The Metropolis has launched the “disgusting” photographs of Denny Blaine Park that millionaire philanthropist Stuart Sloan despatched to Mayor Bruce Harrell in March 2023 forward of pledging $1 million to assemble a kids’s playground on the nude seashore frequented by Seattle’s homosexual and trans residents.
Whereas each the Metropolis and the neighbors group, Denny Blaine Park for All, have instructed The Stranger that they had been involved with trash, unlawful parking, alleged incidents of public intercourse, public masturbation, and in any other case illegal exercise on the seashore, these photographs from Sloan solely seem to point out folks having fun with a legally protected proper to nudity on the seashore.
Sophie Amity Debs of Pals of Denny Blaine, a park stewardship group affiliated with the Seattle Parks Basis, known as the photographs “completely unscandalizing.”


“The beachgoers photographed are usually not doing something express—they’re casually utilizing the seashore with out garments on,” she stated in a textual content message. “There isn’t a intercourse, no drug use, no lewd exercise; not one of the issues that they *purported* had been the explanations for attempting to crack down on this seashore. I feel it was already clear from the texts, however this actually drives house: Sloan and the mayor’s actual ‘grievance’ was simply folks being nude there in any respect.”
Sloan despatched the photographs to Harrell’s personal cellular phone and to Seattle Parks and Recreation Superintendent AP Diaz on March 18, 2023, together with a collection of texts that the Metropolis launched publicly final week.
In a March 2023 textual content, Sloan instructed Harrell he’d taken the freedom to censor the genitals in his photographs. We’ve requested the Metropolis if Sloan additionally censored their faces, or if the general public information division did that, and we’ll replace once we hear again.
“That is disgusting and as you’ve stated, we’re on the best aspect of this subject,” Sloan wrote in an accompanying message. “I hope you agree that we have to get forward of this or it is going to be tougher as soon as the nice climate returns … Thanks for taking the time to learn this message. I’m not complaining about Parks, I’m simply severely involved that we simply can not let one other yr go by, it’s simply DISGUSTING!”
Mayor Harrell maintains that he didn’t know Sloan was the donor behind the mission, a declare that the activists who rallied in opposition to the Metropolis’s plans to assemble the playground reject.
In a March message to Parks Superintendent Diaz, Harrell stated he appreciated Sloan’s “philanthropic place,” which the mayor’s communications workplace stated was a common reference to Sloan’s well-documented philanthropy, and never an allusion to a donation to fund the playground.
In a June 2023 textual content to Sloan, Harrell wrote that he was conscious of the issues of nudity and unsafe waste at Denny Blaine that had turn out to be “completely completely unacceptable on the seashore” and warranted him that Deputy Mayor Adiam Emery can be working with him straight to deal with the difficulty.
“In case you are disgusted I share your disgust,” Harrell wrote.
Final week, the mayor’s workplace stated nudity was a protected proper of expression and that the mayor revered folks’s capacity to “train that freedom at Denny Blaine.”