Naked
Page 11
A 1931 portrait of Maurice Parmelee (1882–1969), a prominent sociologist and the author of Nudism in Modern Life (1931). (Courtesy of Maurice Parmelee Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, New Haven, Connecticut)
Parmelee based his belief that sexual repression caused far more problems than it solved on his own experiences growing up in a socially conservative, religious family. The son of missionary parents, Parmelee spent his early childhood in Turkey, and when he returned to the United States at the age of thirteen, he grew up in “small communities under rigid puritanical discipline” and did not have an “opportunity for sex expression until past adolescence.”148 Parmelee resented his devout upbringing, and in contrast to Rev. Boone and Rev. Huntington, he rejected the “superstition of Hebraic-Christian religion that sex is unclean” and unapologetically discussed sex relations, birth control, and sex education.149 He hoped that his writings would “promote the sex freedom which is essential for the emergence of integral man and woman possessing a rich and well rounded personality.”150
Parmelee’s liberationist approach to sex drew on eugenic arguments as well as the works of progressive sexologists. Social reformers such as Sanger frequently used the rhetoric of eugenics to make a case for birth control because it limited the number of children born into poverty, making future families healthier, lowered crime rates, and helped produce an overall stronger race. Nudism, according to Parmelee, also served a eugenic purpose by aiding the process of “sexual selection” since “deformities and malformations are all too apparent in a state of nudity.” Rather than focus on a “small portion” of the body such as the face or genitalia, men and women would “make their choice, so far as physical traits determine choice, according to the beauty of the body as a whole.” This led to a happy marriage and ensured “fit parents for the more beautiful mankind of the future.”151 In addition, for over thirty years, Parmelee corresponded with Havelock Ellis about sex customs, personal morality, and moral reform. The well-respected sex researcher wrote the foreword to Nudism in Modern Life, in which he praised Parmelee’s contributions to sociology and promised readers that the nudist treatise offered valuable insights about the “general direction in which our civilization is to-day moving.”152 Parmelee’s 1918 book Personality and Conduct relied on Ellis’s scientific approach to sex research to critique a “sexual double standard” that encouraged male promiscuity while requiring female chastity. He also explained the need for frank sex education to guard against venereal disease and unwanted pregnancy, justified the legalization of prostitution as a public health and safety measure, and called for a contractual form of marriage that incorporated open relationships and made it easier to file for divorce. Parmelee’s most provocative proposal involved an institution called an “amatorium” that would “facilitate the rapprochement of prospective sex partners and mates” by providing a site where young adults could visit and experiment with sex with one another rather than visiting a prostitute or entering marriage without any sexual experience.153 Through the science of eugenics and modern sexology, Parmelee presented a radical critique of repressive sexual mores.
In Personality and Conduct, Parmelee expressed ambivalence toward homosexuality. On the one hand, he felt that it was “wholly indefensible to penalize homosexuality,” and he considered homosexuals “useful members of society.” Yet he also referred to gay men and women as “unfortunate persons” and asserted that “normal hetero-sexual relation is doubtless the most desirable.”154 Despite Parmelee’s ambivalent attitude toward homosexuality and the therapeutic and familial character of nudism that was promoted by a religious leadership, Jan Gay, a lesbian journalist, children’s book author, and sex researcher, also played an important role in introducing nudism to the United States. Gay’s On Going Naked (1932) provided another early account of nudism in Europe and suggested that the nudist movement appealed to and accepted gay men and women.
Gay’s active and open participation in New York City’s emerging gay and lesbian community shaped her writings about her nudist experiences in America and Europe. Gay assisted a number of scientific studies on homosexuality that were being conducted by physicians, sex researchers, and social scientists in response to the perceived growth of the homosexual population in New York City in the early 1930s. Gay had worked as a journalist since 1922 and had attracted the attention of sex researchers by interviewing a number of European and American lesbians. According to the historian Jennifer Terry, Gay hoped that “scientific explanations of sex variance would engender greater tolerance toward lesbians and homosexual men.”155 Gay, who lived openly with her partner, Zhenya Gay, and had worked with Magnus Hirschfeld at his Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin, helped gain the confidence of gay men and women participating in a study overseen by the privately funded Committee for the Study of Sex Variants (CSSV). In On Going Naked, Gay followed the lead of Rev. Boone and Rev. Huntington by denying that eroticism played a significant role in nudism. She asserted that “few things are so conducive to chastity as the observation of a great many unattractive human bodies.”156 Nevertheless, she communicated her sexual orientation to readers when she described a trip to the countryside, where she sunbathed nude with Zhenya and two homosexual men. The text made it clear that Zhenya and Jan were lovers, as were the men, John and Hall. After they swam in a cold stream, Gay recalled, “Zhenya toweled me vigorously, while Hall gave John a rubdown.” Then “John and Hall chose the sloping bank for their siesta, while Zhenya and I each curled up on a shallow step of the dam.”157 While many readers likely remained oblivious to the same-sex intimacy imparted by Gay in On Going Naked, the text implicitly welcomed gay men and lesbians to nudism. Advertised in the New York Times and sold in the Nudist alongside other early nudist treatises, Gay’s On Going Naked helped introduce nudism to the United States as well as to early gay and lesbian communities.
In contrast to Gay, Parmelee looked to nudism to encourage healthy eroticism. While Parmelee conceded that nudism likely “decreases sexual stimulation through the visual senses,” he contended that it might be “more than compensated by its heightening through the tactile sense.” Parmelee saw sex as more than a reproductive process. He asserted that the strong emotions produced by eroticism or sexual stimulation were just as important as visual stimulation or physical pleasure. He believed that the concealment of the body “accentuates lust by intensifying curiosity” and prevents the “play function of sex,” which he defined as the emotional component of sexual relationships.158 The nudist camp proved to be an ideal environment to promote the “play function of sex” since “psychic impotence and phobias” caused by the “ignorance of sexual facts” disappeared in a setting where men and women interacted without clothes, shame, or inhibitions. Unhampered by a constant desire to see the body, men and women could focus on “training in the art of love.”159 Nudism, according to Parmelee, had the capacity to redefine eroticism as a necessary component of a healthy relationship.
Parmelee took issue with nudist leaders who tried to “demonstrate that nudism has nothing to do with sex.” Parmelee envisioned nudism as a “movement of dissent [that] asserts the rights of individuals and of minority groups to regulate their own conduct and morals as they see fit as long as they do not interfere with the rights and welfare of others.” In his unpublished autobiography, written in the early 1960s, he regretted that a “good deal of Puritanism is displayed by some of the nudists,” and he opposed the effort to “chain the movement, so to speak, to marriage as a legal and sacramental institution and to the family which is to result from this institution.” Yet the nudist leadership’s aversion to sexual expression did not necessarily mean that all nudists rejected the erotic potential of the movement. Parmelee explained that the effort to frame nudism as therapeutic or familial came about as a “precautionary reaction against the fear of suppression by conventional, moral, and legal restrictions” and were “incidental accompaniments of the movement at its present stage o
f development.”160 Parmelee maintained that the image of respectability promoted by nudist leaders concealed a membership that embraced the eroticism of nudism.
Parmelee’s close relationship with Rev. Huntington and Rev. Boone also suggested that nudism’s image of respectability may have been more of a façade than a reality. Parmelee and Rev. Huntington both graduated from Yale University and continued to correspond with each other for over sixty years. In one letter, Rev. Huntington expressed that he had “more in common with [Parmelee’s] points of view about life in general than almost any other member of [their] class.” Even though the two old classmates clashed over religion—with Parmelee asserting that Jesus was “mainly a mythical character” and Huntington proclaiming that he was “quite an enthusiast” when it “comes to Jesus”—nudism, and presumably Parmelee’s perspective on sexual freedom, served as common ground.161 Huntington endorsed Parmelee’s early role in promoting nudism when he asserted that it was “too bad that [Parmelee’s] book on nudism [was] not clearly recognized as the first in English on the topic.” In the 1950s, Rev. Boone also stood behind the book, selling it in the Nudist, and he claimed to have sold fifty thousand copies of Nudism in Modern Life.162 Although many early nudist leaders projected an image of respectability by stressing the movement’s therapeutic, religious, and familial character, they also felt comfortable associating with Parmelee and marketing his far more radical vision of American nudism.
To grow and prosper in the United States, American nudism negotiated the fluid boundaries of sexual liberalism by architecting an appearance of respectable normalcy even as many of its early advocates supported sexual experimentation, radical politics, and homosexuality. The increasing acceptance of heterosexual pleasure in popular culture, in the courts, and in bohemian communities such as Greenwich Village made nudism especially appealing to individuals interested in advancing the cause of sexual freedom in the early 1930s. Yet the perception that nudism constituted another form of commercial sexuality, encouraged promiscuity, or served as a haven for gay men and women required that nudist leaders take steps to situate nudism within the heterosexual boundaries of sexual liberalism. The rural settings of its camps, the focus on the physical and mental benefits of going naked, and the presence of a religious leadership gave nudism the familial and therapeutic character critical to maintaining its tenuous claims to respectability.
The Fifth Annual International Nudist Conference
In the summer of 1936, the fifth annual International Nudist Conference, held on the “spacious and beautiful” grounds of the Lake O’ Woods nudist camp in Valparaiso, Indiana, celebrated the rural growth and prosperity of nudism in the United States.163 The convention drew almost a hundred nudists from twelve states representing forty of the eighty-five active nudist colonies in the United States.164 Occupying tents, auto trailers, and summer cabins during the two-day event, conference participants enjoyed a program that intended to expand the influence of nudism. Attendees explored four major themes: the “relation of nudism to education, publicity and the nudist movement, the development of the national nudist community and the place of nudism in a changing social order.”165 By the fifth annual International Nudist Conference, the nudist movement had emerged as a stable and growing organization in the United States that had plenty of reasons to look forward to a bright future.
The images documenting the celebratory conference reflected the rural character of American nudism, hinted at the potential eroticism of its representations, and revealed the constraints in which nudism still operated in the United States. One image that headlined the Nudist’s coverage of the fifth annual International Nudist Convention demonstrated the movement’s perilous balancing of the illicit and the respectable. It shows a young woman whose genitalia was airbrushed and who stands in front of dense vegetation, a hidden path, and a sign announcing the location of the Lake O’ Woods camp. The image enticed a mostly male readership to the article through the figure of a young and attractive, though censored, woman smiling welcomingly. Other images illustrating the article echoed the bucolic environment of the camp by displaying the “cleared woods, rolling hills and dales, and a matchless lake,”166 fully equipped with “piers, diving boards, and rafts.”167 In contrast to the images that had appeared in the Chicago Tribune during the Ring trial, which displayed male and female nudists awkwardly walking among dense vegetation, one of the images in the Nudist showed a solitary athletic man preparing to dive into a pristine lake surrounded by bountiful vegetation. Emphasizing strength and, with the image of a canoe in the bottom right-hand corner, recreation, the photo focused attention away from the eroticism of the naked body and instead used a wide-angled perspective to recall a pastoral ideal of nakedness linked with the tradition of skinny-dipping. It made it easy to envision children playing along the shore, families paddling a canoe around the lake, or young boys and girls innocently going out for an afternoon swim.
Although frequently censored, nudist imagery emphasized the rural character of the movement while exhibiting young and attractive women who likely still appealed to male readers. (Nudist, November 1936, 7; courtesy of the Sunshine and Health Publishing Company)
The nation’s newspapers saw the conference as an opportunity to reexamine the development of nudism in the United States. Three years after the Ring trial, sensational newspaper headlines and text disappeared. The Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the Hartford Courant approached the conference as a perfunctory event and curtly announced its location, the number of attendees, and the election of new officers.168 Closer to the events, the Chicago Tribune treated the conference as front-page material while avoiding sexual overtones. One author began his exposé by revealing that he or she intended to write an “introductory short cut into the actuality of the everyday practice of nudism as witnessed at the Lake O’ Woods camp.”169 Posing as a visitor who had not decided to disrobe, the writer witnessed the “ordinary routine of a nudist colony” and wrote that “camp life” resembled that of “any summer resort.”170 The writer observed a bridge game, swimming, a man and a woman strolling through a clearing with their two young children, members lounging in deck chairs under a big oak tree, and even a “typical family argument.”171 Outside of the city, nudists appeared nonthreatening, family oriented, and normal.
Many nudist images used a wide-angled perspective to recall a pastoral ideal of nakedness associated with the tradition of skinny-dipping. (Nudist, November 1936, 9; courtesy of the Sunshine and Health Publishing Company)
The members who frequented the Lake O’ Woods club displayed respectability and represented the increasingly American character of the movement. The Chicago Tribune reporter explained that nudists admitted members only after a “visit to their homes and with an eye to cultural background.”172 Primarily they hoped to avoid admitting “morons” who wanted to “look at [their] wives and daughters.”173 For this reason, they often excluded “elderly bachelors” and had expelled one man, a “Harvard Professor,” who occasionally came back from town “unpleasantly drunk.”174 Although the Rogers Park community opposed the nudist stockade in their neighborhood because they thought the presence of foreigners and the immorality of public nakedness would reduce their property values, the reporter found “several well known Chicagoans” who attended the conference, including a concert pianist, a Chicago radio executive, an authority whose name was “well known to readers of two national weekly magazines,” an “Oak Park writer; a Highland Park school teacher, and a Chicago railroad executive.”175
Nudists closed the celebratory conference by promising to bring their “tenets . . . before the American Public.”176 Undaunted by their expulsion from Chicago, New York City, and Michigan, nudists remained steadfast in their ideals and principles and their commitment to expanding a growing network of rural nudist clubs. Confident that the therapeutic, spiritual, and psychological benefits of going naked would bring the movement and its rural
camps respectability and stability, delegates at the fifth annual International Nudist Conference took steps to ensure that the movement’s message would not succumb to censors, hostile local officials, or unscrupulous pornographers. The Findings Committee recommended that the organization and its flagship magazine change its name to avoid associations with “morbid and burlesque types of nakedness.” Several leaders bemoaned the fact that many “burlesque theater managers, night club troupes, disorderly road houses, and exposition side shows” used the terms “nudist” and “nudism” to “further their own business enterprise in the field of commercialized pornography.”177 To promote the movement’s emphasis on health and recreation instead, nudists adopted a new moniker, the American Sunbathing Association (ASA), to represent the national organization and renamed the Nudist, Sunshine and Health. The conference delegates then secured financial support for their flagship publication and made plans to wage a campaign in Michigan to amend the law in the state that resulted in Fred Ring’s conviction. Al Flynn, the operator of Sunshine Park in Mays Landing, New Jersey, concluded the conference by declaring, “Let us go out and sell nudism to outside groups and carry it to the four corners of the earth.”178