Naked at Lunch (26 page)

In 2002, in Wilmington, Vermont, a local real estate developer—aren’t they always the bad guys in these stories?—was planning to build a subdivision of luxury homes adjacent to the Harriman Reservoir. For some reason the developer didn’t believe that wealthy retirees would want to share the expensive lakefront with the skinny-dippers who had traditionally used the reservoir. Initially the developer put an anti-nudity ordinance on the ballot and, despite efforts by the NAC, won. But as skinny-dippers were cited—and learned that citations came with a yearlong ban—locals became disgruntled. The NAC mounted an effective grassroots campaign and got the ban rescinded.

These are small victories, to be sure, but even if you aren’t a skinny-dipper I think it’s reasonable to allow others to do it, not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because of equal protection under the law, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, you know, stuff like that. That’s the battle Lee Baxandall was fighting. Sadly, Baxandall suffered from Parkinson’s disease and was forced to retire in 2002. He was subsequently elected to the American Nudist Hall of Fame in 2004,
⁷⁰
and he died in 2008.

In an interview Baxandall said, “A country that lacks nude beaches is not a civilized country.”
⁷¹
And that rings true to me. Just look at Europe, the birthplace of Western civilization, where every beach is top-free and nude beaches dot the coastline. Skinny-dipping is pretty much the norm in the Greek islands, while Spain, France, Italy, and most other countries have official and unofficial beaches where nudism is permitted. There’s even a nude beach called Ursetvika
********
in Norway that’s inside the arctic circle.

But read the Naturist Society’s current list of official nude beaches in the United States and you’ll find less than ten. That’s because the U.S. Parks Department and local officials are still playing Whac-A-Mole with skinny-dippers. Religious groups lump nudists in with pedophiles and sex offenders, developers build condominiums next to nude beaches and see them as threats to their investment, and prudes and moralists apply political pressure to ban nudism. Even a site as secluded and difficult to get to as Black’s Beach comes under attack from conservatives from time to time. But then this kind of fundamental fear of people who prefer not to wear clothes has been plaguing nudists since Charles Crawford and the Fellowship of the Naked Trust first dropped trou in 1891.

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The Boy Scouts in Cuba
, cowritten with Marshall Brickman and Danny Kalb.

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Traditionally called a
media noche,
the sandwich consists of a sweet Cuban roll with ham, roast pork, Swiss cheese, mustard, and pickles.

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From the 2002 album
Handcream for a Generation
.

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It’s now just called
N.

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Formerly called the National Family Legal Foundation.

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A self-described “servant ministry building an alliance to keep the door open for the spread of the Gospel by transforming the legal system.” This is the same group that fought for Arizona’s odious SB 1062, a bill described as “protecting religious freedom” when in actuality it would have allowed people to discriminate against homosexuals and minorities and then hide behind “religious freedom.” Fortunately the governor of Arizona vetoed the bill before it could become law. The Alliance Defending Freedom’s senior counsel, Doug Napier, said, “Freedom loses when fear overwhelms facts and a good bill is vetoed. Today’s veto enables the foes of faith to more easily suppress the freedom of the people of Arizona.” Which is, you don’t need me to tell you, utter hogwash.

********
Near Saltfjorden, about an hour’s drive east of Bodø.

The Dark Secrets
of Lisa Lutz

W
hen I first started writing this book I asked some of my friends if they’d ever been to a nudist club or a nude beach, or if they’d had any kind of nonsexual social nude experience. A few admitted that they had gone to a nude beach or were naked at Burning Man—one of my friends and his wife went to a nude beach as a rehearsal for Burning Man—but except for one female friend, who it turns out is a bit of a nudist, most people had either no experience of social nudism or had tried it once and never did it again. I heard a lot of stories about teenage skinny-dipping in lakes and quarries and backyard pools, and a few tales of going topless at rock festivals. My favorite story was from a female friend who was taken to a nudist club on a second date. Which is one way to break the ice. But for the most part, people tried some version of nudity and then put their clothes back on and kept them on. However, there was one friend who had a story.

Lisa Lutz is the author of six novels in the Spellman series, beginning with
The Spellman Files
and ending with
The Last Word.
She’s also cowritten the novel
Heads You Lose
, the children’s picture book
How to Negotiate Everything
, and
Isabel Spellman’s Guide to Etiquette: What Is Wrong with You People.
She is a very talented and funny writer and, as it turns out, has harbored a dark secret from her childhood.

She lives in the country in New York and I live in Los Angeles, so we sat down at our laptops and Skyped about her past.

“All right. So tell me, was this some sort of child abuse or something? What happened?”

“Right.” Lisa heaved a sigh. “Well, I don’t . . . Okay . . . my mom married her second husband when I was about six and they got really into the seventies. I mean they were just fully entrenched in it.”

For me, personally, the seventies was about the birth of punk rock, the Sex Pistols and Talking Heads, and the rise of New German Cinema and filmmakers like Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Wim Wenders, all of which were major obsessions of my late teens and early twenties. But I do remember my father, in particular, trying to be part of some kind of hip and happening seventies scene. He would eat fondue and drink sweet Portuguese wine while sitting on a flokati rug with his girlfriend. She wore striped bell-bottom pants and those peasant blouses that were so popular at the time. They would listen to James Taylor and Creedence Clearwater Revival records. Sometimes they would drive downtown in his exotic sports car to meet their friends. Maybe they went to a disco. It wouldn’t surprise me.

I wondered if Lisa had experienced a similar childhood.

“My mom wanted to disco dance, and they’d have friends over and then they’d bring an instructor over. So they had disco dance lessons in our house, which was, to me . . .” She paused before continuing. “I was that kid that was always embarrassed of everything and everyone around me. And so this was just the height of embarrassment. I remember we weren’t allowed to watch them but we could hear the music and hear the instruction.”

“That does sound embarrassing.”

“There’s a lot of things. I’m not saying they did, but my parents could have had key parties for all I know with the way they were. They just were into it.”

“And nudity was part of that?”

“My mom was naked a lot around the house. And then after a while my stepdad was naked a lot. And they would . . . they would try to talk to me about how you’re supposed to be comfortable with your body. And I remember learning the basics of sex at a freakishly young age as well.”

I asked her to clarify what, exactly, a freakishly young age is.

“Like freakish, I mean . . . And this wasn’t—my parents didn’t do it. There was some book that was like a sex book,
Where Did I Come From?
I remember my mom’s friend reading it to me—and I couldn’t have been more than four—and being mortified. But the thing is, I remember that. That is really one of my first memories ever in life. And so I was just . . .”

Her voice trailed off as she collected her thoughts.

“. . . I think that they were trying really hard to be this new modern type. And so they were naked in the house.”

“That’s it? They were indoor nudists?”

Lisa groaned. “They had these friends who lived in the Hollywood Hills. A guy named Harvey and his wife and they had a swimming pool. So my sister and my stepbrother and I would go over there and we all swam naked.”

“Were you a teenager by this point?”

“None of this went past, I would say, age nine. So that was the first time of seeing other people naked. It was the first time I saw fake boobs. And I didn’t understand that they were fake. I just thought, ‘Wow, they’re just so, like, round and big.’”

I could see where breast augmentation might traumatize a young girl. They traumatize me and I’m an adult.

Lisa continued. “I liked this woman a lot. She was very nice to me. She was the second wife of this doctor. They were a part of the whole thing. And we did that a lot.”

I wondered if that was it, just an innocent backyard skinny-dip, but there was more to her story.

“We would take vacations, I remember, as a family. We went to Miami to visit my grandmother. And then one day we took off to the beach. But it was a nude beach. I mean my grandmother wasn’t with us and I don’t know if anyone told her. And this was the first time it was just sort of complete naked people everywhere. I was just sort of like, ‘What are we doing?’ The beach thing, it really bothered me.”

“Why do you think it bothered you so much?”

“I don’t know. I think some people are nudists and some people aren’t. I think this is a fair statement. When I was a teenager I had a friend who didn’t look awesome naked. Let me just put it that way. She was a big girl, but she was naked all the time. You came over to her house, I mean you were lucky if you got her in a towel. And to this day I just think that’s her thing. She doesn’t like the feeling of clothes. Whereas, I am . . . People have joked that I go to bed in a suit. But I like the old-timey pajamas. If I’m woken up in the middle of the night for a fire, I want to be able to run outside and be able to wear that for the next two days to two weeks if the whole house burns down.”

“Because you were sensitive about your body? Or what people thought about your body?”

“During this time I absolutely was comfortable wearing a swimsuit. Which I can’t say is the case, you know, these days. I liked swimming. I liked that stuff. I just didn’t see why everybody needed to see me completely naked. And I found something very strange about my parents’ extreme openness about sex. Because it didn’t end there. I mean . . . I guess she’ll never read it . . . but you know my parents liked to explain everything to me even if I didn’t want them to explain it. I remember walking through the living room and my dad was watching some sort of very soft-core porn. There was, like, some topless nurse. And I’m just like, ‘Okay, just keep walking.’ And they stopped me and said, ‘Lisa, are you confused? Do you want us to explain this to you?’ And I’m like, ‘No, I’m fine.’ And someone apparently on the screen was having an orgasm and they were trying to explain an orgasm to me. And I just felt like, ‘I don’t care.’ You know, I kind of had this sense of ‘I’m a kid. I don’t need to know this shit right now.’”

I can empathize with her parents. After all, this was a time when
The Joy of Sex
was a bestseller and people thought it was healthy to talk openly about sex and reproductive health; the feminist revolution was in full swing, pocket calculators were replacing the slide rule, and the microwave oven was introduced. It was also the era when running naked across a sports field or through the streets or basically anywhere there was a crowd of people became a fad known as “streaking.” It was especially popular on college campuses and an “epidemic” of streaking broke out. The climax of the streaking sensation was 1974. That year saw the world record of 1,574 simultaneous streakers recorded at the University of Georgia on March 7. On April 2, at the Academy Awards, a man famously streaked across the stage flashing both a peace sign and his penis, and by May, Ray Stevens’s classic novelty song, “The Streak,” was number one on the
Billboard
’s
Hot 100. The sexual revolution of the 1960s was being assimilated into mainstream culture, and being naked and running free was as popular as it ever got.

Lisa agreed. “I think they were trying to be really open. I’m sure that they read some book or some article or something that suggested it was, you know, good for kids or whatever to let them know what’s going on. But this phase literally stopped, like stopped sharp, when I was ten. And while my mom was still naked around the house my dad wasn’t. It’s like they sort of were aware that once they had kids that were going through puberty, this was maybe weird. And so it stopped completely. And then later I found that my mother could be very prudish about sex, at least in terms of the idea of me having sex. Even though I wasn’t having sex, they were always thinking I was up to something. And I think part of it’s just because they spent so much time talking about it when I was little.”