Somewhere Over the Rainbow:
Gay Nudist Thoughts on Securing Body Freedom for Us All

By Queerchoice

When it comes to claiming rights to greater body freedom it should be clear, but still isn't, that gay and straight "nudists" - or whatever name you use for people favouring clothes-free options - need one another for protests and progress towards change.

Ever since its foundation social nudism has mostly portrayed itself as a "family" movement. Camps welcomed couples rather than "single men" which often meant not just predatory straight males but gays. Even if managers and individual nudists were welcoming, gays still risked cold shouldering from the rank and file as on occasions happened to me at a club I sometimes visited during the nineties for the recreational opportunities. Faced with discrimination gay nudists have gradually formed their own clubs and agendas. Now and again, people realize they exist when they get a brief media spot, if they've been allowed by police or festival committees to be naked at gay events like Pride or Mardi Gras. At which time they may also get lambasted by fundamentalists, feminists, mainstream nudists and conservative gays as exhibitionists undermining the social contract or the reputation of other nudists and gays.

Specifically gay opposition which sometimes (as in Sydney, home to the biggest gay events) includes bans on their nude participation at parades, is particularly hurtful and discriminatory given the kind of sexually suggestive displays otherwise unofficially permitted other groups. Double standards are unfortunately present everywhere throughout society but the embattled position of gay nudists and the potential they represent for establishing a more "out" nudity is worth more consideration and support by all those who believe in a broader human rights.

Most people automatically assume that nudity and any "problem" with it, is chiefly something to do with women being naked. Men are supposed to want to see women naked and women supposedly natural exhibitionists given the chance. This isn't quite how things are, especially as regards the practice of any non sexual public nudity. This, whether one thinks of the ancient Greeks or India's Jain monks, or various tribal groups, has been something more in evidence among men than women. Indeed, if nudity is defined by exposure of the genitals, only men are ever fully naked because female genitalia are internal and hidden. The laws at least sometimes acknowledge this when they impose penalties on males for so-called "indecent exposure" which they don't impose, or do so with less rigour, on naked females. Nudity as exposure of genitalia is "solar" (as confirmed by dream analysis in which sun/phallus associations emerge) whereas female nudity is "lunar", half hidden. This lunarity is the reason female eros doesn't need nudity, and may prefer scanty clothing, to be the erotic object for men it is mostly wrongly assumed any wholly naked woman is, or is trying to be.

What does all this mean? Basically that a symbolism and psychology are at work which determine that legally and as regards new values, any body freedom movement is at least initially about the right of men to be naked and popular reactions to that. Men will usually need to make the first moves on their own behalf and they usually do. Women are more likely to follow when they feel safer not simply to protest a right but safer in relation to men and what their nudity might mean. It's therefore helpful if gay men are involved in protests because they are the least threatening to women. And an imagined male "threat" is easily the biggest problem.

When Naked Guy Martinez pioneered going naked in Berkeley it was female students put a stop to it appealing to the idea his gesture equaled"harassment". The legal problems that the (gay) TNTMEN have recently had in Toronto after five years of being permitted to parade nude, has come through a group of feminist women. Many women seem to feel threatened and insulted by the nude male who carries for them suggestions of rape, violence or phallocracy. Also, some mothers decide their children are threatened by the mere sight of naked men or the thought that such males might be predatory pedophiles

Education and reason alone can hope to overcome these irrational ideas and prejudices. People need to know that there's no special or necessary connection between sexual violence and exposure. Above all they need just to be familiarized with the idea that nudity beyond the confines of the occasional free beach is possible and even a basic human right and one which doesn't create mayhem or the end of civilization. But how will this change to perception and falsely protective laws come about?

Pictures and news of people naked in unexpected places help make the point. and bravely harmless, idealistic individuals like Vincent Bethell and Terri Webb have been challenging custom and aiding a revisioning of human possibility in ways that may increasingly bring out others for demos. Some, like Richard Collins, the nude cyclist of Cambridge UK, see the matter as one of a gradual claiming of territory and creating of precedents. If people can get used to seeing him and others cycling or picnicking in certain places, precedent is created that becomes harder to undo and if challenged can become a matter of larger protest. Though his interest is art, the nude crowd photo shoots of Spencer Tunick, which police must permit and oversee, likewise have something of this same territory claiming, precedent making effect.

But short of instituting a Nude Festival day, on the more regular basis, various gay events are among the most obvious and media related opportunities for affirmation of body freedom rights. Their opportunities for altered custom and perception should be taken up and gays supported by other nudists for the precedents that can be established for unthreatening, mostly male public nudity. But whether it's an event where they're free to be naked or one where they must risk being so under threat of arrest, either way gays could use the safety and power of numbers. Sometimes they have this and that's how gay nudism first showed itself. In a New York parade of the late eighties a group of fifty naked Radical Faeries ran down Fifth Avenue, avoiding arrest by sheer numbers and the interest evinced. And it was this that set the example that other places from Amsterdam to Cape Town to Toronto have followed. But there aren't always the numbers and more often than not there aren't. Maybe half a dozen of a larger group will go nude (even where police are not a threat reputation with co-workers can be!) and that number can be arrested as recently six of the TNT men have been.

This leads to my crucial and "queer" point. I will suggest that gay and straight nudists can unite for their rights under the rainbow or "queer" banner. And just as straight parents of gays and straight politicians join gay parades and demonstrations, so too should straight nudists help to swell gay nudist numbers to make a real public statement.

There's no need to be shy or feel compromised as a straight nudist. "Gay" designates a sense of being born with a certain orientation, (which is what most gays feel is the case for them), but the "Queer" word is today related to an influential ideology based more on individual choices. You don't need to be gay to be "queer", you only have to be a sexual individualist who challenges existing value systems and claims certain rights. I was born gay but I choose to be sometimes radical about clothes, so I can rightly call nudism my "Queerchoice". It could be the same for other body freedom people who don't need to be gay to cooperate with the gay nudists who seem more willing to accept them than vice versa. Nudism is one of the colours of the rainbow of difference within the increasingly alternative people's rainbow flag.

Nudists who like to highlight their essential sameness with society by being against the individualism represented by gays are like those socially assimilationist gays who prefer to think of themselves as completely normal except for what they do in bed. Both groups probably need to recognize their essentially "queer" difference from the norms, something which reaches beyond sex and bodies to attitudes, temperament and value systems generally. Nudism is supposed to encourage acceptance of oneself and others as they are. Gays who operate within a gay culture sometimes accused of body fascism have much to learn and to teach fellow gays (who too often censor them out of events) about precisely "acceptance". They also need to work with other nudists to realize the value of acceptance. Hopefully some "queer" middle space that's somewhere over the rainbow (or beneath it) can be found for all of us and the sooner the better if we are to enjoy more bodyfreedom within society.