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blaugust: dispatch from seattle's queer nude beach

hello and salutations. this past weekend my gf and i plus our extended polycule & friendgroup all took a trip out to denny blaine, seattle's historic queer nude beach. this was the third time i've been there (first time in 2025 though) and it's always such a wonderful and life-affirming experience. which makes it all the more nerve-racking that a not insignificant number of powerful people in this city want to see the beach closed for good, or at the very least see nudity banned on the waterfront.

this despite the fact that nudity isn't illegal in seattle.

some context. denny blaine is on the far-east side of the greater seattle area, on the shore of lake washington. it is ringed on all sides by extremely wealthy home-owners who have only ever been hostile to the generally low-income and extremely visibly queer frequenters of the park. seemingly every year (at least since i moved here in 2020) these prudish losers try to pull some shit to sabotage the park, under the banner of Denny Blaine Park For All (their opposition, Friends of Denny Blaine, has had a more successful track record). most notable of said losers is one stuart sloan, former owner of grocery store chain QFC, whose mansion is right next door to denny blaine. in 2023, sloan anonymously donated $1 million to the city for them to build a children's playground adjacent to the park. this was transparently an attempt to problematize nudity at the beach, and was roundly rejected. in 2024, sloan was caught personally texting seattle city mayor bruce harrell about the "problem" of nudity at denny blaine, who responded "if you are disgusted, i share your disgust."

earlier this year, police raided the beach and arrested a trans woman for being nude. the charges were dropped and police informed to not perform such actions in the future, but it set the tone for a year of spurious legal challenges. the current cause du jour is "sex and public masturbation," and denny blaine for all have taken it to court. a conservative judge ruled that the city needs to take steps towards mitigating the offending conduct and prove to the court that they're taking the issue seriously.

the problem is, obviously, that isn't happening. everyone who frequents that beach knows the environment they're in. to the extent that it might be happening, it's almost certainly at the same rate as anywhere else in a city as big (and full of deliberately abandoned surplus humans) as seattle. but that doesn't matter. rich people say it's happening and they have the phone numbers of people in charge and lots of money to throw around, so it's happening. how do you prove it's not happening? you literally can't. they keep coming up with these half-baked solutions, from planting a cop or a park ranger there full-time (tho tbh under the right circumstances a lifeguard might be a good addition), to creating "clothing required" zones around the park, to erecting a big wall between the road and the park proper so folks in the neighborhood don't have to see any disgusting female penises. and hey, you know, a divider doesn't sound like the WORST idea right? if naked people are just right up on the street and everything?

well let's zoom in on the picture from that capitol hill seattle blog i linked above real quick:

first of all, it cannot be overstated how small this park is. do you see how few parking spots there are? oh yeah, you bet the rich folks nearby grouse about on-street parking in their neighborhood in peak beach months (which wouldn't be a problem if more than one bus served the area [and even that one requires an extra ten minute hike to get there], but you know how much rich people hate public transit). here's what you need to understand. all along the top and bottom of the two outlined "zones" in the above image are very high walls that occlude visibility from all sides. that median grassy area where ZONE B is written is at the top of a relatively steep hill, meaning the whole park exists in a narrow downhill corridor. add the many trees to the mix and you really have to get right up into the parking zone to see *any* bodies. now you see that wall between the left half of ZONE A and the part facing the water? yeah, that's even further down hill, probably another six feet. plenty of naked people chill in the left half of ZONE A but most of the nakedness occurs by the water. because it's. you know. a beach. and then if you look closer at the right side of that image, you'll see barriers that extend out into the water. those are very high walls built by the neighbors so they don't have to see any naked people on the beach! which is great for us because it means we have to swim waaay out to the edge of the beach's territory to see mt tahoma, the very landmark that makes lake washington such coveted real estate. thanks stuart!

all of which is to say: you really, really have to go out of your way to see naked people at denny blaine. the idea that it poses any kind of disruption to the community is laughable. it is also entirely a moot point. nudity is not illegal in seattle. being naked is not a disruption. if someone flashes you, that's already a crime. if someone is jerking off in public, that's already a crime. to say you have to restrict the entire region in order to prevent the hypothetical possibility of a few edge cases is absurd, but that's the logic behind every single conservative crackdown on queer self-expression. the rich people have money and the stooges in the seattle city council and the mayor's office have open pockets. if they keep getting complaints, then surely there must be a problem. if the queer people of seattle who vastly outnumber them make a stink about that problem not existing, well, they're just a "sub-group" from outside of seattle with different morals from the rest of the people in the city. we see the exact same dynamic playing out right now with payment processors cracking down on queer nsfw content on steam and itch, where a thousand suburban-fascist australian callers can get massive takedowns initiated but tens of thousands of queer callers just get shut out and dismissed (this is not to say calling payment processors is a lost cause, PLEASE keep calling them!!).

censorial prudishness disguises itself in a cloak of "public safety" but it's only ever about money. payment processors don't need to justify their actions because protecting their profits is common sense. you say "this is wrong" and they say "well that's neither here nor there." what the opponents of denny blaine want is to never have to see a poor person, same as every other rich donor. why not donate money to build a separate, larger nude beach that's more accessible by transit? no, of course not, that wouldn't benefit sloan's bottom line. no, they just resent having to share space. they want to own lake washington. they want to own denny blaine. they want to own seattle. they want to push all the unhoused and queer poors out and out and out until they're gone for good, in distant exurbs or shitty tinyhouses or in jails and prisons where they belong. they want to surveil and criminalize and minutely manage the visible social fabric of this city, and foreclose the possibility of it being for (or, god forbid, of) anyone else.

which is why it's essential to go to the fucking beach. i am very shy and historically had a lot of issues with my body. before i got on hrt i used to be covered head to toe in a thick dark coat of hair, my biggest source of dysphoria since adolescence. when i briefly went shirtless at a beach as a camp councilor (everyone else was shirtless), laughter and disgust spread among kids and adults alike. but i am a trans woman. i exist in the world. i am allowed to take up space. my body is my own and i should not be ashamed of it. denny blaine is a place where dozens of other trans people can get together, take off their clothes, and just be. i cannot express to you, if you haven't been yourself, how freeing it is, how enlightening and spiritually rejuvenating, to witness so many feminine penises and masculine vaginas in one place that they just seem normal.

because they are normal. our bodies are just bodies like anybody else's. we live in an excruciatingly prudish society that drills in all of us an overwhelming sense of terror at any possibility of exposure to anything remotely adjacent to sex. and then you spend a couple hours at the nude beach and that whole aura is broken in an instant. being there feels a little bit like being part of history, especially now. it's a site of physical equalization. a respite from our eugenic and bioessentialist nation. a communion for the fags and dykes and queers who have increasingly fewer places to call their own. the idea that people being "exposed" to our bodies "against their will" is inherently sexual and violating (at a beach that has been known for public nudity since the 80s) is just absurd. they're wrong, and everyone but their donors knows it. what the city needs to do is simply tell them, thanks but no thanks. money should not be the end-all be-all of this fight.

there is no epidemic of public sex at denny blaine. there is, however, an epidemic of unwanted voyeurs. and while the politics involved are highly specific to seattle, the power dynamics at play are all too universal.

don't let them fool you. your body is not a crime.

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butch demigirl char aznable and his shithead trans girlfriends haman karn and garma zabi

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"becomes" 🤨🙄

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me: and the baby stewie is like clever and talks. he is friends with brian the dog who also talks and likes to write

green troll: tell me more of this “lowest griffin”. perhaps he too is live under bridge? bridge in “quagmire of great filth”?

me: well quagmire is actually another character

green troll (frightened): spirit of land

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I once had this incredibly weird dream where I was watching a youtube meme video, and it was so convincing that I legitimately thought it was real until I searched and searched and searched and couldn't find it.

So it's just the intro cinematic to Elden Ring, except when it gets to THE LOATHESOME DUNGEATER, instead of moving on, the voice just keeps saying THE LOATHESOME DUNGEATER in a more and more distorted voice, with weird color filters, and instead of the rest of the cinematic, it's just zooming in on different, pixelated images of Ted Cruz.

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here are my pits! for you freaks! I hope you jack off to it 🫶

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morning bus stop

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brain worms

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I don’t feel like logging out of this and onto my personal account but i think this is transgender enough to post here

Bionicle tramp stamps

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the aspiring judo master has been expelled from the interdisciplinary womens no-gi topless 33C heat semi-finals after she grabbed her opponents boob to throw her

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this one’s for the pit freaks

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coworker asks if i like harry potter and i have to make a disco elysium skill check to come up with a response

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woof woof 🐶 aww we love a cute hairy puppy 💖🩷💖

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soundscape of young green martian playing with pvc pipes

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girl who woke up with a hangover due to one (1) pineapple cider

Onlyfans

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where is your mind?