Free Naked at Lunch by Mark Haskell Smith Page B

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.