Eastern Exposure : Lifestyle: Along the New Jersey shoreline is the first and only federal beach where clothing is optional. Nudists hope it’s not the last.

New Jersey’s Sandy Hook is a wind-swept spit where the dunes are white as sugar and snarled in poison ivy. It’s also a national proving ground in a discreet little war of private morality--and public exposure.

To get here, just park in Lot G--always the most crowded lot at this historic seashore--where the bumper stickers proclaim “Happiness Is No Tan Lines!” and “Nude Is Not Lewd.” Then take the weathered boardwalk across a few hundred yards of strand until you come to a stretch known as South Gunnison Beach. You can’t miss the sign.

“Attention:--Beyond This Point You May Encounter Nude Sunbathers.”

And sure enough, you’ll find a solid two acres of bare skin, whole families of the unclad splayed out blanket to blanket, wind screen to wind screen, in a fluttery patchwork that resembles a Turkish bazaar.

Nowhere else on the East Coast are you likely to see so many naked people crowded in one place--and in plain view of the Manhattan skyscrapers. (As the Sandy Hook “naturists” like to put it, on a clear day you can barely see Manhattan.) What’s even more remarkable is that National Park Service rangers, who regularly comb the beach by horseback and 4-wheel-drive truck, don’t seem to mind.

Sandy Hook has long been one of the East Coast’s most popular nudist haunts, but until official “warning” signs were erected last summer, skinny-dippers here claim they always felt like lepers. Now they can do this thing out in the open, though many social nudists prefer to remain anonymous, because so many of their employers, clients and even family members apparently have problems with their lifestyle.

“Having a sign changes everything,” says Ralph, a naturist who drove all the way from Maine to spend the weekend at Sandy Hook. “It gives us a certain dignity. The government is finally acknowledging our existence. We don’t have to feel like we’re always sneaking behind a bush to pee.”

It’s painful to imagine how many committee hours went into crafting the language of that sign, which is the only one of its kind on a national seashore in the United States. Nudist enclaves are fairly commonplace on the West Coast--from San Diego’s Black’s Beach to Baker Beach in San Francisco to Rooster Rock State Park in Oregon. And in Europe, topless beaches are the rule rather than the exception.

But on the Atlantic Coast, where the Puritans landed and politicians are still liable to go ballistic over public nudity, a formally acknowledged nudist beach represents a small benchmark in the sexual revolution. It also signals a change of perspective at the National Park Service in Washington, the squeamish custodian of U.S. seashores: Last July, in a quiet experiment that went unreported in the national press, Gunnison Beach became the first and only federal sand set aside for the “clothing-optional lifestyle.”

After years of debate, the Park Service has decided to use this half-mile stretch as a trial to learn whether openly declared nudity can work on a public beach without angering prudish locals or drawing voyeurs.

Depending on how things work at Sandy Hook this summer, the decision may presage a new era of glasnost on the issue of nudity at other contested federal beaches across the country, from Cape Canaveral to Cape Cod to the Texas Gulf Coast. The Naturist Society, the national organization that has been most active in securing public beaches for nude sunbathers, has hailed the development at Sandy Hook an “unprecedented” victory for what it has called the Free Beach Movement.

“We have crossed the Rubicon,” one Naturist Society brochure proclaims.

On this particular afternoon at Sandy Hook, it’s 81 degrees and the skies are a deep blue. A score of American flags pop in the stout breeze. Out in the slate-colored harbor, a rusty tanker lumbers south toward the open Atlantic. More than 1,000 nudists are out batting volleyballs, throwing Frisbees, flying kites, dispensing back rubs and sitting on lawn chairs playing gin rummy.

“It’s a great equalizer, being out here,” says Bob, a New Jersey advertising executive, as he looks back over the whitecaps of New York Harbor toward the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. “You meet somebody, and you don’t know whether he’s a doctor or a mechanic, whether he drives a Rolls-Royce or a pickup truck.”

“For me, this place is like paradise,” Bob’s friend Lotus says in a salty Jersey shore accent. Lotus is the secretary for the Sandy Hook Suns, a loose-knit club of social nudists who have no clubhouse other than the confines of Gunnison Beach. She is an amiable, heavyset divorcee in her early 40s with ginger-blond hair who speaks of nudity in a matter-of-fact voice tinged with disbelief that anyone would want to go to the beach any other way.

Lotus is editor of the official publication of the Sandy Hook Suns, the Gunnison Gazette, which she distributes without charge to newcomers on the beach. Pictured in the logo over the newspaper’s banner is the club mascot, “Sandy,” a bare-bottomed lass in pigtails who looks like the girl in the old Coppertone advertisement except she’s all one hue.

“The people here are the friendliest you’d ever want to meet,” Lotus says. “The pretenses are taken away. Hey, there’s nothing to hide behind.”

*

A century-old tradition with roots in an outdoor fitness craze that swept Germany in the 1890s, naturism has long dwelt on the fringe in the United States, the subject of New Yorker cartoons and Diane Arbus portraits.

During the 1960s and ‘70s, nudist “colonies” were widely lampooned as a passing fad for swingers. But today naturism is a growing movement that increasingly appeals to married couples and families who seek to raise their children “without shame.”

No one knows how many closet--or so-called “patio”--nudists there are, but social nudism is a large and highly organized subculture that extends coast to coast. The Wisconsin-based Naturist Society has 20,000 members, while the American Sunbathing Assn., an older, more conservative group headquartered in Kissimmee, Fla., boasts a membership of 40,000.

Lee Baxandall is the director of the Naturist Society, editor of its magazine (Nude & Natural) and author of the definitive guide to nude beaches around the world. A leftist intellectual who sports a goatee, you might think of Baxandall as the Trotsky of the nudist movement.

Baxandall says naturism offers a wholesome middle ground between prudishness and prurience. “Social mores in this country have swung back and forth between puritanical repression and pornographic exploitation,” he argues. “Naturists strike a balance between the two.”

Social nudists attend weekend retreats in the Poconos, stay in clothing-optional bed & breakfasts, communicate with fellow buffers on computer bulletin boards, go nude sky diving or canoeing (known as “canuding”), live year-round in nudist resorts or take all-bare Caribbean cruises arranged by outfits like Skinny-Dip Tours.

But naturists are happiest by the ocean, where they say the connection between the nude body and the elements is most obvious. The fight for clothing-optional zones on national seashores has always been the centerpiece of the Naturist Society’s lobbying efforts.

Naturists sometimes refer to bathing-suit wearers as “textiles,” “cottontails” or “the clothing-obsessed.” “Bathing costumes have no place in the sea,” Baxandall contends. “No more so than bathing suits on octopuses or salmon or whales.”

Naturists insist they have the numbers on their side. A recent Gallup Poll reported that 72% of Americans approved of nudity in “places set aside for the purpose.” But Baxandall contends that “body-distanced fundamentalists” have “ghetto-ized” nudism into private camps and clubs.

Current laws against discreet nudity are positively Victorian, he argues. In Barnes v. Glen Theater, a 1991 U.S. Supreme Court decision that involved nude dancing in Indiana, the court labeled public nudity an “evil” and gave states new powers to broaden their indecency laws. In North Carolina, a person arrested for nude sunbathing can be charged with a sexual offense. It is still a crime to be “merely nude” in New York and Indiana, and in several states and local communities it’s illegal even to advocate nudity.

The past decade has seen a spate of disappointments for the naturist movement, including the loss of traditional nudist sunning spots like Florida’s MacArthur Beach and Assateague Island National Seashore in Virginia.

“In the ‘80s nudist beaches were disappearing at a rate rivaling the destruction of rain forest in the Amazon,” Baxandall says.

Which is precisely why the victory at Sandy Hook is cause for such celebration among nudists across the country.

“It’s a huge step in the right direction,” declares Baxandall.

He hopes successes like Sandy Hook will soften the “clothing-compulsive” mood around the country, particularly with Bill Clinton in the White House.

“We’ve heard rumors that Clinton skinny-dipped back in his days as a law school professor in the Ozarks,” Baxandall muses. “Could be a good sign.”

*

It’s oddly fitting that Sandy Hook should serve as a test site for nudism, for the dunes and salt marshes here were once home to the first official proving ground for the U.S. Army. Between 1874 and World War I, ballistics experts bombarded the strand with everything from Gatling-gun fire to 16-inch-caliber cannonballs. Today, sunbathers still find rusty shell casings in the sand. Park brochures advise visitors that any military ordnance found on the beach “should be reported immediately to the ranger.”

For as long as anyone can remember, Gunnison has attracted nude bathers, but theirs was a phantom lifestyle. The naturists had to sneak through holly forests and goldenrod to reach their illicit stomping ground near the piping plover refuge. The Park Service tried to pretend it wasn’t happening, but rangers kept receiving complaints from outraged “textiles” who would casually stroll onto the beach and be confronted with full-frontal nudity.

Last summer Toni Egbert, president of the New York region’s Tri-State Metro Naturists, decided something had to give. She and her colleagues treated the Park Service rangers to a “sensitivity” class in which they described how an openly nude zone might work.

“We explained to them that we are normal, wholesome people who just happen to enjoy being nude,” Egbert recalls.

The decision to post signs was too controversial for the local superintendent to make alone; approval ultimately had to come from the Park Service superiors in Washington. By National Nude Weekend last July, the Park Service had erected the signs, expanded the parking lot and hired lifeguards. The nudists were phantoms no longer.

Yet even with the signs, the Park Service’s official policy on nudity remains ambiguous. Understandably, it’s wary of drawing the ire of politicians like Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), the powerful Appropriations Committee chairman, who in 1991 reprimanded Park Service officials for considering formal acknowledgment of a similar clothing-optional beach in Hawaii.

Sandy Hook superintendent Skip Cole gingerly points out that since neither New Jersey nor the federal government has statutes forbidding “mere” nudity, the National Park Service simply has no authority to arrest nude sunbathers.

“We don’t condemn nudity, and we don’t condone it,” Cole says. “We simply take the position that it exists and it’s got to be managed. But we are not necessarily saying that nudity is an appropriate activity for a national park.”

Last summer the Park Service received fewer complaints from the “textiles.” This was due in part to the diplomatic efforts of the Sandy Hook Suns and the Tri-State Naturists, who distributed leaflets that laid out the rudiments of nude-beach etiquette. (Among other strictures, the polite naturist is not supposed to engage in “overt sexual activity” or take photographs without the subject’s permission. “Beach Romeos must learn to take no for an answer!” admonishes the leaflet.)

Despite the leaflets, 41 naturists were arrested last summer on charges ranging from public drunkenness to lewd and lascivious conduct. The Park Service has warned all beach-goers that if the violations aren’t drastically reduced this summer, the rangers will yank the signs and revoke Sandy Hook’s special status for good.

“We haven’t waved any victory flags,” says Toni Egbert. “There’s always the possibility some religious fanatics will come down and raise Cain. We’re still viewing this as a temporary gift from the Park Service.”

“This beach is still very much on trial,” Lotus says at the end of the day at Gunnison Beach. “So we’re out here every day making sure it works. This is the only place we’ve got.”

She slips on an oversized shirt and walks toward the sign that warns: “Entering Clothed Area.”