Chapter 43

The Naked Guy

Andrew Martinez—Berkeley

Growing up in Cupertino, Andrew Martinez was a polite, popular, and athletic young man. He was a straight A student and played defensive lineman at Monta Vista High School. When he was seventeen, he decided that clothing was a form of repression and determined to become a nudist. Ever the considerate person, Martinez first went door-to-door in his neighborhood to ask neighbors if they had any objections to his nudity.

Wearing only a backpack and sandals, Martinez got about a mile from his home when a police officer stopped him. Putting that experiment behind him, Martinez enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1991 to study business and sociology.

During his second year at Berkeley, Martinez started showing up for class in the buff. He always put a sweatshirt on the seat of his chair, and if someone objected, he would put on some clothing. The six-foot, two-inch-tall student, with handsome looks and a toned body, was a member of Berkeley’s judo team. Martinez was always candid and straightforward about his nudity, saying that he was challenging the sexual repression of Western society.

The city of Berkeley is known throughout the world as the fountain-head of freethinkers and radical intellectuals, so it was no surprise that the gentle and charismatic Martinez inspired a political movement. In September 1992, Martinez organized several “nude-ins” around Berkeley and San Francisco, some that attracted ten thousand people, although only a couple of dozen were naked. Martinez appeared in the buff on the national television talk shows The Montel Williams Show and The Maury Povich Show, and he wrote an editorial explaining his nudity for the Oakland Tribune.

In the fall of 1992, Martinez was arrested for indecent exposure while jogging, but his novel ideology got the charges dropped. He was arrested soon afterward, again for indecent exposure, when he showed up for his court appearance naked.

The UC Berkeley administration passed an anti-nudity law as part of the Student Code of Conduct, and Martinez was quickly expelled. Not being in school or having a job, and knowing that his fifteen minutes of fame were up, the “Naked Guy,” as he had become known, felt betrayed by his supporters as they all went on with their lives. He didn’t have the money to file a lawsuit against the giant UC system, and nobody offered to help him. You could say that he felt naked.

Martinez hung out in People’s Park and walked around Telegraph Avenue window shopping. Friends noticed that he seemed different. He started to push around a shopping cart filled with rocks, leaving piles of them here and there so that people would have something to throw when the revolution started. He enjoyed stopping traffic during rush hour and taunting the police. At the co-op in which he lived, he spent his days chipping at the cement driveway, with the intention of returning the man-made stone to nature.

Returning to his family home in Cupertino, Martinez gave up walking around naked. He continued studying judo, traveled to Europe, and tried to write a manuscript about his life, but he still acted erratically. Eventually, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and he spent the next decade in mental institutions and jails.

In January 2006, while living in a halfway house, Martinez got into a fight with a guard and was taken to the Santa Clara County jail. Further disruptions put him in solitary confinement in the maximum security section. The overcrowded jail offered minimal access to mental health professionals.

On May 17, 2006, Martinez was found by guards in his cell with a plastic bag over his head. He was rushed to the hospital, where he died the next day.