Naked at Lunch (9 page)

…

There have always been pockets of nakedness scattered around the United States—wacky religious sects, anarchist personality cults, utopian communities, and dudes that just liked to be naked on the farm—but none of these was organized in the manner of the German nudist clubs. However, it didn’t take long for the siren song of clothes-free frolic to spread from Germany to New York City, where, in 1929, an enterprising young German named Kurt Barthel placed an ad in a local newspaper looking for kindred spirits interested in bringing
Nacktkultur
to the United States. Barthel had organized a few nude sojourns out in the Hudson Highlands, mostly with German expats and a few curious Americans, but now he wanted to do something a little more serious. A small group met at the Michelob Café on Twenty-Eighth Street in Manhattan on December 5, 1929, and formed the American League for Physical Culture (ALPC). It was a strange time to be planning a nudist club. Wall Street had crashed just two months earlier, Prohibition was in full swing, and according to the National Weather Service records, it was 32 degrees Fahrenheit outside. But then again, now that I think of it, if I were broke, sober, and freezing, I might look for something fun to do.

The ALPC started out simply enough. The group rented a gym with a swimming pool and held weekly meetings. A
Miami Daily News
article from 1933 describes one of these meetings, reporting that the basement gymnasium was “more than faintly redolent of perspiration and disinfectants.” A typical session would go like this: members would perform calisthenics to warm up, maybe play a little volleyball or generally exercise, and then relax with a swim in the pool. Surprisingly—and unlike many of the clubs in Europe—the league had almost equal numbers of men and women from the beginning. The American nudists took a more pragmatic approach to being in the buff. They ignored the bans on coffee and tobacco and didn’t require strict vegetarianism, and they weren’t writing books and pamphlets about a return to a romantic idealized kind of naturism. They just liked to take off their clothes and hang out.

Membership in the ALPC grew rapidly, that is until someone dropped a dime on them and the police raided one of the gatherings, arresting seventeen men and seven women for public indecency. Fortunately they found a sympathetic judge and the charges were dropped. But Barthel knew he needed to find a location where he and his friends could practice nonsexual social nudism without threat from overzealous law enforcement or religious prudes. Besides, with more and more people coming, they were quickly outgrowing the gymnasium. The ALPC eventually leased some land in Ironia, New Jersey, and dubbed it Sky Farm.

Like many of the other nudist or naturist retreats founded in the early days of the movement, Sky Farm continues to operate in the same location as a “members only” nudist club.

Sky Farm set the template for American nudist clubs and, as more and more people tried nonsexual social nudism, clubs and resorts gradually began springing up around the country. It was a start, but as we’ll see in later chapters, the real boom in organized American nudism was yet to come.

*******
Modern beach volleyball, with its skimpy bikinis and sunscreen-shiny skin, pays unwitting tribute to the ancient games.

********
No booze, coffee, dancing, or pulp fiction? I don’t think we would’ve been friends.

********
Pudor went from being the author of naturist books like
Naked Men
and
Rejoice in the Future
to self-publishing anti-Semitic books with titles like
Germany for Germans
and
Preliminary Work on Laws against the Jewish Settlement in Germany.
By the early 1930s he was the editor of a magazine called
Swastika
,
which, if you can believe it, criticized the Nazi Party for being too tolerant of Jews.

********
I’m guessing they bought another acre.

I Left My Cock Ring
in San Francisco

I
didn’t realize that public nudity was legal in San Francisco until it wasn’t.

I mean, I’d seen naked people in the city before; there was the naked Christlike dude who walked down Polk Street carrying a red telephone and telling people “It’s for you,” and I’d witnessed the gay men sitting around and catching some sun in the Castro, one of the oldest and largest gay neighborhoods in the country. And then there is the Pride Parade, a clothing-optional celebration of gay culture, which, after the Rose Parade, is the largest parade in California; the seven-and-a-half-mile Bay to Breakers race where contestants dress in goofy costumes or nothing at all; and the largest fetish festival in the world, the Folsom Street Fair. All of these events featured ample public displays of male and female genitalia and nobody seemed to notice or care. Getting naked was just part of San Francisco’s freewheeling culture. It was the kind of thing that made the city special.

Not just because of the parades and fetish fairs, but because San Francisco has a history of tolerance for nudism. According to the
San Francisco Bay Guardian
’s
“Nude Beaches 2012”
report, there were three quasi-official nude beaches—Golden Gate Bridge Beach, North Baker Beach, and Land’s End Beach—within the city limits. And then there were the hippies who danced naked in Golden Gate Park.

And then, on February 1, 2013, it was banned.

This came as a surprise to a lot of people, but it’s not like there were never no limits on public nudity. You might have been able to walk down the street naked, ride the bus or the subway, and sit down in a restaurant and have dinner, but you couldn’t sunbathe in the city parks. That ban was put in place by the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Commission to discourage the aforementioned hippies from taking off their clothes, waving their arms in the air, and twirling around to a psychedelic jam session. Although, if you ask me, it’s a totally weird law because isn’t a park the place where you’d prefer nudists to go? Maybe they should’ve just banned hippie dancing.

Public nudity was also banned for sexual purposes, which I guess is more of an erection ban. In fact, according to California Penal Code Section 647(a) nudity is legal in California except when a person “solicits anyone to engage in or . . . engages in lewd or dissolute conduct in any public place or in any place open to the public or exposed to public view.”

So it’s not like San Francisco was a totally freewheeling pleasure dome of nakedness, but then again, compared with every other city in the country, it kind of was. Until it wasn’t.

I was surprised to see that the ban had been led by Scott Wiener, the San Francisco supervisor from District Eight, which includes the Castro, Noe Valley, Diamond Heights, and other neighborhoods. Not only is Supervisor Wiener a gay man, but he lives in the Castro, and you’d think that he would be sympathetic to the gay men who sunbathe in public there and you’d be right. It turns out that he is sympathetic to the nudists in the city, but the Harvard Law graduate is a politician, and he found himself caught in a political struggle that is a lot more complex than it looks on the surface.

I sent Supervisor Wiener an e-mail asking for an interview and he responded with a tentative yes, although he was honest enough to say he hoped I wasn’t writing a “hit piece” on him. I hopped on a plane and, on a stunningly beautiful February morning, found myself going through security at the magnificent expression of Beaux-Arts architecture that is the San Francisco City Hall.

I walked down a long corridor, past a group of women speaking Chinese and wearing yellow plastic hard hats, and found Supervisor Wiener’s office. When I was finally ushered in for our interview, I was taken aback. Scott Wiener is a tall man—six foot seven according to
SF Weekly
—trim and fit with a close-cropped beard. He was wearing a checked shirt that coordinated in an off-kilter way with a zigzag pattern tie, which indicated he had style and a sense of humor.

I knew I was a weird appointment in his busy schedule, but he was gracious and friendly as we sat at a table in his office and he popped open a Diet Coke.

“I’m curious how this became your issue.”

He smiled and said, “Can you remind me again—I didn’t go back over your e-mail—you’re writing a book?”

Now that I have a pretty good sense of what nudism is, I’m trying to understand why there are so many laws against it. My personal experience has shown me that nudists are, for the most part, not kinky freaks or weirdos; they’re not exhibitionists or voyeurs or anything other than people who just like the way sunshine feels on their naked bodies. And here in the United States, more often than not, they’re grandmas and grandpas. Hardly a revolutionary demographic.

I explained what I was doing to Supervisor Wiener in general terms and it seemed to put him at ease. He nodded, took a swig of soda, and began.

“We have a long history of nudity in San Francisco. At the beaches, at all the fairs, and as long as I’ve lived in the Castro, which is going on sixteen years, there’s always been the occasional naked guy who walks through the neighborhood. There are always two or three of them that maybe every week or two you would see. I don’t remember anyone complaining about it. It wasn’t a big deal. It was sort of part of the spice of the neighborhood and the city, but it was fine.” He took another sip of soda. “It coincided right about the time that I took office at the beginning of 2011.” He paused and gave me a rueful smile. “Lucky me. I actually did go back and talk to my two opponents in the race and I said, ‘Do you remember this ever coming up as an issue during the campaign?,’ and none of us could remember it ever coming up.”

Supervisors typically campaign on broad platforms like public safety and quality of life issues like fixing potholes, planting trees, constructing bike lanes, dealing with problems like homelessness, and improving public transit. They rarely get involved in civil liberties debates.

“What changed?”

“There was a group of guys that would be primarily at Castro market, but elsewhere in the neighborhood, hanging out naked pretty much seven days a week. Then it expanded with guys coming in from around the Bay Area to get naked in the Castro, because they couldn’t do it in their hometown. It went from this occasional quirky fun thing to something else. I think at the very beginning when it happened, people sort of raised an eyebrow and maybe it got a little annoying but thought, ‘Okay, this is just . . . this is interesting.’ After a few months of that, people started to get more and more unhappy about it.”

“What kind of unhappy?”

He sighed. “Primarily this is painted by some as straight people imposing values in the Castro, but it was mostly gay men who were upset about this in the neighborhood. It wasn’t just at Jane Warner Plaza. I got quite a few reports of—again showing just incredibly poor judgment—some of these guys walking right by elementary schools, even when class was getting out. I heard from McKinley, from Sanchez Elementary, and again just showing very, very poor judgment.”

Naked men walking in front of elementary schools doesn’t strike me as a protest for body freedom or liberation; it’s an intentionally provocative gesture.

Wiener continued. “For the first, almost two years, there were just huge amounts of e-mails and calls and people stopping me on the street demanding that I ban it. I really resisted those calls. It’s not what I wanted to be legislating. It’s not the issue I wanted to be known for . . .” He paused and gave me a kind of helpless look. I realized that a guy with a last name that’s a euphemism for penis wouldn’t want to be known as anti-nudity. Obviously.

I laughed, I couldn’t help it. Supervisor Wiener has a good sense of humor.

“. . . And frankly, I didn’t want to ban it.” He paused, collecting his thoughts. “After a while it just became completely untenable and there’s a pressure that was building in the neighborhood, and elsewhere because Castro market is such a prominent physical place, the pressure that was building was just . . . it was becoming explosive. There was a lot of anger being directed towards me for not taking action. So I started just asking people, ‘What do you think? Should I do this?,’ and by and large a lot of them were like, ‘You know a year ago I would have told you no, but I think you need to do it.’ Ranging from Cleve Jones to other people, mostly gay men, and I sort of came to the conclusion that although I had always thought that this will run its course . . .”

Cleve Jones is a gay rights activist and cofounder of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, and was a colleague of assassinated gay rights leader and San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk.

Wiener sat back in his chair, his extremely long legs splaying out. “It was just getting more extreme. There were days when you would go out there and there would be ten, twelve, fourteen of them congregating in the plaza, walking around the neighborhood. The whole issue with the cock rings started—”

“Cock rings?” I interrupted.