Wine, Cheese, Couchsurfing, and Nudity

Image by Vincent Ma via Flickr

Last year, in the course of my reporting on Nudists, I met a person who may be the least private guy I’ve ever known. Online he often goes by the moniker NakedGuyNYC. In person, he goes by Paul.

I took the subway with him last winter for a small wine-and-cheese gathering at his home in Bushwick. “If Brooklyn is the new Manhattan, then Bushwick is the new Lower East Side,” said Paul, as we crunched through the snow toward his loft apartment in a converted warehouse near Dekalb Avenue on the L line.

When Paul walks through the door with his guests, like any host, he indicates where to leave shoes and other belongings, but after removing his own winter coat, he continued to undress until he was in a state usually reserved for bedroom partners and intimate moments.

I found myself vaguely uncomfortable at first, but the other clothed guests seemed to take it in stride. And soon, four other Nudists – three man and a woman — arrived, so Paul was not the only exposed attendee.

The other clothed guests were temporary residents of the loft apartment: four Couchsurfers from around the country that Paul was hosting. He is a regular Couchsurfing host, allowing random strangers to stay in his apartment on a regular basis for free.

And then there was me, “the journalist,” one who neither surfs couches nor dispenses with clothing with people she’s just met.

“I’m a person who’s enjoyed being nude since I was 12. My mother would send me upstairs to take a shower, and I would get undressed, and start playing in my room. And just forget what I was there for. But I didn’t claim the nudist mantle until college age,” said Paul, who runs Males Au Naturel, a group that has monthly male-only Nudist parties and events, including an annual nude Superbowl party, most recently held on the Upper West Side.

Two lofted beds flanked the large room, and high overhead, an umbrella hung upside down from an exposed ceiling pipe, as if Mary Poppins had once crash landed naked here. Everything in the Bushwick apartment tends to be as exposed as Paul. Circulating the room with a plate of red grapes, Triscuits, and three soft cheeses, Paul maneuvered around door-less closets packed with clothes, a tall metal shelf holding canned goods separating the kitchen from the dining room’s round glass table, and two couches covered with sheets. Nudists always cover the surfaces they sit on, often carrying a small towel with them for that purpose.

Paul made his way to his computer to put on a Tears for Fears B Sides playlist. Computers play a central role in Paul’s life. The Internet has made it easier for Nudists to find each other and organize gatherings. The non-Nudists in the room are also friends born of the Internet. Paul regularly hosts travelers—up to 12 at a time, which makes for tight quarters in his one-room loft—who find him through CouchSurfing.org, a web site through which thrifty travelers find free accommodations around the world. Paul is accustomed to many people in a small place, having been the second to last in a brood of 10 children in a Roman-Catholic family in Providence, R.I.

“I thought it would be really uncomfortable when I first decided to crash with a Nudist,” says M.J., 22, a hefty Californian. Paul was a little testy with M.J., as he was pushing the limits of hospitality, then in his third week sleeping on one of the four cots Paul had purchased for hosting. “He doesn’t make the nudity a big deal. He comes in, gets undressed, and then just acts normal,” M.J. added.

Indeed, it was surprisingly easy to adjust to the naked people among the clothed. There was actually steadier eye contact maintained among the attendees than is usual. Good manners required not staring at the unmentionables. Even if they were mentioned. Frequently.

“The difference between a nudist and an exhibitionist is that the nudists will put their clothes on when they get cold,” said Tamara, a West Village denizen with dyed red hair, gray at the roots, a tattoo on the pale skin of her wrist her only adornment. She said she feels more comfortable being nude, but there are exceptions. “When somebody else leers at me, it makes me feel uncomfortable. I pose nude for art classes all the time. But one time, a maintenance man came in during the class and just gave me this look, like ‘Wow, a nude girl,’ and it made me feel so uncomfortable, I just wanted to cover up immediately.”

Paul admits to more exhibitionist tendencies with his nudity, but claimed he doesn’t like “being a spectacle.” Over the past five years, he has taken his nudism out on the streets of New York, creating over one thousand naked self-portraits. He’s happy to share them with the party attendees and has also made them available publicly online on Flickr (NSFW).

Though his hair is now cropped short—two years ago, he donated it to Locks for Love—in the photos, his dark locks flow down his back making him a horse-less Male Godiva wandering streets, parks and subway stations. Mid-stride on the Montrose Avenue subway platform. Lounging on park benches. Standing among the clothed on St. Mark’s Place.

“I started doing the portraits to explore what it is to be naked and why it’s such a big deal in this society. The naked female body is almost always accepted. What I am trying to discover is whether I can be a male and be a nudist and be accepted in society. There’s a fear of the male body; for many, it invokes violence and aggression. I want to challenge that,” said Paul. “When I am taking these photos, I can tell people are anxious at first to see me out in public naked. But when they see the camera, they become okay with it. The camera diffuses their anxiety and fear.”

Though Paul claims he has created the portraits in order to make public nudity more acceptable, one senses that he is attracted more by the camera’s ability to justify his own public nudity. The photographs are not high-resolution enough for a gallery exhibition, though he does have over a thousand “friends” on Flickr who have assumedly perused his portraits. Though the terms of service for the photo-sharing website forbids users’ sharing “obscene content,” the administrators allow his nude photos because of their artistic nature—though they are placed behind a firewall for minors.

As the party wound down, the Nudists and I left Paul with his Couchsurfers, and heading back to the subway station to take the L train back to Manhattan, chatting about how strange it would be to have strangers constantly around, treating our apartments like free hostels. “It makes sense for Paul though,” said Tamara. “He hates being alone.”