Naked Protesters & Nude Activists

This photograph from Murdoch Environmental Green Action is a little light on nudity (those fig leaves are such a cop-out) but the heavy equipment and the armed cops add enough drama to make this a classic of its kind.

The web page dates from March 2001 and the photograph is captioned simply: “Nude protesters halt clearing of Dalyellup Tuart forest”.

Lady Godiva being the patron saint of all nude protesters, I cannot resist posting this bit of art even though I don’t have an artist credit for it. If anybody can help with that, I’ll be in your debt.

Here’s a scene from what the BBC described as an anti-capitalist demonstration at London’s Oxford Circus on May Day, 2001:

Captioned: “Rain and Cold Did Not Deter Protesters”

Here’s an indoor shot of naked protesters “rehearsing” for the “No GM Ambush” on November 16, 2003, in Parliament Square, London:

Larger version here, courtesy of Bare Witness.

Here are some photos of the lovely Carla Santos, a 21-year-old cutie who (on May 24th, 2001) went streaking around the National Congress building in Brasilia to protest against the president of Brazil:

The magazine Brazzil has the whole story:

Carla Santos, 21, the president of Ubes (Uni o Brasileira de Estudantes Brazilian Union of Students) went a step further: she left all her clothes on the lawn facing the Congress and, naked, entered a moat built around the congress with the purpose to avoid that demonstrations got too close to the building. She sang the national anthem, shouted slogans against the President, and ran on the lawn. Over Carla’s naked body, there were short protest messages like CPI (Parliamentary Committee Enquiry) and Out FHC, which is an abbreviation for Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Bottomless, she semicovered her breasts with a Ubes’s flag. Her exposition lasted close to 30 minutes.

There are some excellent nude photos (and video!) from the World Social Forum in Brazil in January of 2003. Indymedia has the story, which it characterizes as a nude protest against police brutality:

Police did what police do best when they violently attacked protesters and bystanders on the last day of the World Social Forum. It started when a Mapuche woman who was attending the WSF and staying at the international youth camp was arrested with charges of “obscene acts” for bathing nude in a river. Activists saw this and organized over 400 people to protest by nonviolently taking their clothes off in solidarity. When the nude protest left the youth camp to march downtown the police attacked. After injuring and arresting some of the the nude protesters the police lashed out at journalists and bystanders. An unknown number of people were hospitalized or arrested as a result of the police assault.

Here are some of the naked protesters:

That may have been a protest, but it also looks like one heck of a party.

Here’s a picture of Vincent Bethell, the so-called “naked nutter” who gave the London cops such a merry time of it back in the late 1990s:

Here’s a cute naked vegan whose St. Paddy’s Day blarney seems not to be impressing the stalwart policemen of Chicago:

Possibly it’s because veganism isn’t popular in the erstwhile “Stockyards of America?”