Retro nude swim meet (photos)

Do you know of any photo taken at a swim meet where females were in attendance and the photo was verified as real and not photo shopped? I find it hard to believe that photos that show faces and places could not be verified and eliminate the “well, maybe it was photo shopped” comments. I have seen at least a dozen vintage photos of men’s and women’s teams posing together (male nude – female bathing suites) and being told that they are all photo shopped. These are recognizable people and yet I have never heard of any of these photos being verified by those in the photos or by relatives of those in the photos.

Like other writers, David B apparently perceives his experience as an aberration when he tells his mother that he is expected to perform before the community in the nude. His mother’s response seems to be an elision. She says he should “not be embarrassed but proud of how I looked.” Hmm. Since when did a mid-Twentieth Century bathing suit hide a muscular body? Does David’s mother mean that her son should be proud to show his genitals? Whatever she meant, David B and others became “proud to show off our ‘manhood.’” And David B was told that the girls enjoyed “knowing how we looked naked.” This makes his swim meet sound like an experience to which the girls were unaccustomed. Was this swim meet an aberration? Is it just fiction?

The retrospective total denial of this young, male, social, athletic nude swimming bears false witness because it distorts the past by enforcing codes that have grown up in subsequent decades, and then requires those who could remember to trim their memories to fit their requirements. This denial is ideological, like Stalin’s vanishing Commissar. Art and photographs were falsified in Stalin’s Soviet Union in order to “un-remember” Nikolai Yezhov, in a manner memorably satirized by George Orwell. In that same manner, I have been flatly told by several women my age (at reunions, for example) that they could never have attended a swim meet in which the boys competed naked, when in plain fact I was one of the boys, on swim teams with their brothers, and they were present as spectators (I know for a fact). But now according to them, it did not happen because it could not have happened –and the swimmer, like the Commissar, vanishes.

To Gavin and Frank, It’s been awhile since I commented on this blog but the last few comments gave me conflicting thoughts. I appreciate Gavin’s comments and listing even the venues where swimmers went nude in the presence of women spectators and coaches. It seems hard for me to believe that an adolescent even in those days would comfortably chat with women or girls he knew while being nude. However, so much of what Gavin says is part of my experience in the 50’s and early 60’s. So even hearing third-hand accounts of nude swimming in public venues and now Gavin’s first hand account and that of a friend’s father year ago, it is still hard for me to fathom. I remember reading a column years ago about an American family visiting Europe (don’t remember the country) where they attend a swim meet where the boys were all nude including the son of the family’s host. So there must be some truth to this.

There are also no verifiable reports that female family members ever attended a nude YMCA swimming event. (I have found ONE article that talks about very little boys removing their suits to swim faster at a family-attended swim meet back in the days of wool suits, but the boys were very young, five or six, and were referred to as “tadpoles”.) In the days of nude YMCA swimming, women were not allowed past the front desk.