Cape May Diaries
37 - The naked truth
The blush on Jerry’s face said it all.
She said she hadn’t even known about the nude bathing beach in Cape May until someone told her while she was traveling elsewhere.
Lighthouse Jerry as we liked to call her knew a little bit of everything about Cape May, or so she thought.
“But I didn’t know anything about Higbee Beach,” she told us during a recent visit to her at the top of the Cape May Lighthouse.
Nudists, of course, are among the most misunderstood people on the planet. But in a place as drenched in moral Victorian tradition as Cape May, this “different” way of thinking is difficult to make plain.
Nudists (if I may use that term most call themselves naturalist) in other parts of the state have told me that nakedness does not make for lewd thoughts, clothing does, and called nude bathing a kind of stripping away the illusions generated by clothing.
In this theory, a bikini is far for immoral than wearing no bikini, because such clothing points out those parts of the body most desirable or teases people with suggestive glances.
Most claim being naked strips away all distinctions, making each person equal – no designer clothing with which to act superior, no fancy jewelry such a platinum Rolex watches with which to brag.
Most claimed that people tended to forget the nakedness rather than find it stimulating.
But in an age as totally hypocritical as ours and the Victorian Age, we can have all the Nip-Tuck sexually boiling out of our televisions, but never have a naked body exposed to the public air.
Higbee Beach became a kind of moral litmus test for a traditionally moral community where regular religious radio broadcasts once sought to turn the world into one large revival meeting.
Cape May can hardly be blamed for its objections to having naked bodies strolling around the beaches. It is, of course, one thing to have them all looking like Nicole Richie or Britney Spears, but for most of those who choose nature over family values, come with all the bumps and lumps more typically human than the polished statues Hollywood produces.
The ruling of a state committee to allow local municipalities to ban naked bodies from prowling state beaches gave Cape May all it needed to close Higbee Beach – since the beach is technically owned by the state.
The issue was complicated by the fact that some “naturalists” particularly “gay naturalists” chose to have sex in the sand dunes – a gritty and complicated act that seems to me punishment enough for their public exposure.
A similar problem closed nearly all of the unsupervised high way rest areas throughout the state over the last several decades – where gay liaisons frequently transpired. For non-gay males stopping merely to relieve ourselves, the change of use made for uncomfortable moments.
The one difference between the Higbee Beach naturalist scene and locations upstate is the public sex. Those who attended summer colonies in Warren County in the early 1990s, for instance, prohibited public sex as well, and they were hardly descendents of the New England whalers.
I don’t know if most residents of Cape May understood how popular a place Cape May had become for gay couples. For a long time it served as an off season destination for gay couples – a distinction that was extremely prominent in the New York area Gay Press when my wife and I chose Cape May for our honeymoon in 1990. Higbee each in particular was a well-known destination point that must have riled the locals to no end – although I suspect, most people here did not care what people did in private. The public aspect of the act seemed to be the issue, more than the act itself.
Although the areas where this so-called lewd behavior took place was surrounded by dunes and not exactly in the eye of the public, bird watchers frequently used the same area leading to somewhat embarrassing moments when movement in the bushes proved to be something less than the rare species they expected to find.
We had heard of Higbee Beach previously, but made no effort to find it during our early visits – though it lay on the Delaware Bay side of the Cap May-Lewes Ferry station. Had we known, our trips across the bay might have provided a few more exciting sights than the drudgery we suffered staring out only at rough water and agitated gulls.
In some circles, naturalist Bill Vogt and his wife, Arlene became heroes in challenging the ban, stripping off their clothing in a protest that eventually led to the court challenge attempting to overthrow the ban. Since men can go topless, they argued, why can’t men?
The issue became a question of states rights when the court threw out the conviction against the man because he happened to be trespassing on federal property, while kept the ban on the woman because she was still on state land when she was arrested.
Perhaps the feminists should take a long look at this to determine whether or not the legal system has a hidden prejudice against women?
Lighthouse Jerry, of course, seemed to find the information about the nude beach funny, as if someone had pulled a practical joke on her. She wasn’t sure she believed it when first told, and only later came to realize the joke was real.
For me, the sexual revolution of the 1960s – in particular a painful night in Greenwich Village I witnessed in 1969 where gays rioted against cops – changed the landscape for public exposure. When I was young, it was still possible to skinny-dip in a local stream. Those moments were only marginally about sex, a playful innocence that has vanished into a haze of uncomfortable personal rights. And even as Jerry laughed about the whole thing, I felt oddly conflicted, as if I was on both sides of the issue, hating the imposition of other people’s morality, but also hating the violation of public space to which I also have a right to use.