The emporer has no clothes - Quebec's first nudist king Gaetan Couture: martyr or tyrant?

Nudist in Chertsey, Quebec, 1975

  Gaetan Couture (born c. 1914)  returned to Canada after serving in World War II to become an engineer but then got sidetracked by a new passion: stripping down in front of other fleshy, naked people and frolicking around gleefully with them.

 Gaetan, who stood a stubby 5'6", and his wife Blanche Couture so enjoyed basking in the sunshine with their bums and naughty bits exposed that they joined the fledgling Quetan nudist association in 1948. 

 The Quetan administration was impressed by Gaetan Couture and deemed him tactful, committed to the cause and thoroughly bilingual.

 The Quetan brass hoped Couture could negotiate a merger with the Heleos nudist group, which had much-needed land that the Quetan group sought.  Neither side warmed to each other as Couture suspected the other gang of poaching its members.     

  Police raided the Heleos group in 1950 and some wondered if Couture hadn't put them up to it. Heleos disbanded, leaving the Quetan nudists as the biggest game in town. 

Gaetan Couture

 The Quetans then purchased a remote 70-acre plot of land near the village of Mille Isles northeast of Lachute for $1,000.  Several members sought to avoid having their name publicly associated with the nudist group so it was agreed that the land would go under Couture's name and be divided into shares. 

 Couture, by this point, had shown his colours, as he would sometimes manhandle, verbally abuse or even threaten others with blackmail. 

 Couture figured the land should belong to him, claiming that the management work he had put in justified him being the property owner. He proved averse to physical labour and found excuses to avoid doing the manual work that other members were required to do.

 Couture blundered by taking unauthorized photos of nudists in 1949 and it appeared his reign at the top was doomed but he survived the blip and was promoted to Eastern Director of the Canadian Sunbathing Association (CSA) and shmoozed Sunny Trails newsletter for good publicity. 

 By the end of 1949 Quetans had 42 members and 20 children members. The club purchased magazine ads and Couture wrote a column for Vivre d'Abord magazine. 

 Quetan members met during the cold winter days to play cards, sing songs and and tan naked with sun lamps.

 The Quetan club paid off its mortgage by 1950 and planned to build cabins on their property but things fell apart on 29 July 1951 when nine provincial police officers emerged from some bushes and charged Couture and his wife Blanche with  "being found on property other than their own in a state of nudity and public view."  

 The Quebec Provincial Police said that they had been investigating the group for about a year and some believed that a neighbour had laid the complaint after Couture had rubbed her the wrong way by pestering her with offers to purchase her chalet. 

 Nudists compared the arrests with Premier Duplessis' crackdown on Jehovah's Witnesses as Sunshine and Health magazine wrote that "like a drowning man, Duplessis is trying to crawl up again toward popular approval by attacking and harassing a minority."

 Couture, now 38 and living with his with at 2710 Barclay, bugged the Canadian Sunbathing Association to pay his legal bills. The trial started in November 1951 in St. Jerome where Judge Oscar Gagnon showed that he wasn't partial to nudists, telling the court that "this is a Catholic province and we observe certain beliefs and adhere to certain practices."

  Gagnon judged that the group was naked in public because they were not limited to friends and family but also included strangers. He sentenced Couture to six months      

 Couture, meanwhile, was submitting all measure of invoices to CSA and they were none too happy with his exaggerated accounting. Nonetheless they helped him bring the case to appeal where Judge Montepeti overturned the ruling and dismissed the charge because prosecutors hadn't gotten a green light from the attorney general before taking the case to trial.

 The CSA was hardly jubilant because the judgment freed Couture on a technicality without winning approval for the practice of nudism. Couture cut ties with the CSA and moved to Ottawa to work as a federal civil servant.

 Couture remained in charge of his group and, along with 10 members of Quetan, attended the American Sunbathing Association convention in Atlantic City in September 1952 where he was elected King. He made a point of denouncing Quebec's Provincial Police department during his victory speech.

 Couture was back in trouble in November 1954 when naked photos discovered in Australia were traced back to him. Police seized hundreds of photos and films and a court sentenced him the maximum sentence of two years in prison. 

 An appeals court reversed the conviction in  April 1955, noting that the prosecution hadn't proven that Couture was selling the photos. 

 The judge scolded the QPP for sending in a pair of male undercover officers who posed with one of their girlfriends for photos. Judge Bissonnet said the practice, "could not be tolerated." 

 Two years later, in December 1957 police arrested Couture yet again, this time for "transmitting obscene matter through the mail and possessing obscene materials. A judge sentenced him to six months in February 1958. What became of Gaetan Couture after that remains a mystery but it's assumed that he just kept living until his heart stopped beating, like all other people since the dawn of time.

 Premier Duplessis died on 7 September 1959 and the ongoing onslaught against Quebec nudists mellowed. Many other nudist groups sprouted up all around the province and its members gleefully strolled about naked without a care in the world. 

 For more about nudists in Canada, see Au Naturel: The History of Nudism in Canada by James Edward Woycke, 2003.