white ink remark, “I smoke my pipe.” I had a little pipe that blew bubbles. Two other photos showed me in that bassinet in completely innocent, even adorable, nudity. As a self-conscious teenager, I was embarrassed by a tiny penis preserved there for “all the world” to see, as though once I became famous, some tabloid newspaper or magazine would publish such an Italian Renaissance-like chubby cherub. Abject humiliation? Photoshop had not yet been invented to doctor the photos with fig leaves or a tiny bikini. Surreptitiously I destroyed the prints, hoping my father had not kept any negatives.
I cannot recall ever seeing my mother or my father naked, and if I had, I would have been as embarrassed as catching them having sex—and that never happened either. I didn’t even peek at my mother’s breastfeeding my sister, born seven years after me, and, of course, I have no memory of my own breastfeeding. My mother did invite me to feel her swollen belly when my sister was kicking furiously shortly before being born.
My teenage years in the Boy Scouts were as innocent as can be. I wasn’t even sure how babies were made until I sent away for a book that arrived in a plain brown wrapper. Not Dr. Spock but some nineteenth-century writer, maybe Paolo Mantegazza, whose Italian work was translated into English except for explicit sexual passages given in Latin, like something to be worked at or decoded. Also my aunt, my father’s sister, passed along a scary and outdated sex manual, not of how to do “it,” but all the venereal diseases you could get from sex outside marriage, illustrated by drawings of pockmarked degenerates. I was the next in line to get the family book that warned not to do anything stupid, or my penis would fall off.
When I had passed all the merit badges necessary to achieve the exulted rank of Eagle Scout except lifesaving, I had run out of time with repeated failures at the Boy Scout summer camp and went to a neighboring town that had a YMCA with an indoor swimming pool and an instructor who could test my water skills. What I didn’t know until I arrived there with my swim trunks was that the rules of that particular YMCA required nude swimming. Why? To keep the pool free of lint. My shock and chagrin at the realization that I had to swim naked and show that I could “rescue” this adult male who was also naked motivated me to pass the test on my first try. Using the cross-chest carry, I towed “the victim” from the middle of the deep end to the edge of the pool.
To my mind at that time, “nude” meant Renoir. “Naked” was unwanted exposure of my body, causing excruciating embarrassment. Years later, I would equate “naked” with welcome sexual excitement except on those few occasions when I visited nudist colonies and had to repress sexual feelings.
At my Bucknell University fraternity, some of the brothers challenged a skinny music major to walk across 7th Street to the laundromat naked, put quarters in the soda machine, and walk back across the street. The catch was that there was a woman there doing her laundry. If Skinny could successfully accomplish this without “chickening out,” he would win the jackpot the other guys put together. He did it. I would not have had the guts.
In the 1950s, sex seemed as remote in college as in high school. I never had any sexual experience in those years with any coed. Women were required to be in their segregated dorms, under a curfew of 10:00 p.m., later on weekends. But no matter. I could have had a date out until 4:00 a.m. and still not be able to score anything more than a less passionate kiss. Forget getting naked or even unsnapping a brassiere.
A college friend during my graduate studies at Bucknell took me to the home of his very rich neighbor in North Jersey. At the shallow end of an elegantly designed outdoor pool, she had had the architect create a statue of her in a very sensuous nude pose. As I stood admiring the statue, I overheard one of the narcissistic woman’s friends remark to the other, “This boy has a very handsome physique.” I was proud to look good in skimpy swim trunks. Nothing more materialized, just a slightly elevated ego.
Sometime in my twenties, I saw ads for nudist colonies in New Jersey inviting both nudists and neophyte curiosity seekers, the ads proclaiming how healthful nudism was. I wrote to the box numbers given and took a Greyhound bus to the first of three colonies I eventually visited. It was called Camp Goodland, near Hackettstown. Another young man about my age happened to be on the bus, and we arrived at the same time. Before we were given the run of the property a stern-faced woman met us in the main office. “Gentlemen, welcome to Camp Goodland. Is this your first experience with a nudist colony?” We assured her it was. “You will find that nudism is the most natural thing, healthy for mind and body. For the first half hour that you are here, I want each of you to carry a towel to cover up. After that you should have no problem.” While I remember the woman’s introductory comments, I don’t remember whether she was nude or fully dressed. Strange, right?
Walking around the grounds, I saw naked men, some with great physiques, others with fat, hairy breasts and sagging stomachs, dangling testicles, and not one erection. Some of the women, both young and old, were in good condition, very attractive for their years, others with double and triple stomachs, and breasts hanging to their waists. No one seemed concerned. About a dozen were engaged in what I learned was the unofficial nudists’ chief sport, volleyball. I joined in and, in the heat of competition, got over any self-consciousness and was confident enough to drop the towel which I had wrapped around my waist. The young man who arrived with me on the bus, however, continued to have erection problems, angering one older male nudist who complained to me. “What is it with your friend, walking around with a full valise?”
I replied, “He’s not my friend, just a stranger who arrived on the bus with me. I haven’t noticed that he’s carrying any baggage.”
Later in the day, I played my first set of tennis in the nude on the only clay court. My only concern was that the court was not well maintained and black ants were walking everywhere.
Both regular members and newcomers were told to assemble for dinner, dressed for the meal, and later dancing. My eye, earlier in the afternoon, had wondered to a very attractive young woman about seventeen working as a waitress. Her mother was one of the women with a double stomach and had raised her daughter as a nudist, but as Carol reached puberty, she felt self-conscious and would only accompany her mother if she could be fully dressed. After dinner and dancing, most of the group piled into cars and drove into town to enjoy the local bowling alley.
Families stayed in bungalows for the weekend or the entire week. I was given my own quarters for the night. From what I could see, there was no sex, just happy, healthy nudism divorced from sex. I thought it was strange that of all the women in the nude, including some very attractive people, I was drawn to a teenager who was fully clothed. The attraction, in fact, was so strong that I got her address in New York City and later invited her to be my guest at a Bucknell fraternity party. No one at Bucknell knew she had been a nudist, and I never got to see her naked. She graduated high school and went to the University of Cincinnati to study architecture, and after one last letter, we lost contact with each other. The year I guess was 1960, and I was working on my master’s degree.
This nudist experience felt surprisingly liberating though I left the camp with some uncomfortable sunburn on body parts that had never been exposed to the sun. A man who lived in Hazelton, Pennsylvania, drove me in his MG sports car as far as he was going, and I took a bus the rest of the way home.
The second nudist colony I visited was Sunny Rest Lodge in the Pocono Mountains near Palmerton, Pennsylvania, in the late 1960s when I was living in Trenton, New Jersey, and the third at Sunshine Park, Cape Mays Landing, in South Jersey, soon after I moved to New York City in 1971. I remember nothing about the Pocono resort, and my only recollection about the Mays Landing location was swimming in the Great Egg Harbor River and playing nude tennis with the famous journalist, Gay Talese, as my partner. Wearing only tennis sneakers on a hot, humid summer day, I felt the macadam surface radiate extra heat to the point that I asked, “Does anyone mind if I put my shirt back on?” Perspiring a bit less, I held up my end well enough for us to win. I knew that my good tennis partner was a well-known journalist, but not that through
