My parents were closet revolutionaries in the 1940s.

They were children of the “Age of Aquarius” 20 years before that 1969 nude musical “Hair”  debuted on Broadway. They had never heard the song “Let the Sunshine In” when I was born in 1944.  They were just quietly revolutionizing their stuffy lives.

My parents slept in the nude. They read Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet” out loud in bed to each other as romantic poetry, and they subscribed to Playboy magazine, all before and well into the 1950s during the anti-communist hysteria of U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.

Or I should say my father alone subscribed to Playboy, not both of them. That caused a family dispute between my mother and her sister, as my mother defended my father’s First Amendment right to read what he wanted to read.

Her sister considered the magazine scandalous and “would never allow it in her house.” Hrrrmph!

First Amendment or not, the magazine arrived in the mail at our Hamden, Connecticut house in plain brown wrapper in the 1950’s.

My father kept the magazine in a chronological stack on a side table with a cabinet next to his easy chair in the living room.

My mother defended his right to do so to her prudish sister by saying “Bob and I think the female body is a classical work of art.”

It’s not as if my father was a pre-hippie social rebel.

No, my father was a middle class personnel director of a brass fittings company in Meriden, Connecticut all during the 1950s.

How ordinary. He even wore a necktie at supper, as Playboy magazine sat out in the  open in the living room a few feet away.

What a strange way to grow up. I thought all parents slept in the nude and defended their first Amendment right to read Playboy magazine, which seems so utterly tame in the 2025 world of internet which is flooded with pornography.

My parents fancied themselves homemade intellectuals. My mother never graduated from high school. She had to go to work to support her divorced mother. My father attended a few business courses at New Haven College but never graduated. He too came from a broken family.

Both of them were part of a youth group run by a Yale Divinity School professor, Douglas Macintosh at a Baptist church.

That’s where they learned to read poetry out loud to each other and defend their First Amendment right to read what they wanted.

Macintosh was a nationally known defender of free speech. A Canadian citizen, he refused to “promise in advance” to fight in “any and all American wars”  when he applied for American citizenship in the 1920s.

He took his claim, which was dubbed “selective conscientious objection,” to the Supreme Court even as a professor at Yale Divinity School.

He lost in the 1931 case United States v. Macintosh but he held firm.

His example inspired my parents and prompted their commitment to freedom of thought, although I doubt the matter of nudity as freedom of expression ever came up in Dr. Macintosh’s youth group.

My parents even gave their first born child  (me) the middle name “Douglas” in 1944 in honor of Macintosh, who died in 1948.

I was given the chalice which Macintosh used as a Canadian chaplain in World War I. In 2008 I donated the chalice to Yale Law School where it is on display in its reading room in honor of Macintosh’s 1931 Supreme Court case.

And my Connecticut parents?

They died in their 70s,  over 30 years ago, well decorated with wrinkles, still sleeping in the nude and reading Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet” out loud to each other before they turned off the lights —- even for the final time.

Paul Keane is a retired Vermont teacher who was reared in Connecticut, and is a graduate of Yale Divinity School.

https://www.courant.com/2025/09/06/opinion-my-ct-dad-had-a-playboy-subscription-my-mom-supported-it/