Category Archives: nudes

My real encounters with nudists didn’t wait until I was a teacher to occur. I went to the University of Iowa for a Master’s Degree in order to satisfy all the requirements for a teaching certificate.

While there, it was not only at the hippie-dippie daycare center where I changed diapers, and the very liberal parents were happy about their children’s backyard skinny-dipping in the blow-up pool while being chased around naked by adults with a hose to spray them with, but also in the efficiency apartment where I shared a kitchen and bathroom with an honest-to-god nudist.

Ned never explained to me about being a nudist, but whenever he watched my television in my half of the efficiency apartment, he came right on in without a stitch of clothing on. I was a little shocked. But I got used to the fact that any time he was in the apartment, he was naked. He explained to me about spending the summers at a nudist resort in Mexico with his family. He lived naked every single moment that he didn’t spend in public where nakedness was illegal.

He was the one who explained to me how the polite thing for a nudist to do was to carry around a towel to sit on when he visited my bedroom and used my chair to watch TV while I sat on the bed. He didn’t do much of that because he wasn’t wild about wasting time watching TV. But when we played chess, or just talked about life, the universe, and everything, he was always in his birthday suit.

I got used to the idea that there were actually people who were mentally healthy and otherwise normal who also inhabited our world feeling that I was the abnormal one being averse to being naked in the company of others.

Ned’s girlfriend, when she came over, was never naked. She did tell me she thought he was a little nutty on the subject of naturism, but she also mentioned that he was really good-looking that way because he lifted weights and had body-builder muscles. And she agreed to pose naked for me at his insistence because I had told him about having an anatomy drawing class at Iowa State. She didn’t seem to be shy about nakedness either, although that is based on only the one incident. She seemed much more at peace with Ned’s naked habits than I was. And I got the distinct impression that she loved him enough to convert to his way of life when they got married.

So, I did learn a lot about nudism, naturism, and nudists by living with one for two semesters of grad school. Now, I know I promised to tell the very embarrassing story of the clothing-optional apartment complex in Austin that I mentioned in Part Two. But I will get to that. Maybe in the Part-4 post if I don’t let my mind wander again like I did in this post.

One might wonder why I am thinking about nudity so much. And I suppose if I am going to devote a book of essays to the obsession, then I should probably explain why I am so obsessed and why I am trying to actually be a nudist. Of course, you will probably laugh about it when I get to the real reason. At least I hope it’s a matter of laughter and not pitchforks and torches.

You can probably trace the nudist thing in this blog to the publishing of my YA novel, Recipes for Gingerbread Children. In that book, there is a pair of twin sisters, Sherry and Shelly Cobble, who are nudists, come from a family that practices nudism at home, and are beloved child friends to the main character, Gretel Stein, the old woman who survived the Holocaust and had once been a nudist herself, before Auschwitz.

This was not the first book I published, nor, in my opinion, the best book I had written and published to that point. But it was the first book to become popular among a special classification of book lovers. I mean nudist and naturist writers of fiction. One of them read and loved the book, becoming an advocate for it, and inviting me to become a part of their writer’s group. That advocate has many wonderful nudist-centered stories available on Amazon under his pen name, Ted Bun. I recommend that you check out his work if you have the least bit of interest in living life without clothes on all the time.

The obsession does go all the way back to childhood, however. I was a child innocently fascinated by nature and what it felt like to be immersed in it with little or no clothing on. I lived at a time when bathing suits only covered the part of me below the belly button down to barely below the crotch. And I was fascinated on Friday nights by the nearly naked body of Tarzan Ron Ely and his boy sidekick Jai as they swung on vines through the African jungle. And I will have skinny-dipping stories to share later in the book as well. I liked to go to the Bingham Park Woods south of town and ride my bicycle naked up and down the park pathways. I loved the feeling of being naked outdoors.

That innocent love was tragically suspended by a traumatic thing that happened to me at the age of ten that I will have to talk about in this book. And it will not be any easier to read than it will be for me to write about it. But nudism and naturism have a strong enough attraction for me that it eventually helped me overcome the trauma. Nudity has been a good thing for me throughout my life, even during that period that I felt it was bad for me. And I will have to do a lot of explaining about that.

And so, in this introductory excuse-making and rationalizing essay, I finally come to the real reason I need to write this book. I decided that, when I retired from teaching, I would choose to do at least one thing that truly terrified me, but would help make my life complete. Skydiving, flying an airplane, and bungee jumping was all beyond what I had the power and monetary resources to do. So, in 2017, I agreed to write an article for the True Nudists website about trying nudism for the first time. I then arranged to make a first-time visit to Bluebonnet Nudist Park in Alvord, Texas. And I will be writing about how I carried out that evil plan in this book as well.