Naked
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In small towns and large cities across the United States, for example, young men and women, who attended an expanded public education system and enjoyed the privacy and mobility afforded by cars, participated in a dating culture that was no longer restricted by parental supervision or the moral authority of community and religious leaders.10 Other working men and women moved away from their family homes to find work and greater sexual independence in cities that offered a number of “cheap amusements.”11 At the same time, bohemians, feminists, and sex radicals began to campaign for legal access to birth control and called for a companionate form of marriage based on romantic love and sexual satisfaction rather than procreation and economic status. By the 1920s, a growing consumer culture expanded sexual liberalism beyond the young, the working classes, or bohemian communities. Popular films, newspapers, magazines, and books, once censored by powerful vice societies such as the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV), began to use sex and erotic expression to attract audiences and readers from all segments of American society.12 In many ways, the rise of sexual liberalism created the ideal circumstances for nudism’s emergence and development in the United States.
Yet the growing social, cultural, and legal tolerance of heterosexual pleasure in modern American society depended on the exclusion of threatening, violent, or deviant forms of sex. This era of sexual liberalism promoted and enforced heteronormative boundaries that restricted sexual expression to adult, white, middle-class, heterosexual couples within the nuclear family. Once reviled materials such as birth control pamphlets, literature containing sexual themes, and titillating men’s magazines gained reprieve in the early 1930s with court rulings that protected material with literary or scholarly merit. The state and federal court system, however, continued to use repressive nineteenth-century laws or subjective community standards to suppress depictions of homosexuality, films dealing with interracial sex, and burlesque shows that catered to male audiences.13 Long-standing laws banning interracial marriage made sexual contact between the races illicit and influenced many civil rights groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to adhere to the politics of respectability rather than to make marriage, and interracial sex, part of its struggle for racial equality.14 Beginning in the 1930s, the media frequently sensationalized violent sexual crimes against young children, encouraged widespread fear of the “male sexual psychopath,” and pressured state legislatures to pass reactionary legislation that often targeted homosexuals.15 In addition, the U.S. government, which previously prosecuted homosexual behavior through obscure campaigns against perversion, developed a social policy in the postwar period that privileged heterosexual relationships and explicitly denied homosexuals rights and social benefits.16 The rise of sexual liberalism in the United States did make erotic expression acceptable. However, it was tightly restricted by the parameters of heterosexuality, practiced by white Americans, and contained within the nuclear family.
The place of nudism within the boundaries of sexual liberalism was tenuous and required constant negotiation. The therapeutic principles of the nudist movement challenged American assumptions that tied the body to shame, eroticism, and immorality and clashed with local police, politicians, and community leaders who raided the movement’s camps and gymnasiums, seized its magazines and films, and accused nudists of immoral acts. The nudist movement, however, made it difficult for law enforcement, judges, and juries to distinguish so-called deviant sexualities and materials from examples of morally acceptable heterosexual behavior and display. Nudism appealed to white, middle-class families in search of health, recreation, and an alternative sexual ethic as well as to men and women of all sexualities who saw nudism as a way to view pornography, to make sexual contacts, or to engage in intergenerational sex. In addition, despite attempts by camp owners and members to promote a white-only movement, nudist leaders called for the racial integration of camps, frequently romanticized the naked nonwhite body as natural and healthy, and argued that obscenity laws that only permitted the display of naked “primitive” bodies discriminated against white nudist representations.
Respectable and illicit, therapeutic and erotic, nudism both conformed to and violated the heteronormative boundaries of sexual liberalism. The assumption that acceptable heterosexual forms of erotic behavior and display could easily be distinguished from marginal, deviant, or unacceptable forms of sexuality anchored sexual liberalism. Nudism, however, demonstrated that these distinctions remained deeply ambiguous, often overlapped, frequently shifted over time, and were very subjective. By encouraging men and women to go naked together as a form of physical and mental healing, nudism confronted an ideology of shame and distanced itself from public anxieties about same-sex desire. At the same time, the presence of naked men and women invited comparisons to burlesque shows and an underworld of commercial sexuality. Similarly, the need to advertise the therapeutic benefits of nudism through attractive and healthy male and female bodies helped recruit new members and generate interest in the movement even as it provided a source of pornography for both heterosexual and homosexual readers. The celebration of the nudist family as a symbol of innocence and purity countered many of the public’s fears and accusations of unrestrained eroticism. Yet it also created a haven for intergenerational sex as nudists as well as local authorities, judges, and juries clung to the assumption that the heteronormative domestic environment effectively constrained sexual deviance. By revealing contradictions and instabilities in sexual liberalism, the nudist movement ultimately undermined it and helped bring about the dramatic changes in sexuality that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s and the explosion in eroticism that has increasingly defined the modern American consumer economy.
The rise of sexual liberalism in the twentieth century left many major religious faiths in the United States unable to articulate a clear sexual ethic in the first decades of the twentieth century, even influencing some liberal Protestant groups to look to American nudism for a modern conception of sex and the body.17 After decades of struggle, sex radicals, birth control proponents, and free speech advocates successfully challenged the moral authority of nineteenth-century institutions such as the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV) and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). Many liberal Protestants who desired a modern sexual ethic that allowed women access to sexual knowledge and birth control turned to nudism, which offered a religious leadership that critiqued repressive religious organizations, provided a nudist reading of sacred doctrines, and articulated a positive spiritual interpretation of the naked body. In books, magazines, films, and statements to the press, nudist leaders sought to make social nudity more palatable to the American public by advancing the idea that nudism, in satisfying “the natural curiosity” to see the naked body, curtailed promiscuity, premarital sex, sexual perversion, and prostitution. In contrast to censorship efforts or suggestive clothing designed to heighten erotic desire, visiting a nudist camp, scanning the many pictures in its magazines and books, or watching one of its promotional films eliminated the desire to consume indecent literature, to attend risqué burlesque performances, or to frequent a prostitute. Although religious leaders frequently attacked nudism as a sign of society’s increasingly lax morality, the movement appealed to individuals and families in search of an alternative moral ethic.
Even as a religious nudist leadership officially argued that going naked with other men, women, and children eliminated erotic desire, the movement embraced the politics of sexual liberation. Nudism welcomed the support of the many liberal activists, birth control advocates, free lovers, political radicals, and civil libertarians who gathered in New York City’s Greenwich Village to discuss, debate, and challenge the conventions that dictated daily life as well as the boundaries restricting free speech and sexual expression. The bohemian communities that flourished in Greenwich Village in the 1910s and 1920s experimented with alternative living arrangements such as open marri
age and free love that promised erotic pleasures, honesty, individual autonomy, and gender equality. Nudism also intrigued the Greenwich Village community as another way to challenge conventional life and to free the naked body of shame, inhibition, and artificiality. The sociologist and economist Maurice Parmelee, whose Nudism in Modern Life: The New Gymnosophy (1931) helped introduced nudism to the United States, developed many of his radical critiques of capitalism, marriage, sexual regulation, and organized religion at the clubs, cafés, and settlement houses he frequented in Greenwich Village. Parmelee envisioned a nudist movement that encouraged sexual experimentation, embraced eroticism, and advocated for radical social, economic, and political change. In addition, Jan Gay, a lesbian journalist who assisted several sex researchers studying homosexuality in the 1930s, also spoke to the prominent gay and lesbian communities in Greenwich Village in her book On Going Naked (1932). The willingness to incorporate advocates of sexual freedom, political radicals, and sex researchers, despite the risks they posed to the nudist movement’s respectability, signaled that many nudists identified with the cause of sexual liberation.
The bohemian communities of Greenwich Village also played an influential role in shaping nudism’s legal defense over the course of the twentieth century. Many of the artists, writers, intellectuals, and birth control advocates residing in Greenwich Village frequently violated local, state, and federal obscenity laws and turned to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) for legal assistance. The ACLU had originally formed in response to the Red Scare of 1919 in order to oppose antiunion government policies and to defend the civil liberties of political radicals. With its headquarters located in the heart of the Lower East Side neighborhood, several members of the ACLU, including cofounders Roger Baldwin and Crystal Eastman, frequently experimented with open marriage, nude sunbathing, and free love. In the 1920s and early 1930s, these experiences influenced ACLU attorneys to join with anticensorship activists, who had long sought to improve access to birth control and sexual education, to fight resurgent efforts to censor public discussions of sexuality and to resist a strong “public reaction against the nudity and racy language that was common in films.”18 As part of an expanded defense of sexual expression and knowledge, the ACLU defended nudists as early as 1934 when the New York State legislature passed an antinudity ordinance, prohibiting all nudist activities. In 1940, it also helped Maurice Parmelee overturn the seizure of Nudism in Modern Life by the U.S. Customs Service and in the early 1950s initiated the decade-long legal battle that culminated in the 1958 Supreme Court decision that stopped the U.S. Postal Service from seizing nudist magazines from the mail. The illicit and respectable characteristics of nudist activities, magazines, and films made nudism an ideal vehicle for anticensorship advocates to extend their battle for freedom of expression in the United States.
The perceived eroticism of the naked body remained a constant threat to the therapeutic and religious character of nudism, which was promoted by American nudist leaders. Many Americans associated the public exposure of the body, especially in urban areas, with commercial forms of sexuality and leisure that threatened to undermine the boundaries of sexual liberalism. In Germany, Nacktkultur maintained a network of urban gymnasiums, often operated by socialist groups, that served a large working-class membership. Before Hitler’s ascendency and the banning of all socialist activity in 1933, the membership of the Zentralkommission fur Arbeitersport und Korperplflege (Central Commission for Workers’ Sport and Hygiene), which included subsections that participated in nudist activities, had grown to 1,456,162.19 In the United States, however, many social critics and moral reformers asserted that nudism’s therapeutic ideals and principles masked the movement’s effort to profit from the commercial appeal of the naked body. Local police, community leaders, politicians, and judges conflated nudist gatherings where men and women came together to exercise in a gymnasium or to sunbath at a park with a rapidly expanding sexual urban underworld where burlesque shows entertained large, rowdy crowds of men. There they believed prostitutes used their scantily clad bodies to entice customers; seedy bookstores, theaters, and newsstands brandished nudity for profit; and naked men met in bathhouses to engage in homosexual acts.20 The growth of commercial leisure and sexuality in American cities during the first part of the twentieth century made nudist activities and meetings a threat to heteronormativity and sexual liberalism.
The nudist movement’s link to commercial sexuality and radical sexual politics faded in the wide-open spaces of the American countryside. Quite in contrast to current assumptions that link sexual expression with the city, the sparsely populated regions just outside major metropolitan areas provided hospitable spaces for men and women to go naked. American nudists, like their German counterparts, contended that city life weakened the individual physically and morally, and they encouraged men and women to return to nature at rural camps where they could expose their bodies to the sun, light, and air. In the early twentieth century, many intellectuals, health reformers, and physical culture promoters also worried that Americans’ increasing disconnection with their natural environment would weaken the nation. These anxieties fueled efforts to promote a closer relationship with nature that included going naked in the wilderness.21 Kenneth Webb, one of the main promoters of organized camping in the United States, for example, considered nudity the “fifth freedom” in an Eden-like setting that would also be free of fear, want, hunger, and religious persecution.22 In addition, in small towns throughout the United States, the habit of taking a swim in the local lake or river sans clothing remained so common that the practice occurred across racial lines and doubled as a site for homosexual experimentation.23 In the 1930s, a network of rural nudist camps that built on the idealized relationship between nature and nudity emerged. Nudist camps such as Lake O’ Woods in Valparaiso, Indiana (fifty-five miles southeast of Chicago), Sky Farm in Mays Landing, New Jersey (located fifteen miles away from Atlantic City), and Elysia in Riverside, California (about forty miles outside Los Angeles) allowed urban residents to escape the noise, pollution, and stresses of the city and removed barriers that separated the individual from nature. Large camps offered rolling hills, open fields, expansive lakes, lush vegetation, and towering trees, which allowed nudists to take full advantage of all outdoor activities and all their associated benefits. Far away from prying neighbors and local police, nudists could enjoy hiking, athletic competitions, swimming, rowing, and of course, sunbathing.24
The rustic nudist camps of the 1930s transformed in the postwar period into well-equipped resorts that catered to families. Prior to the Second World War, nudist parks resembled their German counterparts with Spartan grounds where groups participated in rigorous exercises and reconnected with nature. After decades of economic depression and war, however, American families began to pursue leisure and recreation with a renewed vigor. With over half of American families owning a car by 1948, more workers compensated with paid vacations than ever before, and an expanding interstate highway system, travel became easier, more affordable, and anonymous.25 While many families packed in the car to experience the nation’s natural beauty, camping at national parks, or concluding their trip at a popular amusement park such as Disneyland, which had recently opened,26 others could just as easily veer off the beaten path to enjoy a relaxing, therapeutic, and fun-filled day of nude sunbathing, swimming, volleyball, and waterskiing. Vacation spots such as Coney Island and Provincetown had long been places where visitors could experience “new sorts of pleasures” and “experiment with new, often less restricted, rules of conduct and behavior.”27 In many instances, the tourist experience often implicitly or explicitly accepted the uncovering of the body, the public expression of sexuality, and even casual eroticism.28 While certainly eccentric, nudist resorts served the function of relaxing otherwise-entrenched social conventions, as was a contemporary trend in vacationing culture.
Despite nudism’s therapeutic ideals and network of rural camps, censors targete
d nudist materials as another example of pernicious, commercial sexuality and forced the courts to disentangle the illicit from the respectable. The books, magazines, and films of nudism served the needs of individuals interested in participating in nudist activities while also providing a source of erotica for a variety of sexualities. Individual nudist groups began to publish monthly magazines to promote a fledgling network of camps, to provide information on upcoming activities and events, and to recruit new members through an ongoing discussion of nudist principles and ideals. Magazines such as the Nudist, which began its thirty-year run in May 1933, featured large, glossy pages and numerous photos alongside lengthy articles on a variety of nudist topics. Displayed at newsstands and sent through the mail, the Nudist sold thousands of issues each month and played a significant role in financially supporting national nudist organizations such as the International Nudist Council (later renamed the American Sunbathing Association). The editors and leaders of the nudist movement wanted the many pictures in their magazines to show the benefits of going naked at a nudist camp; but the display of the naked body also allowed for multiple readings. An image of a naked muscular man presented readers with a symbol of strength and athleticism or a source of titillation for both women and men. The display of full-frontal female nudes of all body types exhibited nudism’s commitment to showing the body without shame while also providing glimpses of genitalia rarely displayed in other forms of commercial pornography. The many images of children in the magazine communicated the natural joy of going naked and gave individuals seeking out intergenerational sex a venue to gaze at prepubescent youth.
Filmmakers tested the legal and moral boundaries of decency by bringing the therapeutic ideals and principles of nudism to theaters around the country. In the early 1930s, filmmakers released several nudist films that closely resembled the format, content, and style of exploitation films that addressed health and the practice of medicine early in the twentieth century.29 Prior to the 1931 Hays Production Code, health reformers frequently used films to address controversial and sensitive topics such as abortion, birth control, and euthanasia and used the “allure of popular entertainment to attract audiences . . . for their own educational, recruitment, and fundraising purposes.”30 When the studios began to enforce the code in 1934 to avoid government regulation, they specifically targeted medical films that exhibited bodies or focused on “repellent subjects” and significantly limited what could be seen in most movie theaters.31 The code, however, did not regulate independent theaters and art houses, which continued to screen controversial films that projected enough merit and respectability to avoid the ire of local censorship boards and authorities. Because nudist films had the merit of a social movement, they made it difficult for censors to deny filmmakers licenses to exhibit the movies. Although publicity and curiosity drew in large male audiences, the films generally featured tame plots that revolved around the health benefits of nudism, providing only brief glimpses of the naked body. The legal battles over nudist films, like those that involved the movement’s books and magazines, forced the courts to decide on what did and did not constitute indecency.