THE MUSHROOM CLOUD: MERVIN MOUNCE'S PROPHETIC UTTERANCES

(1909 - 1995)

The sudden mushrooming in the number of nudist magazines presented to the public is a cause for some concern, wonderment, and speculation. Your memory serves you correctly if you have the impression that just a few years ago there were only a few nudist magazines on the newsstands in the United States. In recent years, the long established nudist publishing houses added several additional titles to the two standard official journals which they were publishing as organs for the two national nudist organizations. Up until just two years ago, the total number of bona fide nudist magazines probably did not exceed six or seven.

Suddenly, within the past two years, and most noticeably this year, the number of nudist magazines has tripled or quadrupled, so that now not less than twenty-three magazines professing to be nudist are on the newsstands or definitely scheduled for publication.

What has caused this rash of “free enterprise” and what are the possible consequences?

First, let us say that if America stands for anything, it stands for free competition. The American businessman reserves for himself the right to lose the shirt right off his back! Competition is the stuff out of which this country and its products and services have been hammered. Besides being an enterprise of free men, business competition has the great advantage of improving the final product offered to the buyer. In this case, there is no question but that competition among the nudist publications is up-grading the quality of nudist magazines. This is a fine by-product of fair competition and can only result in magazines which will provide the reading public with more diversified, artistic, and intellectual presentation of the nudist ideas.

Thus, it would seem that the application of free enterprise by nudist entrepreneurs and the resultant competition are not things to be feared in themselves.

Why is it that the 1960's have been characterized by this great proliferation of nudist magazines? Several factors, at least, are involved.

First, the established nudist publishing houses wished to diversify their nudist titles. For example, an official journal is not always the satisfactory magazine in which to present the wide range of nudist topics available. In the case of the Outdoor American Corporation, it was felt that there was a need for a variety of separate nudist magazines to handle such facets of nudist life as: camp and organizational matters, non-organizational topics of a serious nature explored in depth, humor, and recreation, the international scene, and health and diet. Thus, we have such familiar titles as American Sunbather, Eden, Sun Fun, Naturist, and Nude World. But in addition to diversification by some of the established nudist publishing houses, several extraneous factors arose which were inviting to new enterprises. Such firms as the Outdoor American Corporation and the Sunshine Book Company had won major court battles on behalf of a free press –battles which were continuing affairs for years, battles which involved such issues as these: are nudist magazines obscene, are nudist magazines entitled to second class mailing privileges, are nudist magazines fair game for the whims of custom inspectors, are nudist magazines to be free from harassment of postal authorities, etc.?

In the main, these issues were won by the established nudist publishing houses at great monetary expense and only after employing some of the best legal minds in the nation and only after battling these cases through the United States Supreme Court at costs not less than $10,000 per case. These battles epitomized the “risk” nature of the free enterprise system and often the life work and estate of a few dedicated nudist leaders hung delicately in the balance as the court's decisions were awaited. The end for the nudist press could have come suddenly on several occasions had a capricious public opinion prevailed over the more sober judgment of competent jurists. To date, our great faith in free speech and free press and the freedom of inquiry has been sustained.

Such successes by the established nudist publishing firms have naturally provided impetus to more timid souls. The business climate today is safer, from a legal point of view, for new ventures to sally forth to test the give and take of the business world. Things look safer today for a risk of money and effort.

Coupled with these remarkable court victories, we see something else which is unique in the history of American nudism. Never have we had so many talented nudists, writers and photographers, people highly skilled in the field of graphic arts, who as a middle-aged group feel compelled to take an all-out business risk or else see their opportunity for personal business affluency slip by, perhaps forever. Gradually through the years these people have acquired skills in the fields of writing and photography and they have served various apprenticeships with existing nudist publishing houses and now, as a group, these people find themselves in their early to middle forties. In a sense, they have always been a bridesmaid, but never the bride and the feeling exists that the time for an all-out gamble is here and now. This is not a criticism of these people. It is rather a statement of a unique fact –unique in the annals of nudism, for all of these new magazine editors are bona fide nudists who generally know their way around in nudist circles. It is true that some of them have characterized their past lives as “gypsies” while others have been consistent “losers” in a variety of enterprises, but the fact remains they have know-how, they have reached an age in life, when they feel pressed to take a big financial gamble, and they are nudists. As with all business risks, it may prove to be the case that they may lose the shirts off their which is not a disaster to a nudist, but is the end of the road for a business undertaking.

However, these are factors above and beyond these to speculate about.

In finally taking the financial plunge to launch their nudist publications, some of these people, lacking capital but long on graphic arts technique, have formed business contacts with publishing firms which are known in the trade as “girlie houses.” These are publishing firms who print a long string of cheap girlie magazines bordering on the lewd, and always in poor taste, and it seems damaging to social nudism to say the least, to think of a nudist magazine occupying a cubby-hole– or even an office across the hall from the editors' desks of a batch of cheap girlie journals.

In the past, nudist magazines with only rare exceptions have been careful to identify themselves with bona fide nudist publishers and editors and careful to lay claim to the educational, sociological scientific, and recreational aspects of our nudist way of life. We have shied away from any financial backing or loans with firms who have a sordid string of girlie offerings.

When in the name of taking a business gamble we find ourselves closely allied with publishing interests which do appeal to prurient interests, we have cut the ground from under our nudist protestations of high moral and sociological purposes.

In the case of some of the new nudist journals, there appears to be a danger involved of too close a financial dependence upon the “good will” and assistance of firms heretofore identified mainly by their emphasis upon the girlie-type of magazine.

This in turn must raise the gravest of doubts on the part of camp owners, cooperative groups, and individual nudists as to how to think about nudist publicity. Are our nudist parks to become loosely and subtly enmeshed in the financial machinations of the girlie trade? Is there any assurance for the idealistic nudist who heretofore would pose for a nudist photographer that his cooperation is not simply playing into the hands of unscrupulous publishers who now have entered into financial alliance with nudists bent on casting on final batch of dice hopeful that their 7 come 11 will turn up in the mid-forties?

To say the very least, these close associations with firms who publish so many girlie magazines play right into the hands of people such as Editor James Jackson Kilpatrick, author of The Smut Peddlers (Doubleday and Co., 1960) who criticizes the nudist movement with the stinging rebuke that it claims upon virtue need a bit of retouching. Indeed, our virtuous claims will need retouching if we find our nudist reporters and photographers drifting out of our camp grounds after a day of shooting and news-gathering and taking up a huddle with girlie publishers over the financial solvency of the latest nudist magazine. The deeper the financial troubles for any nudist magazine, so aligned, the closer must be the dependence upon the good will, support, and comfort of such publishers.

This, as we see it, is one of the real dangers of the current rash of new nudist books being printed by houses which specialize in girlie magazines. It is a situation which could inadvertently hurt the good name of the social nudist movement. It is a situation which could make camp owners and members leary of cooperating with bona fide writers and photographers. It is a situation which could, in the end, hurt us seriously and make our sincere testimonies before state legislatures and county commissioners a mockery.

If we have become so unidealistic that, by god, we must make our “pile” no matter with whom we cooperate and align ourselves, then indeed, the slow stain of this world's contagion has spread to the nudists.

We hope that these fears do not materialize, but given the unique circumstances surrounding the mushrooming of nudist magazines in the early 1960's, we would not risk a wooden nickel that these dangers do not exist.

In the past, nudists controlled the nudist scene –be it strong, weak, or indifferent. Today there is real reason to speculate: Does the dog still wag his tail or is the tail wagging the dog?

It is obviously an issue which is going to have to be confronted by the organized nudist movement, for the means may now well exist by which for our brand of forty pieces of silver we have undermined the confidence of the rank and file in the authenticity of our nudist press.

Mervin Mounce, Editor

(Source: American Sunbather, Vol. 14 No. 8, 127th issue, August, 1962)