Confessions

This photo is a self portrait of me when I was about 22 way back in 1976.

It took until 2005 before I had the courage to admit that I was a nudist, and it's one of the best things I have ever done. To wake up nude, and not put on any clothes after a shower are just a couple of life's small pleasures.

Over the past year I have had time to reevaluate my past in terms of nudity, and there were a surprising number of instances where my true self attempted to emerge.

I've stated before that as a child I had lots of experience with social nudity, from swimming at the YMCA, to skinny-dipping in lakes, and experiencing gang showers in high school. None of these experiences ever seemed the slightest bit traumatic or abnormal, either to me or any of my friends. Perhaps the skinny-dipping, done in broad daylight when I was around 11 or 12, was in our minds as being a bit taboo, but we had great fun doing it and we knew that this was really the way we were intended to swim.

Oddly enough, after high school all of that changed. I think now that my nudist tendencies were suppressed by circumstance rather than some sort of inner transformation. When I went to college I lived in a coed dorm - 2 floors of women, and one level for men. This situation forced us all to be more modest than we might otherwise have been. There was always at least a towel around our waists when walking to and from the shower. Also, the showers on the men's level were all private stalls since it was originally an all-women's dorm, so we never saw each other naked on a regular basis. It's as if the closed stalls were telling us to keep our bodies to ourselves.

Now I'm talking about non-sexual nudity here, I have never been inhibited when it came to sexual situations. No lights off under the covers for me.

But in group social situations, there was never any nudity. I do think that this is part of the problem that American society has with the human body, that we are conditioned to think that nudity equals sex and vice-versa. Back in college, if I had been stark naked in the corridor when a woman walked onto our floor, there would likely have been an incident. But if we were naked together in a dorm room by mutual consent with the door locked, that would have been OK.

There was one time when my girlfriend and I went to visit another couple in their apartment. After a couple of bottles of wine, we began to play cards and someone suggested poker. One thing led to another and soon we were all taking off our clothes. At first it was sexual - once we were all naked, someone spun the wine bottle and we began kissing and hugging each other. And then our hosts suggested that we all move into the bedroom.

Now 3 out of 4 of us were agreeable. I don't think that this would have been a partner-swapping situation, but certainly we were ready to have sex in front of one another. But my girlfriend balked at the notion, and that was fine, and nobody made an issue out of it. Our hosts opened another bottle of wine and we all stayed in the living room and watched some television. Oh, and we did not bother to put our clothes back on, it was a hot night, and since we already now knew what we all looked like naked, getting dressed seemed unnecessary. That night we all ended up being nudists.

After getting married and having a child, there were no other instances of social nudity. As a father with a daughter, I became very modest and virtually never walked around naked, although we let our daughter run around in the buff all she wanted. The responsibility of parenthood is very great, and the pressure to "do the right thing" sometimes can overcome common sense and practicality. Looking back now, I wish that my wife and I were practicing nudists, it would have been great to have shared that freedom together as a family.

But the nudist in me was still alive. I can tell you honestly that I've always hated wearing clothes, I specifically remember going to work in a jacket and tie on hot days and feeling like I was going to suffocate. And I always slept in just a pair of briefs for as long as I can remember, I was never a pajama person.

During summer breaks from college I was often alone at my parent's house during the day when they were at work. They had a nice secluded piece of land and I would go out nude sunbathing whenever I could. I was also studying photography and took many nude self-portraits, one of these is at the top of this post. But I did all of this in relative secrecy as if I was doing something to be ashamed of.

But after my marriage all of this stopped completely. It's just the way things were. But I did continue to do something in secret that nobody ever knew about - whenever I knew that I was going to be alone for an extended period of time, I took off all of my clothes around the house. I know now that this was just the nudist in me trying to tell me something. I also did this in secret, never telling my wife because I believed that she would simply not understand.

So last year I began being naked more and more as our daughter was away at school and my wife was out of the house a lot. And if you go back and read my very first posts from that period, you will see that I finally let my nudist self emerge.

All married couples hide something from one another. It's usually not a good thing. My desire to be nude was something that I could easily suppress, and by letting this side of me go dormant was not damaging to our marriage. Had my wife reacted negatively to my nudity when I finally told her, this might have been a much different story. But she loves me for who I am, and while her first reactions to the naked me were a mixture or puzzlement and laughter, she now is perfectly accepting and even encourages me.

I am naked now most of the time. If you are already a nudist or naturist you understand perfectly how much better life is without clothes. I hope that all of you reading this who have similar feelings will act upon them and not be ashamed. Letting go of thousands of years or clothed social history is not easy at first. and there are many out there who will never be able to overcome the false shame brought about by religious indoctrination. You are all already naked, it's the clothes that are unnatural and unnecessary. Free your body, the mind will follow.

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