By ZEKE BARLOW
Scripps Howard News Service
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Wearing a thong bikini bottom and loose T-shirt over her deeply tanned body, Sonya Robinson felt overdressed.
If the 59-year-old Ventura woman had had her way, she'd be sunbathing au naturel on Bates Beach, working on the perfect tan she's been seeking since first shedding her clothes in the name of nudity almost 20 years ago.
Over the years, Robinson spent countless hours on this beach in Carpinteria, playing volleyball, basking in the sun, making friends, all while wearing nothing but her warm smile.
But about seven years ago, when local residents started complaining about the hundreds of nudists who flocked to the beach, along with the gawkers and other nefarious characters who came to watch, police starting cracking down on those who stripped down. Soon, the nude beach that for years had slipped under the radar of officials was gone.
Now, a "Nudity prohibited" sign juts from the cliff-side path leading to the long, narrow beach, an ominous warning for those who dare to try to embrace the beach's past.
Robinson and her fellow nudists want to change all that.
On a recent Saturday, Robinson and about half-dozen other members of the Southern California Naturist Association sunbathed clothed while flying a banner for their group to raise awareness for their cause.
They want a little stretch of beach to call their own, a designated place where they can be free of laws and clothing and be naked as the day they were born.
"We don't want the whole beach, just a portion," said Robinson, who retired from the Ventura County school system. Scores of members of the group, with a roster of about 120, are from Ventura County.
Naturist-association members have been on a campaign to spend $2 bills in Carpinteria to show how much money a nude beach could pump into the community. They plan to meet with local officials to persuade them to give a one-year furlough from Santa Barbara County's no-nudity law, to prove that a nude beach can exist without the dubious characters that can sometimes come with it.
But Lt. Darin Fotheringham, who has worked on the Bates Beach issue for years, said that's highly unlikely. It isn't necessarily because of the nudity itself but the people a whole beach of bare skin attracts, he said.
"Are they themselves causing a bunch of criminal acts? No," he said of the handful of nudists trying to take back the beach, but "there would still be problems, because it is all of the other activity that the public nudity brought."
In Bates Beach's heyday in the 1980s and '90s, hundreds of nudists would bask on the beach, but when the Internet exploded in the late '90s, word of Bates Beach spread beyond the relatively small group of recreational nudists.
The beach was posted online as a place to cruise for sex. People would stand on the cliffs with binoculars and cameras eyeing the nudists below. Residents complained of people having sex in the bushes and other inappropriate behaviors.
"It became populated by people who were no longer interested in people sunbathing as much as other activities," said Steve Halsted, a member of the Rincon Point Homeowner's Association, a cluster of multimillion-dollar homes south of the beach. "A few bad instances ruined it for the people who were just sunbathing."
After a slew of complaints, Fotheringham led an operation that resulted in a series of tickets and beachgoers putting their clothes back on. Even though the occasional nudist would strip down sometimes with a friend as a lookout, the nudists largely left.
Naturist-association members agree that things got out of hand, but say this time will be different. They say they will self-patrol the beach, reminding people of nude-beach etiquette (no photos, no staring, no unwanted advances) and keeping undesirable folks at bay.
After the crackdown at Bates Beach and fearing that the same thing could happen to the famed Black's Beach in San Diego, Lloyd Johnson started the Black's Beach Bares, a group of nudists working to keep the beach from being overrun by undesirables and open to nudists.
The naturist-association folks said they would like to try to emulate what was done at Black's Beach, but the San Diego beach involves different circumstances. Black's is on a state beach, where the "Cahill policy" takes effect, a law interpreted differently by different groups. The policy basically says a person must complain about someone's nudity and the person must be given a warning first. Black's Beach is also relatively remote and the main access is a primitive trail down a 300-foot cliff.
Bates Beach is on Santa Barbara County and Carpinteria city property, and laws there prohibit public nudity. Access is down an easy path that starts at a large parking lot.
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