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Barefoot Man is proud to be working with the World Naked Bike Ride (WNBR) in London on creating content about issues that matter to both projects. We welcome the opportunity to work with people on an unprecedented scale and hope our recent pilot shoot will mark the start of a bigger, longer-term collaboration.
The World Naked Bike Ride is not only one of the biggest naked events of the year, it also takes place in many cities around the world. Famous for its unique approach to body positivity and environmental activism, WNBR encourages participants to cycle nude through a number of major cities around the world each year. The campaign aims to raise awareness of the vulnerability of cyclists, the human body’s impact on the environment and the need for body positivity.
All of us at Barefoot Man are grateful for this opportunity to explore the shared values of both organizations. WNBR is a ground-breaking project that uses nudity to promote social awareness. The campaign started as a pro-cycling environmental protest in much the same way that we set out as an allyship project to address homophobia in sport.
Both campaigns have since gained an understanding of the wider, often complex issues that are raised by nudity itself. We wanted to create engaging content that celebrates how both WNBR and Barefoot have contextualised nudity as an impactful and relevant way to promote social change.
We took at crew of five, including two stills photographers and two film camera operators, along to the WNBR London ride on 8 June and offered participants the opportunity to share their stories on camera.
Nudity can be polarising but it is also illuminating. Both WNBR and Barefoot seek to address the ongoing complexities of how men’s and women’s bodies are viewed in society.
We are currently working on our first film with footage shot on 8 June at the London ride. By including interviews with a diverse range of participants, we hope to promote a broader understanding of body positivity, healthier masculinity and our relationships with the world around us.
For more information about WNBR London, please visit wnbrlondon.uk
The Warwick Rowers began as a humble student calendar initiative, but over the years it has evolved into a much bigger campaign. Alongside our ever popular calendar (sixteenth edition for 2025 on its way!), we tell our story through film, a monthly magazine, live events and social media.
We began by challenging homophobia in sport. It became a way to look at men’s bodies as a means to promote healthier masculinities and more mindful approaches to understanding the perspectives of everyone around us.
This transformation was not just about changing perceptions but also about fostering a meaningful dialogue between individuals from diverse sexual orientations and backgrounds.
Birth of the Warwick Rowers Museum
Following a decade of impactful activities and discussions, we have begun a new chapter with the development of the Warwick Rowers Museum. This has already started with the Seeing Men exhibition, our first venture into showcasing our work in an online gallery which has already raised nearly £8000 for registered charity Sport Allies.
We plan a huge expansion of our gallery over the coming months and years as we build a truly multimedia, interactive online space that will celebrate and build on our history of looking at men’s bodies in innovative and engaging ways.
This virtual exhibition space will not only serve to document the journey of the Rowers but also to act as a beacon for the “Barefoot Movement,” advocating for inclusivity and openness among men from all walks of life. The museum will feature a rich mix of media, including text, videos, and podcasts, all aimed at chronicling the experiences and insights gained from the Rowers’ activities.
The Museum’s Mission: Dialogue and Understanding
Our museum will seek to share and empower greater empathy, building directly on our original intention to foster understanding and solidarity between gay and straight men through real world experience.
The museum’s exhibitions will detail our evolution from a simple calendar to a social movement promoting mental health and social change through the use of art and open dialogue. It will narrate the story of how we used our platform to unite people across different sexualities, and then across different genders and lived experiences to reach better understandings of how we could support each other in our lives.
Challenges and Triumphs
The museum also delves into how our project developed through the incredible opportunities that enabled us to inspire supporters around the world and the many obstacles we have had to overcome to continue and develop that advocacy. This journey will be vividly captured through interactive and multimedia exhibits in the museum.
The museum not only revisits the past achievements of the Warwick Rowers but also sets the stage for future explorations of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and power dynamics. It positions itself as a contemporary space akin to the Saatchi Gallery, but with a focus on queer, feminist, and BIPOC perspectives that challenge traditional narratives and promote a more inclusive view of society.
Funding and Creative Direction
The Warwick Rowers Museum and Archive is going to be more than just an exhibition space. It will be a must-see destination for a whole range of audiences. Some of it will be freely available to the general public, though we will of course encourage donations to charity as we have with our prototype Seeing Men exhibition. Other parts will, by their nature and in keeping the original intentions of our early contributors, will be available to ticket holders and members only.
All revenue from entry fees and merchandise sales to directly fund our continuing development not just as a museum but as a wider project that conducts research and training. All stakeholders, including original members of the Warwick Rowers, will have significant input into the ongoing management and future development of the museum and its contents.
A Cornerstone of the Broader Barefoot Vision
The WR Museum will share our history, but it do more than just celebrating past successes. We want to encourage eveyrone to think differently about masculinity, identity and coexistence. We want to reflect the recent history of which our project has been a part – a world that values diverse perspectives and recognises the importance of holistic wellbeing.
Through this innovative platform, we hope that our will continue to make a profound impact on societal norms and be part of a global dialogue about the essential issues we must address today to create the best possible outcomes for future generations.
Barefoot Man cares about how we look at the naked body. That includes addressing the lack of gender parity in nudity that still prevails in popular culture.
A recent article in the Guardian cites a study from 2019 which proves the disparity between male and female nudity is real. It found that 27.3% of female characters took their clothes off in 2018’s top 100 films at the US box office compared with only 8.5% of men.
That’s quite a gender display gap!
The focus of the Guardian article is a growing trend towards full frontal nudity on screen “in a crop of summer comedies, with female stars daring to bare all for laughs.”
The article quotes critic Kristen Lopez, film editor for the Wrap: “Movies are trying to bring back joy and fun after the Covid years.”
“I think we’re seeing this response to the last [few years] of sadness and trauma. What’s the best way to do that? To bring back frivolity and nudity.”
Lopez later points out that men are not being very visible in supporting the sisters here.
“There is an attempt by women to reclaim ownership of their bodies and make nudity a part of that,” Lopez is quoted as saying. “At the same time, it’s still putting the burden on women, so we’re not really seeing nudity in equal measure for men.”
What Lopez would like to see is what she calls “equal opportunity nudity”, although she recognises that this could be a challenge. As another contributor states, “The biggest taboo is male full frontal nudity.”.
And don’t we know it! That is why reaching gender parity in cultural nudity is one of our key goals at Barefoot Man. We know that closing what we call the Barefoot Deficit will not happen anytime soon, but it is a goal that men can get behind – and in front of!
Our plea to male actors, their directors, their intimacy coaches and anyone else who stumbles into creating a moment of male nudity is this: do not strap latex porn dicks onto male actors and performers. As the article mentions in passing, “…the TV industry seems to be happily embracing prosthetic penises in shows such as Pam & Tommy, Euphoria and Minx.”.
The use of prosthetic penises is not showing solidarity with women. Nor is it supporting men. It is imposing a damaging and distorted view of the penis on mainstream culture.
It is time for us to desexualise how we look at women and take an authentic look at men.
Notes from Our Journey
When we started out as the Warwick Rowers, we were a group of fairly privileged, university-educated white men. The only thing that really distinguished us was our age (the photographer was definitely a lot older than the athletes, though he denies it now) and our sexuality (if you have ever met our photographer, you will know that plausible deniability was never an option).
We were exploring how our age and sexuality had led us to very different experiences of sport. It was inclusion, but within very defined parameters. We confronted the role of sport in perpetuating homophobia and we showed the power of individuals within sport to make it a leader for change.
We have never stopped producing our calendars or our films or our monthly content because the further we have travelled, the more we see the privilege of men like us, and the responsibility of all men to support change.
As our project broadened into an exploration of healthier masculinities and how men could help to create a more equitable society, we began to understand more about people’s lives are affected by the intersections between their ethnicity and their gender as well as their sexuality.
Women now play crucial roles at all levels in our project, including as photographers, but we still have a long way to go. We are particularly keen to explore the challenges faced by men who are Black and queer.
We know that not everyone believes in the theory of intersectionality, but it has always made sense to us. Exploring how our lives depend on where we land at birth has always been at the core of our project, from the first moment when a Boomer queer photographer bumped into some Millennial alpha males at a university boat club. So it is very much part of what we intend to explore at Barefoot Man.
We have just launched a WhatsApp channel because we are committed to engaging more people in a more active and diverse conversation about healthier masculinities. Look out for more details of our new channel in our December issue and, of course, on social media. We want to hear more voices of women, of BIPOC people, of people who may not have felt a connection to naked men in a calendar. Because one thing that we come to understand over the lifetime of our project is that the old school rules of masculinity have affected everyone.
The first Black man to sign up to our campaign was D’Paul. He was not actually the first to appear, but he signed up in October 2019. Of course, this was just a few months before Covid-19 changed everything, so D’Paul’s debut got delayed. We eventually made it work when D’Paul brought his incredible energy and life experience to our retreat in Joshua Tree, Southern California in April 2023.
Meanwhile, downhill free rider Cody joined our project in 2021 when our intrepid duo of videographer Tom and photographer went off to Mexico to film and shoot the first FireRide festival in Puerto Vallarta. Cody became the first Black man to have a starring role in our calendar and our digital content, including being our pull out poster boy for in the 2022 calendar – one of our favourite images, and a favourite with our supporters too.
In 2022 we met Leyenne, who came to work with us at the Include Summit for inclusive sport in Birmingham. It was not long before Leyenne was touring the conference centre in a WR onesie, and a few weeks after that he was happy to get out of the onesie at a calendar shoot in London, again with our regular contributing photographer Holly. He made our 2023 calendar in two stunning shots by Holly.
Born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, D’Paul has already impressed our team, our subscribers and our supporters on social media with his humour and his candor about the challenges he has faced as a non-conforming Black man in a conservative culture.
D’Paul is helping us to create a more diverse conversation within our project, and we are proud that he is on the cover of our 2024 calendar as well as appearing regularly in our films and monthly Portfolio.
In this November 2023 issue of ROAR Portfolio, we have brought together a collection of some of our best shots of Cody, Leyenne and D’Paul. We are very keen to work with more Black and BIPOC men, so get in touch if you’d like to be featured in a future calendar and a future Piece To Camera!
While it took us a while to get to this party, we feel we are in good company. Rustin is the first feature film from Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company, Higher Ground. Already tipped for an Oscar, the film celebrates the life of Bayard Rustin, a civil rights activist whose significant work was often discounted because of his sexuality.
Now streaming on Netflix, Rustin chronicles the run-up to the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, during which Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.
The film stars Colman Domingo in the title role. Directed by George C Wolfe, the film offers a portrait of grassroots activism and a man who, faced with prejudice from some civil rights leaders on his own side, declared: “On the day that I was born Black, I was also born homosexual. They either believe in freedom or justice for all, or they do not.”
We are with Bayard Rustin on that. And we are proud that our ‘we’ includes D’Paul.
To read more about Bayard Rustin and to access a review of the film, check out this recent article by David Smith in The Guardian.
Why We Are Looking at Buttholes
There was a time when the WR project would have edited buttholes out of our films and images – although we know from forums that we have occasionally slipped up over the years! Now, we want to show them. We want to show that the butthole is as much a part of male anatomy as the penis, and particularly part of how we experience sexual pleasure.
Human culture is a rich tapestry woven with beliefs, norms, and taboos that vary widely from one society to another. The male butthole is a fact of life that, like menstruation, tends to remain hidden in the shadows.
In this article, we get to the bottom of how we look at buttholes by delving into the cultural sensitivities surrounding them, and shedding light on the diversity of perspectives, taboos, and changing attitudes.
In many cultures, the male butthole has traditionally been a source of embarrassment and even shame. The lingering stigma around anal sexuality has roots in historical taboos and patriarchal, heteronormative ideologies. However, there has been a gradual shift in attitudes, largely due to the LGBTQ+ rights movement and increased awareness surrounding sexual health. Discussions about anal health and sexual pleasure are more open, with individuals and healthcare professionals addressing concerns without the fear of judgment.
Why We Need to Care About Buttholes
Regardless of cultural beliefs, it is essential that we all understand the importance of anal health. This includes discussing common issues such as haemorrhoids, anal fissures, and sexually transmitted infections, as well as promoting safe sexual practices, such as condom use.
It is also important for inclusion that we become more conscious of how our attitudes towards men’s buttholes are products of heteronormativity and toxic versions of masculinity.
Thankfully, the LGBTQ+ community has recently had the power to play a pivotal role in challenging stigmas and opening up conversations about the male butthole. By advocating for equal rights and sexual health, this community has made significant strides in normalizing discussions about anal health and pleasure. We believe all men need to be allies in a quest that is about letting the sunshine into our buttholes instead of thinking that’s where sunshine comes from!
Education is another key area, and one that we will be addressing in Barefoot Man. One of the most effective ways to break down cultural sensitivities is through education and awareness. Schools, healthcare systems, and community organizations can offer informative programs that address the male butthole as a natural part of human anatomy. Encouraging open, non-judgmental discussions can help individuals make informed decisions regarding their health and sexuality.
This piece was originally published in the September issue of ROAR Portfolio. Go here to subscribe to our monthly digital downloads and browse our extensive range of digital content – including our recent film about butthole sunning, which is included in our WR23 Roar Portfolio for September!
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A brand name is more than a tag. It embodies an organisation’s essence, beliefs and vision. Changing brand name is a challenge that no organization undertakes lightly.
So why are we changing our name again?
We started out with a question. Can men challenge homophobia by taking their clothes off?
As the Warwick Rowers, we proved that they could! As the Worldwide Roar, we enabled sportsmen everywhere to join the original rowers. Dozens of men from different countries and different sports have now shown their passion for change through our project.
All the men who have taken part in our project have helped us to understand its potential to deliver more than a message. We have seen how much they have benefitted from the experience.
This is not just about our message to the world, it is about the men who undress to deliver that message.
Our participants are men who have learned to check their privilege, test their vulnerability and make a lifelong commitment to change.
They went naked to connect with the world around them. To leave a lighter footprint on society. To recognise that men could live more happily with less control. To embrace vulnerability and empathy through breaking taboos around how the rest of us could look at them. That is how they came to be the original Barefoot Men.
Barefoot Man embodies our pride in the achievements of the men who have joined our project and our unwavering faith in their potential.
As Barefoot Man, we can draw a clearer map for the future. Join us as we take another bold stride forward on our journey.
The video below is the “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” ad from Coca Cola’s 1971 “It’s the Real Thing” campaign. It has been consistently celebrated as one of the most memorable and iconic spots in advertising history – not least as an early example of diverse visibility.
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Fifty years later, the battle for diverse visibility continues, and in ways that were unimaginable in 1971.
Today we know that not everyone can look at the world through the straight male gaze. The desires of others – especially women and LGBTQI men – must be visible and celebrated too. We need to change how we look at men, and some men need to change how they look at the world!
The guys in the WR project agree. These real amateur athletes get totally naked for our calendar (and even more totally naked in our books, films and monthly Portfolio!). They commit to nudity with purpose to show their authentic support for change. They know that once you get your kit off in the internet age, you will be out there naked forever. So WR is literally the real thing! It’s what the world wants today.
And now you can buy the world a calendar! Or at least your friends, your neighbours, your colleagues and everyone else you know.
We still live in a world run by men who want to look at women.
We still see the objectification of women all around us, from Instagram to Game of Thrones. And now that film-makers feel obliged to include the odd penis on the menu, that penis is likely to be fake*.
This is not the world you asked for. Where is the visibility of your desire?
The Roar is one of the few places where we specifically champion the rights of people who want to look at men. People who want to create a world where all of us can look at each other in a healthy way, on equal terms.
We are men of all sexualities who believe in your right to look at us. So much so that we will step into the firing line for you. Naked.
But to win this revolution we need your help!
Our visibility can be your visibility.
All you need to do is buy our calendar, hang it wherever you want and see what happens next.
You can put us somewhere private, as a reminder to yourself that you have allies. We hope you’ll feel the difference, and we’d love to hear about it.
Or you can hang us in a public place as a declaration to the rest of the world that you stand with us for change! We’d love to hear your stories of how the world responds.
Either way, you will have our gratitude and our support. And our naked bodies, of course.
Happy New Year from all of us! We’ll be here all year with our skin in your game.
The Men of Worldwide Roar 2023
PS Please note this uprising is cruelty free and suitable for vegans! True, you have to take us out and put us up against the wall! But we promise you don’t have to shoot anyone. Our highly professional and very humane photographers have already done that bit for you. 🙂
PPS *Our standard calendar does not include frontal nudity. Our films, books and digital content do demonstrate our commitment to the cause as men with actual penises in all sizes.
Whatever you might think about her accidental ascent to becoming a head of state, Queen Elizabeth II became the formal leader of a major power in the mid 20th century and went on to win the respect of the world. For seventy years, she met all the most important people on the planet. More importantly, they met a smart, yet unpretentious woman who had agency. Her fifteen prime ministers valued her ear and her experience. The way she fulfilled her inherited role created a legacy for women everywhere. We sent her our calendar and we understand it not only gave her a giggle but delighted her as a sign of the progress made during her reign to show greater respect for women and for the LGBTQ+ community whom she embraced so fondly in her day to day life. God bless you, Queen Elizabeth, who quietly guided so many of us through so much extraordinary change.
Here is a letter that we wrote to Queen Elizabeth in 2015
Your Majesty,
We read that you enjoy receiving correspondence from your subjects throughout the Commonwealth, and we thought we would write to share our story with you.
We are the men’s rowing team at the University of Warwick and for the last six years we have been producing a calendar. Given the state of our student finances, it is a blessing that ours is the sort of calendar where the lack of a costume budget has been no barrier to success.
When we began our calendar, it was with the modest ambition to raise a few hundred pounds for much-needed boat repairs. Six years later, we have raised over half a million pounds to support our club and other good causes.
We believe our success lies in the very generous support that we received early on from the gay community, and how we responded to that. Although most of us are straight, we immediately embraced our LGBT supporters. Over time, and somewhat to our surprise, this has led to our calendar becoming an international symbol of challenging homophobia, particularly in sport.
The calendar now sells in over eighty countries around the world, and our tour of the United States last Christmas generated half a billion page views in US online media. (If you google Warwick Rowers, you will see there is a lot out there!)
Since 2014, 10% of calendar profits** have gone to funding the establishment of Sport Allies, a project to make sport more inclusive, particularly of LGBT young people. Team sport is where the problem of exclusion is worst. For example, Sport Allies’ research has identified that LGBT students who engage in sport at university are 50% less likely than their heterosexual counterparts to play a team sport.
As rowers, we value hugely how participating in team sport has benefitted each of us in terms of our personal and social development, and we know that those seeking to recruit university graduates value these qualities, too. In today’s competitive labour market, that can be the difference between success and failure. Our goal, through the message of our calendar and through the work of Sport Allies, is to help young LGBT people access the same life chances that we have. For us, it is nothing more than good sportsmanship and fair play.
Just last month, some of us were lucky enough to travel to New York to help launch an initiative by Visit Britain to attract more LGBT visitors to the UK. We were very flattered to be told that our calendar is an example of how modern Britain is able to maintain traditional pursuits and values yet demonstrate progressive leadership in a swiftly changing world. It prompted us to write this letter to you now.
It is an enormous honour for all of us to be able to make a contribution, no matter how small, to how Britain is seen in the world, and we are honoured, Ma’am, to remain Your Majesty’s humble and obedient subjects – in all our states of attire.
The Warwick Rowers
**Since 2016, WR has devoted 100% of its surplus resources to funding Sport Allies and academic research into healthier masculinity.
This Christmas, as every year, we have posted pictures from 2014 of Tristan and his Warwick Rowers 2015 calendar buddies decorating a tree in Bel Air, Los Angeles.
The pictures have become like the decorations that every family gets out of a box each Christmas – much loved and somehow irreplaceable! But we are always open to change and this year we decided it was time to think again about how we celebrate Christmas.
The thing is, our family is getting bigger. Our first calendar cover as the Roar featured more athletes than ever before and our third calendar features the most athletes in total.
We are now working with sports bodies around the world to ensure that the Worldwide Roar will continue to grow, and at an even faster rate! Supporters will soon be able to get involved in the Roar in ways that we had not thought possible before. The Worldwide Roar will deliver on the promise of the Warwick Rowers by helping everyone to understand their relationship with masculinity, and how that affects their relationship with the world.
We will always cherish our pictures and our memories from 2014, when a handful of rowers went halfway around the world to promote our message of allyship. It was a great moment for our project, and we wanted to reflect the community that we have become as a result.
That was when Lucas, our calendar star and social media guru had a great idea! He invited our Instagram followers to create their own takes on our iconic Christmas shots and send them to us to share on our account. The response was incredible.
There were so many entries that we had to ask people to stop after 24 hours so that Lucas’s own family could have some time with him over the holidays!
You can see some of the results here, and the rest by visiting our Instagram account at @worldwideroar. All wonderful shots from incredible supporters, creating a new Christmas tradition at the Roar.
Thank you to everyone who took part in our competition, and to all of you who have spent many Christmases with WR. We’re family and we’re already looking forward to creating a lot more new traditions in 2022!
