Another quality page linked to Jim's Pen is Central!

PhD: Let's see, here's a question for the Teen Beat crowd: Whom do you admire and why?

AM: Historical people who really stood up, did their thing, and faced criticism. Socrates, Pasteur, Thoreau.

PhD: Makes me wonder, did Thoreau ever walk around Walden Pond in the nude?

AM: I think he would have. If he's all alone for a year, what would he continue to hide for?

PhD: What other kinds of people?

AM: Well, the leader types I admire a lot, like Gandhi, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Timothy Leary, Allan Ginsburg, those guys, they really started the whole psychedelic movement.

PhD: Right. Allan Ginsburg's done a lot of stuff in the nude, too.

AM: Yeah. Those guys were getting stuff done and getting shit happening. I admire that.

PhD: I think one of the reasons why you've gotten the good reaction that you've gotten is that there's a lot more innocent nudity in American history than you would realize growing up today. For example, I've got friends who grew up on farms who say they had a swimming hole, and everybody -- mother, father, sister, brother, little kids, big kids -- everybody went down to the swimming hole and you didn't bother with a bathing suit. Even in big cities, where there used to be men's clubs and the YMCA, you just assumed as a matter of course that you would swim in the nude because it was all men. My freshman year was the last year my college was all male, and in the pool there you could swim in the nude, which most guys did. It was considered perfectly normal and natural if there weren't members of the opposite sex around. That made it a lot of fun for gay people...

AM: [Laughs heartily] That's really interesting. If you accept gay people of the same sex in the same bathroom together, with all the sexual tension that is possible there, then why not accept men and women sharing bathrooms, too? You know, that segregation of sexes kind of falls apart.

[Let me note for the record that Andrew's coop is coed, and when he took a bathroom break, he pissed with the door open.]

PhD: It's strange what that implies about heterosexuality, isn't it? It suggests that heterosexuals are so sex-crazed that you have to separate them in the bathrooms and the shower stalls because otherwise they might attack each other!

Let me change the subject. What would you say to women who say that they would be very upset if they ran into a naked, 6-foot-4 male jogger late at night in Berkeley? That they would worry that you were some kind of crazy rapist?

AM: I guess I would talk to them about why it would be so threatening, and about the social symbols and attitudes that would make them so intimidated? [Here, as often in the interview, Andrew's voice rises in a questioning inflection.] The fact that I'm big and brown and I have short hair -- I don't think it's really fair to hold that against me, and it's not fair to hold the nudity against me, either. So I'd try to convey that point of view. But generally, there's nothing really I could say to make the fear go away.

PhD: In other words, if they're scared of being raped, then they're scared of being raped, and they're going to be scared by seeing a naked man that they don't expect to see, is that right?

AM: Yeah. I don't want to sound callous, but let's say I was just walking around with shorts on, and jogging... You can't argue these things, because at that point it's not a rational discourse in social policy -- it's someone's fears and emotions which are really affected. I guess the most I could do is to sound understanding, say I'm sorry, but generally that doesn't change my position.

PhD: Let's go back to your internal dialog, because I'm intrigued by the way you kind of talk to yourself. I think a lot of people do that; half of the brain wants to give them courage and the other half of the brain is being rational and conservative; there's that split in everyone. But you seem to be really listening to the part of you that wants you to be consistent and strong, and make a difference in the world.

AM: Yeah, there's a lot going into it. There's so many streams of thought which say, "you need to do this, and don't hold back." I value the embarrassment very little, especially since I see it as colonial -- mental slavery? Malcolm X said it well: you're socialized to buy into something you don't want to buy into? So I see all this embarrassment and shame as holding me back from freeing myself from society? I definitely want to get rid of it, and there are very, very few reasons why I would want to act on those embarrassments?