You'd think we were back in FRP fan motor Suppliers the stagnant 50's, the way people still get all worked up whenever a little playful nudity shows up on the landscape of daily life. After fifty years of radical confrontation and expanded social consciousness around a thousand different aspects of sex, sexual orientation, and gender, it would seem that something as harmless a little bare skin would simply be too insignificant to show up on social crisis radar screens, even among folks a good deal more conservative than you and I.

Well, nice thought, but for all our real progress on these fronts over the years, plain old nudity still seems to be as real an issue as ever, out there in what passes for the Real World. The shift from Clinton to Bush as icon of national leader doesn't help, even if the shift is as much about image and style as anything else. As the White Picket Fence reality of the new administration seeps inevitably into the national subconscious, it's taking less and less to ruffle the feathers of people who want to see nothing but Pleasantville wherever they turn. Among people who have fused fear of the body and fear of sex into one bubbling cauldron of moralistic anxiety, it doesn't take much for them to feel like the devil is at their door, waiting to infect them and theirs with some rapidly mutating virus of moral turpitude.

I'm not even talking, this time, about stories that put sexual deviance or sexual diversity up for discussion on the current events chopping block. Let's ignore, for the moment, the lawsuit by Indiana state legislators to block performance of "Corpus Christi," a play about a guy named Joshua growing up gay with his twelve close buddies in modern-day Texas, and attempts by The Promise Keepers and The American Family Organization to keep a record album with the song "Jesus Christ, Homosexual" from ever reaching retail stores. Let's also skip over the story of how Leilani Rios had to go to court to hold onto her place on the Cal State Fullerton track team after she refused to quit her job as an erotic dancer. These are important stories too, but they are about something a little more loaded than simple nudity.

We know how tightly people can get tied in knots about sex that's outside their personal sense of what's mainstream. But what's been piling up in my folder of clips for possible future columns are stories about nothing more controversial than the reality of the naked human body, about the inclusion of the naked human body in some rather straightforward works of art, theater, and advertising. These are naked images that have nothing to do with sex at all. But plenty of people are steaming about them nonetheless.

Provincetown, Massachusetts, is not what you'd call a conservative town. It's best known as an artist colony and as a specifically gay-friendly resort. In the nakedness department, it's even got its very own delightful, publicly-sanctioned, clothing-optional beach. Nonetheless, the Crown and Anchor Inn, which has been showing a local production of Off-Broadway's biggest hit, "Naked Boys Singing," has been twice ordered to "cease-and-desist" showing the play by P-town's erstwhile building commissioner, Warren Alexander. Alexander has classified the show as adult entertainment because it includes full, frontal (male) nudity, and in P-town, adult entertainment is not allowed within 500 feet of churches and municipal buildings. Both the local Town Hall and its Unitarian Church are closer than that to the Crown and Anchor.