At some point, I think I was about 13 or 14, I began to be quite curious and enthralled with the idea of being naked. Perhaps it was something as simple as, like any normal human, I was curious to know what all the fuss was about. I came from the traditional Mormon / Christian home where nudity, or anything like unto it, was simply not tolerated or discussed. Ever. Period.

Being naked was, apparently, something I wasn't supposed to do, but why? Let's get to the bottom of this! I think it's safe to say that my parents stern enforcement of no-nudity had the exact opposite effect they intended it to, and had our family adopted a "nude-is-okay" policy, then it might have been no big deal to me at all.

At first, I simply experiment in the privacy of my bedroom. I started out sleeping naked, advanced to reading books on top of my covers naked, and from there to being naked around the house when I was good and sure I was home alone and all of the curtains were closed.

Fast forward to sixteen. I never could afford a car as a teenager, but I did invest in a fairly trusty bicycle, and many summer afternoons found me out in search of a place to be naked outside. It was no easy task, but I was absolutely dying to know what it would be like to feel sunshine and wind on places of my body that had never been exposed to it. Ever. The trouble was, we lived in the heart of the Twin Cities suburbs and it took some work to find a suitable location, but I eventually found the perfect spot.

Sandwiched in-between a graveyard, an underground water treatment hill, and a sleepy upper-class neighborhood was a thick plot of woods that was owned by the city and was fenced off with "No Trespassing" signs all around. The fence was poorly maintained and foot trails crisscrossed the area. I often saw people walking their dogs or taking a jog, and a few times I even saw a city employee who smiled at me and waved. I figured it was safe to explore.

The patch of woods was large, the joggers scarce, and the terrain hilly. With a little exploring, I managed to find a remote little hilltop that had no trees and was densely covered by mulberry bushes which were almost the same height as me. I walked to the middle of the patch, cleared away a small area, laid down, and waited until I was sure nobody could see me, and then I stripped.

I was instantly hooked forever. I laid there that first day long enough to get a light sunburn, but I honestly didn't care. It was such a treat to be naked as the day I was born, feeling the sun and the breeze, listening to the birds and the wind.

As often as time and weather would permit I made my way back to the exact same location... sometimes I brought a book, sometimes I just slept, but mostly, I enjoyed shedding the shackles of clothing for a short time and feeling the light breeze and warm sun on my entire body.

I should interject at this point that I had never heard of, and knew nothing about people who lived an all-out nudist lifestyle. I thought I was a lone man in the world, and that my love of being naked outside was something that I would forever practice alone and in remote locations. At the age of 16, 17, and 18 I was NOT thinking about a wife and kids, and the idea of a nude family, had it been introduced to me, would have been shocking, weird, and not at all intriguing.

I do recall that at some time in high school I was watching the ten o'clock news with my parents when a report came on detailing a nude resort had opened up somewhere just outside of the Cities. My dad said something to the effect of "Good... now we can gather all the hippies and freaks together and torch the place." He was of course joking, and in fact, I think my mom may have smacked him playfully for being so harsh, but his point was made.

Of course, I didn't tell them of my frequent trips to the lonely hilltop, but at the same time, I partly agreed with him that adults who get together and get naked in mixed company were most likely up to some sort of odd sexual behavior, and I mentally wrote them off as either sexual deviants or just plain weirdoes. I had not yet learned to separate the ideas of group nudity and sex.

Fast forward to college. In 1988 I graduated from high school and went to Brigham Young University. During my Freshman year, I never took advantage of the nearby mountains to enjoy being nude outside, but after my mission, I more than made up for it. Now that I had a car (something I lacked my freshman year) it was easier to explore all of the canyons and roads that went up them. My all-time favorite was to drive up Hobble Creek Canyon as far as cars are allowed to go, and then hike up even further. In the heat of the summer, nothing felt better than to work up a sweat hiking and then dip naked into the cool, crystal clear stream.

But, I'm getting ahead of myself. During my freshman year I met a girl who was to advance my knowledge and curiosity of Nudism light years into the future. She was a casual friend, never a girlfriend, and no, I never saw her naked. She was also from Sweden.

I have no memory of how we got on the topic, but one day we ended up discussing how surprised she was to find that Americans were so uptight about nudity, and about how loose and casual the Swedes are about it. Some of the things she told me absolutely boggled my mind.

For example, in grade school, there are no boys and girls bathrooms, only student bathrooms and teacher bathrooms. They have individual stalls for privacy like we do, but the boys and girls all share a common bathroom. In junior high when they have gym, there are no boys and girls lockers, just "the lockers" and everyone changes and showers together. Same in high school.

(I recall in 5th grade that the horniest boy in class, Mike B, told me that when girls go into the bathroom they all take off their clothing and dance around naked. I didn't think to ask how he knew this odd fact, but at the time I also accepted it as truth. It sounded good, after all. Not knowing what girls look like naked, and not knowing what they do while in the bathroom, led myself and many other like-minded boys to run rampant with our imaginations. Not so in most of Europe.)

At home it was the same thing, she explained. Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters... nobody thinks anything of being naked in front of each other, and there is no embarrassment or squeamishness about it. It's just life.

She went on to say that their teenage pregnancy rates are much lower than in America. Pedophiles almost don't exist. Rape is nearly unheard of. In America, she said, we create our own sexual problems by being so uptight about our bodies, and then we punished the people who have sexual problems.

I was SURE she had to be making this up. There was no way it could be true!!! As further proof, she produced a photo book she had about life in Sweden. It was in Swedish so she had to read it for me, and while none of the book dealt directly with nudism, I recall very vividly a section of the book that talked about ice saunas... the tradition of bringing a portable sauna onto a frozen lake, becoming very hot and sweaty, and then jumping from it into a hole drilled in the ice.

There was a photo of a family of five: dad, mom, teenage daughter and son, and younger daughter, all sitting in one of these saunas, all naked. They were sitting in such a way that not much was hidden from the camera.

I stared and stared and stared at that photo, and even today I could almost sketch it from memory. What was shocking to me about the image, beyond a family having no shame of being naked with each other, was how un-sexy it was. Not only was it not a turn on, but I almost found myself wishing that the teenage girl, who has plenty good looking, would have been wearing a bikini instead. It was just too honest and open to be sexual.

Now, had the girl been alone, and had she been photographed in just the right pose and with just the right light, then the image would have of course been totally pornographic. But as it was the best words I can find to describe it were: un-sexy and educational.

A few months after this conversation I was in the library doing a research paper for my Freshman English class. The conversation with the girl from Sweden (I no longer recall her name) was still rolling around in my head, and I took a diversion from the research paper and looked up the keywords "family" and "nude" in the library computer. The search led me to a thick book that had been written sometime in the late '70s. I found a remote corner of the library (lest someone I know should see what book I had) and spent hours reading. It talked about how different cultures across the globe regarded nudity, but the section on which I focused was North America and Europe.

It confirmed much of what my Swedish friend had told me. Europeans, it would seem, are much more relaxed about being naked, and Americans are very uptight. It did say, however, that this uptightness was slowly showing signs of shifting. It also said that a very small percentage of American families did choose to adopt a much more casual approach to family nudity, and it showed a photograph of another family, which like the one of the Swedish family, is still etched into my memory.

The family was American. They were all in the bathroom. The dad was standing at the sink shaving, naked but for the shaving cream on his face and a small towel over his left shoulder. His daughter was leaning against the vanity next to him and they were having a conversation. She was also naked. Her back was to the camera, her entire body was visible from the back, and her reflection from her bellybutton up was visible in the mirror. Judging from her face and her breast which were just starting to develop, I would guess she was maybe ten or eleven years old. Her much younger brother was behind the father and was in the process of pulling up his underwear, and their mother was taking a shower behind a glass door which obscured nothing.

They were so normal looking! If they had clothing on and I met them outside, they were the all-American family with two happy, healthy children. And yet at home, they all hung out naked in the bathroom! This was staggering to me, and shattered so many principles of right and wrong which had been drilled into my head since I was a small little boy.

I thought about these families for a very long time. I thought about the family in which I had grown up. I thought about how the relationship with my parents and siblings was always more distant and stilted then I would have liked. We all lived together in the same house, and we all loved each other, but none of us were really friends with each other.

How different might our childhood have been, I wondered if we hadn't all been so stuffy about being natural with who we really were. Would we have been more open and honest with each other? Would we have been more relaxed and not so rigid in our relationships? Who knows. We�ll never be able to turn back the clock.

I made up my mind that day, sitting there in the BYU library, that I wanted to raise my future family like the two families I had seen in these photographs.

Now, a good fifteen years after that day, I'm married and have two kids: a seven-year-old daughter and a five-year-old son. It has taken some effort, but we have become a family who is not ashamed or embarrassed, and we don't feel a need to hide from each other. There is still work to be done and progress to be made. I would still like us to also become a family who feels the same way about other people outside our immediate family. I'm working on it, and I'll keep you up to date via this forum.

... We'll, if you're still reading, thanks for sticking out this long post. Now it's your turn. If you would like, take the time to share with us how you got started. Be as honest and open as you like, and thanks in advance!

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