Interview

Andrew Martinez is a student nudist. Unlike the momentary streakers of yesteryear, Andrew walks around Berkeley, California, wearing nothing but sandals, and a key and a peace symbol on a chain around his neck. When he needs to carry things, he wears a backpack. And when he goes to class, he wants to go totally nude; in a nod to health and social conventions, he sits with a towel or sweatshirt between himself and the seat.

Andrew is straight, but as his gay fans know -- from seeing him on talk shows such as Maury Povich, Montel Williams, and Jane Whitney -- he frequently compares his campaign for public nudity with the campaign for gay rights. Add to this the facts that he has a killer bod on a 6-foot-4 frame, a winning smile, a Playgirl photo spread, and an unaffected manner and you get a natural media celebrity who may well have more than his fifteen minutes of fame.

I had the good luck to interview Andrew on two occasions: first on the phone, in preparation for bringing him to San Diego for a scientific panel, and second in person, when I visited him at his student coop in Berkeley. We also talked later, as his case proceeded through UC Berkeley’s tortuous student discipline system.

I discovered that Andrew has a philosophy behind his nudist activism, and a personal history that doesn’t quite account for the courage and straightforwardness of his quest. At the scientific meeting he walked around with his shirt off, which instantly identified him, and he told me that it was uncomfortable to be questioned by the psychology types he met there. “You could almost hear their minds going ‘click click click’,” he said, as they tried to figure out why a nice boy like this would risk his college career over what some consider to be at best a publicity stunt. Of course, the same could be said of some of the early gay rights activists. People would have asked them, Why not keep sex in its place? In the closet? An unimportant detail in your life? Then activists fought their battles, won a lot of them, and now more people realize that their sexual fantasies and sex lives are at the center of their lives. The more you think about it, the more Andrew’s quest for total acceptance of the visibility of every part of the body resembles gay liberation’s fight for acceptance of every part of our sexuality.

By the way (as I told the conference), Andrew has no scrapbook into which he puts 8 x 10 glossies of his nude escapades, no videotapes of his “Nude-In” on the Berkeley free speech plaza, and no copies of the newspaper articles which have been written about him. As you search for explanations -- and you will -- scratch “narcissism” off the list.

These were some of my thoughts as I sat down across the table from Andrew in his coop’s dining hall. Accompanying me was my friend Philip, a delightfully sharp-tongued, very upfront San Francisco resident who had read about Andrew in the papers. And strangely enough, Andrew was wearing clothes: sweat pants, sweat shirt, sandals, and socks (more than I was wearing, which was just shoes) -- just as I had found him upstairs a few minutes before, tucked into bed, talking on the telephone with the Playgirl interviewer.

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Real Men Don’t Wear Clothes

An Interview With Andrew Martinez,

“The Naked Guy” at UC Berkeley

We tried -- and failed -- to find a publisher for this interview back in 1993. Most straight media aren’t interested in naked men, and most gay publications turned us down because Andrew isn’t gay. It is, as far as we know, the only in-depth interview with Andrew ever conducted; it is certainly the only one which explains some of the deeper reasons why he did what he did.

Andrew relaxing in his messy dorm room.