"When he was the Naked Guy, he was completely sane."

The NYT Magazine has its end-of-the-year set of articles about various people who died in the past year. The one that caught my eye was the Naked Guy (Andrew Martinez):

[A]s a student at the University of California at Berkeley, Martinez... ate his meals nude. He went to parties nude. He even attended class nude....

It was easy to dismiss his behavior as a silly stunt, but to those who knew him, Martinez was guided by an endearing, if naïve, sort of undergraduate idealism. Raised in a family that refused to buy clothing with designer labels, he now argued that all clothes were a form of repression and that by not wearing them he was making people think about the coercive nature of convention. “Our purpose is to prove that people define normalcy in their own terms,” Martinez said at a “nude-in” he staged in 1992 at Berkeley, during which more than two dozen people disrobed.

The nude-in made the Naked Guy a media favorite. The feminist writer Naomi Wolf hailed Martinez for making himself “more vulnerable to the eye than women were.”

(Typical Wolfish bilge.)

[I]n the fall of 1992, the school instituted a dress code mandating that students wear clothing in public. Martinez quickly ran afoul of the rule, and after he showed up naked for a disciplinary hearing, he was expelled.

Things go very bad for Martinez after this point, and not just because the school kicked him out. The poor man, who became a media darling, really was mentally ill. He suffered for many years, and, in the end, killed himself.

Until his death, Martinez’s family and friends did their best to keep his mental illness a secret. This was at his request. “Andrew did not want people to know about his illness,” his mother said, “because then they would think he was crazy the whole time.” In his moments of lucidity, there was one thing he desperately wanted to convey: “When he was the Naked Guy,” one friend said, “he was completely sane.”

This is very sad, including the poignant way his mother and friend seem to think that if only he had been allowed to live amongst us in the nude, he would have kept it together.

Take this, brother, may it serve you well
Maybe it's nothing
What, what oh...
Maybe, even then, impervious in London
...Could be difficult thing...
It's quick like rush for peace because it's so much
Like being naked
It's alright, it's alright, it's alright, it's alright
It's alright, it's alright, it's alright, it's alright
It's alright
If, you've become naked
Block that kick, block that kick, block that kick, block that kick
Block that kick, block that kick, block that kick, block that kick
Block that kick, block that kick, block that kick, block that kick
Block that kick, block that kick, block that kick, block that nixon