The nudist movement was established in North America in the early 1930s by German immigrants who believed nudism was healthy, a way to commune directly with nature. The movement flourished and waned, forever trying to distance itself from pornography. Brian Hoffman tells the story in Naked: A Cultural History of American Nudism. Our conversation has been edited for length.

Nudism is an outré subject for a history book. Your friends and colleagues assumed you were a nudist looking to justify a cause.

I didn’t grow up as part of a nudist group but my parents were part of the counterculture. Nudity in the backyard or daily life was ordinary. I lived in Los Angeles in the 1980s, and in my neighbourhood there were screenwriters and set designers. It was a funky upbringing. As I grew older I realized this is not how most people live and I kept returning to the question, why do people have such disparate ideas of nakedness? It is considered an immoral act or something that is completely normal.

Western culture focuses on the erotic connections. Nudism to me became a prism to understand how Americans thought about the naked body and how those thoughts and cultural assumptions changed.

It was German immigrants who first introduced nudism to America, but they were rejected by many communities. It was, after all, the early 1930s, and there was a lot of censorship of what were deemed pornographic films and books in Canada and the U.S.

In Germany it was very popular from the turn of the century. It was a reaction to urbanization, rapid industrialization. The idea was to go back to nature, to be healthy, to get exercise, have gardens and be a vegetarian. When they came to America in the 1930s, most German immigrants went to New York or Chicago, and when they wanted to practise nudism they ran into trouble. Going naked in a gymnasium in Berlin is whole lot different than going naked in a gymnasium in New York. Going naked in North America at the time was about eroticism, burlesque, the gay bathhouse, striptease. It wasn’t about health, fitness or recreation.

The way they were able to navigate this situation was to go outside the city. Nudist camps began to spring up in the country. In America and Canada nudist camps are always out in the middle of nowhere.

In the U.S., the rural areas have a long tradition of accepting nakedness, of the skinny dip, of going back to nature, the poets Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. You still got in trouble, they still got raided if they were too up front but, especially in the 1950s, they managed to set up communities that didn’t impose on neighbours, that were related to health, fitness, family and recreation.

The American Civil Liberties Union undertook the defence of those who wanted to establish nudist camps, but there were serious problems that I thought would have made the ACLU blink: black Americans weren’t allowed to join nudist camps; neither were gays, single men or, in the early days, Catholics. There was an emphasis on white Protestant married couples and their children.

The head of the ACLU in the postwar period was a man named Roger Baldwin and he was a casual nudist himself. He would often go naked near his country home in Martha’s Vineyard. That was one reason the ACLU was willing to help out the nudist movement.

There wasn’t complete agreement, of course, because the nudist movement was very out there in terms of American values, especially in the 1950s. The ACLU took a moderate approach and focused on the fact that it was about family and respectability.

The problem is you can’t tell who is a real nudist and who is doing it for other purposes. This is what judges struggled with when cases went to court. No one knew who the people were who looked at nudist magazines such as Sunshine & Health or looked at nudist films. It could be people interested in pornography or intergenerational sex.

The ACLU was cognizant of this. They, however, won a legal case in the early 1950s to allow Sunshine & Health to be mailed to subscribers. The post office had been seizing it and in 1955 they begin to accelerate seizing it from the mail. The irony is that this magazine that defined the movement in the U.S. and won its court case to show full-frontal nudity went out of business in 1963. It was no longer special. Any publication could then show full-frontal nude bodies.

Still, Sunshine & Health and other nudist magazines were seen as pornography because they featured many photographs of naked women and men.

It was pornography, whether it was intended to be or not. Some of the images were definitely pornographic. If you look at male beefcake magazines, there are many similar images in Sunshine & Health. People were buying it to look at pictures of nudes, especially gay men, because they could avoid being accused of reading pornography if they were looking at a nudist magazine.

The vast majority of the covers in the late ’40s or ’50s are attractive females and they look much like Playboy magazine. It was a safe way of looking at pornography.

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More men than women wanted to join nudist camps, and this became a problem, understandably.

It was always a problem. The camps in Connecticut still, today, require men to bring their wives. The approach was different from camp to camp, but it often involved very strict rules, that if you come you have to bring your wife or girlfriend.

It brings up questions about sexuality. Are you there to check out people’s wives or daughters or are you there to check out other men? One response was to have these strict rules so that you had to come as a couple, as a family.

But there were children at the nudist camps who could have been targets of pedophiles. Weren’t feminists responsible in the 1970s for the passing of laws protecting children from sexual deviants?

They did become troubled by child pornography and the possibility of pedophilia in the movement and they pushed those issues to the forefront, and it is to the credit of feminists that laws protecting children were passed.

You note in your book there are more nudist camps now than ever before. That really surprised me.

Nudism cleaned itself up and became about cruise ships and spa-like resorts where you could have a sauna or a massage. Older camps that were rustic and about nature started to go out of business as high-class nudist resorts were established.

With the digitization of American lives, people are taking pictures of themselves and are more comfortable displaying their own naked bodies. It is not shameful to have a naked photo on Twitter. So now it is companies, rather than the government, controlling how we can see people on social media. There is a decline in state censorship of media. People are more comfortable with the naked body. It is on their phones, in their computers. It is on film.

The digital generation has been sexting since they were teenagers. It is not this shameful thing.

The Free the Nipple campaign (which believes women should be allowed to roam around topless, just as men do) is becoming mainstream. There are actresses and singers, Rihanna and Miley Cyrus, doing it. The digital generation is comfortable about showing their bodies.