Naked at Lunch (35 page)

It’s not like we were alone; there were several nudists around, including a guy who stretched out in the sand in front of us and began doing yoga poses—I’m no expert but his Warrior II looked pretty good—and a number of naked people walking back and forth on the beach. I drank from my water bottle, trying to wash the dust from the road out of my throat, and pointed out the obvious to my research assistant.

“The water looks pretty good,” I said.

She looked at the aquamarine bay, the cruise ship looming in the distance, and pulled her legs up to her chest. “Don’t let me stop you.”

So I stripped down and waded out into the water. Once I was in waist deep I turned and waved.

She waved back.

I could see that she was nervous about getting naked in front of all these strangers, but I tried to be encouraging. I splashed around in the water—and believe me when I say that it was the most delicious water I have ever swam in—and called to her, “You’ve got to try it.”

She waved again and took a picture.

“Seriously,” I said. “It’s amazing.”

I knew she was wearing a swimsuit underneath her clothes and I thought that, at the very least, she might just come in wearing that, so I was surprised to see her take off her shirt and shorts, and then shimmy out of her swimsuit. She stopped for a moment and applied a layer of spray-on sunblock to her exposed breasts.

I wanted to shout some encouragement but figured that she probably wouldn’t appreciate my drawing attention to her, so I just floated nonchalantly in the bay and watched as she tossed the sunblock onto the chair and skipped down the sand and out into the water.

When I talk to nudists and naturists about how they got started, they almost always say that skinny-dipping was the gateway to becoming a nudist. If that is true, if nude swimming is the gateway drug, then nude swimming on a beautiful day in crystalline water on a private beach in the Bahamas is like taking the best drug in the world.

I could tell my research assistant was suddenly understanding the pleasure of swimming without clothes. She could not stop grinning.

We swam for a while, then walked out and sat on our beach chairs. We let the dappled sunlight dry our naked bodies as other nudists sat around us and naked couples strolled along the sand. A warm breeze blew across the water and I was struck by the realization that it really was perfect. A nudist utopia. There’s a reason that early engravings of Bahamian natives show them wearing nothing more than some shells around their necks. You don’t really need clothes when the weather is this luscious.

And yet it wasn’t real. It was a travel industry fantasy owned and operated by a multinational corporation. The bartenders and cooks all came from the ship, along with all the food and drink. No one lived on the island. The maintenance crew all lived on Eleuthera, a more populated island, about thirty minutes away by boat. They were shipped in on the days a cruise ship was in port. I wondered aloud if this kind of corporate-curated vacation experience was going to be the future of the travel industry. My research assistant reminded me, “It’s not the future, it’s right now.”

But for the nudists, private ownership of the island gave them permission to do what they came to do, and in that regard, it was a beautiful thing. Even my research assistant admitted that it felt amazingly good to be naked on that beach. Which didn’t mean that she was ready to be naked at the salad bar.

Back on board the ship, people were required to dress for dinner, and while for many that meant shirts and slacks for the men and dresses for the women, for others, evening wear was the chance for the dudes to break out the floral-patterned Tommy Bahama shirts and for the ladies to dress like cheap Vegas hookers. Skintight miniskirts and super-plunging necklines seemed as popular on board the ship as they were at Cap d’Agde, as did a kind of minidress that appeared to be made from fluorescent volleyball nets. I have to say that it was confounding at first. During the day, grandpas would wear macramé cock rings and lounge around the pool, while the grandmas typically wore a sarong or a cover-up at least part of the time, but at night everything changed, the men put on their Dockers and Hawaiian shirts and it was the women’s turn to flaunt it. I should make it clear that this wasn’t for any of the theme night parties, this was just the normal dining room attire.

I realize that we live in a world where older people are marginalized in the public consciousness. As far as Madison Avenue, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley are concerned, the old and the overweight don’t exist. For sure they don’t have sexual feelings.
That would be gross.
But here they were on this boat, wearing cock rings and see-through clothes, a bunch of grandmas and grandpas looking like they just stepped out of a really weird Beyoncé video. After I got over my initial shock—and I’ll be honest, it’s more of an aesthetic prejudice than anything—I thought . . .
Right on!
Let the old and the heavy get down with their bad selves.
Why not?
That’s what nonsexual social nudism gives them. They get to feel sexy without having to be sexual. They get to expose their carnal nature, but the rules of nonsexual social nudity don’t allow them to satisfy their urges in public. There’s no risk. The pressure’s off. Sexual contact and innuendo are forbidden, so you can dress up and pretend that you’re a Vegas hooker without having to turn tricks. You can wear that dominatrix outfit or that weird penis thong with the suspenders that loop over your shoulders. Strap on that studded leather bandolier that crisscrosses your sagging breasts. It’s all okay because it’s fantasy. And it is definitely way sexier than that snowflake sweater you wear when the grandkids come over for Christmas.

What the ship’s crew thought about all this, I cannot say. Holland America declined to let me interview the captain or any of the staff, and the few crew members I did talk to just smiled and said there was “no problem” and they hoped I was enjoying the cruise.

One evening in one of the cocktail lounges I asked a young Filipina waitress what she thought of all the naked people. She smiled and said, “Everybody is very nice.” But there was a sly humor in her smile that told me she found the whole experience profoundly amusing. I took a sip of my Manhattan and said, “Have you ever worked on a nude cruise before?”

She laughed. “No. First time.” And then she really started laughing and turned and walked away.

I will say that whatever concerns the crew members might’ve had about a ship full of naked people, they were always professional. If they gawked, they did so discreetly. For the most part, they acted like nothing was unusual. Even if they were just trying to avoid being run over by the naked people zipping around on their electric scooters.

The cruise director summed it up nicely in one of the introductions he gave before the evening’s entertainment. “On most cruises people sit there with their arms crossed and wait for us to entertain them. But you guys? You guys are here to have a good time! I love you guys!”

He also said that he had made a conscious effort not to say that other cruises were “normal” cruises, because he didn’t want the nudists to feel that he thought they were abnormal, but he wasn’t sure what the right word would be. A man in the back yelled, “Textile!”

If the casino or the nightclub or the various musical entertainers weren’t your thing, the ship offered theatrical shows every night. About half the people attended these shows naked, sitting on towels, while some came from dinner in the dining room. There was variety in the entertainment. I saw a fairly funny comedian; a cross between Blue Man Group and Stomp; the worst magician-comedian I have ever seen anywhere; a “Tribute to New York” musical extravaganza that opened with a song made famous by the band Chicago; and, best of all, a passenger talent show featuring a naked harmonica player and a man wearing only a T-shirt while playing a piccolo trumpet. I wondered if he was playing the small trumpet to make his penis look bigger.

But by far the most interesting diversion was the production of
The Vagina Monologues
presented as part of the onboard entertainment by an amateur group of Canadian actresses.
The Vagina Monologues
is a play written by Eve Ensler, in which a variety of female characters monologue about their vaginas. The play is sometimes performed as a solo act, sometimes with multiple actors; this production had six women taking on different monologues. I’m not a theater critic so I don’t really want to dissect the production or the performances. The actresses gave it the old college try and sometimes that’s enough. But I will say that it was strange to sit in an audience of mostly naked people watching a play performed by naked women talking about their vaginas when you could plainly see their vaginas. It gave the performers a vulnerability that comes from being naked onstage, and the audience seemed extremely appreciative of their efforts. But then one thing I’ve noticed about nudists is they are very appreciative of any activity that reinforces their choice to be a nudist. Now that I think of it, most people are like that.

…

I don’t know if she was inspired by all the naked people around her or felt some kind of peer pressure, or perhaps she was just up for the challenge, but my research assistant began taking tentative steps toward having her own nonsexual social nude experience. Every evening, after dinner, we would bring our wine back to the room and sit naked on our private verandah, letting the night breeze whip around us, watching the stars, listening to the dull thud of the waves against the hull as the ship slowly plowed the Caribbean. From there she tried a simple stroll down the corridor outside our stateroom sans clothing as a test, and then, realizing that no one was really looking and, honestly, who were they to judge, she began to make quick sorties around the boat. A simple trip in the elevator. A hop down the stairs. A topless excursion to the espresso bar. Or we would sit naked on the promenade deck, which was shaded, reading and looking out at the ocean.

The more time you spend naked in the company of other naked people, the less awkward it becomes. It is not, in my experience, a normal thing to walk around a salad bar—or a casino or library—without clothes. But that’s what was happening. Nude had become the norm.

Bare Necessities, the Austin, Texas–based company that chartered the cruise, says, “Our mission is to provide relaxing, entertaining and health-conscious vacation opportunities that offer non-threatening, natural environments where the appreciation, wonder and compatibility of nature and the unadorned human form can occur.” Which, to its credit, is pretty much what was happening. We were nakationing with our fellow nakationers.

This was the fifty-fourth nude cruise that Bare Necessities had chartered since Tom and Nancy Tiemann founded the company in 1990. Bare Necessities offers several nude cruises a year, trips like the Big Nude Boat tours of the Caribbean; luxurious European cruises on clipper ships that churn the Mediterranean from Italy to Croatia to the Greek isles; and journeys to places like Fiji and Vanuatu in the South Pacific. On the company’s website it claims that 70 percent of its passengers are repeat customers and I don’t doubt it. Almost everyone we talked to had been on a Bare Necessities cruise before and was planning to go on another. It’s one of the more compelling aspects of the experience, because Bare Necessities has managed to create a community, or at least a place that feels like a community, of loyal customers, many of whom plan their yearly vacations around these cruises. They’re not kidding when they guarantee that “you’ll vacation with someone you know.” People were hugging and reconnecting and picking up where they left off from the last cruise. Which is not to say that we felt like outsiders. Arrive as a single male and you might be met with indifference or outright hostility, but show up with a pretty blond research assistant on your arm and nudists could not be friendlier.

One night we shared a table in the dining room with two retired couples, whom I’ll call Larry and Donna and Gary and Brenda, couples who’d initially met at a nudist camp in Colorado and had become close friends. They had been on about a half dozen cruises together, and for this voyage they’d splurged on private poolside cabanas for the week. We were invited to stop by and enjoy the splendor of the cabana anytime. As Donna said, “You can recognize Larry by his cock ring.”

And she wasn’t kidding. One afternoon I strolled past the poolside cabanas on my way to the espresso bar and Larry and Gary were splayed out on loungers, eating chocolate-dipped strawberries and sipping champagne, living the good life in their hand-knit cock rings. Apparently the crafting of a macramé cock ring requires some trial and error to get the correct fit; or as one of their female friends explained, “Frank started getting a hard-on when I put his on, so he had to take it off.”

Being naked in the company of other naked people creates a kind of camaraderie, a nonsexual intimacy, that you just don’t see in typical social settings or on a textile vacation. It’s an unusual experience.

I had arranged to meet Nancy Tiemann while on the cruise, but unfortunately it became like one of those missed connection ads you see in the back of an alternative weekly and we never were able to meet up. I believe her when she says that things get “hectic” behind the scenes. However, after the cruise, I managed to ask her a few questions.

Nancy is a fit and attractive sixty-year-old Texan, a woman who does yoga and is involved with the local farmers’ market in Austin. Because what she does—run a company that provides nude cruises around the world—is unusual, I was curious how she got started. Was she always a nudist?