Gym class? Yes. Like others have said, no showering afterwards. You had 3 minutes once class ended to get to your next class. How could you possibly shower? In retrospect, it’s not pleasant, but no one thought anything about it at the time.
Team sports were always after school was over. You finished, went home and showered there.
I will echo the above from my experiences. But I would have to say in high school, we played a lot of golf and some bowling. Everyonce in a while we played a game of softball in the gym so we never really got all that sweaty.
Nowadays, (I am in my mid twenties) I hang out naked in the locker and steam rooms and shower naked when I go to the gym. It is kind of fun in a free and liberating kind of way.
Showering wasn’t required (class of '03) and the showers were almost never used. We just changed shirts and shorts over our underwear (& most guys were reluctent to have both off at the same time). Some of the sports teams showered after practice and occasionally jocks would shower if they had gym in the mornings. Nobody changed in stalls though (no doors). I hated gym (and all the male PE teachers) and skipped as much as possible. I didn’t shower simply because none of the other boys showered. If they did I would have. From 10-13 I went to a “Christian” summer camp. There were stalls, but they only went up halfway didn’t curtains. My 1st night I (along with with alot of other boys) kept our underwear on. After I was done I realized how pointless it was to shower in tighty-whities. By the end of the week our counselors had to keep reminding us not to walk outside out tents naked and everybody slept naked. We even made fun of the more modest boys. It’s all about peer presure.
I guess I fall into the category of “just take care of your business and get dressed”.
I don’t mind guys undressing in front of me / undressing in front of them, showering with them in the same area, going to and from the showers, getting dressed together, etc.
But geez, it just creeps me out when these old guys want to hang out nude striking up conversations with people and strolling around the locker room like it’s the “nude dudes social club”.
Then they go up to the sinks to shave, etc. without putting a towel around their waist and lay their junk right up on the counter.
Just take care of your showering/clothes changing needs and either get dressed or put a towel on.
I joined a gym, not a men’s bath house.
I used to work out at a predominantly gay gym (in Chelsea, in New York). I can tell you that I felt no different about it there, than I do now. I like to be naked in groups as little as possible. If I drop trow, the towel is ready to be wrapped. If I remove towel, the underwear is ready to go on. Gay gym, straight gym didn’t matter. So, I really don’t think homophobia is an issue in this at all.
Hijack:
Interestingly, for reasons that escaped me, one of my current gyms (though not predominantly gay, certainly has a large gay clientele) has shower stalls, but no curtains. The women’s locker room, I’m assured has curtains. My gay buddy laughed at me when brought it up, and he said, “Why do you think we’re all in such good shape around here.”
I’m an gym-rat (age 46). That is, I’m a heavy weight lifter; in both senses (a heavy weightlifter AND a heavyweight lifter). I’ve noticed a similar trend.
I think it’s a products of the more “tender” ways that schools are treating students these days. You know, don’t want to have ANYONE being offended, so certain things are done away with. Seems that communal showers were one of the things that have been quietly shuttered.
But, jeez, showers used as STORAGE AREAS?!
You’d at least think the sports teams would use them after practice and games!
After football practice at school, I was sometimes LITERALLY covered in mud.
In H. Allen Smith’s The Complete Practical Joker, he mentions an infamous stagehand from the days of Vaudeville who would walk through the women’s dressing room. He’d yell “Close your eyes, ladies, I’m coming through…”
Re: the OP, we had group showers in high school and college, and I never really gave it a thought about walking around nekkid. About ten years ago I was a member at Bally’s, and again with the walking around nekkid. Now, the gym I use is at work, and there’s not so much walking around naked, most people wrap a towel around their waist even though it’s only about twenty feet from the lockers to the showers. There are still a few guys who walk around nekkid, but we also have a few on the other end of the scale who go fully dressed to the showers (individual stalls which have a pre-shower stall with hooks on the walls) and do all their changing there, and a few guys who don’t even shower after working out. Their co-workers must love them.
[QUOTE=HampshireThen they go up to the sinks to shave, etc. without putting a towel around their waist and lay their junk right up on the counter.[/QUOTE]
There’s one chick who does this at my gym. While she doesn’t quite lay her “junk right up on the counter”, she does spend a lot of time walking around without any clothes on. It doesn’t freak me out or anything, but I do wonder why she does it.
When I was in high school we were one of the last classes that did naked showering. It was kind of stupid because we had a total of 40 seconds to enter shower. dry off, and get dressed before the end of class. It was simply a matter of conforming, cause no showering was ever done. The showers were turned on and everybody dropped clothes, walked in a single unwavering line under the showerheads, and out the other door grabbed a towel wrapped it around, and hoped to get back to your clothes before they were thrown in the toilet.
Everybody aimed for the median path. the guys who were scared to get naked and covering themselves got picked on a wusses, and the guys who lingered too long naked were showing themselves and picked on as gay.
That’s still how I operate today I guess. While showering, naked, but not more than 5 seconds before or after the water is on. And I do look for some privacy and face the wall before towling off butch and sundance.
The gym is a little different as far as nudity goes, in my opinion. In a nudist type environment, the sexuality is dealt with up front and everybody understands that whatever sexual issues you bring up are your own. The purpose is to be naked, openly and often. A mens’ locker room can be a little different… not because everyone is cruising for sex (although some occasionally are), but because there is nudity in a place where sexuality is a concern but nobody really knows where each person stands. I think maybe 30 years ago, most men in the locker room never dreamed that it was a place of any sexuality at all (or if they did, they absolutely did not let on), but it’s a slightly different world now.
Personally, I don’t really care who sees my body. But I know if I cavalierly flaunt my goods, others may wrongly see it as sort of a sexual advertisement. Of those who saw it that way, some would be offended and some would be attracted. Since I’m not trying to create those situations, and it’s not a requirement that I show off my package to the world, I practice just a bit of basic modesty. Nothing like hiding under a towel to cover each and every single exposure, just dressing with face to the wall, not lounging around for a half hour with my legs splayed apart, etc.
Heck, nobody’s modest in my gym – everyone walks from the lockers to the showers naked, and we’re of all ages.
Well, an anecdote fraught with assumptions… for several years I worked out at a gym in midtown Atlanta (quite the bustling gay hotspot). The showers had a view of the changing area, and they had vinyl curtains. The shower curtains always had an eye-level hole large enough to see through, and whenever a curtain was replaced, the eye-level hole would appear again within days. The prospect of someone using me as a wank object strikes me with the same indifference as if they were getting off over a furniture catalog; that’s their thing, I have no reaction to it. But knowing that someone could be watching, I did become conscious about trying not to give off any come-hither signals and trying to find a locker somewhere other than the “observation deck”. I don’t go to the gym to deal with that kind of attention.
Which is why I find it funny whenever a gym/school/club/etc remodels and replaces a communal shower with private stalls because of lawsuit concerns, privacy, behavior complaints, etc. Private stalls (especially with locking doors) encourage more of the “unseemly” behavior that the institution seeks to prevent.
It’s hilarious. These guys are few and far between (at least in my area) and I don’t think they realize that this makes them the object of more attention, not less. People look at them with a puzzled “what the hell are you doing?” face. Sometimes the towel will slip off and then they have to juggle the half-pulled-on underwear with trying to grab the towel.
It’s because of the Internet and it’s preponderance of porn.
The only other naked men that guys see outside of the gym have huge cocks, and the only other naked women girls see have huge breasts.
No one wants to take off their clothes for fear that other people will notice how spectacularly un-endowed they are.
The people you see flitting around the lockerroom are the ones who have never seen porn 
bolding mine.
You know how sometimes someone says something and you’re SURE that’s the first time in history that those words were ever put in that order?
…well, for me, those four bolded words has to be one of those times.
I thought people were more modest in locker rooms now because of all the jerks with camera phones, but maybe I’m wrong.
Pretty much that’s what I notice, though I go to a relatively upscale club that probably skews slightly older, since the dues are probably a little expensive for someone just out of college. I don’t notice the younger guys being that much more modest, with one exception: at one of the locations I go to, we have nude, gender-separated jaccuzis, and I rarely see anyone who looks even as young as I am (48), let alone younger than that, using the men’s.
I will not put my clean towel around me when I’m all sweaty after working out, so I head to the shower in the altogether. But on the way back I usually wear the towel since it helps absorb residual water that I might have missed. So, going both ways I’m guided by primarily practical concerns.
I think men generally are a lot more modest these days. To me, it sometimes seems that men’s bodies are thought to be generally ugly even under the best of circumstances, and then so many of us are flabby anyway, which encourages the wearing of shapeless, covering styles. Then wearing clothes like that, what’s the point of being in shape, so some guys probably end up fatter than they otherwise would.
In middle school, we got plenty sweaty but just put our street clothes back on and went on with the schoolday. Teachers must have been disgusted.
When I was entering my teen years (early '80’s) we had swimming class in school and we were strongly encouraged to shower afterwards, but nobody did. Also, during that time we were all going through… changes. I remember one of the popular guys- handsome, football player-type- was getting changed out of his suit and I had to do a double-take- his junk was the size of a horse’s. I of course assumed every other guy had one like that too, having never before been exposed to one other than my own. I hadn’t yet begun my pubescent transformation and was mortified that someone would see my own tackle and I’d be the laughingstock of the school.
Nowadays, I’ll change in the gym lockerroom with the same speed I do it at home. I don’t linger naked, but I don’t scramble to get covered either. I don’t walk around naked. Clothes come off, wrap a towel, go to the showers, towel goes on a hook, finish shower, dry off, towel around waist, back to locker and get dressed.
In my public, small town, Midwestern high school, they had an old swimming pool with just two small locker rooms - one for the boys and one for the girls.
Girls had an odd, one-size-fits-all suit that they wore and then threw in with towels at the end of swimming class.
Boys all swam in the nude! Yep - four years of swimming classes and four years of nude swimming. The first couple of classes were a bit intimidating, but after awhile, you didn’t care. My cousin still works at the high school and said it is still the school policy.
I remember one swimming class where the school bells were out of sync and all the boys dove into the pool in a hurry when the girls swimming class suddenly appeared out of nowhere to begin their class.
There was another incident with one of the guys who was rather proud of what he had and intentionally got, uh, excited as a joke. The swim coach made him stand on the end of the diving board until everything returned to normal.
This same public high school also had mandatory ROTC for a minimum of one year.
I tell people these stories and hardly anybody ever believes me, but it is all true.
Specific to the OP - I used to go to a Gay gym in West Hollywood and it depended on the person. Some guys just loved ambling nude over to the showers, taking their sweet time and putting it out there for the world to see - other guys wouldn’t even take a shower and just left and went home to shower. Almost all of the guys were in good to fantastic shape, so I think it had less to do with body image than personal preference. Some people don’t care, others are more modest.