title: Lee Baxandall
text: Lee Raymond Baxandall (January 26, 1935 – November 28, 2008) was an American writer, translator, editor, and activist. He was first known for his New Left engagement with cultural topics and then as a leader of the naturist movement.
  
  Early life 
  Lee R. Baxandall was born on January 26, 1935, in Oshkosh, Wisconsin to Neita Evelyn (née Lee) and Raymond W. Baxandall.  He attended Oshkosh  High School. He attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he obtained a Bachelor of Arts in 1957 and a Master of Arts in 1958 in English, studied comparative literature at the doctoral level, and became one of the editors of Studies on the Left, a New Left intellectual journal known for its free-wheeling qualities.  In 1960, Baxandall traveled to revolutionary Cuba.
  
  Theatre work 
  Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Baxandall demonstrated a strong interest in the relationship between culture, particularly theatre, and radicalism.  He translated plays by Peter Weiss and Bertolt Brecht, edited a collection of writings by the German social critic and psychologist Wilhelm Reich, compiled an annotated bibliography on Marxism and aesthetics, and wrote numerous essays on major literary figures, including Bertolt Brecht and Franz Kafka. In 1965 he gave lectures at the Free University of New York on 'Marxist approaches to the Avant-Garde Arts. Baxandall also wrote plays. His Hiroshima Requiem about the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan was put to music by Leonard Lehrman and performed in 1990. His play Potsy which was chiefly a monolog in an outhouse, was also performed, as was his play Claws of the Eagle − Claws of the Jaguar, which he wrote in 1967.
  
  Leftist writing 
  In 1973, he edited a collection of writings by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on art and literature with Polish philosopher Stefan Morawski.  Baxandall's writing appeared in a wide variety of venues, from left-wing periodicals such as The Nation, New Politics, The National Guardian, and Liberation, to mainstream publications including The New York Times and intellectual-cultural outlets such as Partisan Review, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and New German Critique.
  
  Naturism 
  After the death of his father in 1970, Baxandall increasingly shifted his time back to Oshkosh. He took over his father's education publishing business, The Baxandall Company. By the late 1970s, naturism become the main focus of Baxandall's activism. He first took up the activity as an Eagle Scout in Wisconsin and frequented a free beach with his family at Cape Cod National Seashore in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1974, he travelled to the West Coast of the United States to meet founders of the free beach movement there: Eugene Callen and Cec Cinder. This became Beachfront USA. Having inherited his family's publishing business in Oshkosh in 1970, which he managed by traveling back there monthly and then by relocating to there permanently in 1978, Baxandall began to publish Free Beaches magazine and created the Free Beaches Documentation Center, collecting data from all over the world on nude beaches. In 1980, he published Lee Baxandall's World Guide to Nude Beaches & Recreation, a color guidebook locating places to go nude all over the world, which he succeeded in getting distributed through major book channels. It was updated and published again several times, the last being in 1996.
  
  Baxandall's view was that nudism fostered body acceptance and broke down the alienation and repression that stood in the way of the realization of full human potential. He founded The Naturist Society in 1980 and was the first editor of its magazine, Clothed with the Sun, launched in 1981 and renamed Nude & Natural in 1989. The Naturist Society had very inclusive membership policies, in contrast to the more conservative America Sunbathing Association, now known as the American Association for Nude Recreation. Baxandall is a member of their Nudist Hall Of Fame.
  
  Baxandall was one of the originators, along with Eugene Callen, of "National Nude Weekend," later "National Nude Week," which he used to generate media attention for the cause. He helped organize and sponsor the first nationwide and later regional annual Naturist Gatherings, with seminars and nude fun for everyone. He also commissioned Edin and Ethel Vélez to produce a series of videos (World of Skinnydipping, etc.) depicting the naturist lifestyle and debunking myths surrounding nude recreation.
  
  Baxandall founded the Naturist Action Committee, the primary group responsible for early warning and defense against those who would legislate naturists out of existence in the United States. He was the first to retain the services of a professional lobbyist to get the movement's viewpoint heard in state legislatures and Congress. He founded the Naturist Education Foundation, devoted to improving awareness and acceptance of naturism and body acceptance throughout North America.
  
  Personal life 
  In 1962, he married Rosalyn Fraad. She became an early women's liberation activist and they had a son, Phineas. Living in New York City from 1962 to 1977, they were active in the movement to end the Vietnam War. They later divorced.
  
  Lee's first brief marriage was to Judith Woelffer, with whom he had a child Pamela in 1958. In 1992, Baxandall remarried, to longtime companion Johanna Moore.
  
  Later life and commemoration 
  In 1995, Baxandall was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and he retired from public life in 2002. He died on November 28, 2008, in Oshkosh.
  
  Baxandall is commemorated by the naming of a bridge in his honour at the Desert Shadows Inn Resort and Villas, Palm Springs, California.
  
  Quotes 
   When the culture into which we are born strays too far from nature’s laws, we suffer; a ‘naturalization’ is in order.
   Body Acceptance is the idea, Nude Recreation is the way. Popular motto of The Naturist Society
   Every civilized nation has nude beaches. That's a mark of a civilized nation. from video: The Beginner's Guide to Skinny Dipping. The Naturist Society. Fast Forward Images, Inc. 1991.
  
  Publications 
  
    reissued in 1978
   
   
    reissued in 1981, 1995 and 1997
  
  See also
  
  Notes
  
  References 
  
   
   
   
    as reproduced in
  
  External links 
   Obituary for Lee R. Baxandall
   Naturist Action Committee Advisory: Lee Baxandall (1935-2008)
   Lee Baxandall Enters the Nudist Hall of Fame
   Lee R. Baxandall Bridge
   Baxandall letters to New York Review of Books
  Naturist Education Foundation
  
  1935 births
  2008 deaths
  American activists
  American naturists
  People from Oshkosh, Wisconsin
  Social nudity advocates
  University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Letters and Science alumni
  Writers from Wisconsin
  20th-century American male writers