You know, it was a long winter, and now everybody's back at the gym trying to burn off those extra pounds.  It's always gratifying when you start to see results.  I knew all the steams I was taking at the Y would pay off.  And yesterday they did: I got a date! 

I mean, in the steam room.


I'm sitting in the steam (properly attired in my regulation white towel) when all of a sudden a burly rugby type sitting across from me reaches out through the mist and introduces himself as Anthony.  (For any youngsters in the house, that's kind of an old-school "poke".)  We struck up a rather ordinary conversation (this is what we called chat before there was "chat"), and soon we'd settled on dinner and drinks later this week.

As Friends of the Blog surely must know by now, I'm a big fan of incidental public nudity.  Incidental, because if nudity is too intentional it very quickly becomes either scary or ridiculous.  Two guys who just happen to be naked, on the other hand... 

Unfortunately, the hysteria around nudity in places where you should expect to find it, and the insistence on linking normal nakedness to perversion, poisons any ordinary pleasure in it one might have.  Not in the nudity per se, just in a homosocial environment in which not being clothed is no big deal. 

OK, I'm not going to lie to you: nudity is always interesting.  Or is it just me?  I have held onto that delight in the grotesque all children revel in and adults abandon as they become targets of it.  I am an adult, of course, but while there's plenty that turns my crank, nudity is more often a turn-off in real-life than a turn-on. 

Which just proves my point.  Nine times out of ten nudity and sexuality have nothing to do with one another. 

Nakedness is refreshingly demotic, though.  The way we experience nakedness in public or semi-public spaces like bathhouses and gymnasiums obviously says something about the way we relate in social spaces in general.

Nakedness and clothing are not a minor point in culture, after all.  Clothing is culture, and all culture is a kind of clothing.  It is fabricated, acquired, and worn in one way or another.  What does our fear of giving up the fetishes of culture, our reluctance to make a place in our culture where they're left at the door say about us?

Never mind how strange our efforts to sever sexuality from social life would seem to many past cultures, the attitude complements our equating nudity and sex.  We must avoid nakedness at all cost because obviously all people can possibly do when naked in the company of others is fuck.  

And it is one thing people can do, for sure.  But this idea of nudity as a prelude to perversion is so pervasive in our culture today that it takes the form of a cause-and-effect: if nudity, then fucking — which is in itself perverse.  And probably wishful thinking on the part of those who most fervently believe it.

Take it from someone who has tested this hypothesis again and again: it's false.  Alas.

Social nudity is not about sex.  Or not only about sex.  On some level everything's about sex, after all, innit?  Social nudity has any number of functions.  From shedding our society skins to establishing trust in ways we simply can't when clothed.  If a man can look you in the eye when both of you are butt naked, it means something.

As inspiring as the naked form can be, it can also be touchingly pathetic. We guard ourselves in public for precisely  this reason.  We worship human strength in all its glory, but human frailty is also a part of the social equation, and seeing it on the body in an ordinary setting teaches us something important about life. 

I remember what excited me when I was younger and first exploring Budapest's wonderfully diverse spa culture.  And it wasn't all the dangly bits.  Yes there was sex to be had — and that is part of any social milieu — but much more than that was the pageant of social interaction with one vital element missing.

Sometimes you're surprised.  I met a guy one day at the Rác in Buda, back when my language skills were still a little shaky.  We flirted in the main bath, and made plans to meet later outside. When I saw him clothed — a fashion victim of the first order — I realized I couldn't possibly sleep with him.

More than once or twice.

OK, so we kind of dated for six weeks — whatever. That's not the point.

The point is: nakedness is another country, and it takes a whole different set of social skills.  The cues we so often rely on to decide who it's safe to socialize with aren't there for us. 

And that's a good thing. 

Now, I'm not one of those guys who makes it a point to hang out in the locker room naked.  On the other hand if I'm doing something that reasonably requires I be naked, like showering, I'm not going to pretend it's a big deal, that I've got some kind of extra special junk, and make a tragic display of depriving my audience of a glimpse of my glory.  The show must go on.

The other day I saw a grown man showering in his underwear.  Um, the bits you need to clean?  They're under there.  Bathing 101.

Anyway, back to Anthony.  What I like about the Y is, first of all, it's a little more working class, and you know, working class guys are just friendlier and more polite in my experience.  That's really the reason I switched from BSC.  In the four or five years I went there — and I tried several locations around town — I just found the staff dried-up and bitchy, and the atmosphere stale and stifling.  The gym is not a factory, bitches, it's a theater. 

The Y is like going back in time to the up-with-the-people era.  It's gloriously diverse (OK, yeah, the Asians play basketball on one end of the court and the African Americans on the other, but it's mostly a height thing), people say hi.  It's that old-school feeling.

And it's an old-school Y — America's first, in fact.  The Huntington Avenue Y traces its roots back to the original Y at Washington and Summer streets in downtown Boston and on to its next home at the corner of Tremont and Temple Place, and then to the present location, where it formed the cornerstone of a little university originally known as Northeastern University of the Boston YMCA.

That last move was 82 years ago, and now Northeastern wants to annex the building for a high-rise dorm.  I joined right as that debate was heating up. 

And speaking of heating up, I left before Anthony got dressed — he was headed back for another round of steam — so I've only every seen the guy naked. 

Seeing him clothed will be very revealing.