ETHICS:
Breaching Oka etiquette

In which an amateur photojournalist is assaulted by an enraged naturist mob

by CHRIS BARRY

Not so long ago I got a call from an American newspaper asking if I would be interested in writing a report for their Travel section on the state of nudism here in the Montreal area. Sure, no problem, I figured, given that outside of the nude swim deal they do at UQÀM every Saturday night and the odd private naturist club/campground on the outskirts of the city, the only consistently reliable place for public ass-baring in this part of world is at Oka Beach.

It sounded like the perfect job for me; no real research involved, I could bang out a crucially important story of this magnitude in, oh, maybe an hour and a half, and I was getting paid in dem big beautiful Yankee dollars.

“I’m your man,” I told my new boss, “I’ll have this sure-to-be-Pulitzer-Prize-winning fucker on your desk in less than a week,” and promptly got to work writing a bunch of typically irrelevant nonsense on big, bronzed, bouncing bazoombas at Oka, how to find the place and a short sidebar on nude beach etiquette. Not that I knew anything about what was considered acceptable behaviour on a nude beach, but I could take a reasonable guess that ogling 14-year-old female nudists while sporting a full-on erection might be frowned upon. Besides, since when have “journalists” actually been required to know what they’re writing about? What was there to know in the first place? Certainly I could grasp the proper decorum by intuition alone, I reasoned.

The reluctant photographer

But upon submitting my journalistic masterpiece a few days later, I soon learned that such intuition could not be ascribed to my new American masters. “Great story, Chris, really insightful,” came the word back from the obvious liar doubling as my editor at said publication, “except we’re really going to need a photo to accompany the article, which I think we’re going to run a week earlier than originally planned, so, uh, you’re going to have to get up to Oka Beach right away this afternoon and furnish us with a couple of pictures. Otherwise, well, you know, we won’t be able to run it, and, uh, as I assume I’ve already told you, we only pay our contributors on publication. But look, don’t worry, Chris, we’re prepared to throw you an extra $50 for your effort—and that’s American dollars, so it should actually mean something to you up there in Canada.”

So off like an obedient little pup I went, hating life and with trusty 50mm Pentax K1000 in hand, all the way out to Oka fuckin’ Provincial Park to fulfill my journalistic duty.

As it turned out, ’twas a glorious hot summer afternoon in early July, as they say, and after a relatively quick initial exploration of the area, I found the clothing-optional section of the beach and discreetly set up camp far back from the lakeshore, vaguely hidden among the trees in a rather thinly populated spot. Too considerate—or perhaps modest—to whip out the monster and risk intimidating all the other males on the beach by the pristine majesty of my manhood, I sat back in my 15-year-old ripped-up tan Speedo and started scouring my surroundings for photo ops.

Sand, sun and drooping genitals

About 30 feet to the left of me was a young, relatively attractive blond chick with a well-hung dude who I assumed must have been her boyfriend. To my right and front were the predictable swarms of older, beer-bellied guys, the odd matronly middle-aged female with husband and/or family in tow and a half-dozen or so saggy-balled elderly dudes incessantly walking up and down the shoreline like lunatics, merrily swinging their pointy dog penises around in the glorious hot summer breeze.

Now honestly, all I wanted to do was snap some innocuous photo of some distant anonymous bare ass against the backdrop of Lake of Two Mountains and get the hell out of there. Baking under the sun is not something I’m terribly fond of, and you can go ahead and call me crazy, but neither was I eager to capture any covert wide-open beaver shots of suntanning grandmoms or anything else along those lines. I could happily leave this sort of activity to the photographers who regularly post their stuff on various voyeur Web sites, and appreciate these delectable images from a distance via the safety of my computer.

It struck me that the most professional way to deal with the task at hand was to simply work up the guts, approach the younger couple to my left and politely ask them if they wouldn’t mind taking a couple of seconds to model for me. But I just couldn’t do it. I mean, what was I going to say to them? ”Hi, can I take a photo of your delicious tits and his big cock for this newspaper story I’ve just written?” I don’t think so.

Naked rage

So I decided to take the coward’s way out and, as discreetly as possible, just try to shoot the first few bare asses that came my way. Which is what I did, except perhaps not as discreetly as I had hoped, because within moments of finishing my first and only role of film I spotted what appeared to be a six-strong mob of angry male nudists rushing over the sand in my direction.

Now one might be inclined to believe that, outside of a jailhouse shower room, the sight of six big naked men charging at you with their dicks bobbing up and down is probably more comical than intimidating. But I can now say, with 100 per cent certainty, that it is not. The next thing I knew I was surrounded, dicks and arms flailing about while this beer-bellied nudist vigilante started grabbing for my camera, pushing and kicking me, with one guy, in classic Charles Atlas, bully-of-the-beach tradition, even trying to kick sand in my face—as though this were the ultimate insult.

“You think you can come here and take pictures so you and your friends can jerk off to us on the Internet?” one violent and obviously delusional fat guy yelled at me in French, as a growing crowd of bloodthirsty nudists started to assemble in anticipation of my lynching. “Eh, you piece of shit,” croaked another while lunging unsuccessfully for my camera.

“No, no, you don’t understand,” I pleaded to the sand-crusted uncircumcised penis now only inches from my face as I tried to get up from my towel amidst yet another avalanche of blows. “I’m a journalist here on assignment for an American newspaper,” no doubt sounding very much like a desperate and frightened James Woods in the movie Salvador. “Honest, there’s absolutely nothing salacious about the pictures I just took. No faces. I’m serious, these are for a family newspaper, man!”

But even after showing them my oh-so-impressive press credentials the mob was having nothing of it. A few females started taunting me about my admittedly ridiculous Speedo, and how come I wasn’t man enough to take it off. Before I could respond with an appropriately sharp witticism, somebody finally wrestled my camera away from me, ripped out the film, and threw my camera back down hard in the sand. “You want to take pictures? Then you come and ask first,” one of the mob yelled at me.

“Okay, understood. Great. Will somebody let me take their photo then?” I asked around hopefully, vainly trying to regain my composure and an iota of dignity. “You see, I won’t get paid unless I deliver a photo to this big unreasonable editor I have in the States and, uh, you’ve got to understand, I didn’t want to be here in the first place and…”

“Maybe you should just get the fuck off this beach before you really get hurt,” the naked brute who broke my camera interrupted, egged on by the approving cheers of the now 40 or so nudists assembled at the scene.

Retreat, tail between legs

Recognizing when to admit defeat and call it a day, I hurriedly packed up my things, and, while my tormentors continued to taunt me in the distance, started making my way out of the park—traumatized, humiliated, feeling sorry for myself, but self-righteous as hell.

After all, as much as I genuinely sympathize with people who only want to frolic on the beach in the nude without having their images popping up all over the Net, Oka Beach is in a provincial park, and as such, is a public place. And if you’re going to bare your booty in a public place, and somebody wants to photograph it, then unless they intend on publishing said photo with your likeness being clearly identifiable, well, there ain’t too much you can legally do about it. It’s just not the same deal as if it were in your backyard or at a private nudist club—where I’m still willing to hazard a guess that physically assaulting somebody for breaking a “no photos” regulation might be considered somewhat illegal as well.

But rest assured, should I ever be forced into a gig like this again, which I somehow strongly doubt is ever gonna happen, you’d best believe I ain’t going nowhere near that beach with a camera unless I’ve got the rough and ready gang from Reporters Without Borders in tow. Consider my lesson learned.

Oh, and for the record, when I finally got back home and called my editor to tell her what had happened, she informed me that it wasn’t going to be a problem, they had decided in the interim that it would be more prudent to run an illustration with my story anyway. Wonderful.