Beyond This Point You May Encounter Nude Sunbathers

Paul Signac, Cassis, Cap Lombard, Opus 196, 1889.

In August 2004, my friend Joseph and I organized a trip to Dubrovnik before chartering a boat on the Adriatic Sea. A Croatian friend advised me of a tiny nearby island called Lokrum. It was popular with nudists, he said, and had perfect swimming coves.

I told Joseph about the island when we met up in the Dubrovnik airport, and the next morning, anxious for the sea and sun, our skin the color of too much office work, we rode the ferry toward Lokrum. Only then did I mention that it was a nudist beach. “I don’t mind,” Joseph assured me. “Me neither,” I replied. “I just hope some of them are attractive.” Joseph turned to me with a smirk. “No,” he said. “I mean, I don’t mind being naked.” I hadn’t seen much of Joseph in the past year. Now I was going to see too much of him—every inner-thigh freckle, scrotal wrinkle, and circumcision mark. 

I’d met Joseph in my early twenties in New York, and he quickly became like a brother to me. In fact, we were part of a small, tightly knit group of mostly young, mostly gay men who formed something of a surrogate brotherhood. We were each other’s keepers in a city that was careless about its young inhabitants’ lives. In