Easy Entry To Social Nudity

Promoting Nudity Through Charitable Fundraiser

Thomas Francine, organizer of Skinny Dip Day. (Tom Caldwell Photo)

Thomas Francine’s entry point into social nudism was skinny-dipping during the 2009 Rainbow Family Gathering in New Mexico.

The Rainbow Family of Living Light Gathering is an event taking place in national forests across the country, providing a place for a loose-knit group of people from the United States and other countries to come together and pray for world peace. The first gathering took place near Strawberry Lake on the Arapaho National Forest in 1972. Last year, the gathering took place in New Hampshire and, this year, in California.

Interviewed during the Moon Groove Music and Art Festival in Mohnton, Pennsylvania, Thomas recalled of his experience in 2009, “I was very self-conscious at this time of my life. From being a kid through my young adulthood, I was very, very self-conscious, … so I was trying to force myself out of my comfort zone.”

When Thomas saw people jumping into a stream, naked, he was too scared to join them at first.

“A couple of days went by, and I said, ‘I’m going to do it. I have to do stuff like this,’” he said. “I did it, and then one minute later, I was like, ‘Why was I so scared of this? Oh, this is great!’ Like, no one’s looking at me weird. We’re having a nice conversation, people are just having fun, and, yeah, just like we actually have clothes on pretty much, except I don’t have a feeling of shame. So, yeah, so that was my first step into it.”

Today, Thomas is responsible for Skinny Dip Day, a fundraising event that this year took place simultaneously at 15 locations around the world. Scheduled each year on the second Saturday of July, it raises money for the Fistula Foundation, a nonprofit that provides surgical intervention for women with obstetric fistula, a devastating childbirth injury that leaves women incontinent, humiliated, and often shunned by their communities. Surgery is the only cure, and the Fistula Foundation has stepped forward to provide that cure for women who otherwise could not afford it.

“They build up local health infrastructure in dozens of countries around the world that have extreme poverty and horrible health care,” he explained. “They put up outreach programs, find women with this condition, and they build up local hospitals that already exist, so they have better capacity and treatment conditions. And it’s a very simple cure. It only costs about $619 to cure a woman, and so that’s why it’s such a high-impact charity, because it costs such a small amount of money to totally transform someone’s life from horrible body shame to being back in the community and having the sense of confidence in your body.”

This year’s official Skinny Dip Day took place at several locations in California as well as New Jersey, Indiana, Connecticut, Michigan, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas, with other locations in South Africa and the United Kingdom. Altogether, they raised $10,722 for the cause — a success story that led to several newspaper articles about the event.