The Dunites: A Colony in the Sand

During the nineteen thirties, while most of California was grinding through the Depression, a loose colony of people made a different calculation. They moved into the Oceano Dunes and built their lives there, in handmade shelters between the shifting sand and the Pacific, and decided that conventional society was simply not for them.

They called themselves Dunites. They included anarchists, nudists, Theosophists, artists, and poets. Gavin Arthur, grandson of President Chester Alan Arthur, was among them. He founded a commune he called Moy Mell and later wrote a memoir that addressed his sexuality with a directness unusual for the era. The dunes' isolation provided a degree of freedom from the surveillance and prosecution that followed queer people in nineteen-thirties California. Arthur's papers are now held at the ONE Archives at the University of Southern California, the world's largest repository of LGBTQ history.

The Dunites were not purely solitary. They attracted visitors, including John Steinbeck, Ansel Adams, and the composer Henry Cowell. They produced a mimeographed literary journal, the Dune Forum, for approximately a year around nineteen thirty-three and nineteen thirty-four. At peak the community numbered perhaps thirty-five people. Contributors to the journal included the writer Havelock Ellis and the poet Robinson Jeffers.

The experiment ended not with internal collapse but with geography. In nineteen forty-two, Arthur offered the Moy Mell compound to the United States Coast Guard, which needed the dunes for wartime defense. By the early nineteen fifties the community had dwindled to almost nothing.

The dunes are now an off-highway vehicle recreation area and a federally protected wildlife refuge. The shelters are gone. But for a decade during the Depression, this stretch of sand was a functioning alternative society, which remains the strangest and most California fact about this beach.