BUFFY
Camping, au Naturale
INSIDE LOUISIANA’S ONLY CLOTHING-OPTIONAL CAMPGROUND AND RESORT
Story by Chris Turner-Neal • Illustration by Burton Durand
I
t was ten in the morning, and I was riding backward on a golf cart past a group of naked men. I hadn’t won a prize or lost a bet: I was on a tour of Indian Hills Nudist Park in Slidell, Louisiana’s only clothing-optional campground and resort. The site’s operator Tim Kraemer was whizzing us along the campground’s roads, waving at residents and giving me a quick rundown of the property’s history. It’s a family business. Founder, Gottlieb Kogel, opened it in 1971, later bequeathing it to friend and employee Hilda Kraemer, who ran it with her husband Selves until their recent retirement, in which she bequeathed management responsibilities to her children Stephanie Lasserre and Tim. The siblings didn’t know their parents ran a clothing-optional resort until they were young adults. Relatively complex legal arrangements protect both the Kraemers’ and the local government’s interests: a long lease ex58
pressly protecting operation as a nudist resort also requires a Kraemer or heir retain the land. The Kraemers have, through responsible stewardship, built up a reservoir of trust; it’s easy to imagine a Slidell power-that-is saying something like “I’m not having any naked people I don’t know move in up the road.” Indian Hills hosts a small enclave of permanent residents and also offers rental cabins, campsites, RV spots, and day use. They know it’s funny—one of the rental cabins is called “No Tan Lines,” and signs on the private cabins make heavy use of bear/bare puns. A pool area and kitchen/activities center anchor the site, which also offers a nature trail and three stocked ponds. (One of them is watched over by a concrete menagerie of giraffes and gorillas—whimsical décor former cabin tenants or guests balked at transporting when they moved away.) An events calendar offers yoga, painting, karaoke, and other activities throughout the
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week, with theme weekends popping up more or less monthly—the particularly confident can even participate in a crawfish boil competition. Looking to the future, Kraemer hopes to further promote the idea of nudity as an activity, not necessarily as a lifestyle—plenty of people might welcome the opportunity to step out of their routine and their drawers, but don’t realize that a day or evening jaunt is possible. One of the classic sitcom setups about nudism: is it rude to show up clothed? Of course not. We live in a world that has embraced the trouser and the blouse, and the vast majority of Indian Hills is clothing-optional so people may be as (un)dressed as weather and comfort permit. Exceptions are the clothing-necessary office and front of the property (to avoid startling the delivery people) and the pool area, where nudity is required to avoid an awkward dynamic—you can imagine how people might feel more comfortable with everyone in the same boat.
The stereotype of the nudist as an older, probably-European man reflects certain truths: social nudity is more popular in Europe (which sent its Puritans to this continent), and while hanging out outside naked is older than civilization and indeed the human species itself, the practice did see an expansion in the ostensibly freewheeling 1960s and ‘70s. Kraemer noted that the older nudist cliché is buoyed by the fact that retirees simply have more time to engage in their hobbies. On the March Saturday I went, the age range skewed a little older, but there were people of all ages; the clientele was largely, but not monolithically, white nor was it particularly male. In modern-day America, nudity is often solely associated with sexual activity; if you search “nudism” online—say to research an article you’re writing—you find many more giggling clickbait articles than actual sources on the history of social nudity as a cultural phenomenon. Indian Hills is not unaf-
