Lee Baxandall

Lee R. Baxandall is an American writer, editor and critic. He is a retired leader of the naturist movement. He is also a translator and post-marxist.

Career

Baxandall began his naturist activism in the 1960s, when he and his family visited Cape Cod National Seashore to skinnydip.

In 1974 he travelled to the West Coast of the USA to meet founders of the Free Beach movement there: Eugene Callen and Cec Cinder. This became Beachfront USA. Baxandall began to publish a Free Beaches magazine documenting the activities of the free-beach movement. Around 1976, he moved his operation to Oshkosh, Wisconsin, USA. There, using the family's publishing business, he created the Free Beaches Documentation Center.

He began collecting data from all over the world on nude beaches and published "Lee Baxandall's World Guide to Nude Recreation", a color guidebook locating places to go nude all over the world, which Baxandall succeeded in getting distributed through major book channels.

Baxandall commissioned Edin and Ethel Valez to produce a series of videos ("World of Skinnydipping", etc.) depicting the naturist lifestyle and debunking myths surrounding nude recreation.

Baxandall founded The Naturist Society (TNS) and was the first editor of its magazine, "Nude & Natural" (N) (originally titled "Clothed with the Sun"). He founded the organization as a loosely structured matrix of Special Interest Groups (SIGS) that welcome everyone from nude bikers to gay and lesbian and transgendered naturists to nude massagers and everyone in between. This was in contrast to the conservative American Association for Nude Recreation.

He was one of the originators, along with Eugene Callen, of National Nude Weekend and later National Nude Week in the USA. He used this to generate media and public attention to the naturist movement as a whole. He helped organize and sponsor the first nationwide and later regional annual Naturist Gatherings with seminars and nude fun for everyone.

He founded and is still a member of the American Naturist Action Committee, the primary group responsible for early warning and defense against those who would legislate naturists out of existence in the USA. He was the first to retain the services of a professional lobbyist to get the movement's viewpoint heard in US state and federal legislatures.

He founded the [http://www.nef.oshkosh.net/ Naturist Education Foundation] devoted to: improving the awareness of naturism and body acceptance among both naturists and non-naturists and achieving an understanding and acceptance of naturists and their activities throughout North America.

Lee Baxandall has been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and has retired from public life.

Quotes

*"When the culture into which we are born strays too far from nature’s laws, we suffer; a ‘naturalization’ is in order."
*"Body Acceptance is the idea, Nude Recreation is the way." Popular motto of The Naturist Society
*"Every civilized nation has nude beaches. That's a mark of a civilized nation." from video: "The Beginner's Guide to Skinny Dipping". The Naturist Society. Fast Forward Images, Inc. 1991.

Publications

Naturism

*"World Guide to Nude Beaches & Recreation" (1980) ISBN 0-517-54983-2
*"International Guide to Nude Beaches and Recreation" (1981) ISBN 0-88373-107-X
*"World Guide to Nude Beaches & Resorts" (1995) ISBN 0-934106-20-7
*"Lee Baxandall's World Guide to Nude Beaches & Resorts: New for the '90s" (1997) ISBN 0-934106-21-5

Other

*Marx and Engels on Literature and Art (1973) Ed. by L.B., Stefan Morawski ISBN 0-914386-01-8 ISBN 0-914386-02-6
*Radical Perspectives in the Arts (1973) Ed. by L.B. ISBN 0-14-021423-2
*Fur, logs, and human lives: The great Oshkosh woodworker strike of 1898 (1976) ASIN B0006WJCII
*Marxism and Aesthetics: A Selective Annotated Bibliography (1978) ed. by L.B. ISBN 0-391-00298-8
*The Mother (1989) by Bertolt Brecht, tran. Lee Baxandall ISBN 0-8021-3160-3

ee also

*Clothes free organizations
*List of public outdoor clothes free places
*Social nudity
*Nude & Natural
*Public nudity
*Skinny dipping
*The Naturist Society
*Nikki Craft

External links

* [http://www.tallahasseenaturally.org/newsletters/16_4.html Lee Baxandall Enters the Nudist Hall of Fame]
* [http://naturisteducation.org/baxandall_bridge/ Lee R. Baxandall Bridge]
* [http://www.naturistsociety.com/resources/history.html The Naturist Society: A Brief History]
* [http://www.nybooks.com/authors/3999 Two book Reviews of L.B.] - Brecht in Plastic, Ibsen's Secret