More From the Memoir Vault

Granada Digs, Susan was Born in NYC, Social Work, Naked

I am resending this to my subscribers due to an unacceptable number of errors and typos. My apologies.

*

OUR APARTMENT IN GRANADA


Our apartment in Granada was a little basement place that stayed cool in the afternoon, during siesta, when we would retreat there to sleep and to fuck our brains out. Not usually in that order.

We were loud fuckers (!!) and I still wonder if the people who owned the house were ever disturbed by our sometimes raucous lovemaking. When we tried to be quieter, that effort made orgasms even more intense but given the space and privacy, we let loose with whoops and hollas and guffaws. We have fun. I am one of the only men I know who has had multiple orgasms…. or maybe the only one who admits it? Maybe people just don’t talk about that stuff. Why the fuck not?

The house in Granada, in the old Moorish quarter, the Albaicin, with its twisting narrow streets and stairways, was a three-story place.  Our apartment had a gorgeous, tiled entryway, in that really spectacular blue, and it opened to a little sitting area. The kitchen and bathroom formed an “L” and had airy open windows to the outside. We had no view except for the open windows to the entry, but a few steps out our door and around the corner of the house brought us to a small, cobbled area where, turning left, we had an amazing view of the Alhambra. There was a little bar next door that was shaded by canvas, had a couple of small, tiled, fountains, and looked out over the river and its ravine toward the Alhambra. We would stop there many afternoons before our siesta or right after it to have some Sangria. We would often be the only ones there at that time.

There was an open market every morning in the square at the top of the hill that the Albaicin occupied. We bought much of our fresh produce there. For meat and canned goods, we went to a little grocery a few blocks away from that square. There was a woman working as a butcher there who would see us every day and became friendly with us. She spoke no English and the little bit of rudimentary Spanish we understood and spoke simply did not move quickly enough in our ears or out our mouths to keep up with the pace of the way the people around us spoke.  

One day I attempted to buy some patties that looked like ground beef or lamb. The woman and I had some difficulty communicating well enough so I could find out what kind of meat it was. Finally, she began to grunt like a pig, I exclaimed “Pork!” and laughed and so did she.  I said “Ah! Americans!”  She said “No…. Hombre!” and we laughed some more.

At noon the market square was transformed into a restaurant. A wonderful, shaded area with umbrellas and benches, kids playing and the various surrounding shops lost in the informal relaxed air of the Spanish afternoon. I had an amazing shellfish and fish stew there that I still can taste at times. So simple and yet so completely fitting for the afternoon.  One other time I had a mix of lightly breaded little fish, including fresh anchovies, which were a revelation to me… none of that heavily salted strong taste I was used to from the canned variety. These were as delicate and flakey as a premier plate of freshly caught Great Lakes smelt.

When we first got to the Albaicin after a longish but comfortable bus ride from Alicante where we had spent a few days (on the way we traveled through a palm tree forest that was first planted by the Phoenicians) we had a difficult time finding the house we had rented. Actually, the cab driver left us off on the very narrow main road that winds through the neighborhood just up a stairway street from the house, but we were confused and wandered a bit. He even came back and attempted to straighten us out, but the language barrier was formidable, and we searched all the way up to the Mirador St. Nicolas, really just “above” our lodgings, a gorgeous, shaded plaza where hippies and gypsies hung out, played guitar and sold handicrafts in the cobbled square with its amazing view of the Alhambra and the surrounding mountains. It became a favorite hang out later in the weeks we stayed in the district.

There are ghosts in Granada, for me at least. And the barely cloaked threat of a potential return to a cruel megalomaniac dictatorship seems to hover over any place recently released from the prison of fascism (or any other tyranny with an “ism” attached to it). Once past the joyful release from tyranny a disturbed calm settles over the place. Here, there was little talk, even in 2005 when we were there, about that era. Of course, our language barrier may have something to do with this. But perhaps there is a normal response in people after being delivered from a period of great pain that makes recalling details to those who have not experienced it very difficult. As if those pilgrims to such places, even if they are earnest and authentic in their seeking, cannot hear the details in the way they were felt, so it is not worth the pain of re-traumatization to give them voice. We found this silence, even at Lorca’s home, somewhat unsettling… but also fitting.

On our way back from a weekend in a little town on the coast of the Cabo de Gato, a national park on the Mediterranean, we wandered outside and in the olive groves on steep hills and the wide, fertile, alluvial plains around Granada, eventually looking over places related to Lorca. The little village where he was born was empty and his house was closed. When we sought out the place where he was said to be buried, we could find no one in the town who would direct us there. We were able to find the Chamber of Commerce in the little town and they directed us to an area outside of town, not the gated park where there is a memorial, which was closed, but a place where we could pull off the road and walk back through rows of some rather recently planted trees. 

The fellow we finally spoke with in the Chamber of Commerce politely clarified that many people besides Lorca were buried in these places. We walked back into the trees over the rocky track away from the road. There were a good number of large indentations in the surface, covered, filled, with rocky soil, mostly rocks and edged by borders of haphazardly placed cut boulders. Not unlike the large, quarried limestone boulders used for piers and breakwalls around harbors in the Great Lakes. The large, roughly rectangular, depressions had little home-made memorials, many faded from years of being out in the elements. Plastic flowers. Ribbons, Faded notes and personal mementos. There was one of these depressions with a large cross shaped from the rocks and stones that filled the mass grave. It was silent.  It was silent and I was alone. I could not say I was disturbed. Stunned? Surprised by my utter lack of feeling? 

I would save that for later in our trip and the bench outside the house from which Franco’s goons stole Lorca away…  where I wept and wept. We were the only people touring the house at that time, except for an old gentleman with a cane who appeared in the yard and watched me cry, silent, with intent and a kind of comfort hard to describe. 

One of the best things about our travels is that we generally time our journeys to be off-season a bit to miss the crowds. Our weekend out of Granada, when we rented a car and traveled to the Cabo de Gata, was one such journey.  The little town of San Jose was nearly deserted. We got our pick of the hotel rooms available and got a room in a whitewashed hotel with blue trim. All the rooms opened to an airy inner courtyard. In the park the shoreline consisted of dramatic rocky headlands with desert beaches in pockets between cliffs and rocks and we found the one designated for nudists and lay around naked all one afternoon. We had hoped to go back the next day for an even longer beach trip, but the wind was hard and drilled the sand into us painfully and fleets of pretty little translucent green jellyfish filled the bays so that swimming was a bit dicey.  Their sting was not very painful. The bays and the dry high headlands around each beach were spectacularly one of a kind. We had dinner on my birthday on the porch of a little restaurant across from our hotel. They brought me a glass of ice-cold limincello as a gift.

The next day we traveled back to Granada via the only route that transverses the Sierra Nevada range, the same mountains we could see from our viewpoints in Granada, and the second highest mountains in Europe. The road was narrow and twisting, a bit frightening, especially when one had to make room for a tour bus coming the other way around a high and narrow road. No guard rails, but I assured Susan that once we were in the National Park at the higher reaches of the mountains that there would surely be some. I was wrong. At one point we had to stop to pee. Susan went down a little upgrade from the road into an olive grove, but her momentum going downhill at such an elevation gathered in an alarming way and I, we both, were frightened for a moment that she would soon be tumbling down the mountain side. Luckily it did not happen. Americans.

We wound to the apex of the road and suddenly all of Spain lie spread out before us. The road made a seemingly endless number of twists and hairpin switchbacks all the way down the face of the range into the vast plains. I swear I could see the Pyrenees. There was a castle about two-thirds of the way down the mountainside. And still no guardrails. Luckily there was little traffic. It was the only time I have ever driven that my hands sweat. But we made it home.

*

*

SUSAN WAS BORN IN NEW YORK CITY

It is something she likes to tell people and it’s true. Her mother was born and raised in the city and met her father in the heady days at the close of the Second World War. They were married and moved back to his town, a tiny place lodged between the shore of Lake Michigan and Lake Charlevoix in the northwest lower peninsula of Michigan. It was established as a summer retreat destination via boat and/or train from Chicago. One of the summer associations is a large parcel of lakefront land with blocks of very large Victorian cottages and summer homes. Susan worked in one of them as a maid. 

Her mother had already established herself as a businesswoman in New York. She worked for a large publishing company and gave that up to move to Charlevoix. She went back to New York to have Susan, her first child. The story goes that she warned her husband that should he decide not to come to New York for the birth the marriage would be over. The marriage lasted until Susan’s mother died of cancer when Susan was 17. Those were the days when no one talked about the possibility of dying and the treatments were primitive, painful and devastating... or at least more so than they are now. Susan never was able to acknowledge with her mother that she would die soon, and she lives with that terror still.

Susan tells the story of how, when her father told her mother that the Native American kids stand close to cars as they pass on the roads in towns like Charlevoix so they can fall down and pretend they’ve been hit just to get some money, Susan told him that could not be true. She was five. That pretty much defines the nature of her relations with her father, but in saying that one should not let it undermine the deep respect and love they had for one another… and how much her father listened to her. Susan did a lot of theatre, as did I, with Robeson Players in Grand Rapids and took her father to a party afterwards where her father, in spite of being surrounded during his life by a family that regularly engaged in what I call “Nigger Talk” was polite and disarming and excited to have met the primarily black cast and crew of the show.  

Susan’s dad was a polite and insightful man who had once wanted to be a history teacher and a coach but gave that up so his younger brother could go to college. His own father was of lumberman stock, was a bad drunk and a diabetic. One memory of him that Susan repeats is of coming upon him shingling a house after a leg had been amputated. There is also a story about how he was leading a horse and load of lumber (load of something, I don’t remember what) across the frozen waters of Lake Charlevoix from Charlevoix east across the lake to Boyne City.  Apparently, it was snowy with limited visibility. The horse stopped dead and would not go further, regardless of what Rube (her grandfather’s name was Rueben) did to motivate it. On checking ahead some he soon discovered a huge black maw of an opening in the ice. He told Susan “I kissed that horse right on the mouth” to which Susan said, "that’s a great story grandpa”. He replied, slapping the table “It’s not a story goddammit, it’s the truth!”

His wife was raised on Beaver Island, a large island in the middle of Lake Michigan, thirty miles west and north from Charlevoix. She taught school on another nearby island, High Island, where there was a religious community “The House of David”. That island is deserted of human habitation now.

Susan stayed close to her mother’s people who lived in New York. As a child she spent summers in the city with her mother’s cousin’s family, all girls but one, the youngest son. They continue to stay in touch and include her as family on many occasions.  Susan’s memories of those summers on Rockaway Point are punctuated by evenings in which the tide would rise and slosh under the summer cottage that was built on pilings over the bay. When a group of these women gather it is always a very animated and vocal happening with much laughter. The men, even the brother, are quieter but a remarkably loving bunch… although her one second cousin, the one we are closest to, had a beau who early on in their relationship was unnerved by this, to him, raucous interaction and once in a restaurant where everyone was finishing breakfast, he demanded that they be quieter. There was a split-second moment of quiet, and then the happy bunch continued.  They all stub their toes frequently…  an attribute Susan shares.

Susan is a brilliant actor. That I met her during an audition and went on to play with her on stage in a number of plays we were in together was an absolute thrill for me, not just because I was able to do something I love with someone I love (and who also loved what they were doing) but because she was so good she made me better. I remember some scenes we were in together in a Tennessee Williams play “Orpheus Descending”, a terrible little play done by an inexperienced and stilted theatre group. I was electrified, and, as I had the lead male role, I was also very relaxed in those scenes, the most I could be, simply because I was with her. What was her character? She played a local painter woman who had visions. She was born with a caul, which, as she tells it in the play, gave her visions.

We were also able to play opposite each other in a production of a play named “Greetings” It was done by a new theatre group in town, some people who had moved to Petoskey and tried to build a semi professional theatre group. It was a hopeless endeavor, as they were actively sabotaged by the local civic theatre group and then went on to sabotage themselves in spite of their significant gifts and exceptional talent. We were lucky enough to be able to play with them. And we learned so much. Susan shone in “Greetings”. Her ability to mix quick dialogue with constant business and movement completely impresses me.

She is also one of the finest teachers I have ever met. When she joined a court-funded program for adjudicated teens, her educational program was brilliant. Completely focused on learning style and experiential learning, she was able to uncover some of the gross and terrible traumas inflicted on kids by the school system. One young lady who had carried a persistent record of being “borderline mentally retarded” and unable to master basic academic skills came through Susan’s program with a project of making a full fashion line. The victories were substantial and moving. Although so were the losses. One of her favorite young men committed suicide by putting a gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger.

It is difficult to write a short piece about Susan; the depth of my respect and love is fathomless really. Where would I start? Well… here is a start and I shall continue. It still seems a miracle to me that I have met someone to whom I can travel with, not only in the literal sense, but also in the metaphoric sense that we all travel through our lives. I told her, just the other day, in the midst of one of our too frequent, passionate and adolescent arguments, that no one ever told me they loved me. And that is true. At least not in the sense that one expects as a child. This was in response to the fact that she says, “I love you” often. Sometimes several times a day.  I should appreciate that without question, but it still seems so alien to me. I want to know what it means. I have difficulty hearing it without all the variety of circumstance and intensity that it carries. I ask what it means. I doubt its veracity. That pisses her off. “Why can’t you just accept it?” She says. But I want to know, I say, I need to know. No one ever said that to me. Not before I met you. Not really.


  (Notes of correction from Susan: “Mom and Dad meet early on in the war; Dad was in NY awaiting orders and "training". They picked each other up on Broadway.  They wrote to each other throughout the war and were married a week after he got home from Europe on Labor Day.

I don't think Grandma Pearl was born on Beaver Island.  They moved there after Great-grandpa Stephens sold his lumber mill in Williamsburg and started one on Beaver Island. (After turning down Henry Ford's offer to go into business with him)”)

*

*

SOCIAL WORK

I started having a series of dreams not long after I started working on the adolescent wing of the psychiatric hospital back in the middle 1980s.  It was my first job in the mental health field. The art theatre where I had worked for a few years as a projectionist and manager was bought out from under the owners I worked for (one was a favorite college professor), and I was laid off. By the Fall I was able to get a job at the hospital through the suggestion of an old friend of mine who worked there.

At its central theme, the dream series concerned a rather confusing overlap between my being an employee of the hospital and, by some fluke, also a patient. In some of the dreams I was very aware of my patient status and in others the fact that I was both an employee and a patient was alarming and surreal. In others it was quite matter-of-fact. I recall in one dream that finding my patient chart was the central story line. As I was about to open the chart I woke up.

By then, my own alarming and difficult period of paranoia and delusions had receded enough and kept at bay for me to work (And I hesitate to call it that. Although I recognize that pattern of thinking as not very healthy, I could not call it dysfunctional… because it DID function in some way. I’ll talk about that in some other chapter.) In fact it had never, after the initial onset, interrupted my ability to do a job... if I could find one.  I had three at one time as I wrapped up my undergraduate work. The theatre job was kind of perfect and I loved it, so moving on to a more formal eight-hour shift kind of position was different.

I found the place to be frightening and accommodating at the same time. I worked second shift so the pressure to perform for the various administrative types and physicians that came through during the day was lessened. I found I got respect almost immediately. I discovered my sense of boundaries and some mysterious automatic gift of insight I had, and compassion, was not dependent on a college degree and was absolutely key to my success.. 

Over and over, throughout the thirty-plus years I worked as a social worker, I was grateful I did not go to a social work school. My observations of the people who come into the field, especially to work with people beset with the most crippling thought process and mood conditions, always make me draw the conclusion that the only thing academic training in the field prepares one for is to be completely disenchanted with what kind of impact one can have and to be trained to draw fast and immoveable lines between the people served and the professionals serving them. It is very clear that such lines are non-existent. I think the series of dreams I described instructed me in this, if not the feeling I always got that I had been very very lucky not to be thrown into a psychiatric facility at some time when my difficult thinking was at its worse.

After a few years working in the hospital, I went on to get a job in community mental health care as a case manager with one of the new case management agencies put into place all over the country in response to the ruling that insisted, and rightly so, that people with disabling conditions of thought and mood have the right to be treated in their home communities. 

Entire populations from numerous state run asylums were being emptied out as case management and other support services were being made available to them. In those days one was able to get a social work license by having a bachelor’s degree and demonstrating facility with the skills required and having your application signed by someone with a higher degree status.  Many people, and in particular many men in the field, found out that they were good at the work and were licensed in this manner. As requirements for social work licensure, at least in Michigan, have become more academically rigorous… and now one must have a degree in social work to get the license…  the number of men in the field has dropped precipitously. At the latest point in my career, when I found myself in a group of social workers at a conference or training, I was usually one of very few men present. I would estimate one man out of twenty.

The other big change worth mentioning is the fact that, although it was no secret that community care was always somewhat less expensive than institutionalized care, the difference was not that pronounced, and initially in the new community care settings the focus was on the therapeutic benefits to the clients and how they could normalize their own lives, and even recover, once back in their own communities. 

Of course, one of the problems involved the fact that many people who had been left to waste in the horrific asylum system would be discharged into a community in which they had no family ties, or their family ties were broken due to the strain of the behaviors that were a result of their mood and thought difficulties and the subsequent lack of support to families when one of or more their family members were caught up in such a mental health related crisis. By the time the Reagan Republicans and then the even more draconian Tea Party Republicans gained power over public health budgets (and with little resistance from the Democrats) the entire mood of those in the field changed. 

This was very pronounced in Michigan when Governor John Engler took over and made some rather startling and unprotested changes to how community mental health systems were administered and funded. Without going into the boring details of capitation and what was in the end a kind of administrative usury, the focus of discussion turned dramatically to one about saving money vs. saving people. 

Programs were cut and case management agencies forced to find and refer to non-existent or completely over booked and sometimes non-reimbursable services. Jails, at first just a very last resort option, were employed more and more as the only available choice for safe housing for someone who required multi-faceted community support outside of a hospital setting and had come to the attention of the police because of problematic and potentially self--injurious behaviors. 

The ability to locate a hospital bed in times of extreme crisis became more and more problematic (at a time of crisis the closest psychiatric bed for one of my clients may have been and often was over 100 miles away), and while the state was busy building a multi-million-dollar state of the art forensics facility for the criminal insane, psychiatric hospitals were closing for lack of sufficient reimbursement.

In the almost thirty-five years I worked in the field no new psychiatric hospitals were built in Michigan. There have been a few new wards opened, but more closed, and generally the new ones found old facilities, like prisons, to occupy. Medicaid and private insurers (and more recently the so-called Medicaid expansion program in Michigan called “Healthy Michigan”, which has been largely turned over to private insurers to administer) only pays for short stays and longer stays at the remaining and ancient state run facilities are paid for off the top of each regional community mental health board’s budget and out of a continually besieged state granted “general fund”.

I experienced growing disappointment and helplessness in what had been, when I started, an exciting and heady era in mental health care. It wasn’t perfect in those early years, and some of the techniques and approaches were re-traumatizing… but the people working in the field were excited to be there and creative, inventing their own systems of care when the only ones in existence at the time were based on long and stultifying stays in institutions.

 I worked for many years in the Assertive Community Treatment program… a multi-disciplinary team of people who shared a caseload of those considered the highest users of community and institutionalized care… those most “at risk”. When the program was first put into place it was thought to be a lifelong care system, but, low and behold, people who were once thought to be incapable of life outside an asylum, and then similarly thought to be incapable of living without significant and sometimes daily intervention and care from a care team, GOT BETTER! What a thought.

The mental health recovery movement, with programs like Open Dialogue that came out of Finland, and other treatment approaches currently being developed outside the US, took this recovery seriously and are at the forefront of exciting progress being made, with minimal use of medications and few uses of forced hospitalization and vastly improved outcomes. The differences between this and what has happened in the US, its mental health care system dictated by the stranglehold of the pharmacological industry and a refusal to fund community care programs at even a fraction of what it once dedicated to the asylum system, are stark and tragic. More people with disabling mental health conditions are treated in prisons than in community programs... and we all know about the shameful percentage of people in the States that are incarcerated.

Of course, much of the reason I stayed in the field was because of the people I met and what I learned from them and the satisfaction I got from being a kind of Virgil to people who were even less able to navigate through the prohibitively complex and bureaucratic Gordian’s Knot of an overlapping, highly privatized and compartmentalized service delivery system. At the same time I could  help them sort through their difficult and often heart breaking stories of loss while they tried to put their lives, minds, hearts, and souls back together.   I even consider that a key to my own undulating feelings of social isolation might have something to do with the fact that I relate more strongly to these “crazy” people and find more that is sane in them than in the general population. 

But then, they ARE in the general population… or should be… and most of them would not think of dropping drones bombs on weddings or cutting money for food programs and assistance programs to the poorest and most needy in a community. Perhaps some of them would, but over all I think they are, as a group, much more compassionate. They get it. For all the betrayal they have witnessed, even from their own thinking and ability or inability to feel joy and sorrow, they are people I would trust more than most.

And, I think, that was the lesson of my dream. That I am one of them…. and I am proud to be.

And I have yet to discuss my long-time employment as a family counselor and social worker in a hospice organization... but those stories are many and will come at another time.

*

*

WE BECOME NAKED

I’m not sure when I became aware that being naked was stigmatized, or when it was I realized that the stigma was stupid and being naked, once one traversed the thorny, but thankfully short, terrain of automatic shame and/or sexualization of being naked, was relaxing and right.

That being said, I am not one for playing volleyball naked. All those parts bounding up and down. 

Of course, my first glimpse of nudity in terms of it being a club, like a nudist organization, DID come somewhat sexualized. When I was in Boy Scouts one or more of us would sneak nudie magazines in our packs to take on our weekend camping trips. There weren’t many, if any, ‘good’, mass-produced porn mags yet. Or at least none that 11- and twelve-year-old boys could get their hands on. A good proportion of the magazines we had at our disposal, under the flashlights at night, passed around to be perused while wrapped in sleeping bags against the cold night air, were those slick magazine journals of life in nudist “camps”. People standing naked in smiley groups near a pond or rustic building. And yes, people playing volleyball. We were curious about the naked body and our burgeoning sexualities got folded into this. Circle jerks were then common, as well as strip poker, and contests to see who could cum first.

Nakedness was charged for years with automatic sex. My dick got hard at the first swipe of air. Sleeping naked created all kinds of sensations once I entered the highly hormone entrenched land of puberty.

Puberty. Bizarre word.

I am trying to remember when I started to become more relaxed with nudity. We swam naked during YMCA classes when I was in elementary school and then again in high school during the swimming part of phys. ed. class… at least the boys did. One reason given to us was that swimsuits would leave threads and fabric waste to clog up the filtrations system, even though the girls did not have to go naked. This apparently was a common practice in many places and not even snickered at, at the time. When I very recently told someone born thirty years after I was that we used to do this, they were shocked and had never heard of such a thing “Wasn’t that kind of weird?” 

Actually, no...no it wasn’t. Not all that much. It was expected. In some ways it was responsible for putting at ease any worries one had about one’s body. I was very curious about other naked bodies from the time I can remember remembering. In our household I saw female nudity quite often, as my mother was not modest. My father was more modest and being the only boy in the house I became quite curious if my stuff looked like other guys’ stuff. The weekly naked swims at YMCA classes with dozens of other little boys of various sizes, shapes, races and colors provided an answer.

We swam naked in the first two years, grades 9&10 phys ed. class, of high school as well.  This was a little different due to the varying stages of adolescent development. I myself went from a rather short chubby kid with few pubic hairs to a rapidly stretching out thinner kid with quite a crop of hair.  There was a tension to this nudity as well, masked by towel snapping and sometimes exuberant horseplay in the water. During their pool time the girls would tear holes in the paper that was taped over the windows of the doors on the inside of the natatorium so they could return later in the day and watch the boys swim nude. Apparently watching the young men dive off the diving board was a favorite past time.

The nude swimming made it easy to check each other out. Of course, one had to be careful about how long one looked, but everyone looked. There was one kid who was quite well-developed for his age and well hung (at least compared to me at the time) who sought me out, and I him, during free time at the end of the formal swimming practice and workout. We would wrestle in the water. This was not an unusual past time during free time and often other guys would pair off or form groups in which a rough housing kind of physical contact was expected and condoned. Water polo, both as a formal use of the class time and informally during the 10- or 15-minutes free swim we got at the end of the hour, was fun. That guy and I didn’t speak much (it was a large school and more like a small city in itself so it was easy not to know some people very well) outside of gym class, but were drawn to each other for this wrestling match.  Sometimes I had to loiter in the water for a time when the whistle would blow to end the class and get us in the showers due to an erection. Oh, those penises just don’t behave. It really wasn’t until I was in my fifties that my erection stopped misbehaving in public.

All through my late childhood and into adulthood, even now, I look for opportunities to skinny dip and luckily there are plenty of remote beaches and little lakes where this is possible without attracting any unwanted attention.

This is the one thing about nudity, however, that was relaxing and educational. Engaged in enough nudity for a long enough period of time, one became less likely to feel it as a primarily sexualized state of being. On the nudist beaches Susan and I went to once we discovered them (and no volleyball was expected, thank god) the whole exercise was doused with a rather normalizing aura.  No one was perfect. Everyone was different, and no one is better… not really. There are always a few perfect bodies (very few) but the rest of us do not even have to compete. And we have no clothes that would automatically compartmentalize us according to class and social standing. Many unnatural things fell away.

Besides, body surfing au natural is much more comfortable… no sand gets trapped in one’s suit.

This is not to say that sexualized nudity wasn’t ever in evidence at nude beaches, though it was and is frowned upon. As it came to be said: If you want to have sex on the beach go to one that isn’t clothing optional, you are much less likely to be arrested. And volley ball games are pretty rare.

There are beaches that were largely nude, and remote, here in Michigan that were noted as cruising areas for non-straight men, and these were, at one time, quite busy with sex in the sun. I’m not sure one could say that this was a threat to the moral fiber of the nation though, when it was always consensual and didn’t involve lynching or torturing anyone.