which is pretty much exactly what nudists do at nudist resorts.

The NAC intervened and convinced the county commissioners to revise the bill, rewording it to protect the interests of naturists.