The Denny Blaine Park trial wrapped Thursday after parkgoers testified about the nude beach’s importance to Seattle’s queer community. The parties currently await a verdict from King County Superior Court Judge Samuel Chung.
After lawyers for the park’s neighbors presented their evidence, the City of Seattle and the parkers group Friends of Denny Blaine (FDB) called up witnesses to discredit neighbors’s claims that the two-acre park had become a public nuisance hotspot for masturbation and urination.
If the plaintiffs, Denny Blaine Park For All, which is bankrolled by the beach’s wealthy neighbors, get their way, the city could be forced to ban nudity or temporarily shut down the park. Happy Pride!
The City of Seattle argued that Judge Chung’s ordered abatement plan and its solution, an ugly dividing fence, had curbed lewd behavior. FDB went on the offensive, questioning the true motivations of the plaintiffs and touting the benefits of the historically important nude beach.
A Masterful Abatement
The City’s lawyers argued that, in the last ten months, Denny Blaine hadn’t been neglected at all. It had received a disproportionate share of resources and attention. The City had stepped-up police patrols, assigned Seattle Park Rangers to monitor the beach, and increased litter pickup and landscape maintenance.
On the stand, Seattle Police Department (SPD) research scientist Dr. Loren Atherley said there were four fewer sex offense-related calls in the first five months of the year (seven), compared with last year (11). But in terms of all crime, the raw number of reports remained about the same.
SPD Officer Austin Wright was called to the stand to discuss a June 15, 2025 call from Carrie Christensen, house manager to Stuart Sloan, the millionaire next door who anonymously pledged $1 million to build a children’s playground at Denny Blaine and who has put muscle behind the effort to shut down the beach.
In Wright’s body-worn video, Christensen alleged that a man had masturbated next to a nude couple and their infant. Christensen then showed Wright a video she had recorded. It didn’t show a man masturbating, but it did show Christensen screaming “fuck you” at him. Wright remarked that she smelled of alcohol. When the officer spoke with the couple, they said the man had not been jerking off.
Christensen then asked for Wright’s superior, Sergeant Michael Gore. He arrived on the scene and repeated that officers had seen no evidence of masturbation.
Bathing in the Positives
Friends of Denny Blaine’s lawyer Susan Foster argued neighbors like Sloan, who built his mansion next to the park between 2015 and 2018, should have been well aware that Denny Blaine was a nude beach and nexus of queer life in Seattle. People had been bathing nude there for nearly a century, and queers had made it a hub as early as the 1970s, according to the archival news articles the group’s lawyers read into the record.
FDB also submitted testimony from the historian who secured the park’s listing on the Washington Heritage Register, Michael Houser of the Washington State Department of Archaeology and Historical Preservation.
FDB listed the ways it’d worked to curb bad behavior at the park before the neighbors’ suit, including asking the cruising app Sniffies to remove Denny Blaine Park from its map and securing a city grant to redesign the parking lot, improve the porta potties, and install better signage.
Earlier in the trial, neighbors said nudity used to be rare at the park. But many of FDB’s witnesses were longtime parkgoers who said they’d always known the beach as a nude beach.
Kristin Zavorska recalled the park as a lesbian and gay hub when she was coming out in the mid-1980s, when on a sunny day, at least half the beach would be nude or topless. Rabbi and queer activist Fern Feldman testified that during the height of the AIDS epidemic, Denny Blaine was one of the few places sick gay men felt comfortable showing their naked bodies. Kathleen Blanchard, a retired gardener for the Parks Department, said naked people were a common sight at Denny Blaine in the 90s and early aughts.
Elayne Wylie, a founder of the trans rights organization Gender Justice League, said Denny Blaine had been clothing optional in the nearly 20 years she’d gone there. Banning it now would have a “chilling effect” on a community already ostracized for their bodies.
Other parkgoers spoke on the positive effect the nude beach has had on their lives. Madrona resident Michael Duryee said his daily ritual of skinny dipping and mediating at Denny Blaine helped him treat his severe anxiety and depression. Denny Blaine was the first public place that body piercer Lynn Loheide took off their shirt after top surgery. They regularly recommend the beach to clients with eating disorders and body dysmorphia so they can see what ordinary bodies look like.
“[Denny Blaine] reminded me that all bodies are beautiful, all bodies are valuable, all bodies deserve time out enjoying the sun and the nature,” Loheide said.
In their closing arguments, Rylan Weythman, lawyer for the neighbors’ group Denny Blaine for All, reiterated their plaintiffs’ demand to close the park for 60 to 90 days so the city could “reset expectations” around nudity.
“No other city would think it was reasonable to put a nude beach in the middle of a single-family residential neighborhood,” Weythman said.
Assistant City Attorney Joe Groshong said “things had changed” at Denny Blaine Park, and, apart from a nude protest on Labor Day weekend, there were only “isolated and transitory cases of nudity in the upper park” since the fence was put up.
FDB attorney Foster suggested there may be ulterior motives for the plaintiffs’ decision to proceed with the lawsuit, including the possibility that the land could revert to the neighbors’ parcels in the event Denny Blaine Park were to be permanently closed. She argued the plaintiffs had made it clear they wouldn’t tolerate nudity at the beach under any circumstances.
“It’s the typical NIMBY approach to dealing with issues,” Foster said.
