I wish profoundly that I could be with you at
Antiparos, to help celebrate some of the enormous and favorable changes that
nude living has brought to Western civilization during the past decades.
To appreciate how it has been accomplished, you would have to go back with me to the Saturday in April 1948, when my wife and I first ventured into the nudist life.
At that time, nudist parks in the United States were very few and many were under continual legal harassment. The one magazine of the movement was mercilessly persecuted by the Post Office Department. The idea of social nudity was assumed to be condemned by almost the entire population. The parks themselves were widely reputed to be nothing but open-air brothels.
But the nudist idea persisted. And as more and more people ventured to try it out, they learned a great truth- The best-kept non-secret of the time. They learned that all of humanity is made up of males and females, all of them astonishingly alike.
In the days of the fanatical Anthony Comstock, “leg” was an unacceptable word. And God forbid anyone should use the word “breast”. The Great Pretense was maintained that human anatomy was a vast and terrible secret, not to be revealed.
The last decades have witnessed enormous change. After the final defeat of Post Office harassment a deluge of so-called nudist magazines flooded the country, many of them spurious. Then along came “Playboy” and others to celebrate feminine beauty, at first with caution and then in toto. Even the plethora of garterbelts and other accoutrements couldn't make this nudity unattractive.
Some will recall the last line of the film Gone With the Wind: “As for me, madam, I don't give a damn.” In response to this a fundamentalist preacher widely predicted that the moral fibre at the nation was in danger of irreversible sin.
Today, even in supposedly prim America, nudity is common on the screen -not by unknown “models” but by internationally applauded actors and actresses.
On the beaches of Greece where you gather, are people of many nationalities with many native languages,, choosing varied diets and following different religious tenets. Yet none of that difference will be visible.
Men and women will be indistinguishable except for the uniform sexual differences. Regardless of ages, sizes and shapes, as God decreed the men will be men and women women.
It is so among all the uncounted millions of other human beings, whose total burgeons into the billions now. WE ARE ALL ALIKE. The only difference is that we come in two flavors.
This is the great truth of humanity, and a testimony to the power of a Creator who could make us all so similar. And as we renew our knowledge of our universal likeness, let there be peace among us.
Donald Johnson
(The author is the co-author of “Nudist Society: The Authoritative, Complete Study of Nudism in America,” New York: Crown Publishers, 1970, 432pp. His personal archive of nudist publications is considered the most complete in North America.)
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