While the battle to keep Denny Blaine nude is playing out in court, members of the queer and nudist communities that love and utilize the park have continued to visit the popular beach this summer.
In a city where developers and wealthy NIMBYs seem to be nearly constantly scheming to carve up public space for private gain, revolutionary energy is also bubbling up at Denny Blaine in the form of puppets, nudity, and unapologetic queer defiance.
This weekend, guerrilla performances transformed the lakeside park into a stage for radical satire, bodily liberation, and a middle finger to privatization. The shows were part absurdist comedy, part scathing political critique, and directed their ire at figures like Stuart Sloan, the wealthy neighbor who has spent years trying to sanitize Denny Blaine, and Mayor Bruce Harrell’s laughably inept attempts to placate the NIMBYs.
One performance swung between nostalgia for freer times and biting commentary on whose bodies get to take up space. “These are my boobies!” declared an actor, fully nude except for a top hat. It was cheeky but the message hit home. Freedom has some rough edges — and the battle isn’t done.
CHS reported here on the latest around the park east of Capitol Hill on the shores of Lake Washington as the city has proposed a plan to create a “nude zone” within the park to win a compromise with a neighbor group suing to either bring an end to nudity and reports of illegal sex and drug use at the park — or shut it down.
Group Friends of Denny Blaine that has been working on community solutions to the issues around the park, its place in queer and nude culture, and the wealthy surrounding neighborhood had proposed a plan that focused on park rangers and new signs to keep Denny Blaine open — and nude.
But the city is now focused on a plan that would split Denny Blaine into zones. “To address Plaintiff’s concern that nudity should only be permitted in particular areas of the Park, the City’s Plan limits nudity to a specified area, with a visual barrier separating that area from the remainder of the Park,” the court-filed plan reads. “The City has selected the portions of the Park that will be clothing optional based on the Park’s geographical terrain and the historical use of the park.”
This weekend, the plays and puppet shows echoed many of the absurd elements about the legal fight pitting wealthy neighbors against the park’s LGBTQ and nudist history.
The Wandering Can offered a melancholy allegory for isolation in a bottle-dominated world. Mr. Green Juice Can, a lone outsider, drifts through bars, the light rail, and QFC, searching for kinship in a city too obsessed with its own reflection to notice. The heartbreaking piece mirrored the park’s history as a refuge for those pushed to the margins.
The park’s layered history also took center stage in a searing puppet show tracing its origins on stolen Indigenous land to its modern-day status as a queer haven. The performance skewered colonial profiteers like Charles Denny and current elites like Sloan and Harrell, who are now trying to push out nude bathers by installing a playground.
“Fuck Stuart Sloan!” echoed through the park as puppet of the mysterious Sloan (played by Rich Uncle Pennybags) met a honey bucket genie, where his three wishes: to erase park goers, unleash rats, and crush hope, all spectacularly backfired. Each scene was backed by banners displaying leaked texts between Sloan and Harrell, in which they pathologized nudity as “disgusting” while scheming to abate the park’s unrestrained joy.
Hope Freije, co-organizer, framed the event as both celebration and resistance: “We don’t need permission from the city to be naked,” Freije said. “Queer people, trans people, need a place to be, because it’s not safe for us everywhere.”
The day’s players — many nude or mostly — were in the spirit. And say they always will be.
“The courts can say what they want, because fuck it, we’re getting naked,” declared co-organizer Jackie Donovan.
As the shadows grew longer across Lake Washington, the message was clear: Denny Blaine isn’t just a park, it is a living stage for liberation. And if the rich and the city try to fence it off, they will likely find themselves countered by artists, puppets, and a whole lot of naked defiance.
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Save our park from billionaires!
save the entire world from them.
Inclusiveness and the concept of “public space” only counts for the cool kids on campus. Exposing children to your ugly naked ass strutting around likely would get CPS called on the parents. Yet this is what you think should be allowed in the public park you have carved out for your special community? Close the park. Keep it closed for three or four years. Everyone loses. Thanks.
Dont bring your kids to nudist beaches if you dont like nudity and dont want them exposed
I find children disgusting (and unsanitary in water) but don’t go to the multiple beaches on the same side of Lake Washington that are teeming with kids and expect the parents to leave to accommodate my personal preferences or comfort levels. If you find nude beaches gross, then you can literally walk around the corner to the non-nude beaches and enjoy yourself. And no one is barring you from getting over yourself and swimming at Denny Blaine if you choose to do so, so cut it out with that conservative weaponization of “inclusivity,” when you clearly have no idea what it means. Your CPS straw man argument is just dumb.
what are you talking about? you are literally not making any sense.
Newsflash: kids can actually look at naked people and be 100% fine. Not that any kids ever go here anyways. There are literally so many other parks for them to be at.
This is such a joke of a post. Take your kids somewhere else!
My wife and I bring our children to nude beaches all the time, including this one at Denny Blaine. Generally speaking, nude beaches are safer for my kids than beaches where everyone is in a swimsuit. There are a lost less creepy people at nude beaches than at textile beaches; people at nude beaches tend to police themselves and make it safer for people to come to, especially for children.
I sure hope that Denny Blaine remains a nude beach. We make sure that we go several times a summer and if it no longer is a nude beach we won’t be coming to Seattle as much anymore (we now live in Portland, which is blessed by at least three nude beaches within 40 minutes from town).
P.S. There is nothing illegal about us taking our children to nude beaches. CPS would never be called on us. And there is nothing that prudes like you can ever do about it!
This is a “you” problem; nudity is legal everywhere in Seattle.
Except it is not, go read the Judge’s opinion.
If you want change in the RCW, you need to make that happen at the state level.
Just because you find naked bodies fearsome doesn’t make them inherently bad…? But if you don’t want your kids around nudity, you have the ability to go to literally any other park in the city. This is such a weird argument. “Everyone loses” in this context are words you only really ever hear from losers. (That said, I know you have your talking points; the “Denny Blaine for All” NIMBYs who really want Denny Blaine to just be for *them* are extremely easy to spot online, y’all arent as sneaky as you think you are.)
you mean you should have the right to bully people from spaces.
The excuses are made up out of whole cloth. It’s clear who and what you are.
Aren’t we on the cusp of a complete loss of human rights via AI? Isn’t the climate tipping (tipped?) beyond the point of no return? I have to wonder if the Right To Share Your Balls In A Safe Space, among other really-important-to-Capitol-Hill issues, don’t steal the energy from things that are going to quickly make these things irrelevant. I get it, guys, but jesus fuck if you couldn’t spend your kingy/queeny time on something more pressing.
You can do multiple things at once
“Save your powder for the big fights” and these same people haven’t found a big fight to throw themselves into yet and won’t.
only one stealing energy here is you kanga. this is an important issue for a lot of people here. and by the way, the things you mention are just larger versions of “rich people getting whatever they want” so it’s all the same fight, just different venues and scale.
You can literally say this even more so for the people they’re protesting. Why are people so concerned with banning nudity from this park instead of all the issues you listed? This protest is a reaction to the first actors that started this.
Dude. What? People who care about a community space got together to celebrate & advocate for that space. What on earth does any of that have to do with climate change or AI? If anything, I’d say supporting and sustaining communities & the spaces they use is a fantastic way to combat growing technology fears–because when people are hanging out & swimming & doing puppet shows and the like, they’re connecting on a human level & not wasting precious electricity to do it.
I wanted to be there, but I was working.
A sea of some of the pastiest mofo’s in the continental US.
not everyone is so ashamed of their body that they feel the need to crawl into a tanning bed make it acceptable for public-rando consumption before receiving the sunlight that is the birthright of all
I dunno, when I saw their comment I chuckled; I don’t think they were advocating for bodily shame, just making a funny observation.
This is obviously AI, or at least AI enhanced. The over the top rhetoric is a classic hallmark of getting out what the operator wanted with the prompt.
uh, what? this is conspiracy theory thinking. you need to question the thought process that led you to this.
The last paragraph is 100% AI generated, perhaps human edited. It’s easy to spot.
Some people recently seem to believe that any sort of creative writing at all is a sign of AI, as though human beings only ever write in a straightforward factual way. To me this “it’s obviously AI!!!” reaction functions as a sign that people don’t read broadly enough.
I didn’t think it was AI, but the tone of this writing definitely caught my attention. Not sure who this writer is, but I’d hate to see this blog turn into The Stranger, with its snarky, entitled and exclusionary tone.
Can you be more specific? I’ve read a lot of crappy AI writing but this didn’t raise a single red flag for me; they used a lot of colorful language but that just served to grab readers, when ChatGPT tries to do the same thing it is pretty cringeworthy.
Being against nudity is such a silly American thing. Do people realize that nudity is common and not sexualized in other parts of the world? Our bodies should be allowed to exist in peace at the beach. Sitting nude peacefully at a beach is not scandalous. We all have bodies.
Americans are silly people about this, it’s true!
My wife and I just got back from the Balkans. We spent a lot of time at nude beaches, in both Belgrade, Serbia and all along the coast of Croatia. We took our two kids. There were nude beaches and nudist resorts all over Croatia and they were filled with families. No big deal!
Our kids are going to grow up with positive attitudes about their bodies. They will surely be healthier than the average American.
pervert deviant narcissists.
republicans?
Eh, just the Denny Blaine “for All” losers…I doubt they’re all republicans, they just have the same vibe because they’re all rich and have nothing better to do than make life worse for people in already-marginalized communities.
Every time a story about Denny Blaine comes up on here, they flock to the comments. It’s pretty transparent.
control-addicts jonesing for their fix…
it’s a very expensive, self-alienating lifestyle that pushes them to the margins of the community (the very water’s edge, they fear liberated people to intensely)
Is this an article or editorial? Muh scheming developers!. Muh revolutionary energy! Muh unapologetic queerness! Emotional language, much?
And this is from someone who couldn’t care less about the park. I have no dog in this fight.
We need dog parks!
If Denny Blaine could be both a nudist park and an off-leash park?
That would drive more support.
There should be reporting of Fred Hutch Cancer Center renaming its buildings after Stuart Sloan. This is happening now. Not a great branding choice when you treat and employ members of the queer community.