Gary Golding Naked and Afraid – Modern-Day ‘Tarzan Of L.A.’ (Updated)

By Chris Cocoles

Even in Southern California – full of limitless dreamers, crackpots, free spirits and misfits – Gary Golding found a niche. So it goes for the self-proclaimed “Tarzan of Los Angeles.”

Tarzan? In L.A.? Anything is possible in this town. 

And if you spend an hour or so chatting up this Redondo Beach/Hermosa Beach native, you’ll understand that while adjectives like eccentric, outspoken, sarcastic and profane could describe Golding, you’ll walk away understanding too that he cares – about the environment; about animals; about kids; about awareness. 

 And while Discovery Channel audiences will get a look at this character on an episode of Naked and Afraid this month – Golding and his partner battled oppressive heat and blood-thirsty bugs in a Brazilian savanna  – his appearance on this show was more than just trying to get through 21 days roughing it in the raw. 

“I make it very clear that I didn’t go on that show to test my survival skills. I want everybody to know that’s not why I went on Naked and Afraid ” Golding says. “I couldn’t give a sh*t about my survival skills. I just had to do that to carry my message to humanity, which is consume as little as possible.”

That’s not just a throwaway line at the end of that quote. Consume as little as possible is literally Golding’s trademarked battle cry. He now has that slogan tattooed on his back – he got the ink after he returned from filming the show in Brazil (under that phrase in smaller letters is “For the children and the animals of the world”). 

“It doesn’t matter who you pray to, what your sexual orientation is, whether you eat meat or not, or whether you choose to feel love or hate in your heart,” says Golding’s website (you guessed it, consumeaslittleaspossible
.com). “These things can be debated to no end and are simply distractions from the one true action that can make the planet a cleaner, more sustainable place by tomorrow if done by all of us today.”

He hopes that being a little bit eccentric and bombastic doesn’t rub anyone the wrong way.

“I asked the producer on (Naked and Afraid), ‘So what did the casting agency say when they gave me to you?’ ‘They told me you were a vulgar loudmouth’,” Golding says during his profanity-laced interview. “‘What do you think now after being around me for eight days?’ ‘They don’t know you.’”

Golding’s message includes eating more organically by foraging seafood – his YouTube page (youtube.com/user/thegoldingstate) includes clips of him SoCal pier fishing, diving for sea urchins and eating grunion eggs – and gathering honey from beehives, part of another Golding project, Bee Warriors. “I travel to schools and bring my live bees and I (purposefully) get stung by them in the class,” he says. 

Golding stays busy with various other ventures. He regularly is requested to speak at Los Angeles-area schools, to which he brings his bees and various small animals to share his message. He also hosts guests on nature tours (tarzanoflosangeles.com), highlighted by kayaking on the L.A. River and into the Pacific to get close to offshore whales and dolphins. But it’s Consume as little as possible that consumes his life. 

“I made it to a show to where you consume almost nothing. You start with almost nothing,” Golding says of Naked and Afraid, in which a man and a women shed all their clothes and get dropped in the middle of nowhere to test their physical skills and mental makeup in a less than pleasant setting. (Each contestant can bring one item into the wilderness; Golding brought a machete and his partner a firestarter.) 

“You’re being filmed in a country that is being devoured by the planet: Brazil. And I told the producers and insisted, ‘I’m not one of these people on the show who’s here to test himself.’ I’m a man who knows exactly why he’s alive. And I’m alive to consume as little as possible. I want to change the world.” 

IN THE LAID-BACK beach communities of Hermosa and Redondo, Gary Golding grew up a rebel.

“My complete story is one of defiance,” the 40-something-year-old admits. 

He spent a lot of time in his grandmother’s backyard, which was full of fruit trees and where as a toddler he’d eat Grandma’s peaches, apricots, lemons; whatever grew out there, young Gary ate it – seeds and all. And there was his fascination with critters and insects.

“I was always running around with a jar full of spiders and bees, and I became what I am,” says Golding, who got his love for the outdoors when his dad got him involved in local YMCA Indian Guide programs that had them doing various activities. “So I was, naturally as a child, completely in touch with nature. When I was 6 or 7 I was given a buck knife to wear on my hip when we’d go camping. Nowadays parents don’t give their kids knives.” 

Although he’s close to his family still, it was clear that he would do it his way, even if it meant lifting a middle finger to authority.

“(People ask), ‘What made you like this?’ And I tell them my father. I remember being 6 years old and I said, ‘Dad, I’m cold.’ And he’d say, ‘Go get a #$%^&*% jacket. What am I? Your slave?’” he says. 

“I knew how to make French toast at 9 from my brothers. I did my own laundry at 7. I hear parents say, ‘I want him to be a kid as a long as he can.’ But I remember as a kid I felt so empowered and such a badass because I could cook French toast. And I didn’t need my parents from a really young age.”

You get the sense he didn’t need much of anything to be content. Around the time of 1999 and the paranoia of the Y2K bug, Golding became obsessed with learning survival skills. It was about then that he purchased his first handgun and became something of a prepper. (“I have two years of food saved up in my house and have desalinators to make the ocean water drinkable, since I live by the ocean. And I have water saved up. I’m into all that too. This is like the funnest hobby that I have.”)

Golding took some survival courses in the San Diego area and then headed to Northern California’s Headwaters Outdoor School, where he learned from one of his mentors, survivalist instructor Tim Corcoran. Golding also picked the brain of another legend in the genre, an Arizona man aptly named Peter Bigfoot, founder of Reevis Mountain School of Self Reliance. They fled together to the desert to learn survival skills in that unforgiving terrain.

“I had that Tom Brown book – Tom Brown’s Field Guide to Wilderness Survival – from when I was a little boy. And I read that when I was like 12 years old and held onto it forever. I even took it to Brazil with me.”

When asked if he’s surprised he’s remained in the urban jungles of the Southland and would feel freer if he lived far away from the chaos of Los Angeles, Golding scoffed at the notion.

“People say, ‘Why do you live in L.A., of all places?’The middle of L.A. is exactly where I need to be heard. Even when it comes to survival and living off the grid, OK, do it right in the heart of L.A. and take your house off the grid. You can do it right here in the middle of the city. You can make this place wild. We have a safari right out here. In California, the real safaris are out by the ocean. I swim with whales all the time. You don’t have to tuck away in the mountains to be a mountain man.”

TWICE NOW, GARY GOLDING has felt like death was near. The first was off the Southern California coast, in July 2014 during a beach outing with friends in Rancho Palos Verdes. A teen had fallen into a cove with a strong rip current and was in instant danger. Golding was the first one to jump in an attempt to rescue the boy and nearly was swept out to sea himself. Eventually, Golding and a friend managed to guide the teenager to safety (you can watch the video, shot by a bystander, on Golding’s YouTube page). 

As a hint of a spoiler to his appearance on Naked and Afraid, Golding says he felt like he was in Grim Reaper territory again after he and his partner Karra, an endurance athlete from Wisconsin, bared all in the semi-arid Jalapão region of central Brazil. 

“There were these blood-sucking flies that sucked our blood for three hours. So right when we get to the location (where they found a water source), she said, ‘Oh my god.’ And my mentality was, ‘I’m walking around sucking the air and I’m eating those (suckers). And she thinks I’m being crazy, but I’m trying to give her the mentality of, look, these are a gift.” 

Golding loved every minute of the terrible condition he was eventually reduced to by the end of his journey. It’s not surprising then that one of his inspirations is Hatuey, a 16th century tribal chief who fled the island of Hispaniola for present-day Cuba. He was burned alive by Spanish pirates after stubbornly rejecting his captors when they asked if he would accept Jesus Christ and be allowed into heaven. 

“I loved the part of almost dying. I loved every bit of it. Because to me it’s beautiful art. It was the reality that this thing really happened to me – almost dying. The two times that I almost died in my life were caught on film, and they’re now beautiful art. I love my moments of almost death,” says Golding, who gleefully asked the camera operator and producer on location if anyone had ever died on the show and said it would be an honor to be the first. “So I don’t view death as negative. I view it was a beautiful transition. I programmed my brain to think that way.”

As it turned out, Brazil was everything Golding hoped it would be. 

“Oh god, it was savanna. I didn’t see one piece of scat. I didn’t see one mammal the whole time I was there. I didn’t see one ripe (piece of) fruit. I didn’t see one snake. I was starving. They put me in this barren hell, but luckily, I had beautiful water.”

And by the time he returned to the hustle bustle of L.A., Golding made sure to memorize at least one important phrase in Portuguese, the same words that now adorn his back. 

“Consumir o mínimo possível! Eu estou aqui pelas crianças e pelos animais do mundo!” CS

Editor’s note: Like Gary Golding at facebook.com/tarzanoflosangeles. His Naked and Afraid episode was set to air the first weekend in April. New episodes of the show can be seen on Sundays at 10 p.m. Pacific. For more, go to discovery.com/tv-shows/naked-and-afraid.