Nudity, sensuality, and the baby boomer experience

Discovering identity and liberation in the backdrop of post-war America

Editor’s note: The following is an edited excerpt of a larger work-in-progress narrative by the author for his own Substack. Today, it’s available exclusively for Planet Nude paid subscribers. The author’s longform edit will be available on his personal Substack in one week. If you’re interested in reading the rest, subscribe here.

Did Spock get it right?

Was my generation too self-indulgent? Were we coddled too much? Did our parents spoil us? That depends.

What can one say about his parents’ generation, where countless soldiers, sailors, and airmen gave the last full measure of devotion to the great cause against fascism and dictatorship in the 1940’s? Life was short, painfully vulnerable and uncertain. Home the survivors came from war and privation into the happy and welcoming arms of a population tired of trouble and strife and hungry for the simple joys of living. Too many were shattered by grief and loneliness. The nation was tired of trouble and strife. It wanted joy for a change. Procreate they did, prodigiously.

As the post-war economy boomed, it was time to build that house in the suburbs, bring a TV and a new couch, get the kids swing sets and new bikes, attire them in the new clothes one could find at bargain prices in department stores like Macy's, Sears, and Montgomery Ward, and then take them to destinations like Yellowstone Park, Disneyland, or the drive-in theater.

After the shock of war and the horrors of Nazi death camps, the better angels of our nature took hold and were allowed to thrive.

Formative nudity

I grew up in an idyllic little New England town in the 1950s. From the small mountain, one could climb above the town, as I often did with my brothers and pals, one was afforded a 360-degree panorama of the great river valley, mountains to the west, and the skyline one could easily make out of the vast metropolis to the south.

We’d pack peanut butter sandwiches and a canteen of water, climb the mountain, watch the boat and barge traffic on the river below, and dream little boy dreams of far-off places. It was a simpler time in the early 1950’s.

We’d also take our bikes down by an abandoned dock at the river. It was without a care in the world that, as little boys, we would entirely doff our clothes and swim. I was young enough to be oblivious to being naked on a hot sunny day by the river’s edge. It was really just ordinary for my generation. Naked boys jumped in swimming holes across the land. It was what we did.

Am I a nudist?

That I greatly enjoy the sensation of the sun and wind on my bare skin, and doing this socially and regularly with others would qualify for the definition.

But maybe I’m only a fair-weather nudist. When it’s really hot outside, wearing wet, sticky clothes is a bother. Feeling perspiration trickle down one’s naked skin during a rigorous activity like tennis or hiking is sensual. But when it is cold outside, I happily layer up in clothing. It just makes sense. Clothes are most convenient if you enjoy cross-country skiing as I have. Clothes are decidedly fun when you take your wife out to an elegant dinner dance, and she’s got the heels, hair, jewelry, and plunging neckline that turns other men’s heads.

Would I prefer to be naked all the time? No.

My mother raised five children. On Saturday evenings, she filled the bathtub with hot water and bathed her youngest three nearly simultaneously. She’d strip us down and say, ok, climb in. She’d grab a wash cloth and a bar of soap and go to work, always being careful, given our propensity to complain if soap got into our eyes, to tell us to close our eyes tightly when washing our faces. She would towel us off together before getting us into our PJs.

I loved my brothers and sisters. Being naked with them was ordinary. I was very physical with my two older brothers. We often pushed, punched, and grappled with each other. I recall once sitting naked with my little sister and exploring her anatomy as she explored mine. It was just two small children being naturally curious about their bodies. It was entirely asexual.

I was eventually given the revelation from my oldest brother about the birds & the bees. Pointing to my erect penis one morning when I was starting puberty, I said to my older brother, “You mean boys putting this into where girls pee is how you make babies?”

“Yes, little brother,” he replied.

One time, when another brother and I discovered what to us was the silliness of an erection, we playfully swatted at each other’s boners. We found it greatly amusing that these protrusions from one’s loins would bounce up and down like springs. It was just funny to us.

These were not obsessions. They were just things we learned in passing.

Once back into our jeans and sneakers, we were off to the next adventure: building a tree fort, placing pennies to be flattened by passing trains on the railroad tracks behind our house, meeting up with other kids on our street to play ball, buck bathing in the river, or grabbing our sleds to go sleighing down the snow-covered hill on our block in wintertime.

Life as a child was wonderful, and nakedness was just part of the wonder of it all. Of course, all of that changed. We got older and more self-conscious, as people and as a nation.

Institutionally mandated nudity

Skinny dipping was engrained within me early on, and I did it routinely as a teenager in high school. Boys’ gym had several days per week designated for swimming. All the boys were sent to the locker room and told to strip. We walked naked to the pool from the locker room. Swimsuits were unnecessary as the pool was closed off, and only boys were using it. None of us questioned this. I certainly didn’t mind. It was just the normal thing to do.

It was some years later that this practice was discontinued with no explanation. No doubt some Puritanical sentiment took hold. When I would later visit art museums and see the statues of nude figures, I would remember the sensuality of being among a bunch of other naked boys in and out of the pool.

An older buddy of mine for whom I worked as a seventeen-year-old pumping gas and changing tires at his gas station regularly took me and a couple of pals with his motorboat trailered to a rural lake. There, being the mischievous kids we were, we went water skiing naked. Once stripped bare, none of us bothered putting our swimsuits back on since we each waited our turns to be on water skis at the end of the tow line.

There was nothing sexual about it. For those of us skiing, our focus was on showing off our skills, jumping back and forth across the wake of the speeding boat. Being naked was part of our general defiance of convention. It was laughter and fun.

As my body further matured, I began experiencing involuntary erections. My mother, who did all the laundry, began complaining about the stains she found on my bedding as a result of so-called nocturnal emissions, otherwise known as wet dreams. I did not discover until my late teen years that I could actually produce ejaculations at will by masturbation. Once I learned the thrill and pleasure that gave, beating off in the shower was routine. I sent countless squirts of semen flowing into the sewers over those years.

I had turned twenty when I had my first experience of sexual intercourse. I met a girl my age. Sarah was her name. One day we kissed. The next night I was in her apartment in her bed in a room she shared with another girl who being a good sport allowed us the room to ourselves. It was bliss. I was truly in love. Madly in love.

Of course, love is fickle. Sarah later moved on to her previous boyfriend and I met another girl. Mary. By then I felt like an experienced pro.

We were hippies

The first day I really got acquainted with Mary she was crossing the street in front of me as I waited in my little sports car with the top down at a traffic light. We had met at a party a couple of nights before and once she recognized me she bolted from the crosswalk, bounded over the door without opening it and plopped herself into the empty passenger seat beside me. Many eyes at the scene were already on her braless look.

Her long blond hair was tied with a string of leather and feathers. She wore beads and was barefoot. Her skirt, as was fashionable at the time, was dangerously short, especially for a girl who I later discovered didn’t bother to put on underwear. To me, she was a goddess. The light changed, and off we went to a destination back in the ’70s where the “flower children” all gathered to parade and party.

So that was the summer of love with Mary. We were both discovering the adult world of consensual sex, and it was an awesome adventure I will never forget. The memories of such thrills last a lifetime. Lucky are we who get to experience them.

My British rust-bucket sportscar conked out, so I got myself a little van that friends helped me paint with psychedelic colors. Occasionally, our hippie friends would clamber aboard (there were no seats in the back, just an old mattress on which passengers would sprawl), and off we’d go to a favorite swimming hole at a secluded rural spot east of the city. A trail led from the road, through a meadow, and down to a bend in the river where, because of the curve, vast amounts of sediment and mud accumulated.

During one afternoon of skinny dipping in the river, one of our friends slipped in the sun-baked mud and fell. He stayed there, exclaiming how good the warm ooze felt. Soon, all of us were slipping and sliding naked in that sodden earthiness. It was a delight. We gave each other mud baths, smearing it all over each other’s naked bodies. Mary suddenly looked ravishing. I was instantly aroused. Sex followed, as it did with a couple others. Onlookers cheered. The Jim Morrison song popular at the time said there was no time to “wallow in the mire.” It didn’t apply to us. Wallow we did, on more than one occasion.

It took some time to wash off in the river. As the mudless naked group of us finally began climbing out in search of our clothes, a middle-aged couple happened to paddle by in a canoe. They simply smiled and waved. They must have seen all the evidence of human impressions in the mud at the river’s edge. I’ll bet they talked about that for days.

I like to imagine the two of them returning to that spot and enjoying a mudbath for themselves. I imagined them in a quiet moment in bed that night, wondering about going back there with their canoe. “Shall we do it?” one of them would have asked. I hope they went.

It wasn’t until after I moved back to the East Coast, my time with Mary in the rearview, that I discovered the magnificent world of nude beaches and nudist resorts.

The nude beach

One day at the office, when I asked our secretary about her weekend, she casually remarked on watching nude volleyball at a nearby beach. She had gone there with her husband on a whim. I had not until then heard about Fire Island National Seashore as a mecca for naked people frolicking in the sun.

After work that day I made a plan to visit Fire Island at the next available opportunity. I was not disappointed. A few dozen mostly nude people had gathered around a volleyball net set up on the beach. All one had to do was hang out and wait his turn. Offering a cold beer to this person or that certainly helped. I was an instant celebrity.

We had six people per team; mostly men and a few women. I had been around naked people before, so I was accustomed to the sight, but I did experience some slight arousal watching the swaying anatomies.

At one moment, I wasn’t hanging entirely limp. As I leaped this way and that for the ball, my swinging lower extremity might have attracted some attention, as I eventually noticed from one female onlooker who hardly kept her eyes off me. When the game was finished, and my side rotated out for another to come in, I took the one cold beer I had left and offered it to the woman I noticed watching the match. She smiled broadly and accepted my gesture. “couldn’t help seeing you watch,” I told her.

“I couldn’t help watching,” she replied. 

I learned her name was Alicia. After she finished her beer I asked if she wanted to jump in the surf with me, I needed to wash off the sweat and the sand. Alicia flipped off the only item of clothing she had on—a bikini bottom—and then away we went. Something in her voice, something in her eyes, aroused me. I moved in close for a kiss, and she kissed back. An arm around her seemed quite natural at that point, and in a moment, we were one beneath the waves.

The rest of the summer I met Alicia often at the beach and sometimes at some night spot nearby. We had a romance that summer. I loved the girl but she was determined to go spend a year in Europe. Not wanting to leave my job, we parted.

Naturism and sexuality

At this point, I should say a few words about a topic that is perennial among nudists, naturists, or people who enjoy naked lifestyles. However they may like to be called, people who prefer not to wear clothes as a lifestyle appear to be persuaded that social nudity—that is, nude activities with other people—should be asexual.

Sexuality and nudity, so the reasoning goes, should not be conflated. In order to advance the prospects for social nudity, those of us who practice it should develop an attitude about being separated from any sexuality associated with social nudity. Such attitudes should put people at ease, women especially, about being around naked men.

In the midst of any co-ed activity, it will be clear immediately to women if any of the men may be suspect to the extent that their arousal may be apparent. This is not to say that women would categorically find it objectionable to see a man with an erection. Many would. Most people would probably have no problem seeing some moderate state of arousal.

While any of my nudist friends may disagree, sex and nudity are nearly inseparable to me. I can spend hours in the company of naked adult men and women and show no sign of arousal. But it does not mean that I may not have imagined what a sexual encounter might have seemed like with one of the naked people I am with. But this dynamic works as well in social settings with normally clothed people. I am just a normal man with an active libido—perhaps too active sometimes—but sexuality is a part of who we are.

And that gets to issue of how we control or manage our own sexuality. Go to any nudist beach or nudist resort and start hitting on any woman, or even any man, and one would soon find himself an outcast.

Manners. That’s what all nudists must practice. As in all interpersonal relationships, respect must be communicated at every juncture. Respect means no presumptions. Respect means developing trust, and if any luck, ultimate friendship occurs because one demonstrates that they are trustworthy. It is an art and mature, successful people practice it every hour of the day.

I am married. I adore my wife. She accepts my nudist lifestyle, although she prefers to engage in it herself rarely. She trusts me because I have earned her trust. Not once in our twenty-five years of being together have I been unfaithful to her. I am not a swinger, although I have met a few in my time. Swingers seek multiple sexual partners. If they can manage all that and still be respected by the people who know them, then more power to them. I, for one, am happy in a monogamous relationship. I have had numerous opportunities to have sex with others—women and men. I have often been flattered when a woman or a man makes a pass at me. I understand the desire because I was as a single man in a constant state of longing and desire.

Sexuality is desire, and nudity naturally enhances the desire because of the immediate proximity to the potential act of sexuality. Sexuality and nudity, for me, are inseparable, but they are controllable. They can be managed respectfully and maturely. How they are managed is a function of one’s character, and when they are managed well, one passes an important test of his character that can make all the difference between rejection and acceptance, between alienation and real friendship in the company of nude people enjoying nudity together. 🪐