Naked at Lunch (7 page)

I often think of organized religion as being the nexus of all the prudery and sexual oppression that inhibits free expression in our culture. It starts
when Adam and Eve eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and then suddenly find their genitalia embarrassing. Connecting original sin and the fall of man with covering your junk
¹³
is disingenuous at best and, don’t take this the wrong way, could be where everything went off the rails. I can’t imagine we’d be a society with the same body issues and eating disorders, and all the guilt and shame that comes with having sexual desire, if we had attended school wearing nothing but extra virgin olive oil. Then again I imagine that sitting in Mr. Speight’s sociology class in the nude might’ve ended up being a perfect storm of raging teenage hormones, spontaneous erections, and teen pregnancy.

But while I think of organized religion as a colossal funwrecker when it comes to nudity, religious groups have practiced nudism throughout history. Dozens of them, in fact. Members of the Digambara sect of Jainism believe that clothing can cause attachment to material things, and so monks live completely nude and have been doing it since the fifth century
B.C
. The Adamites, a Christian sect that flourished in parts of North Africa from the second to the eighteenth century, believed in returning to an Edenic innocence by taking their fig leaves off and practicing “holy nudism.”

In the fourth through sixth centuries, a Spanish sect known as Priscillianists believed that Satan, like an all-powerful and evil Karl Lagerfeld, invented clothing to prevent the healing power of God’s sunlight from reaching our human skin, and so refused to wear clothing; and in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a French Christian sect called the Turlupins believed that clothes were designed to keep people from sinning and that, logically, the faithful didn’t need clothes because they wouldn’t be tempted to sin. Because they were faithful. So they walked around nude. And in the sixteenth century a group of proto-hippies called the Dutch Anabaptists practiced communal living, nudity, and free love. History is littered with crackpot religious sects that practiced nudism, and that’s not counting the Druids, Wiccans, and assorted pagans who performed ceremonies and initiations “skyclad.”

I’ll admit that nudist religious sects have a certain zany appeal, but I’m less interested in people who took off their clothes for religious reasons—people do lots of unusual things for religious reasons. I want to look at the people who have taken their clothes off in a social setting for the simple reason that it felt good. To do that, we fast-forward to 1891 and the Fellowship of the Naked Trust.

…

By all outward appearances Charles Crawford was a model of humdrum administrative industry. His father was a priest in the Church of England, he was educated at Marlborough College, and as soon as he turned twenty-one he joined the Indian Civil Service—then a part of the British Raj—and was sent to Bombay.

In the late nineteenth century Bombay was, as historian Daniel Brook writes, “a kind of bizarro London, where the punctiliously planned efforts of the British were refracted in the fun-house mirror of the teeming, multicultural subcontinent.”
¹⁴
The city boasted a world-class university built in the Gothic style of Oxford and Cambridge, a library based on the Doge’s Palace in Venice, and a train station that wouldn’t have looked out of place in any major European city. Yet despite having technological advances like gas streetlights, sewage was still put out in front of homes in buckets to be picked up every evening by “night soil” collectors, and while the British and European residents enjoyed a lavish lifestyle, the majority of the population lived in cramped slums amid squalor that would produce frequent epidemics of virulent fever and bubonic plague. In other words, Bombay of 1891 was not that different from Mumbai of 2015.

It was the British East India Company, as rapacious a corporation as any in history, that initially ruled over the Indian subcontinent, shipping Indian opium and cotton around the world, all the time running a profit-skimming operation that would make a Las Vegas mobster proud. In 1858 the company gifted the administration of India to the Crown, and the British government took over the job of squeezing whatever it could out of the Indian people.

It was in this chaotic and cosmopolitan milieu that Charles Crawford unspectacularly worked his way up the bureaucratic ladder, starting as a magistrate and eventually becoming, according to the 1894 edition of the India Office List, a “3rd class Sessions Judge in Ratnagiri.” When he turned thirty he married a nice Scottish girl and they had a son, whom he named Osbert.

No one knows if it was a consequence of the boiling heat and humidity of Bombay, the repressive hierarchy of the Raj, the untimely death of his wife from complications stemming from the birth of their son, or some long-buried secret desire, but under the three-piece wool suit and high-collared shirt was a man who was desperate to get naked.

This was an unusual passion in Victorian England, where the stout and gimlet-eyed young queen—a monarch who oversaw a society that exploited child labor in the mines and sent homosexuals to the gallows—was busy making sure that tablecloths were of a sufficient length to cover the legs of tables. This is not a euphemism. Back then a well-turned table leg held an erotic charge that’s hard to find in a contemporary IKEA. “Bathing costumes” were mandatory and nude swimming, which had been common in England in the early part of the century, was banned.

Despite the institutionalized prudery of the times, Crawford had a dream. Leaving his son in the care of relatives after his wife’s death, he returned to Bombay and made the acquaintance of two young American brothers named Kellogg and Andrew Calderwood. The Calderwoods, sons of a missionary, shared his vision of a clothing-free frolic and the Fellowship of the Naked Trust was born.

No one really knows how it all got started. In fact what little is known about the fellowship is due to Crawford’s letters to the English writer and philosopher Edward Carpenter, a leading proponent of socialism, vegetarianism, and a kind of pagan sandal wearing, who lived with his lover in a gay community in the English countryside near Sheffield. Carpenter was a prolific writer, justifiably famous for his 1889 book
Civilisation, Its Cause and Cure—
which posited that civilization was an affliction that passed through mankind every so often like a bad case of salmonella—and
The Intermediate Sex
,
published in 1908, which became a seminal text for the early gay rights movement. Carpenter was a member of the socialist think tank the Fabian Society
¹⁵
and close friends with a diverse group of artists, philosophers, and writers like Walt Whitman, Mohandas Gandhi, Isadora Duncan, D. H. Lawrence, and E. M. Forster. Despite the sophisticated circles he swam in, Carpenter was off the grid before there was a grid to get off. He was an advocate for a simple, natural lifestyle and lived in the countryside with his partner, George Merrill. Remember that this was around 1895, the same year that Oscar Wilde was tried and imprisoned on charges of sodomy and gross indecency, so for Carpenter and Merrill to live in an open homosexual relationship either points to how isolated they were or how badass and influential Carpenter was. Photos of Carpenter show a stylishly dressed and strikingly handsome man with a well-groomed beard and an eccentric penchant for the socks-and-sandals look, who wouldn’t be out of place fronting an alternative folk rock band in Brooklyn or mixing bespoke cocktails at a bar in Los Angeles.

Carpenter was a prominent advocate of what we would now call an alternative lifestyle, so it makes a certain sense that Charles Crawford chose to write him about his nudist dream. Although they had never met—Crawford apparently found Carpenter’s address in a magazine advertisement—Crawford saw a kindred spirit in Carpenter and wrote him on August 18, 1891, detailing his plans for the fellowship. He did, however, take the precaution of requesting that their correspondence be kept confidential: “for personal reasons it would be inconvenient for it to be associated with these views—so easily misrepresented—by those who oppose them.”
¹⁶

Enclosed in that first letter were “The Rules of the Fellowship of the Naked Trust,” which were fairly straightforward: “i. Every member (1) to go stark naked wherever suitable (2) to encourage others to do the same (3) to be plainspoken when desirable on sexual and other subjects usually tabooed, and to discourage unnecessary reticence about them in others (4) to comply with the following rules.”

The rules go on to declare an official motto,
Vincat Natura
(“nature prevails”), describe a secret handshake, and list eyeglasses and false teeth as exceptions to the stark-naked rule.

In a second letter, dated October 25, 1891, Crawford admitted to a lifelong passion for nakedness and his delight that he had found kindred spirits in the Calderwood brothers. He added that they were hoping to get more members, including women, and then outlined a “Statement of Motives” for the fellowship. Crawford broke these down into three groups: physical, “because no costume that has ever been invented is equal in comfort to perfect nakedness”; moral, “because the false shame of our own bodies and morbid curiosity as to those of the opposite sex which result from always wearing clothes, are the chief sources of impurity”; and aesthetic, “because the human body is God’s noblest work, and it is good for everyone to gaze on such beauty freely.”

In the same letter Crawford described a meeting of the fellowship: “In June, Andrew Calderwood and I had a grand day. We went away to a bungalow in the Tulsi Lake without servants and spent from dinner time Saturday till 5 pm Sunday in nature’s garb.”

I don’t know about you, but when I go to a lake house with a friend and spend the day naked, I call that a “dirty weekend.” Or as Vishwas Kulkarni wrote in a recent story about the fellowship in the
Mumbai Mirror
, “It is however the club’s philosophical connect to the sepia-tinted beginnings of the queer movement in Victorian England that makes it more exotic . . .”
¹⁷

Was the fellowship some kind of homosexual liaison filtered through Crawford’s starched bureaucratic brain? Is that why he codified it with rules and official motives? It makes a certain sense; homosexuality was illegal at the time and the bureaucratic foundations of a “society” could’ve acted as a kind of cover story. But the only real connection is that Crawford reached out to Carpenter, who was known as an early advocate for homosexual rights. It’s also difficult to say how much influence the fellowship had on future nudists. Crawford’s activities were discreet and only briefly mentioned by Carpenter (“the existence of a little society in India—of English folk—who encourage nudity”) in his 1892 travelogue
From Adam’s Peak to Elephanta: Sketches in Ceylon and India
.

Sadly, Crawford didn’t get the opportunity to expand his group or continue frolicking “in nature’s garb”; he died at the age of forty-four in 1893 in Bombay from what was officially listed as an intestinal obstruction. The Fellowship of the Naked Trust, the first organized social nudist group in history, had three members and lasted only two years.

…

There’s a synchronicity to the world, whether it’s punk rock or probiotics; ideas tend to pop up independently in multiple places, so it should come as no surprise that in 1907 a young health food freak in Stuttgart, Germany, named Richard Ungewitter, would publish one of the first and most influential books of nudist philosophy. The book was called
Die Nacktheit in Entwicklungsgeschichtlicher, Gesundheitlicher, Moralischer und Künstlerischer Beleuchtung
,
or
Nakedness in an Historical, Hygienic, Moral and Artistic Light
. The book struck a nerve with the German public and became a bestseller. Not bad for a man who had previously tried his hand at selling whole-grain health bread.

Any book urging men and women to take off their clothes is going to get attention, and Ungewitter’s book not only titillated the masses but also annoyed the church and state. Especially when he was preaching a hippie-dippie back-to-nature message during what was a boom time for German industry. Companies like Krupp were manufacturing steel; Bayer and BASF were making dyes, pharmaceuticals, and agricultural chemicals; and the country was connected by an efficient railway system. Germans flocked to the cities looking for higher pay and a taste of the good life.

It was the fin de siècle,
the old century was gone and a new one was beginning. In the cities of Europe a vital and energized bohemian counterculture had sprung up, and new ideas about art, life, sex, and politics were suddenly in the zeitgeist. German expressionist painters like Ernst Kirchner and Max Pechstein had formed a group called Die Brücke and written a manifesto that was redefining art. Cabarets and theaters flourished, with avant-garde plays like Oskar Kokoschka’s
Murderer, The Hope of Women
being produced, and literary journals sprang up filled with prose and poetry that challenged the status quo and attempted to subvert the dominant patriarchy and militarist culture of the previous decade. And while the barons of industry sat comfortably in their factories raking in huge profits, the working classes were being exposed to revolutionary socialism. At the same time Germans were putting
Die Nacktheit
on the bestseller list, the International Socialist Congress was gathering in Stuttgart to coordinate the policies and efforts of all the socialist parties around the world.