Prince Harry, an Apache helicopter pilot for the British military and third in line to inherit England’s royal throne, is now most recently known all over the world for what he looks like naked, in lieu of a few nude photos from his recent vacation.
While on vacation in Las Vegas, Harry was photographed playing “strip billiards”—a game played much like regular billiards, only for each missed shot, an article of clothing is removed—at the Wynn Hotel and Casino earlier this month. The prince was reported by a friend in attendance to have gathered a group of people from the bar at the hotel and invited them up to his penthouse suite, where a rousing game of “let’s get naked” ensued with a bunch of strangers and the prince.
After losing all of his clothes and presumably the game of billiards, Harry stood around covering his royal bits with his hands. Someone at the party must’ve realized that the prince of England was standing buck-naked in the middle of the room, and took the opportunity to snap some pictures with a camera phone, as speculated by TMZ.com, where two photos (one of the prince covering his royal package with his hands, the other of the prince and his uncovered backside tackling another guest) landed just a few days later. From there swept across the world on the cover of newspapers and tabloids—most notoriously Great Britain’s The Sun, which, in order to circumnavigate a palace request that the pictures go unpublished, first re-enacted the photograph with an intern (headlined HEIR It Is!) and later ran the real thing much to the chagrin of the royal family.
Nude photos of celebrities are not a novelty in the media. Pictures of various famous people surface all the time, and are usually met with a few jokes and maybe some minor backlash from the public, but rarely is there any kind of serious repercussion. In fact, there are a few celebrities whose careers were built from getting naked on camera (Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton, both of whom became household names after their sex tapes went viral, to name a couple).
Prince Harry, on the other hand, could be facing some trouble. An anonymous military source told UK’s online publication Express, “[Harry’s] commanding officer will probably have a word—but I imagine his family will be even more annoyed.” The Palace declined to make a comment.
In order to support the prince’s right to bare behind (and bare other things, as well), a few British military fellows began the Facebook group “Support Prince Harry with a Naked Salute!” which features quite a few photographs of men and women alike stripped down to their birthday suits (although the “important” bits are covered, usually by a Union Jack). The group description states simply, “Please cover your crown jewels, tag yourself in your photo as proof of your support to the nation’s favourite Royal!” in protest of the military’s negative feedback. Reports have surfaced that a variety of adult entertainers are scrambling for the prince to flash his crowned jewels for some full-on frontal nudity. Vincent Stevens, publisher for Playgirl magazine, told reporters that “one million dollars would not be out of the question” for a Royal spread. The infamous male strip club chain Chippendales is also attempting to reach out to Harry. A spokesman for Chippendales tells TMZ.com that their Rio location is vying to have the prince as a guest host. Most ridiculously of all, the adult film company Vivid Entertainment has offered Prince Harry $10 million and “the opportunity to truly become the coolest prince of all time, by starring in a fun, sexy, big-budget adult film called The Trouble with Harry.”
All of this madness is to be expected, but it brings up a question that I have yet to come up with an answer for: why is Prince Harry’s naked partying even remotely close to our business? The need for a group of scantily-covered Brits standing in solidarity with the Royal Nakedness is unnecessary, because he didn’t really do anything wrong. While the royal family has every right to be upset (I think any grandmother would be disappointed in her grandson stripping down at a party, regardless if she’s the queen of England), Harry is 27 years old, and has a history of being the wild-child of British royalty.
His previous indiscretions include admitting that he smoked weed at 17 and participated in underage drinking, dressing up as a Nazi for a Halloween party and engaging in a brawl with paparazzi outside a nightclub—so what if he turned up naked at a party? At least he had the decency to cover his private parts. In comparison, it’s not even that negative of a scandal. He’s of legal age to be drinking, and consequently of making drunken mistakes.
There was no violence reported—besides the playful tackling of another (also naked) billiards player, and there’s not a swastika in sight. He was at a private party in his own hotel room—I would hope that someone has the right to get naked in any room he or she paid roughly $80,000 for. He was simply a young man having fun on vacation. Unfortunately, he made the decision to hang around strangers who weren’t ashamed to make a quick buck off of his poor billiards skills.
If the plot of The Hangover holds any truth to the goings on in Sin City, I’m sure these kinds of shenanigans happen all the time. At least he didn’t wake up with a tiger in the bathroom and a stolen baby in the closet. That would have been worth the tabloid space.
Samantha Bloom can be reached atsamantha.bloom@spartans.ut.edu.