Nudist fought for ‘acceptance of the human body’
Turner V. Stokes died June 23, at age 90.
The conversion of Turner V. Stokes began with teenage skinny-dipping and concluded, some 30 years later, at a nudist retreat in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains in the eastern United States.
He had gone mainly out of curiosity, taking his wife after their two children had grown up and left home. What he found, he later said, was “a feeling of freedom” and a growing sense that the nudist movement could “benefit humankind.”
Stokes, an engineer who usually wore a suit in the office but nothing at the beach, went on to become one of the most prominent advocates of nudist spaces, calling for protections for those who wished to bare all in the face of hostility from government officials, religious leaders and other critics who linked nudity to moral perversity.
As president of America’s largest nudist organization, and then as chief of its government affairs committee and political fundraising branch — Nudepac — he became “an omnipresent figure in Washington,” said Bev Price, current president of the American Association for Nude Recreation.
Stokes, who viewed nudism as a civil rights issue and spearheaded political and legal campaigns on behalf of the unclothed, died June 23, at his son’s home in Nanjemoy, Md. He was 90.
The cause was prostate cancer, said his brother W. Royal Stokes, a former Washington Post jazz critic.
Stokes did not present himself as a radical so much as a rebel. He abided by the rules of “textile” beaches (the nudist term for a clothed beach) and never practised “naturism,” as he called it, in the company of those who hewed to more traditional social norms.
Instead, he became a circumspect evangelist for a lifestyle that, to his mind, promoted the unequivocal acceptance of the human body.
“It’s so hard to explain what the appeal is, because you don’t understand it until you participate,” he told the Post in 1984.
“If you’ve ever gone into the ocean without a swimsuit, you’d never wear one again. The thought of a swimsuit is disgusting. Who wants a wet, slimy swimsuit?”
Stokes was president of the AANR, then known as the American Sunbathing Association, from 1986 to 1988. While he called for protections for nude beaches and gatherings across the country, he was best known for his work on Assateague Island, the 59-kilometre barrier island that straddles the Maryland-Virginia state line.
In the early1980s, he helped create a nude beach on the island, and through the National Capital Naturists he oversaw efforts to preserve the sand dunes and clean up litter along the shore. After an article in Playboy magazine drew the attention of local officials, however, Virginia’s Accomack County passed an anti-nudity ordinance that effectively shut down the gathering site.
Stokes led a more than $50,000 effort to fight the ordinance in court, urging fellow nudists to oppose the “self-righteous, self-styled moralists ... who claimed that we are to be likened to pornographers, child molesters, rattlesnakes and agents of the devil.”