Which one? There are a couple of Y's in Ottawa, and the downtown one is well known for it's cruisiness. I know that doesn't really fall into the "nude at the YMCA", but it's an aspect of it. It is located right in the heart of the gay village.
Naked at the YMCA
- Thread starter xenon-naturist
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I live in south. I cannot imagine a Ymca in my town letting young men all swim naked! I think it would be fun but it would not be acceptable here.
My Y doesn't have nude swimming because it's a combo YMCA and YWCA. However, in the Men's + locker room, everyone uses the hot tub naked. I go in if there's a hot guy in there. Usually it's full of fat, gross, balding old creepers, so I mostly use the steam room.
I used to live in a YMCA for a short period. It was rough and full of questionable people.
There was always a calm silence in the showers because most guys seemed happy to show off their junk and let people look
There was always a calm silence in the showers because most guys seemed happy to show off their junk and let people look
My Y is quite upscale. The plus membership is $75/month, so it attracts a lot of upper middle class people. It doesn't have a dormitory though. It just has a gym, pool and day care centre.
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By now, my childhood seems a lifetime and a world view away. Oh, wait a minute. That's the way it is.
I spent my early childhood in a town of fewer than 1,000 people in New Jersey! It seems so strange now to think of any place 50 miles from Philadelphia and 50 miles from New York City as a rural backwater community. But that's the way it was. We had no movie theater, so I missed that whole experience that others I have met in life enjoyed growing up in the 50's. They learned something about the rest of the world through films. I didn't. And I also learned nothing about male bodies and male bonding through nudity. Why? No community pool. No gym in that four-room school house. Nothing of the sort until my family moved across the country to Washington state in my 9th grade year. Talk about anxiety. I went to my first gym class where I was expected to bare it all and take communal showers at age 14 -- as a woefully ill-prepared 9th grader in a middle school setting. The point? It came as a shock, and it was unsettling. But the good part? The culture of the time was supportive. It all was presented to me as the natural thing go do. And it quickly came to feel right. Yes, it didn't take long to like seeing what the other boys had to show. And I soon liked showing what I had too. In short, the experience was presented to me as "what guys do," and it all felt right. I really think today's helicopter parents have deprived their coddled kiddies something important to normal life.
I spent my early childhood in a town of fewer than 1,000 people in New Jersey! It seems so strange now to think of any place 50 miles from Philadelphia and 50 miles from New York City as a rural backwater community. But that's the way it was. We had no movie theater, so I missed that whole experience that others I have met in life enjoyed growing up in the 50's. They learned something about the rest of the world through films. I didn't. And I also learned nothing about male bodies and male bonding through nudity. Why? No community pool. No gym in that four-room school house. Nothing of the sort until my family moved across the country to Washington state in my 9th grade year. Talk about anxiety. I went to my first gym class where I was expected to bare it all and take communal showers at age 14 -- as a woefully ill-prepared 9th grader in a middle school setting. The point? It came as a shock, and it was unsettling. But the good part? The culture of the time was supportive. It all was presented to me as the natural thing go do. And it quickly came to feel right. Yes, it didn't take long to like seeing what the other boys had to show. And I soon liked showing what I had too. In short, the experience was presented to me as "what guys do," and it all felt right. I really think today's helicopter parents have deprived their coddled kiddies something important to normal life.
I used to live in a run down area, it was mainly a hostel kind of place.
In some ways, my upbringing was similar. I didn't have to deal with communal naked showers at my high school, but I did at the Boy Scout and coastal summer camps I went to, as well as swimming pool locker rooms at the university-sponsored summer campus programs I attended. I'm 49, so these were in the early to middle 1980s, in the South. At the Boy Scout camps, scoutmasters and counselors showered with us; at the coastal summer camps, counselors showered with us; and at the universities, professors showered with us. It was--as you said above, Pecker Check--presented as "what guys do."
So it was both relaxing/normal and fraught with sexuality because I was a young gay guy looking around at all the scenery. I had to learn to control myself rather quickly (and fully); hard-ons weren't OK at all, and they couldn't be laughed away as "he has a mind of his own"--because homophobic boys would ask, nastily, "Well, what's he thinking about, then?"
These days, communal nakedness can vary from startlingly/electrically sexual to mundane/prosaic acres of unattractive skin on display (including mine, I'm sad to say--I've got to get back into shape). Sometimes you can even see both extremes in the same locker room or communal shower at the same time. But it is still "what guys do," even though more recently, younger guys have looked at me strangely when I got naked in a locker room or even asked me why I was "showing off" (when I was just walking to the showers with a towel in my hand, wearing nothing but sandals).
The world has well and truly changed, in this regard, which is why I was so stupidly nervous the first time I went to Haulover Beach just north of Miami: I'd internalized that new fear of letting someone else see me naked. But after I got over my body consciousness, it was a truly liberating experience. My husband and I have gone back several times, each time enjoying the freedom of being naked outdoors.
NCbear (who went all over the place just now in my reply to Pecker Check's well-crafted, succinct post)
You're not missing much. Most of the fat old creepers that use it have extremely questionable hygiene. Most of them don't shower like they are supposed to before going in. I haven't used the hot tub in ages now.
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What do you suppose some community pool swimmers think shower-first compliance is all about? A quick shower splash with their trunks on? Neither a direct drop of water nor a hint of soap land beneath the cloth, where the truly foul and fetid particles lurk. Kinda dumb.
Tony56
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Kind of a funny story the first time I used the Y early in the morning.
I had been going after work but during the winter months the high school teams tied up the pool with their practices so I started going early in the morning before work. I did my usual swim and then took a nice hot shower. Went back to my locker, dried off, put on a pair of boxer shorts, and brought my shaving kit to the area where the sinks were.
There were a bunch of other guys there shaving and they all were naked! I never felt so self conscious wearing underwear lol. I shaved naked thereafter.
I had been going after work but during the winter months the high school teams tied up the pool with their practices so I started going early in the morning before work. I did my usual swim and then took a nice hot shower. Went back to my locker, dried off, put on a pair of boxer shorts, and brought my shaving kit to the area where the sinks were.
There were a bunch of other guys there shaving and they all were naked! I never felt so self conscious wearing underwear lol. I shaved naked thereafter.
Bobby Briggs
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I’d like to say I don’t agree with an earlier poster here who mentioned the “perverts” on another thread talking about cruising the showers. As a gay kid, one of the great joys of being gay was urinals and public showers cuz it gave me a chance to see wiener when I wanted. Not only is the current paranoid about nudity a negative influence on young children’s body images and self esteem, it is also ruining the things that existed to make young gay boys like me happy. It’s very sad all around.
When I was a younger boy at the YMCA, there was another boy (about ten years older than I was) who would masturbate in front of me in the locker room. I thought that it was kind of cool to see him do that!
He would ask me if I wanted to touch his penis. I wanted to do it, but then he wouldn't let me.
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