What straight culture gets wrong about gay nudism

On projection, queer body freedom, and the stereotype that refuses to die.

There is a specific kind of knowing smirk that appears on people’s faces when a gay man mentions he spent the weekend at a nude beach. Before he’s finished his sentence, the interpretation is already locked in: nudity plus gay men equals sex. The smirk doesn’t require evidence. It doesn’t ask questions. It already knows.

That reaction is worth examining. Because what it tells us about gay nudism is almost nothing. What it tells us about the person smirking is quite a lot.

For many queer men, taking their clothes off in a communal, low-judgment space is one of the more meaningful acts of self-acceptance available. That’s not a soft claim. Gay men like myself routinely grow up carrying shame about their bodies, their desires, and the visibility that comes with simply existing as who they are. As therapist and writer Matt Lundquist has put it, “For gay men especially, the body is often a site of shame long before it becomes a site of pleasure.” That shame doesn’t dissolve when someone comes out. It tends to migrate, attaching itself to gym culture, to body comparison, to the relentless performance of being seen in the right way by the right people. Nude spaces, at their best, interrupt all of that. No clothes, no status signaling, no armor.

That’s the reality that tends to get flattened when outsiders make assumptions about what gay nudism is.

Living out what I’ve always meant to be. Copyright 2026.

A movement with actual roots

Gay naturism in the United States has a history that most people, including many queer people, don’t know well. While general nudist clubs and resorts had been operating in the country since the 1930s, they were not exactly welcoming to gay men. The broader naturist movement was, for much of its early history, built around heterosexual family life. Gay people were there, of course, but not visibly, not safely, and not on their own terms.

That began to change in the early 1980s, when unaffiliated local clubs for gay naturists started springing up independently in major cities across the United States and Canada. The timing wasn’t accidental. By then, most major cities had LGBT newspapers that had grown directly out of the gay liberation movement of the 1970s, and those papers became the connective tissue for a first wave of gay naturist social clubs. Publications like L.A. Frontiers, the Seattle Gay News, and the Houston Voice carried the word to men who hadn’t known others shared the interest.

The organizational turning point came in 1983, when an openly gay New Yorker named Murray Kaufman, who had been quietly hosting private nude socials for gay men in his home, was approached by Lee Baxandall, the founder of The Naturist Society. Baxandall had founded TNS in 1980 as a deliberately inclusive alternative to the more conservative American Sunbathing Association, and from its earliest days the organization was flooded with inquiries about a group specifically for gay naturists. Kaufman agreed to lead it. Gay and Lesbian Naturists, known as GLN, was formally established that year. GLN was organized in 1984 as a Special Interest Group (SIG) of The Naturist Society by Murray Kaufman and Cheryl Auger.

GLN held its first gathering at the Summit Lodge in Rockbridge, Ohio in 1985. About 60 members, all of them men, attended. From that modest beginning, the annual gatherings grew steadily. By 1992, GLN had become an independent organization and was renamed Gay Naturists International, or GNI. A parallel organization, International Men Enjoying Naturism (IMEN), formed in 1994 after an internal split. The annual GNI Gathering, held each August in rural eastern Pennsylvania, remains the largest gay naturist gathering, attracting about 800 gay naturists.

It’s also worth noting what was happening in the background during this period. The early 1980s were also the beginning of the AIDS crisis, which devastated gay communities across the country and reintroduced layers of shame, stigma, and fear around gay bodies specifically. Building social spaces centered on body acceptance and communal ease during that era was not a small or incidental thing. It was, for many men, an act of resistance against the dehumanization happening on multiple fronts at once.

By the 1990s, the number of local gay naturist clubs continued to grow, particularly in the latter part of the decade, aided by the advent of the internet which meant greater publicity opportunities for new and existing clubs. Today, destinations like Palm Springs and Fort Lauderdale have become established hubs for gay naturist travel, with dozens of clothing-optional resorts in each city. The infrastructure is real, it is decades old, and it was built by people with specific and considered reasons for building it.

Ed Lugo Resort - Clothing Optional Resort for Gay Men - Fort Lauderdale, FL

Why the “it must be sexual” assumption is a form of projection

The reflex to sexualize gay nudity is not a neutral misunderstanding. It draws from a much older framework: the idea that queer existence is inherently erotic, that queer people are always performing or soliciting something, that visibility itself is an invitation.

The double standard is revealing. A mixed-gender group at a naturist resort is read as healthy, European, countercultural in a pleasant sort of way. A group of gay men in the same setting draws suspicion, raised eyebrows, loaded commentary. The nudity is identical. The interpretation splits entirely along the line of sexuality. That tells you something important about where the discomfort is actually located.

Psychologically, this is projection working as advertised: assigning to others the qualities or anxieties that are difficult to sit with in oneself. Western culture has an unresolved relationship with the male body, with homoeroticism, with the idea that men can look at each other without competition or hierarchy as the organizing principle. Gay nudism, in its casualness, holds a mirror up to that discomfort. So it gets reclassified as something easier to dismiss: a fetish, a scene, a spectacle.

“Fetishization,” as Youth OUTright has described it, “is the reduction of a person to aspects of their body, identity, or relationship structure.” When the default interpretation of gay nudity is sexual invitation, that reduction is exactly what’s happening. It refuses to see history, community, or intention. It sees only what it wants to see.

Knowing the history matters because it reframes what these spaces are. They weren’t created as sex venues. They were created because gay men were unwelcome or invisible in existing naturist spaces, and because they needed somewhere to be in their bodies without the constant ambient pressure of being surveilled, judged, or performing for an outside gaze.

What you actually find in these spaces tends to be unremarkable in the best way. Conversations, sunscreen, opinions about where to get lunch, the particular ease of people who have collectively decided that the usual rules don’t apply here. The ordinariness is not a disappointment. It’s the point.

It is also honest to say that queer nude spaces exist on a spectrum. Some lean heavily social; others carry an erotic dimension. Queer communities hold their own ongoing conversations about those distinctions, about consent, about what different spaces are actually for. As one writer for The Daily Californian noted, the line between liberation and hyper-sexualization is one worth taking seriously. That is a real tension, and one the community engages with more carefully than outside assumptions tend to acknowledge.

What matters is the difference between a community working through its own internal complexities and an outsider deciding in advance that the whole thing is one thing. One involves actual knowledge. The other is a stereotype.

Under the rainbow. Photo by The Naked Gentleman used with permission.

Body freedom as a political act, not a performance

Gay men needed their own naturist organizations precisely because the mainstream naturist movement was not built with them in mind. As GNI Executive Director Rick Johnson has explained, some might wonder why gay naturists need their own organization in a movement that talks about inclusivity and acceptance. The answer is that talking about inclusivity and practicing it are different things, and gay men have had enough experience with that gap to build their own infrastructure rather than wait for an invitation.

That history of building parallel, autonomous spaces connects to something deeper. For much of the twentieth century, queer bodies were legally criminalized. Being visible, occupying public space, existing in a body that institutions treated as deviant: these were not abstract concerns. Nude spaces became a kind of sanctuary, somewhere the hostile gaze didn’t follow, somewhere a body could just exist without apology.

That political history doesn’t disappear because the legal landscape has shifted. The experience of growing up queer in most parts of the country still carries enough shame and low-level surveillance that finding a space free of it carries genuine weight. For many gay men, a Saturday afternoon at a nude beach is not disconnected from any of that history. It’s a direct, if quiet, response to it.

Understanding gay nudism doesn’t require much beyond a willingness to ask what something means to the people actually doing it, rather than deciding what it means before the conversation starts. It requires separating nudity from sexuality in a context where that separation is resisted, for reasons that say more about cultural discomfort than anything happening on that beach.

There is a forty-year history here. There are organizations, annual gatherings, publications, and communities built by people who had specific and thoughtful reasons for building them. That history doesn’t make gay nudism beyond criticism or above complexity. It makes it a real thing, with real context, that deserves to be understood on its own terms.

A gay man who is comfortable in his body, without apology, without performing for anyone’s approval, has arrived somewhere. The smirk that greets that arrival is not insight. It’s reflex. And it misses everything.

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This piece explores queer body culture, nudism, and the assumptions that tend to follow LGBTQ+ spaces. If you’re navigating your own relationship with body image or identity, a therapist with experience in LGBTQ+ issues can be a worthwhile resource. Find a nearby LGBTQ+ therapist by visiting Rula.

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