Nudist camp quietly thrives
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 Daniel Mears / The Detroit News A Whispering Oaks nudist watches a doubles tennis match. "We don't do anything very special here," owner Gary Moore said. "But everything we do is tension-free." |
By Kevin Lynch / The Detroit News
OXFORD --
Whispering Oaks doesn't have a golf course, but if they did, the people who live there
wouldn't be apologizing to anyone for its foursomes.
In fact, members of Metro Detroit's only nudist resort have managed to
play horse shoes, shuffle board and soft ball in their well-hidden hollow without drawing
complaints from any of the Oxford Township neighbors for decades.
While the manager of the Beaver Creek Golf links was drafting a public
apology for a wild-spirited golf outing with several Detroit strippers earlier this week,
residents of the tiny camp secluded in Oakland County's northernmost forests went right on
leaving their pants off, and their socks, and their underwear, too.
"We don't do anything very special here," said Whispering Oaks
resort owner Gary Moore as he drove his golf cart unhurriedly by people reading, sun
bathing, even gardening in the nude. "But everything we do is tension-free."
Moore said he's pumped more than $1 million into the resort, where
memberships cost roughly $500 a year. There's a clubhouse with a bar, dart boards, hot
tub, swimming pool, softball field and tennis courts. There are about 450 members.
Moore, a 61-year-old former industrialist, says membership at Metro
Detroit's only nudist resort has grown a little bit every year since it opened in 1963. He
said part of the quiet growth of the nudist movement in Oxford and around the country
stems from the fading shock value of the naked body in the age of the Playboy Channel. But
he hastens to add that the true nudist lifestyle has nothing to do with sex.
"You want to know what this is all about?" Moore asked.
"I can sum it up for you in one word," he said, waving a hand in front of the
neatly kept tennis court where Bob and Lynn Thompson trade polite volleys dressed only in
their athletic shoes and little white socks. "Equality."
"I have trouble making my bills sometimes," said Bob Thompson,
10-year resident of Whispering Oaks and General Motors line worker. "But here, I play
(nude) tennis with a millionaire, and nobody really knows the difference between us."
For wife Lynn Thompson, just 10 minutes of nudity meant the leveling of
a lifetime of programming that said there was an invisible caste system in America that
ranked women by how many inches they could pinch on their waistlines.
Once she realized there would be no pointing, no staring, no laughing,
she said, she experienced a profound sense of relief like she had felt nowhere else.
"I was freaked out for about 10 minutes, the first time I came
here. But everybody made me feel so comfortable. I just realized: There's different body
shapes and different body sizes. And people here just don't pay any attention to
that."
Moore left what he called "the fast track" life of owning and
overseeing three aluminum plants that manufactured residential doors and windows when he
bought Whispering Oaks in 1979. He'd been a member since 1963.