You can only imagine what ecstacy and horror that was for gay teens. I wonder if nude swimming led to the bath houses (“you fantasized about it in 10th grade swim class, now you can act on it!”).
Why not? Coed health clubs were unheard of back then and he would’ve already been naked in the lockerroom.
I wanted to edit my post to clarify that the second line was to the OP but oh well.
I guess it seems rude to me… even if it were a men’s only health club. The locker rooms are different, because it’s expected there.
What you’re missing is that it was expected in many pools as well.
There’s the old joke about the French swimmer who swam nude in races and who complained that the pretty girls cheering him on slowed down his time because he scraped against the shallow bottom. “Then why did you not use your famous back stroke Pierre?” “Ze bridges! Ze bridges!”
There’s an episode of Dead Like Me where an elderly man (Shelly Berman, I think) dies in a men’s swim facility, where the men swim nude. His nude spirit hangs around for quite a while, visible only to the Reapers. In one scene, he walks through a troup of Girl Scouts. Even Mason thought that was “just plain wrong!”