The experience still haunts men. Older men. They had to swim in the nude in Chicago Public Schools and elsewhere around the country.
I wrote about the psychological effects here: When Boys Swam Nude in Chicago Public High Schools. If you don’t think such trials should have made such a difference to those teens, then why have about 20,000 thousand people read my post, not to mention other posts on other sites?
Boys searched for reasons to get excused from swimming. They suffered distress over psoriasis or sundry obvious “defects.” Shame, bullying, and potential arousal at the wrong moment were inevitable; especially anything that might betray a homosexual inclination (long before the word gay meant men who favored other men).
Today, however, I want to answer a question I could not in 2014, when I wrote the post linked above: how did such a practice begin?
According to WBEZ Radio’s Monica Eng:
The country was … obsessed with fighting disease and promoting personal hygiene, which in the 1920s, was also associated with “good morals.” Health officials worried that allowing potentially dirty fabrics into public pools could introduce germs, and bacteria-killing pool chlorination had still not been perfected.
Plus, at the time, swimming pools had fairly primitive filters that could easily be clogged by fabric fibers from swimsuits, which were made of cotton and wool – yes wool.
So, in an effort to minimize bacteria, keep pool filters from clogging and ensure male swimmers were clean, the American Public Health Association (APHA) recommended the following in their 1926 standards handbook:
Those recommendations, nothing more, turned the tide (pun intended) as one school system imitated another and made the practice compulsory. Thus, we have another example of the often observed human tendency to cause unintended side-effects growing out of an effort to make the world a bit better.
Read or listen to the whole story as reported by Monica Eng here: Why Boys Swam Naked.
Dr. Gerald Stein 
Interesting and distressing.
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Indeed, for some it was soul crushing. For others, not remarkable. Happily, I was in the second group.
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Seems like they could have issued small swim trunks that were washed in a chlorine solution prior to the men entering the pool.
I guess there was no girls swimming in school then and there! Yikes.
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The cost of swim trunks seems to have been considered, according to Monica Eng’s piece. Since she also reports that chlorination within pools had not been perfected, treating the materials with chlorine would surely have been an added and expensive encumbrance even if it were not controversial. I recall as a kid that putting chlorine in swimming pools was (indeed) a controversial issue in some parts of the USA. On a side note, summer time and swimming was a scary time before the Salk polio vaccine was created. You might recall from the history books that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had contracted polio as an adult, well before he became President.
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I should have added, girls swam in their own, separate group, and wore unattractive tank suits.
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Hmmm … We have different scary times now.
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What is a mystery to me, is why weren’t any attempts made to make boys trunks, out of the same material girls suites were made of. The school districts had NO ISSUE letting girls swim everyday with their suites, so they must have been ok for the pool filters? You have to read between the lines. Every attempt to keep the boys “programmed” that this was the norm, was done. Clearly this (secual) manipulation was done MORE for the sexual educational purposes of girls, than to promote male bonding. I’m really surprised fathers let it go on for as long as they did…. probably because they were forced into it when they were little. Similar to the reasoning some boys get circumcised. Given an UN-necessary cosmetic surgery to their genitals, so they look like their fathers. Today is it becoming more and more apparent, that male circumcision is in fact…..male genital mutilation. (And it is amazing that even today, Mothers will fight against FGM, but will allow it to happen to their boys…. sort of Hypocritical, to say the least. Just like mothers who forced their boys to be naked, for the educational purposes of his sisters, and friends, at neighborhood pool parties….
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Interesting piece. Either I was so traumatized that the memories are still repressed, or it was no big deal. I do remember the gym instructor rubbing the crook of our arms for evidence of dirt before allowing us to enter the pool. The double standard involving girls makes absolutely no “hygienic” sense; which, of course, suggests other reasons that boys swam nude.
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Thanks, Harvey. I fall into your camp. I remember plenty with respect to high school gym and swimming, but nothing more powerfully than a kid who had a locker next to mine, whose hygiene left lots to be desired. He became an MD specializing in heart disease!
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Dr. Stein, thanks for the update. It’s interesting to note that your 2014 post has received comments over the years since then, even as recent as May 10, 2018. Indications, no doubt, of continued trauma among older males who suffered such indignity.
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Thanks, Rosaliene. I hadn’t checked the dates on the comments, but don’t doubt that the trouble lingers. Indeed, the update was due to someone asking the WBEZ reporter the question for their program “Curious City,” which investigates such things.
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I would like to repeat, if I may, a comment that I made last summer when I stumbled upon this discovery while browsing online last summer.
As I pointed out last year, the rule of nude male swimming in public highschools also applied to team sports, including swimming, diving and water polo, and was often extended clear through college. Male athletes swam nude and totally exposed to the general public, which included classmates, faculty members and family members of all ages and genders. Moreover, since these events were school activities, yearbook photographers were allowed to cover the contests and print the pictures uncensored while naming the contestants in the captions. In addition to the “health and hygiene” rationale, the practice of photographing team members in the nude extended to team pictures as well, with team members, once again, identified in the captions. Evidently, since team pictures for other sports were taken, and team members were identified in the captions while wearing the uniform that they wore when representing their school in competition with other schools, the members of swim teams were photographed in the same manner that they appeared in competition with other schools. Many team pictures were taken combining both male and female members with the boys, totally nude, in the back, and with hardly any interest in concealing anything. There are a lot of old photographs of nude boys and girls in swimsuits combined together, often in no apparent particular order. Furthermore, the practice of compulsory nude male swimming was often extended to life guards, and even at public beaches where male and female lifeguards either often posed for photographs or were simply photographed together “talking shop”. The male lifeguards often wore a special white cap to identify themselves, and that was their only piece of clothing on job.
That was how I, myself stumbled upon the extent of this practice in the past. As I pointed out last year, the photographs are all over the internet.
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I’d be interested to see something documenting this from a website that is known as a fact-checked source. I can tell you with certainty, this did not happen at the Chicago Public High School I attended in the 1960s. I have a yearbook without the pictures you are describing, Joseph. It sounds like you did not witness such things yourself. Nor did the WBEZ article, for example, speak of this.
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Dr. Stein:
Go to the “CHROME” app logo on the Home page of your phone. (In case you you don’t know, or have forgotten, the “CHROME” logo is the rainbow spiral).
When you have gained access to “CHROME”, type in “nude male swimming” and hit “search”.
At the top of the page, hit “images”.
When the images appear, You’ll be able to see a lot of the old photographs right away. Focus mainly on the black and white photographs. There are links that you can click back and forth on.
That should shed plenty of light on the subject.
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I did a brief search, Joseph. I saw many images that seem to date to the early part of the last century, a period before the Chicago Public Schools instituted the naked swimming policy. I don’t doubt that there might have been different practices in some parts of the country or the world. I have not seen anything published by a reputable, fact-checked news outlet that would suggest young men and women swam together (except in nudist colonies) or that public high school swimming contests were conducted before mixed-gender audiences. Perhaps you are a better researcher than I. Best wishes.
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I have to admit, knowledge that this happened to boys, and not girls, really pisses me off. It makes me feel sick that boys were exposed, so woman, and girls could view them. I have read other stories where “Female Coaches” would make clean towel deliveries to the pool areas, just to feast their horny eyes onto the boys, and casually act professional, while the main reason the female coaches were there was to see the naked boys. And countless stories on the internet of girls who would sneak into storage rooms, to see the boys naked, through the heating vents and door cracks. I am very sure there were some homosexual male coaches involved. There is absolutely no reason the boys trunks, couldn’t have been made from the same materials as what the girls wore. This is a very very sick part of history, where boys were manipulated, so the sick eyes of others could view them. I have also read stories of mothers, allowing the boys to swim naked, at home pools, so the daughters, and friends, and neighbor girls could feast upon staring at their genitals. But OF COURSE, the girls were ALWAYS dressed. If I were back in that time I would have absolutely refused to swim naked. Would have told the coaches, teachers, administrators all to go fuck themselves, and called them meat-gazers. I wouldn’t have swam at the pools naked at home either. I truly believe this is EXACTLY the reason this went on. Sick freaks. It surely wasn’t to “help” the boys. It was for the “gazing of boys genitals” that it went on.
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No doubt an unfortunate practice, James. My own experience is necessarily limited, but from what I heard, the more common damage was that which came from the gaze and comments of other young men. But, as you say, there was more to it. Thanks for your comment.
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Do you know about this webpage?
https://sites.google.com/site/historicarchives4maleswimming/home/archives—mid-20th-century-to-current/news-articles-and-columns
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Very interesting. Thanks for this, Joe.
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What is MOST disturbing in the recent link of information I sent you are the comments made by Ann Landers. She made some pretty psychologically damaging comments towards boys who didn’t want to participate in the “forced” nudity. And Amazing MOTHERs encouraged it…… and shared their nude boys for the purpose of girls sexual education.
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Indeed. Ann Landers often made categorical statements. Those more humble might have been hesitant. And, if you recall, Joe, some took her as a higher authority than the Bible!
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we were taken out of class in the 70s boys had to get a nude “physical” with nuns and priests around in an empty classroom. it was so weird. we all got naked a few at a time so they didn’t have to wait but now that i think about it they got off on our confusion and fear too. molestation wasn’t enough.
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Quite a story, Joe. I’ve never heard this type of disturbingly routine form of institutionalized abusiveness. I’m sorry you had to go through it. Thank you for enlightening those of us who will read it.
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Wait, I thought it taught boys to not be ashamed of themselves and gave them confidence? Where did you get the idea that it was negative?
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The idea was in the culture and in the time. This wasn’t the Ancient Greece of Plato’s Republic, nor was it 2021. Perhaps one had to be there to understand it, but a great many boys of that moment were troubled by it. Thanks for your comment, Derek.
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I see, perhaps it should have just been optional. I’m not from USA, in my country in the past it was normal that children were allowed to be naked, but it was not mandatory and there was no gender difference, probably because it was a communist state, in patriarchal USA girls were meant to please men and not think about their own sexuality. For example we had state organized holidays for children and the caretakers would allow us to swim naked if we wanted, now that a lot of pedophilia scandals came out, most people would be hysterical about such practice, which is quite shameful in my opinion, we should be allowed to be free if we want.
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Background and history as well as Zeitgeist do make a difference. Your comment is much appreciated, Derek. Thank you.
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Hello. I have been doing some research on the topic of boys forced to swim nude in high school and YMCA. I have found some information, but I keep running into dead ends and roadblocks. Does anyone know a good place to find message boards on the topics? Thank you for your help
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I do not Brad. What you might do, however, is consult WBEZ in Chicago. They did an article I have referred to elsewhere on this site in a later post. If the writer is still there, you might find a lead to a message board. I believe the show it was featured on is called “Curious City.”
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Hi Dr. Gerald Stein. Where their other stories of girls being around while the guys were nude. I wanted to post my comment here as well.
In College, me and a friend showered nude. At the Men’s Locker room, the lockers were on one side and the showers on the other. There were no hooks for towels. In the middle of the locker room was the door to the gym. As we showered a guy open the door and left it opened. The girls’ volleyball team was in the gym. The coach was talking to them. Me and my class friend had to walk to the lockers. I don’t think they saw us.
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Thank you again, Travis. My hunch is you might have light to shed on other topics I’ve posted, too. In any case, take care.
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As a gay teen I found being naked around other boys a trial. That all changed, however, when I developed ear troubles and couldn’t go in the pool. I was assigned the task of laundering the towels instead, but that only took half an hour, so I spent the rest of the swim period in the bleachers watching the other boys swim. I loved it!
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I remember Crusader Rabbit! Glad to hear that the ear trouble brought you some luck, but I do hope your ears improved. Thanks for reading and writing.
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I see that comments continue to be made after so many years, so I would like to add my POV that is informed by both personal experience and an academic background in the social sciences. I started college in 1967, in time to experience nude swimming in gym class at the U. of Maryland before Title IX made the pools coed. Since my generation had to take a shower after gym in high school with zero privacy, being naked for swimming was not a big deal. As the smallest guy in my HS class, I was bullied everywhere except in the shower. Boys in the 1950s-60s likely also experienced being changed at the beach in the open when we were as old as six. At the Chesapeake Bay beaches back then there was usually families with little kids who were naked the whole day, which shocked no one. We were the opposite of haunted or traumatized by being naked in public, but grew up to be hippies that were comfortably naked; skinny-dipping at Woodstock and in the Reflecting Pool in DC during peace marches. I remember in the late 1980s when suddenly younger guys stopped being naked in locker rooms, which I see as part of the conservative backlash.
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Thanks, Fred. Interesting how different locations reacted differently to the experience. I suppose it was a time of greater social differences (in some ways) than we have now, at least those of the non-political variety.
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