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REVIEW TNS & the INF In The History Of Naturism

Lee Baxandall

THIS MAGNIFICENT WORK by the dedicated, hardworking, unpaid INF President Karl Dreßen-Dressen, in English-is by far the most comprehensive chronicle history of worldwide Naturism ever attempted. He spans from the first FKK theorist, Richard Ungewitter, to the Federation's activities of early 1996. From Australia to Moscow to Astrakhan, and from Black's Beach to Beau Valley to Finland. From Erik Holm to Erkki Husu to Alan McCombe, and not overlooking the Americans, like Bob Walker, Jim Hadkey, Bev Price, Fred Bischoff, Hap Hathaway and Roland Senecal: an immense roll-call of contributors to modern body acceptance.

Dressen maintains an admirable degree of balance and neutrality in his telling. It has to be difficult. The INF adventure to coordinate competing and uneven national interests has been idealistic, fractious, and ill-funded by the national federations of landed clubs. But you'd hardly notice this in the author's judicious summaries.

The 'great' European national blocs within INF do, however, gain inordinate attention as compared with more recent and scanted pioneers in Greece, Brazil, Argentina, Russia, Yugoslavia, Canada and elsewhere.

Dressen is prudent about extending recognition to free beach or "wild" nudity. He also lends excessive credit to traditional ('legal', i.e., landed club) federations, where he does acknowledge public-lands advances.

In this vein a great many heroic free-beach pioneers go unrecognized, or are marginalized. To mention a very few: - Eugene Callen, BeachFront founder in Los Angeles, or Jefferson Poland, who led the first U.S. "nude wade-in" at a San Francisco beach; Jean Rocquemont, founder in Guadeloupe of legal nude beaches for the Western hemisphere; Françine Nenon, who strategized and compiled the first French nude beach guide, long before the federation of clubs (FFN) recognized the 'illegal' beaches; and Angelos Mimikopoulos, whose fine archives and whose organizing and publishing for Greek and East European Naturism have been all but ignored by INF.

This caveat: Few readers will be quite certain about overlooked persons or events, as there's no index. Hopefully a name index can still be compiled and supplied to purchasers and libraries.

TNS Is Well Noted

Indeed, this History of Naturism devotes more space to illustrating our World Guide to Nude Beaches & Resorts and Nude & Natural than it does to the publications of any other single organization whether or not a part of the INF.

Pages 145, 146, 165, 166 and 203 of the History are wholly devoted to reproduction of numerous World Guide photos.

Amply discussed and illustrated.are the Nude Recreation Weekend conceived by the nascent TNS in 1976 (pp. 161, 182), and for the last decade shared by TNS with AANR; The Naturist Society's international conferences held at Antiparos (p. 215) and Belezy (pp. 230, 239) which were informally supported by the INF; and the TNS magazine (pp. 186, 193, 230, 236, 237, 258, 261).

The INF World Guide

First, some comparisons. This 23rd INF edition makes some changes. There's an added, fourth language, Dutch, honoring the extraordinary per-capita participation of the Netherlands in organized Naturism. (The Netherlands is also where the INF guide is edited and printed.)

This edition has also gone up one type size while adding a fourth language. It's also 188 pages shorter than the previous, more unwieldy edition. The space is gained with a loss of informational value. All text is eliminated from listings except for the name, address and phone number of each destination, amplified by appropriate but opaque symbols.

With the verbal descriptions omitted, there is overwhelming reliance on these symbols to communicate the site features. Many North American buyers in particular find the approach is quite user-unfriendly and repellent to their search.

Writing in the INF Bulletin Karl Dressen has acknowledged this problem: "So many complain about missing or incomplete information." Dressen holds out no hope the problem will be remedied in the next INF edition.

The mediocre photos do not offer (to be kind) a compensatory reason to purchase this guide.

Numerous schematic area maps do help to approximately locate the vicinity of a site, although they're still small and mostly devoid of topographical features and route numbers.

This is bare-bones information with much of the marrow gone, compared with, say, AANR's descriptive guide pages.

Its Scope Falls Short

But quantity of raw data doesn't necessarily yield an advantage. The INF effort falls short of the claim or promise in several crucial matters:

- Nude beach listings in the INF approach are, for every country, useless. No directions, descriptions or evaluations are given. These are token, cryptic names only. Notwithstanding, the free beaches-in both senses-are almost always the uninitiated public's first experience of Naturist benefits.

- The club, resort and association listings leave a few quite enormous gaps-"black holes" in the INF galaxy picture of the universe. How can this be allowed?

Similarly to AANR in the U.S, the INF is, at bottom, a trade promotional organization of many but not all, and not necessarily the best, resorts, clubs, magazines and large national associations. Only entities that are allowed or selected to join can appear and be acknowledged in their guides.

To be specific, the editor of the INF guide is not at liberty to list clubs, resorts, or associations that aren't dues-paying INF affiliates-for whatever their several reasons, and however popular and/or excellent these venues are.

Where's Cap d'Agde?

Yet it is not listed by INF or described in any way. Rather, all you'll find among the dozens of color ad pages and 464 additional black-and-white pages of club and resort listings, is the Cap d'Agde's campground (on p. 193, bottom-third). Why is this? Because the campground CHM Oltra is affiliated with the French Naturist Federation, sells its card, demands the INF certification for admission, and thereby enhances the income of INF and FFN. The other, nonconforming 25,000+ nude visitors to Agde on any given Summer day, and these are the great majority, simply aren't enjoying "world Naturism" as the INF defines the geo-reality of its severely compromised listings. If they're not paying the dues, they don't exist! Go figure.

In many respects, of course, INF (as AANR, FFN, and 30 other national franchises of INF) are doing the best they can with intelligence and idealistic intentions. Just don't expect what isn't offered: a disinterested survey of world nude recreation.

- A further problem exists for INF guide users: The computer age hadn't dawned on the INF when this edition was completed on Sept. 1 1995. There seems to be not a single e-mail or Web address printed, even in the ads, and even Fax addresses are rarely provided. Our own World Guide 4th edition broke the cyber-ice in 1995, detailing electronic access to the Internet and Web on pages 17-19.

The international trade association fills a substantial need with its bi-annual compilation. The reader must however be clear that neither completeness nor quality ratings lie within the INF's parameters, its mandate, or indeed, its present capacity.

In sum? World naturism is still struggling with difficulty after its first hundred years. It can't as yet become what it radically wants.

It can only manage what we conservatively can reach for.

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