Read Online Naked at Lunch by Mark Haskell Smith - Free Book Online
Authors: Mark Haskell Smith
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naked, I call that a “dirty weekend.” Or as Vishwas Kulkarni wrote in a recent story about the fellowship in the Mumbai Mirror , “It is however the club’s philosophical connect to the sepia-tinted beginnings of the queer movement in Victorian England that makes it more exotic . . .” 17
Was the fellowship some kind of homosexual liaison filtered through Crawford’s starched bureaucratic brain? Is that why he codified it with rules and official motives? It makes a certain sense; homosexuality was illegal at the time and the bureaucratic foundations of a “society” could’ve acted as a kind of cover story. But the only real connection is that Crawford reached out to Carpenter, who was known as an early advocate for homosexual rights. It’s also difficult to say how much influence the fellowship had on future nudists. Crawford’s activities were discreet and only briefly mentioned by Carpenter (“the existence of a little society in India—of English folk—who encourage nudity”) in his 1892 travelogue From Adam’s Peak to Elephanta: Sketches in Ceylon and India .
Sadly, Crawford didn’t get the opportunity to expand his group or continue frolicking “in nature’s garb”; he died at the age of forty-four in 1893 in Bombay from what was officially listed as an intestinal obstruction. The Fellowship of the Naked Trust, the first organized social nudist group in history, had three members and lasted only two years.
…
There’s a synchronicity to the world, whether it’s punk rock or probiotics; ideas tend to pop up independently in multiple places, so it should come as no surprise that in 1907 a young health food freak in Stuttgart, Germany, named Richard Ungewitter, would publish one of the first and most influential books of nudist philosophy. The book was called Die Nacktheit in Entwicklungsgeschichtlicher, Gesundheitlicher, Moralischer und Künstlerischer Beleuchtung , or Nakedness in an Historical, Hygienic, Moral and Artistic Light . The book struck a nerve with the German public and became a bestseller. Not bad for a man who had previously tried his hand at selling whole-grain health bread.
Any book urging men and women to take off their clothes is going to get attention, and Ungewitter’s book not only titillated the masses but also annoyed the church and state. Especially when he was preaching a hippie-dippie back-to-nature message during what was a boom time for German industry. Companies like Krupp were manufacturing steel; Bayer and BASF were making dyes, pharmaceuticals, and agricultural chemicals; and the country was connected by an efficient railway system. Germans flocked to the cities looking for higher pay and a taste of the good life.
It was the fin de siècle, the old century was gone and a new one was beginning. In the cities of Europe a vital and energized bohemian counterculture had sprung up, and new ideas about art, life, sex, and politics were suddenly in the zeitgeist. German expressionist painters like Ernst Kirchner and Max Pechstein had formed a group called Die Brücke and written a manifesto that was redefining art. Cabarets and theaters flourished, with avant-garde plays like Oskar Kokoschka’s Murderer, The Hope of Women being produced, and literary journals sprang up filled with prose and poetry that challenged the status quo and attempted to subvert the dominant patriarchy and militarist culture of the previous decade. And while the barons of industry sat comfortably in their factories raking in huge profits, the working classes were being exposed to revolutionary socialism. At the same time Germans were putting Die Nacktheit on the bestseller list, the International Socialist Congress was gathering in Stuttgart to coordinate the policies and efforts of all the socialist parties around the world.
Local authorities were caught between keeping enlightened workers from turning Germany into a worker’s paradise and trying to get freethinkers like Ungewitter to
Was the fellowship some kind of homosexual liaison filtered through Crawford’s starched bureaucratic brain? Is that why he codified it with rules and official motives? It makes a certain sense; homosexuality was illegal at the time and the bureaucratic foundations of a “society” could’ve acted as a kind of cover story. But the only real connection is that Crawford reached out to Carpenter, who was known as an early advocate for homosexual rights. It’s also difficult to say how much influence the fellowship had on future nudists. Crawford’s activities were discreet and only briefly mentioned by Carpenter (“the existence of a little society in India—of English folk—who encourage nudity”) in his 1892 travelogue From Adam’s Peak to Elephanta: Sketches in Ceylon and India .
Sadly, Crawford didn’t get the opportunity to expand his group or continue frolicking “in nature’s garb”; he died at the age of forty-four in 1893 in Bombay from what was officially listed as an intestinal obstruction. The Fellowship of the Naked Trust, the first organized social nudist group in history, had three members and lasted only two years.
…
There’s a synchronicity to the world, whether it’s punk rock or probiotics; ideas tend to pop up independently in multiple places, so it should come as no surprise that in 1907 a young health food freak in Stuttgart, Germany, named Richard Ungewitter, would publish one of the first and most influential books of nudist philosophy. The book was called Die Nacktheit in Entwicklungsgeschichtlicher, Gesundheitlicher, Moralischer und Künstlerischer Beleuchtung , or Nakedness in an Historical, Hygienic, Moral and Artistic Light . The book struck a nerve with the German public and became a bestseller. Not bad for a man who had previously tried his hand at selling whole-grain health bread.
Any book urging men and women to take off their clothes is going to get attention, and Ungewitter’s book not only titillated the masses but also annoyed the church and state. Especially when he was preaching a hippie-dippie back-to-nature message during what was a boom time for German industry. Companies like Krupp were manufacturing steel; Bayer and BASF were making dyes, pharmaceuticals, and agricultural chemicals; and the country was connected by an efficient railway system. Germans flocked to the cities looking for higher pay and a taste of the good life.
It was the fin de siècle, the old century was gone and a new one was beginning. In the cities of Europe a vital and energized bohemian counterculture had sprung up, and new ideas about art, life, sex, and politics were suddenly in the zeitgeist. German expressionist painters like Ernst Kirchner and Max Pechstein had formed a group called Die Brücke and written a manifesto that was redefining art. Cabarets and theaters flourished, with avant-garde plays like Oskar Kokoschka’s Murderer, The Hope of Women being produced, and literary journals sprang up filled with prose and poetry that challenged the status quo and attempted to subvert the dominant patriarchy and militarist culture of the previous decade. And while the barons of industry sat comfortably in their factories raking in huge profits, the working classes were being exposed to revolutionary socialism. At the same time Germans were putting Die Nacktheit on the bestseller list, the International Socialist Congress was gathering in Stuttgart to coordinate the policies and efforts of all the socialist parties around the world.
Local authorities were caught between keeping enlightened workers from turning Germany into a worker’s paradise and trying to get freethinkers like Ungewitter to
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