Anatomically Incorrect

In the 20th century, nudists and publications about nudism were subject to all sorts of censorship and legal harassment. Nudist magazine publishers went to great lengths to avoid obscenity charges, which led, sadly, to some unintentionally hilarious results.

#nudism #nudist #obscenity #censorship #nudistmagazine #history #pornography #naturelovers

Transcript

ANATOMICALLY INCORRECT

In 1903, a German named Richard Ungewitter self-published the first known “nudist” publication, a 104-page pamphlet called Die Nacktheit (“Nudity”). That same year, the first “nudist colony,” Freilichtpark (“Free Light Park”), opened to great success. 

Lichtfreuden (“friends of light”), came to the US a quarter-century later, in 1929. Kurt Barthel, a German immigrant living in New York City, placed an advertisement in German-American newspapers and attracted three couples who’d also been nude sunbathers back home. On Labor Day 1929, the small party trekked out to a secluded property a few miles up the Hudson from Manhattan and disrobed, thereby founding, in effect, America’s first nudist colony.

By 1932, Barthel and his group, now calling themselves the American League for Physical Culture, had bought land for a permanent nudist resort, which he christened Sky Farm, in New Jersey. Within three years, there were 80 nudist groups across the continent, from Maine to California. The title of the British nudist magazine Health & Efficiency sums up the attitude and activities of these groups. Strict regimens of exercise, calisthenics, and sports were the rule, matched by stringent prohibitions on liquor and tobacco, and in many cases meat and recorded music as well. 

During the growth years of the 1930s through the 1950s, American nudists were alternately tolerated and demonized, given safe harbor in one locale, mercilessly harassed elsewhere. Sky Farm enjoyed peaceful relations with local authorities from its inception. In 1933, the Maryland Health Society opened and ran a facility near Baltimore without any interference or problems. 

Others were constantly pestered by nosy neighbors, raided by police squads, and treated with little sympathy in the courts. New York City was surprisingly hostile. In 1931, Barthel’s group, meeting behind locked doors in a New York City gym, was raided by police and the members carted off to jail. Three years later, members of a Manhattan nudist group called the Olympians, though they met in privacy, were found guilty of lewd behavior. The Catholic Legion of Decency sponsored a bill in the New York state legislature to make nudity illegal. Technically called the McCall bill but popularly known as the “Private Parts Bill,” it was so widely ridiculed that it was presumed a dead issue—until Al Smith, the most prominent Catholic politician of his day and a proud son of New York, declared his support. The bill became law in 1935 and remained in effect until 1957.

Nudist groups were also subjected to constant harassment from the law and religious leaders in the Midwest and South well into the 1950s. Finally, in 1958, a Michigan Supreme Court judge wrote that it was foolhardy to continue to “burn down the house of Constitutional safeguards to roast a few nudists. I will have none of it.” 

Nudists have been relatively free to practice their beliefs in privacy on their own properties since then.

1958 was also a banner year for nudist publications. In 1933, a leading figure in nudism, the Reverend Ilsley Boone, published the first American nudist magazine, The Nudist. It was later retitled Sunshine & Health. Many others followed. Some were authentic. Others were imitations distributed by pornographers to exploit the public’s fascination with nudism.

From the start of the movement, European nudist publications had been seized by US Customs officials and destroyed as obscene. Nudist publications printed and distributed within the US came under the watchful eye of the US Postal Service. Acting under broad and murky obscenity guidelines first established back in the 1870s, postal officials were free to embargo any publication they felt might in some way appeal to the prurient interests of the American public. 

Nudist publishers acted with the most extreme caution in the hope of avoiding prosecution as pornographers. From the first edition of The Nudist, all photos were airbrushed to remove any depiction of genitalia and pubic hair. Some publishers went so far as to blank out nipples and erase the crease between the buttocks as well. This practice of neutering nudists’ photographs continued until 1958, when the Supreme Court ruled that nudist magazines were not obscene and that the postal office could no longer restrict their distribution.

That ended a quarter-century during which nudists were forced to tolerate the supreme irony of celebrating the human body in private, while presenting themselves to the public in images that denatured, defiled, and even parodied it. The images were unintentionally but undeniably hilarious. Shorn of all secondary sex characteristics, adult nudists appeared as giant infants, sexless as tadpoles. Smiling nudist families waving to the camera were strangely reminiscent of a popular advertisement of the era, a drawing of a happy Sea Monkey family, who were also nude and neutered. 

Rather than celebrating the human body, nudists looked like a species other than human, perhaps one that reproduced asexually, like the jellyfish or starfish. It was not what the nature lovers, as nudists were called, would ever have intended.