Send the kids to bed. This could get rough. We’re dealing with the Naked Human Body. : Romping in the Altogether

To the best of my knowledge, no endangered species of animal has ever been butchered and eaten at Elysium Fields. There has never been a chemical spill, a mass murder, a case of child abuse or meetings intended to encourage either devil worship or sedition. Elysium Fields is not a source of air pollution, nor do its members want to drill for oil, bomb Russia, marry your sister or contribute to the starvation of the little children of Ethiopia.

Then why for the past 16 years has the county of Los Angeles been trying to put it out of business? Because of the Naked Human Body. Send the kids to bed. This could get rough.

Elysium Fields, for those unfamiliar with local gymnosophy, is what is known by its members as a clothing-optional institute and what you and I call a nudist camp. It occupies a woodsy seven acres in (where else?) Topanga Canyon, far enough away from the main boulevard to prevent those who have never seen a Naked Human Body from tying up traffic by trying to catch a peek.

The camp was established by Ed Lange in 1968 as a place for what they call naturists to gather. You can lie around naked if you want, but you don’t have to. Lying around in a hooded, fur-lined parka is also perfectly acceptable, as are various other forms of dress and undress, including shoes but no pants or, for the outdoor pervert, a simple heavy-duty chain around the waist.

Perversions, by the way, are not encouraged at Elysium Fields nor is open sex, though the camp’s enemies suspect that both perversion and sex, and possibly some new forms of human indecency, occur to clapping hands and Pete Seeger folk tunes in the camp’s recreation bowl near the volleyball court. And therein lies the source of Ed Lange’s travail.

Almost since its opening, Elysium has been under siege by a small group of God-loving, trouble-making locals who, in Pavlovian response, cry smut! whenever the word nude is mentioned. County politicians, who hate smut almost as much as they hate campaign disclosure laws, responded by declaring war on Lange. He seemed an easy target for a quickie moralist crusade. Wrong.

Lange has battled them before the Board of Supervisors, the Regional Planning Commission, the County Zoning Board, the Santa Monica Mountains Comprehensive Planning Commission, the Los Angeles County Superior Court and the state District Court of Appeal. He would have also argued before the World Council of Churches, but it never got that far.

The fight has cost Elysium Fields and its 1,400 members almost $100,000 in legal fees to maintain the right to remove their clothes in a private camp, and that right still isn’t guaranteed. They go to court again later this month to continue the battle.

So anxious are our otherwise amoral legislators to put Lange out of business that at one point they tailored an ordinance to officially categorize as nudist camps any gathering of three or more Naked Human Beings. A state court threw it out.

Subsequently, however, the board did successfully declare that hereafter such camps would have to be confined to Zone A-2, a category previously reserved, as Lange likes to say, “for pig farms and gravel pits.”

Elysium Fields is being allowed to remain where it is for five years under a nonconforming conditional use permit, which is the legal equivalent of the Sword of Damocles. To do so, however, the camp must meet 27 conditions, ranging from a road-widening project to an 11 p.m. curfew.

Lange is appealing nine of them. The road-widening project, though it will cost another $100,000, is not one of them.

I’m not a nudist. I’m not a Republican, either, but if you are, it’s your right. Similarly, it ought to be the right of anyone to strip to their freckles if they want to, so long as they are not running naked down Ventura Boulevard.

Why they want to romp in the altogether isn’t important. If it makes no sense to you, neither does your choice of political party make sense to me. Forced to choose, I’d drop my pants and register Libertarian, rather than become a Republican.

Regardless of what reasons they might offer, those who continue to oppose the existence of Elysium Fields do so because they equate nudity with lewdity, a condition caused by limited perceptions and glandular imbalances. Nudity, they reason, exposes the genitalia, and we all know what they’re used for.

If Elysium Fields were Rockwell International, they could be building nuclear warheads on Robinson Road and the county would give them a tax break. Morality ends where power begins. To hell with the neighbors.

I don’t really care if Elysium Fields flourishes or doesn’t flourish, or if its members dance naked on the head of a pin. When you’ve seen two nude bodies, a wise uncle once remarked, you’ve seen them all.

But we all ought to care about the camp’s right to exist free of the harassment that has characterized its shaky history. If government can shut down a private camp because of nudity, its agents are liable to be peeking in our bedroom windows next.

Nothing new there. All they’d see is what they’ve been doing to Elysium Fields for the past 16 years.