On Sunday afternoon, three Seattle Police officers showed up to the queer hangout and nude beach Denny Blaine and told the naked people there that being naked outside, which is legal in Seattle, was actually illegal and that everyone had to put their clothes on.

Witnesses who spoke to The Stranger at the beach say the cops stuck around talking to beachgoers for close to two hours, and told one transgender woman, who was lying naked face down on the ground, not to come back to the beach for a week.

While police were talking to beachgoers, there was also a man parked at the beach who told an advocate that he was with a private security firm that was representing “community interests.”

Advocates and beachgoers confirmed that this was not the first time in recent weeks that police have shown up at the beach investigating claims of lewd activity.

Neighbors have been going after the nude beach for over two years now. In late 2023, beachgoers learned of a plan to construct a playground at Denny Blaine, after neighbor and millionaire owner of University Village Stuart Sloan anonymously donated $1 million for its construction. The plan failed after public uproar, but last month Denny Blaine Park for All, a group of neighbors that includes Sloan, sued the city for allegedly allowing the beach to become a “regional venue” for public masturbation and public sex, a characterization that more than 50 beachgoers who’ve spoken to The Stranger in the last year and a half totally dispute. Advocates say that masturbation does happen at the park, but it’s rare, and the overwhelming consensus is that the community knows how to deal with it and that the police do not need to swoop in. The suit also goes after legal nudity, making the argument that the Parks Department is violating its Code of Conduct by depriving neighbors enjoyment of the park. Surely this is remedied by making sure nobody else enjoys it either.

Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office has told The Stranger numerous times that he supported the right of people to use the park nude. It did not respond to a Sunday request for comment. The Seattle Police Department, whose public affairs office is closed on weekends, also did not respond to a Sunday request for comment or a Monday morning follow up email.

Beachgoers say police arrived around 2:40 pm.

Carlos, who didn’t want to use his full name to protect his privacy, says he was lying naked on the grassy upper level of the park when an SPD officer approached him and said he needed to cover up.

Carlos, who has been coming to the beach for seven years without issue, told the officer this was not true. He’s right.

Nudity has been legal in Seattle since the 1990 case Seattle v. Johnson found a later repealed local law against lewd conduct violated the right to free expression. Washington State has a law against indecent exposure, but SPD guidance posted by former chief Gil Kerlikowske in 2008 says that officers shouldn’t take action unless there’s “lewd or offensive behavior.” Carlos says he was only sunbathing, as was the transgender woman who was trespassed, witnesses say. 

Carlos says the officer told him she didn’t see the difference between nude sunbathing and indecent exposure. Soon, she was joined by a sergeant and another officer.

Carlos texted a telegram group for beachgoers run by Friends of Denny Blaine, the park’s queer-led stewardship group, to sound the alarm about cops telling people to put their clothes on.

Colleen Kimseylove, co-founder of the friends group and a key activist who organized against the playground plan, says they rushed over and spoke to all three officers.

The responding officer told Kimseylove repeatedly that nudity was not legal in Seattle, “period, end of story.” The sergeant told them that nudity at Denny Blaine was a low enforcement priority and that he thought there had to be a “reasonable solution,” but that “they had been directed by our higher-ups to engage in regular patrols of the park.”

“It’s very ominous to speak to representatives of the law in Seattle who don’t know the law of Seattle and are willing to act on the beck and call of millionaires,” Kimseylove says. “It’s not a good feeling.”

The officers told Kimseylove that people would be trespassed if they didn’t put their clothes on immediately, or arrested if they proved belligerent. Kimseylove then told the twenty or so people there what the police had said. Whether they chose to cover up was their choice, they said. Only one person, a trans woman, refused.

John, a man who sat on a wall at the park with his bike, says the woman shouted that people “did not have to comply,” and several witnesses say she was threatened with arrest. Police told her not to come back to Denny Blaine Park for a week, witnesses say. The Stranger was unable to reach the woman.

Several beachgoers say a blonde man parked in a grey Chevy Tahoe, allegedly spoke to one of the officers when she arrived, and they suspected that he made the call.

The man would only smile sheepishly at The Stranger, but he would speak to Kimseylove—who says the man did not give his name or the name of his employer but says was hired as private security by “interests in the neighborhood.”

This weekend’s events are the most recent in a new wave of neighborhood actions against the beach. In addition to the lawsuit against the city, it seems the Seattle Police have been keeping a special eye on Denny Blaine recently. This isn’t even the first time they’ve told people to put their clothes on.

On April 2, Blake Waddell was “Pooh bearing it” (shirt, no pants) at Denny Blaine when an SPD crisis officer approached him and asked about reports of “indecent exposure” at the beach. It was a cold, not so “glorious day” at the beach, Waddell says. Not many people were there. None of them were masturbating.

Slipping on his boxer shorts, Waddell explained to the officer the local nudity law and the history of the beach. The officer, who admitted he didn’t know much of that history, stood thumbs in his armpits, and told Waddell that if a parent with a child had been “affronted or surprised” by nudity there, it could count as indecent exposure. The officer also told Waddell that the enforcement priority at Denny Blaine was coming from a “higher level,” echoing what officers told Kimseylove on Sunday. In a recent email, SPD said it did not know the nature of Waddell’s conversation with the officer.

Two days later, on April 4, Waddell took video of a police boat cruising slowly by the beach. About thirty minutes later, he says two squad cars rolled up. Waddell again slipped on his boxers to meet them in the parking lot, a little angrier this time. He says three officers stepped out and gave him the “same spiel” about stepped up patrols over reports of public urination and masturbation. Again, Waddell saw nobody urinating or masturbating at the beach. Video shows a mostly empty beach.

Waddell, who was at the beach Sunday, says he filed an official on-the-spot complaint with the police sergeant.

Another beachgoer and volunteer with Friends of Denny Blaine told The Stranger that he’d been removing invasive blackberries from the shore on March 26 when two Seattle Parks Department Park Rangers told a naked man to either put his clothes on or move to a lower level of the park away from the street. The volunteer talked with the rangers for about 30 minutes, and like Waddell, explained to them both the law and the park’s long history of nude sunbathing.

The volunteer emphasized that the rangers, polite and receptive, listened intently. He believed it could have been a mistake. The Parks department told The Stranger that it was a mistake and that the police would take reports of lewd behavior from then on.

Beachgoer Nicole Baich says she has also seen police patrol boats cruise slowly by in recent weeks. She called the police presence Sunday “gross.”

“I didn’t expect to pull up to the beach at 3 pm on a lovely, cloudless Sunday afternoon and have it be devoid of my friends and culture because of the cop cars that are down here,” she says. “They’re menacing.”

John, the man with the bike, didn’t know what to think. His friend Bill sitting on the wall next to him did. He cut in.

Bill says he’s come to Denny Blaine for more than ten years. The only people unhappy with the beach were the neighbors. He turned his head to Sloan’s house and said they were here before it was even built. Bill remembers the old brick mansion that used to be there being rolled onto a barge on its way to Bainbridge Island.

But even then people complained. They’ve always complained and the cops have answered those complaints by telling them to put their clothes on. They’d comply, only to take them back off when they left. (Back in 1988, The Seattle Times ran a story about police cracking down on topless sunbathing. Even earlier in 1982, The Seattle Gay News ran a similar story of police citing a woman. Nudity wasn’t legal yet, but the women argued the law was sexist. Nobody was cracking down on topless men).

“You know, there are people who are wealthy who are naked-friendly, and this would be an ideal house for one of those people to buy,” he says. “They paid premium money for it. Then they could invite us over to their hot tub.”

Editor's note: This story has been updated since it's publication. In an interview Sunday, Colleen Kimseylove told The Stranger they had asked people to put their clothes on, but in later text said they had misspoken and had only communicated the possible consequences of remaining nude. The Stranger confirmed with sources who were at the beach Sunday that Kimseylove did not ask people to put their clothes on.