Mildly NSFW - male swimming pool attire in 60s / 70s

April 25, 2023 1:30 PM

Was nudity common among males at swimming pools in the USA in the 60s / 70s or thereabouts?

I stumbled across a discussion on a gay-themed forum where people were sharing their memories of the good old days when men at YMCA swimming pools would not wear trunks and high school swimming classes would take place in the nude. There were even what seemed to be old college yearbook photos of swim teams where nobody was wearing trunks.

I could not really tell if this was wholly true or if there was some kind of embellishment/fantasy going on. I would find it easier to believe if we were talking about somewhere like Germany, but I thought the US was a bit more prudish in that regard.

Did this really happen? Was it common?

posted by iamsuper to Society & Culture (24 answers total)

I know this happened in some areas of the United States, having heard stories from a (straight) man who swam nude in PE in the 1950s.
posted by PussKillian at 1:34 PM on April 25, 2023

Per wikipedia it was common, but earlier, and was ending in the 1950s and 1960s.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:37 PM on April 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

My dad has stories about swimming nude in his gender segregated high school PE classes in the late 60s in Ohio. Definitely true in some places!
posted by merriment at 1:38 PM on April 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

I learned to swim at a YMCA in Kentucky in the late 1970's and our five & under boys' swimming class was nude, though our fathers and instructors wore trunks.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 1:43 PM on April 25, 2023

Two people I have worked with went to public high schools that did nude swimming in gym class for males. One is 62, the other is 57. So this was still going on up until the early 80s.
posted by jonathanhughes at 1:46 PM on April 25, 2023

Best answer: Keep in mind that swimming pools started out as bathing facilities for the urban poor rather than recreation opportunities. Pools were gender-segregated, and nudity was normal. The shift away from that began much earlier than the 60’s and 70’s, but suits were really only mandatory in co-ed situations, i.e. beaches and non-segregated recreational pools. Presumably suits became nearly universal as gender-segregated pools disappeared.
posted by jon1270 at 1:48 PM on April 25, 2023 [6 favorites]

Nude swimming in boys' PE classes was definitely a thing. I know a 64-year-old male who experienced that, and I recently read a novel that took place in the 30s where boys in a PE class were swimming nude (book was clearly autobiographical). I've never heard of nude swimming for older men or in other swimming facilities.

"Skinny dipping" was a term for nude swimming for both males and females, but I always thought of that as something that was mildly scandalous and only in the dead of night when there weren't other people around.
posted by FencingGal at 2:01 PM on April 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

Yes, I experienced that. All-boys Catholic prep school in the early '70s.
posted by lpsguy at 2:07 PM on April 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

There's a podcast episode about that!
American Hysteria, January 23, 2023
posted by feistycakes at 2:35 PM on April 25, 2023 [4 favorites]

My dad said that the pool at his university in the late 60's they swam nude - Engineering program, Toronto, so his class was almost all men. (Though, he had just moved to Canada from Germany, so he may have been more used to it than the other students!)
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 2:40 PM on April 25, 2023

I had non-nude in-school swimming lessons in the late 90s, and I remember hearing about this as something that had continued up through the early 70s in our town.

Re: gender-segregated pools disappearing, the US Senate swimming pool was "men only" until very recently because there were a couple of male senators who wanted to swim in the nude without any women present.
posted by earth by april at 2:42 PM on April 25, 2023 [7 favorites]

It was a thing in Chicago within living memory.
posted by pullayup at 3:03 PM on April 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

We did not have swimming in public schools when I was a student, growing up in Maryland in the 1960s. One heard tales about this, elsewhere; supposedly, the windows of the girls' indoor swimming pool building at the University of Maryland were painted white because they were swimming in the nude in there, but female classmates said this wasn't true. And I never experienced an all-male YMCA pool, so I have nothing.
posted by Rash at 3:26 PM on April 25, 2023

In college in the late 90s, the men’s team supposedly did this when the women’s team was traveling.
posted by susiswimmer at 5:38 PM on April 25, 2023

I worked in fundraising at a YMCA and one of our elderly, male, donors often told stories about the boys at the Y having swim lessons in the nude. As you can see, this is definitely a thing that happened all over the United States. Can't speak for the rest of the world, though.
posted by cooker girl at 5:50 PM on April 25, 2023

My understanding, though I don't have sources for it, is that bathing suits were once considered unhygenic. I can't say why, though I wonder if it's because they could mildew or otherwise get kind of rank.
posted by nebulawindphone at 6:03 PM on April 25, 2023

Adult men swam nude in men's clubs until at least 1970. As an example, the Chicago Athletic Club had only necked men in their pools.
posted by KayQuestions at 6:06 PM on April 25, 2023

Nebulawindphone, I wonder if that's because the swim suits were made out of wool?
posted by freethefeet at 6:39 PM on April 25, 2023

Response by poster: Thanks for the answers. It makes more sense now that I equate it with “bathing” rather than “spending the day at the beach” or “sports activity”
posted by iamsuper at 12:29 AM on April 26, 2023

I attended an all-male college from 1964 to 1968. The College pool was pretty old, maybe from the 1930s, and (we were told) the water filters were not up to being clogged with fibers from bathing suits, so nude bathing was the norm. That said, nylon suits were permitted for swim meets and the like.

A new pool was built a few years later. I think the space now houses the College store.
posted by SemiSalt at 4:29 AM on April 26, 2023

I'm a grad of an All-boys Catholic prep school in the late 60's/early 70's, and we swam naked.
posted by james33 at 6:16 AM on April 26, 2023

My dad attended Georgia Tech in the 1960s. The student body was overwhelmingly men, the ability to swim was a graduation requirement, and swimming classes were nude. I'll have to ask him if he knows what the few women students did about the graduation requirement.
posted by hydropsyche at 6:44 AM on April 26, 2023

I'm gonna chime in to say that my experience seems to have been the opposite of most everyone here. I grew up in the midwest in the '60s and '70s swimming extensively at public pools, the YMCA, Boy Scout camps, and hippie holes in the woods (but never in "school").

The only places I every swam naked or saw others swimming naked were out in rivers and creeks in the woods. This may be related to the fact that the only time I was exposed to single-sex swimming was at Boy Scout camp, but even then we were all wearing suits.
posted by achrise at 10:23 AM on April 26, 2023

Tangentially related, from a 2018 article in the NY Times, "Female Senators, Their Ranks Increasing, Reflect on Breaking Into the Boys’ Club" (archive.is link):

The men also have a better gym than the women and the men’s gym has a pool. When then-Senator Kay Hagan, the North Carolina Democrat, arrived in the Senate in 2009, she wanted to swim there, only to be greeted with a sign on the door that said “men only.” There was a reason for the sign, Ms. Collins said. There were at least two male senators — she would not name them — who enjoyed swimming in the nude. Today, women can use the pool, and the sign says “Proper Attire Required.” When Ms. Hagan lost her race in 2014, the women of the Senate threw her a goodbye party — at the pool.

posted by mhum at 1:06 PM on April 26, 2023 [1 favorite]