In 1994, the ASA recognized the growing acceptance of nudity in American society and culture by adopting the name American Association for Nude Recreation (AANR). Using the language of gay liberation, the president of the AANR, George Volak, announced the name change by declaring, “It’s time we finally came out of the closet.”4 The announcement signaled a more tolerant stance toward homosexuality and a more public approach to promoting nude recreation. The new moniker removed the shame attached to the euphemism sunbathing, a term adopted in the 1930s to distance the organization from commercial pornographers who used the term nudist to market their magazines, films, and theater performances. It also signaled to individuals casually interested in visiting a resort that they did not have to be a committed “nudist,” nor were they required to participate in a movement. The acceptance of nudity in American society made it possible for major corporations to partner with the AANR. Travel companies such as Hertz, Alamo, Enterprise, and Budget as well as 1-800-Flowers, Vermont Teddy Bear, and the hat company Tilley all offered special discounts to nudists and naturists. Even Apple Computers, which maintains a strict policy prohibiting any sexual images or content from its app store, approved the 2011 AANR app for the iPhone.5
With the nudist movement once seen as a threat to the respectability of communities such as Rogers Park in Chicago or small towns such as Allegan, Michigan, many mayors and city officials welcomed the high-priced nudist resorts popping up across the country as valuable sources of tax revenue and as a way to increase property values. The opening of the Desert Shadows resort in 1992 in the struggling uptown section of Palm Springs received support from local officials who relaxed building restrictions, provided a liquor license despite a local law meant to deny the same privilege to strip clubs, and contributed city funds to assist major expansions and additions made to the resort. The resort was built on the site of Doris Day’s Chandler Inn and Errol Flynn’s Lone Palm Inn, an old haunt of Frank Sinatra. Steve Payne, who previously worked for Marriott and Hilton, oversaw several multimillion-dollar expansions to the resort that added several swimming pools, tennis courts, restaurants, an indoor and outdoor spa, and three waterfalls. In the late 1990s, Payne added thirty-eight two-story luxury condominiums across the street, prompting the construction of a 140-foot bridge that allowed guests to visit the resort while remaining nude. The resort now occupied an entire city block where prostitutes and drug dealers had once scared tourists away. Palm Springs Mayor Will Kleindienst reflected on the $185,000 the city had contributed to the “Nude Bridge” by boasting, “We’re very proud of what they’ve done for that part of the community.”6 Charging up to $300 to $400 a night, raising property values, and attracting wealthy tourists to once-blighted areas, luxury nudist resorts such as Desert Shadows made headlines in newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal as major contributors to urban-renewal efforts and as valuable sources of tax revenue.7
The rustic and secluded camps that had shaped nudism in the United States for decades struggled to compete with the luxurious amenities and well-maintained grounds of the new resorts emerging across the country. For much of the twentieth century, the rural, out-of-the-way nudist camps that dotted the American countryside offered refuge to urban dwellers who wanted to go naked into nature and avoid local police, neighbors, and politicians determined to put a stop to nudist activities. Nudists, naturists, and casual nude sunbathers, however, no longer saw seclusion as an asset, and the simple, no-frills outdoor settings of many older camps failed to appeal to guests seeking recreation and luxurious amenities. Elysia, originally founded by Hobart Glassey in the early 1930s in the San Bernardino Mountains and the former backdrop for Elysia (1933) and The Unashamed (1938), closed in 2007. Flora “Flo” Nelson, who owned and managed the camp since 1954, when she and her husband purchased the grounds and renamed it McConville after the previous owner, blamed the camp’s demise on “newer members [who] wanted to change it into a country club-type setting” more amenable to “lazy people who want to be waited on.”8 Although her camp had a pool, tennis courts, and several rustic cabins, it lacked electricity and required a long, winding drive through the mountains. While other early nudist camps, such as Lake O’ Woods in Valparaiso, Indiana, updated their grounds and continued to attract guests, the closure of camps unable or unwilling to invest in expensive renovations reflected the decreasing need for seclusion and organized nudism’s emerging status as a high-end tourist activity.
The emergence of nudism and naturism as a profitable niche in the tourist industry drew the attention of politicians eager to reestablish limits on sexual expression through the issue of child pornography and pedophilia. The increased attention given to protecting children from sexual predators by journalists, child-welfare advocates, feminist activists, and legal authorities led to an enormous increase in arrests, the passage of strict state laws that required the disclosure of the identities of convicted sex offenders to community members after their release from prison, and a number of sensational news-media programs and television movies on particularly heinous child rapists and murders. By the mid-1990s, the availability of what seemed like an infinite variety of illicit content on the Internet streaming into homes, accessible to children, and largely unregulated by the government exacerbated already heightened fears about child sexual abuse. Parents as well as politicians feared that the exchange of child pornography on the Internet encouraged and emboldened child predators and that chat rooms on providers such as America Online and CompuServe provided an opportunity for pedophiles to lure children away from the safety of their homes. For many Americans, sexual predators seemed to be just a click away, and they looked to the government to restore order.
The “culture wars” of the 1990s put the issue of child sexual abuse and the Internet at the forefront of American politics. The election of President Bill Clinton in 1992 angered many social conservatives who disapproved of Hillary Clinton’s feminist background and considered the president’s extramarital affairs an insult to the traditional family. After Bill Clinton failed to resolve the status of gays and lesbians serving in the armed forces, the historian Philip Jenkins argues that the president responded to attacks made by advocates of traditional morality and family by “defending the interests of children.”9 The president mentioned the Polly Klaus incident in his 1994 State of the Union Address, he campaigned in 1996 for a national registry of sex offenders, and he supported legislation that offered to severely restrict the content available on the Internet.10 In 1995, President Clinton signed into law a bill amending the Communications Decency Act so that anyone who made offensive material available online to children less than eighteen years old would be subject to fines and prison terms. If upheld, the law had the potential to severely limit what could be seen, expressed, and consumed on websites. In 1997, however, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously struck down the law, affirming that constitutional protections extended to the Internet and ruling that the government cannot deny the constitutional rights of adults to protect the moral sensibilities of children. Nevertheless, the strong social, political, and cultural consensus that government needed to protect children on the Internet from sexual predators signaled the resurgent influence that age began to have in defining and regulating the boundaries of sexual expression in the United States at the end of the twentieth century.
The focus on protecting children from sexual predators put nudist and naturist activities under renewed scrutiny. After Representative Mark Foley of Florida’s Sixteenth Congressional District was elected in 1994, he made a name for himself as one of the most outspoken opponents of child pornography. In June 2003, he wrote letters to the governor and attorney general of Florida asking them to review the legality of a program for teenagers at the Lake Como nudist resort in Land O’Lakes, Florida. Foley brought additional public attention to the issue of child sex and nudism when he appeared on CNN for a segment titled “What’s Wrong with Nude Camps for Teens?” and asserted, “You put 11 and 18-year-olds togethe
r in a camp where they’re nude, I think it is a recipe for disaster. It is like putting a match next to a gasoline can. You’ll have disasters sooner or later.”11 In 2006, however, Rep. Foley came under scrutiny as a suspected pedophile when reports surfaced that he sent salacious texts from his phone to underage male pages. Foley’s effort to bring attention to nudist activities may have originated from his own experiences as a teenager at the Sacred Heart Catholic School, where a priest “took him biking and skinny-dipping and massaged him in the nude, often bringing him to saunas for fondling.”12 The importance placed on protecting children from sexual predators proved so powerful that it led to the exposure of the influential politician leading the effort to limit child pornography. The heightened anxieties surrounding children’s sexuality at the beginning of the twenty-first century made it very difficult for nudist leaders to quickly cover up instances of sexual abuse or to explain away the threat of pedophilia by invoking the familial character of the movement.
In addition to conservative politicians, the antipornography activist Nikki Craft continued her campaign to expose the sexual abuses that occurred at nudist camps. In 1992, she clashed with the longtime nudist leader Ed Lange on the Jenny Jones Show, a national television talk show that courted confrontation and controversy by surprising guests with jilted ex-lovers, hated rivals, and ideological opponents. Talk shows such as the Jenny Jones Show reflected a larger shift in the news media toward sensationalist coverage and helped popularize the professional and activist literatures on rape, child sexual abuse, and pornography.13 In 1995, Craft also set up the Nudist/Naturist Hall of Shame website to document the prevalence of pedophilia in nudism/naturism with links to news reports, personal testimonials, and nudist correspondence attempting to cover up the issue of pedophilia at nudist clubs, beaches, and events. The website did not go unnoticed by the public. By 2001, according to the Institute of Global Communications, a web-hosting site for nonprofit organizations, the Hall of Shame website had received 7,403,971 visits from 761,270 unique users.14 Craft reached out to the many visitors to her site by asking for additional information from individuals who lived near nudist resorts, who grew up in nudist families, or who served in nudist organizations. She provocatively asked, “Are you tired of pedophiles, sex predators, nudist apathy and the practices and policies that cause it all to proliferate?”15 With cable news shows seeking out controversy and scandal to generate ratings, and the Internet providing a forum for individual activists to speak out against the nonconfrontational policies of nudism/naturism, the issue of intergenerational sex could not be ignored, dismissed, or rationalized by nudist/naturist leaders.
The familial character of nudism no longer communicated natural innocence, respectability, and wholesomeness; it aroused suspicion and threatened to undermine the profits of heavily invested nudist resorts. The days when hostile judges passed over images of nudist children, proclaiming them decent, or when nudist leaders easily covered up an incident of pedophilia before it became a national controversy came to an end at the turn of the twentieth century. In October 2011 a forty-nine-year-old Texas man who had taken videos of himself molesting children at a central Texas nudist resort and at his home was sentenced to fifty years in prison. In Ottawa, a treasurer of a nudist club received a five-year sentence for possessing child pornography, and a British couple that set up a nudist/naturist site to lure children into engaging in a number of illicit activities was convicted of numerous charges including sexual assault on a child.16 While the AANR remained steadfast that it had “promoted nudist family values at its resorts and clubs since 1931,” and it continued to promise that “clubs foster a wholesome, nurturing environment for members and their families,” a culture of suspicion began to pervade nudist resorts and free beaches.17 Numerous resorts across the country chose to ban cell phones to prevent images of naked children from appearing on the Internet, and Nicky Hoffman, a co-owner of TNS and the publisher/editor of Nude and Natural, asserted that if naturists see “someone taking photographs, that camera might end up in the water.”18 Other guests at resorts commented on nudist blogs that events such as the McMartin trial, a high-profile case in the 1980s involving a Manhattan Beach preschool where a number of children falsely accused the owner and her son of sexual abuse and ritual torture, made them think twice about being alone with small children while naked. Others worried that child predators might take advantage of the trusting culture at nudist resorts and began to find the friendly interactions of adults with little girls or boys suspect.19 The greater attention given to child sexual abuse in the later part of the twentieth century and the revelation that a number of incidents involving pedophilia had occurred at nudist resorts and free beaches made many nudists and naturists question the AANR’s assertion that social nudism fosters a “wholesome, nurturing environment for members and their families.”20
One well-known resort caused controversy when it ignored the official family-friendly nudist policy of the AANR and refused to admit children entirely. In February 2011, the new owners of Desert Shadows Resort, renamed Desert Sun Resort following another expensive remodeling project, made the decision to deny entry to all children. Not long after John and Elizabeth Young purchased the well-known Palm Springs nudist resort, the FBI visited them to warn them about the “size and scope of the Internet’s child porn industry.” One FBI agent described nudist resorts as a “candy store” for sexual predators. Unlike nudist clubs that enjoyed visits from regular members and families, luxury nudist resorts such as Desert Sun saw more first-time guests, many of whom had never participated in nudism or naturism and were strangers to regular visitors.21 When an incident occurred involving a child at Desert Sun, the Youngs worried about admitting other child predators, and for their own protection, they decided to prohibit children from entering the resort. Many nudists considered the banning of children a signal that a club or resort catered to individuals seeking sexual activity, swinging, or group sex and spoke out against the well-known resort for undermining the familial character of the movement. One nudist hired an attorney to threaten a lawsuit under California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act, which prohibited restaurants, hotels, and other businesses from discriminating against anyone on the basis of “sex, race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, or sexual orientation.”22 Fearful of prosecution, the Youngs consulted a judge and wrote in a brief to the court that it had been “common practice among pedophiles in recent years to attend ‘family nudism’ resorts” and that it was very difficult to determine “whether any particular individual harbors—or worse, will act on—some improper or wrongful desire toward children.”23 The recent efforts by journalists, politicians, and law enforcement to reestablish the boundaries regulating sexual expression and behavior through the threat that sexual predators posed to children caused many nudists to question the familial character that had long defined the movement in the United States.
At the dawn of the new millennium, the perceived vulnerability of children—more than the sexual dangers posed by single men, people of color, radical sexual politics, or even commercial sex—threatened to undermine the credibility of American nudism as a legitimate social movement. For much of the twentieth century, the erotic appeal that nudism held for men and women of all sexualities posed the greatest threat to the movement’s respectability. Only rarely did the presence of children at nudist clubs, nude beaches, and in nudist magazines and films raise the concerns of politicians, judges, and censors. In the 1930s, local police, moral reformers, and politicians associated nudism with an urban underworld of commercial sexuality. During the Second World War, the uncensored genitalia of adult men and women caused postal officials to begin seizing nudist magazines from the mail. The pictures of naked children, however, failed to arouse the ire of even the most disapproving judges. At the same time, an emerging network of rural nudist camps promoted an ideology of domesticity that excluded single men and people of col
or while celebrating family, nature, and recreation. Club owners and nudist leaders quickly covered up any incidents of pedophilia. The faith placed in the family to contain illicit sexuality protected nudism from further suspicion and scrutiny.
Only as the heteronormative boundaries of sexual liberalism came under attack did the safety of nudist children begin to emerge as a serious concern. The legal victories achieved by the nudist movement in the late 1950s led to a dramatic increase in commercial sexual display and made it possible for the many baby boomers coming of age in the late 1960s to experiment with public nudity at beaches, parks, music concerts, and political protests. The emergence of a more tolerant and inclusive approach to nudism that welcomed liberal activists, advocates of sexual freedom, gay men and lesbians, people of color, and feminists produced contentious debates over the politics of pornography and the threat of child sexual abuse, not to mention the ideological character of naturism and nudism. The struggle to sever nudism/naturism’s relationship with the pornography industry and nudism/naturism’s unwillingness to confront the problem of child sexual abuse at nudist resorts and nude beaches led to the disillusionment of many feminists. The fractured and contentious sexual politics that divided naturists in the 1980s reflected the decreasing confidence in the family to contain and restrict illicit sexuality and behavior.
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