Activists to take it off in favor of nude beach

By Brandon Sprague
Seattle Times staff reporter

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The event over Labor Day weekend has upset at least one local couple who were planning to take their grandkids to the beach Saturday.

"Why should we be forced to change our family plans for that day to avoid being offended?" Magnolia residents Randy and Robin Hansen wrote in an e-mail to government officials last week. The e-mail called the nudists' event "ridiculous" and "illegal."

City Attorney Tom Carr said the city can't stop the event from happening and that police could only make arrests if the nudists' activities prove offensive to others at the beach.

The event, called "As Bare As You Dare," will include body painting, games and swimming, all in the nude. Organizers, a group called the Body Freedom Collaborative, said that beyond planning Saturday's event, they want to establish a clothing-optional beach in Seattle, and that the relative remoteness of the park's north beach makes it a good choice in that regard.

While there is limited vehicle access, visitors usually have to walk 30 minutes to reach the beach.

"We are not asking 1,000 creepy guys to show up on someone's doorstep," said Mark Storey, the collaborative's co-founder and a philosophy professor at Bellevue Community College. "We just want to show people that they can have fun in the nude and the world will continue to turn."

He expects a dozen or so people to attend the event, which begins at 10 a.m.

Storey described the collaborative as a loose organization of "activist skinny-dippers" who staged a nude bicycle ride from Wallingford to Seattle Center in June and held a "Polar Bare" skinny-dipping event five months before that at Carkeek Park.

Randy Hansen said he has nothing against nudity per se — "I like being naked, too, in the shower" — but said that the nudists should go elsewhere.

"If they want to have a place to be nude, make it in a rural area and not in a place with a half-million inhabitants around it."
 
Hansen said he wants the city to enforce a state law prohibiting indecent exposure. But Carr said it's tough to go after indecent exposure — especially if nudists are just being, well, nude.

"Usually with just simple public-nudity cases, we can't prosecute," he said. "[The crime] has to be based on a defendant's intent — if the defendant intends to be offensive" — exposing oneself to a child, for example, or walking naked into a church. Another component of the law is that someone must actually take offense at seeing the nudity in question.

Carr pointed to the nude bicyclists who ride in the annual Fremont Solstice Parade. "The police do not arrest them because we could never find anyone to testify that they were offended," Carr wrote in his e-mail to the Hansens. "In fact, each year thousands of people turn out for the parade knowing that the nude cyclists will participate."

To make a point, Hansen is considering showing up at the beach and being the one to take offense. "If the city doesn't get in front of this, where does it end?" he said.

"Every beach will be open to nude gatherings, and those of us who are offended by this will be the ones displaced looking for 'inoffensive' places to recreate with our families."

To which Storey replied: "The only people who possibly could be alarmed are the ones who go there and intentionally be alarmed."

Brandon Sprague. 206-464-2263 or bsprague@seattletimes.com