How did skin become a sin?

Patrick Scully is a performance artist in Minneapolis. He is scheduled for trial next week on charges connected with swimming naked at a public park.

Sadly, if Walt Whitman were to visit Minneapolis today, he would not likely find the inspiration to write "I see a beautiful gigantic swimmer swimming naked", or to describe "The swimmer naked in the swimming bath ... ." Is contemporary Minnesota so far removed from Whitman's 19th century New England? Where are our nude beaches?

Somehow, we have lost something here that has been enjoyed since the dawn of humanity. For thousands of years we humans have removed our clothes to bathe naked in lakes and rivers. Since the glaciers receded from Minnesota 12,000 years ago, humans have enjoyed the waters of this land of lakes au naturel. Not so long ago, in very recent history, someone decided swimming suits were necessary. What happened?

As a boy in the 1930s, my father used to skinny-dip in Beaver Creek, north of Slayton in Murray County. As a boy in the 1960s, I went swimming in downtown St. Paul. We, swimsuited scouts from Roseville, shared the Wilder pool with grown men, all of whom swam naked. No one regarded either situation as a crime, but our youthful swimsuits were an indicator of America's growing fear of the naked body. Something had changed between my father's youth and mine.

I think the change was driven by fear. The fear is based on a belief that naked equals sex, and sex is bad, and that naked is therefore bad. I believe that many unhealthy behaviors result from this flawed reasoning, ranging from eating disorders to sexual abuse. The repression of natural things encourages them to manifest sideways.

I now live in Minneapolis, where we do ourselves a great injustice by criminalizing nakedness and by reinforcing a culture of fear of the body. Instead we should embrace a culture of appreciation of the body. Such a culture would celebrate who we are, fostering thinking like Walt Whitman's: "I sing the body electric .... That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect." The potential of such a culture exhilarates me.

Fortunately, signs of appreciation, exceptions to the fear, already exist. I frequently spy naked bodies downtown: on sidewalks in front of office buildings, churches, restaurants and government buildings. These bodies are bronze; they are not breathing, but are nonetheless naked. Neither the Walker Art Center nor the park board deems it necessary to warn visitors entering the Sculpture Garden that a naked young woman is standing there on a pedestal. Such art represents a chink in the culture of fear that may make room for a greater opening.

Minneapolis allows for public nakedness, if it is art. Park board ordinance allows for nudity in the parks as a part of artistic performances. But why allow nudity only for artists? Why not for everyone?

We can create clothing-optional beaches, spaces in our community for people to be naked in the sun and the water. There we can "go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked," following Whitman's lead — as naked as our hearts and the weather allow.

"Nakedness itself is not immodest," wrote Pope John Paul II, while still a Polish cardinal. "Immodesty is present only when nakedness plays a negative role with regard to the value of the person."

What about people who don't want to encounter nudity? They could avoid clothing-optional beaches. We already create public and park spaces for a variety of uses, some of which exclude nonusers of those spaces. I do not stroll on public golf courses.

In Western art, nudity represents freedom. Locally, perhaps nudity in art can open a path to greater freedom for everyone who would choose to swim or sunbathe naked, as part of a culture that appreciates rather than fears the body.

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