![]() Knobby whelks, scotch bonnets, Queen Helmet conchs - the shells, once hard exoskeletons for soft-bodied sea creatures, were chinked with tide-tumbled battle scars. And the child-me yearned for tradition, as when, on family vacations to the Outer Banks, my mother and I had searched for sea treasures. The adult-me deserved to share that, I rationalized. My first au naturel experience on Little Beach had been a liberating proclamation of emotional comfort - naked, before you, this is who I am. ![]() In bed that night, I tossed, guilt-ridden over pushing my suburban mother out of her comfort zone. Had his petite Christian wife with a puffball of permed hair just asked to go to a nude beach? His grunt, almost inaudible, said everything. My Air Force-trained father lowered his binoculars and turned from watching a humpback whale fluke slap the water. My inner teenager, that prone-to-shock kid, dangled visions of shells and fun lava pools. Body exploration was private porn, proscribed sex, kept secret. We didn’t lead ascetic lives, but prudish attitudes had invaded our psyches. I’d created a social distance I hated and now wanted to close with this vacation, pitched as a parent-son bonding experience - no siblings, the three of us, alone. Even the two mentors lost to AIDS, a painful awakening to the fragility of life, omitted. I was 36, and for over 20 years I’d scrubbed gay life from our conversations - boyfriends, drag parties, the gay swim team, the law firm homophobia - all nonexistent. At the time, my sexual orientation was subject to a similar self-imposed policy within my family. ![]() It was the spring of 1998, four years into the Clinton administration’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. ![]() The bohemian escapade happened by accident, when, after a stroll down Big Beach and nary a shell for my mother to collect, she asked which beach I liked best. ![]() His journey took him through Europe and the west coast of North America where he learned a lot about both the meaning of nudity and society’s need to censor it.Our Maui travel plans hadn’t included a nude beach. In this episode he shares with us how his investigation into why he is ashamed of his own naked body resulted in a film. Yet Jan Dalchow, a Norwegian film director, felt enough body shame that he created a documentary about it. Many people are under the impression that those who live in Scandinavian countries are very comfortable with nudity. ![]()
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