Yarns Without Threads 

"One of our responsibilities at Harrad is to maintain a sound mind in a sound body. Because we have accepted you in good health, we plan to keep you that way. One hour of Physical Education is compulsory daily. The hour you choose, or you and your roommate choose together, is up to you.

...

"One other aspect of the Physical Education program will tie in with our seminar in Human Values. All sports, exercise, and swimming in the pool will be done in the nude."

Phil stopped talking, and grinned as the gasp of disapproval from the female students. "My lecture is over. For those who are shocked, I can only say that we are not nudists, per se. Nudism as a society or a way of life would be inconvenient. But we must face the fact that man took to clothing to keep warm and for personal adornment. You will find the gym well heated in the winter, and you'll be very comfortable without clothes. From a psychological aspect, we feel that it will prove extremely healthy for you to view each other calmly and objectively as naked human beings."

Every day when I go to Physical Education, there they are ... girls ... naked, swimming in the pool, playing volleyball, doing calisthenics .. . yelling, screaming, soprano-joyous. If I stand by the pool, one of them is likely to shove me in. When I come up spluttering in the middle of other girls, they splash me, or challenge me to a race, or toss a beach ball at me ... and the hour goes by so fast that I can't really believe it is over . . . and then back to the room and I yell for Beth, only she hasn't come back from her classes ... so I lie down on my bed and think awhile before dinner.

Like, yesterday ... I was sitting at the edge of the pool just watching about ten fellows and girls playing water volleyball when Sheila Grove dropped out of the game and scrambled up beside me. She was purring from the exertion. She pulled off herbathing cap, and with her hands swished the droplets of water off her face and breasts.

"Woof! I'm pooped." She grinned at me. "You know just two weeks ago when I first came here and had to walk out in front of everybody naked, I thought I'd die of embarrassment. Now it seems the only way to be ... naked. Stanley isn't such a big shot, either. He told me that he was really scared to death he'd have an erection . . . right in front of everybody. He still gets a little worried about it."

"It's mind over matter," I said, grinning at her. "Like if I thought how nice it would be to kiss your breasts . . . wingo, I'd be in trouble."

Last Saturday I went to "E" College for a football weekend. Sheila arranged it. Tom Brierly, a fellow she met in her Pre-Elizabethan drama course at "R" College, has a brother at "E" who is a sophomore. Sheila was Tom's date and I had Tom's sister, Ruth, for a date. Sound screwy? Well... more to come. I went along as Sheila's brother . . . Stanley Grove!

...

"I think we should see how the other half lives," she said. "Please ... please it will be fun to pretend you're my brother."

"Other than picking up your bra and panties, and trying to find my way into the bathroom through a forest of nylons, I might just as well be your brother," I said, teasing her.

"At least, you've seen me in my birthday suit," Sheila grinned. "I can assure you Tom Brierly isn't going to have that privilege."

"Big deal . . . I've seen the entire freshman class of females at Harrad in their birthday suits at one time or another."

"Has it given you a let down?" Sheila asked. "No more feminine mystery . . . just girls, big, skinny, plump. Do they drive you crazy?... Do you think about sex all the time? I think you should let me read that monstrous journal of yours so I would know better what you are thinking."

"Stay out of my journal," I warned her. "And don't get yourself in a tizzy. I've been studying so hard these past three weeks that I scarcely know you exist."

"Then why do you watch me when I dress and undress?"

"To tell you the truth, I can't believe that you'd ever get so relaxed."

"Neither did I," Sheila said, grinning. "For ten days I self-analyzed myself and wrote at least thirty pages in my journal ... all of which sounds silly. Now I can take it for granted. You're just like some girl I could be living with."

"That statement, my full-breasted friend, is, to use the current vernacular, the living end!"

"Well, I admit I like your anatomy better than a female room-mate's. It's more interesting, and there's no competition . . . please, Stanley . . . will you go as my brother?"

As soon as the education program had been revamped by changes in the State laws and was now under a State subsidy with a non-political, non-elective education board ... our Utopian planners would demand laws abolishing all censorship of any kind. We estimated that this could occur within ten years, but our group would keep a close pulse on the changing conditions within the state and initiate the proposal sooner if possible.

The moment laws were passed abolishing censorship of any kind, the schools, radio, television, the newspapers and all avenues of communication would be ready to combat the influx of any hard core pornography either published within the state or coming in from the outside. ... The weapons would be laughter, ridicule, and a constant revelation and expose of the stupidity of rutting sex . . . showing its lack of meaning, beauty, esthetic values or love for the participants. Working with a population conditioned through twelve or fifteen years of the new schooling techniques, (some of us felt that all censorship could be eliminated within six years) our feeling was that hard-core pornography would be laughed out of the State.

With the abolition of censorship, we expect the portrayal of the nude human body would quickly appear in all areas of communications within the State. Graphic depiction, in any form, of heterosexual intercourse would become commonplace. Children would grow up accustomed to the portrayal of the act of sexual intercourse and the birth of children, in all the arts. Judgement of the value of particular portrayals would be on the aesthetic side, and portrayals of the act of intercourse which failed to measure up to the enlarged sense of human values of all citizens of the State would tend to reflect back disparagingly on the person or persons responsible. Our State would "censor" by unanimous disapprobation of its citizens.

As the portrayal of nudity became a commonplace, actual nudity on the beaches, in and around the home, would become a matter of personal choice and convenience. When the State finally came around to revising the laws regarding nudity, it would be a matter of the law catching up with the actual moral codes and practices within the State.

Beth pointed out a side effect of the complete elimination of censorship: magazines of the Cool Boy ilk would simply languish and die for lack of interest. Once nudity was generally acceptable on the beaches, in public performances, and casually around the home, the voyeur aspects of seeing the naked human being would be supplanted by the wonder, delight and amazement of the male and female body. Magazines and movies whose sole purpose was to cater to a natural desire to see the human body of the opposite sex naked would become superfluous.

Later, Nancy insisted that she wasn't really inebriated. "I never drink to excess," she smiled wearily at Tanya, who was trying to rouse her from the red wood lounge chair. ...

"It did you good to relax," Tanya said. "Nancy, your children are lambs. ..."

"David makes them mind," Nancy said. "... He just acts like a big grouchy bear. He's a boss, after all. No one tangles with a boss."

David, sitting on the edge of the pool, dangling his feet in the water, ignored Nancy's attempt to have herself contradicted. "This is a very lovely pool," he remarked. "Back where I come from everybody knows in California they swim naked in their swimming pools and have orgies when the sun goes down." David's words sounded slurry to him. Without the cover of liquor he probably wouldn't have dared. Now happily tipsy, he grinned at Tanya. "Come on, take off those handkerchiefs and swim in your skin."

Horace pointed at the reflection of the moon in the pool. "Let's be bare-assed astronauts," he agreed. "We can jump on the moon."

"A good idea," Tanya said brightly as she fumbled with the strings holding her bikini.

"The children!" Nancy wailed. "Besides, I can only swim dog paddle." She knew she just couldn't wiggle out of her bathing suit while everyone, especially Horace, watched her. "What if the kids are awake?" she asked. "What if they got up and discovered us all naked?"

Tanya agreed. First they should make certain the children were asleep. Conspiratorially, she led Nancy first to check Sue and Jimmy's bedroom. "I'm afraid I'll be embarrassed," Nancy whispered. Actually, she was both frightened and intrigued. She got Tanya to help turn out all the lights in both houses, so that the neighbors would think they had gone to bed. In Tanya's bedroom she slowly slipped out of her bathing suit as Tanya, already naked, urged her to hurry back to the pool. All four children were sound sleep; Nancy was sorry she couldn't use their presence to dampen the idea. Tiptoeing through the Sheas' kitchen, she was aware of her breasts swaying against her chest. Tanya opened the back door. They were both quite naked. Suddenly Nancy had to go to the John again.

"Silly!" Tanya said, and pushed her onto the patio. "You just leaked. Horace won't bite you, and after all these years David must have seen you in your birthday suit."

With the moon briefly behind a cloud, the pool was so shadowy that Nancy could only see the vague outlines of Horace and David placidly floating on the water. In hoarse whispers the men urged the women to hurry up, because the water was so erotically fine.

"... we arrived at the Albertis' ... The grounds are protected by a semicircular stone wall about ten feet high and covered with vines. ... we finally located an arched door, gothic style, strapped with black irons. ... We rang the bell and waited, finally a metal window in the gate was slid back and Fritzi Alberti's eyes twinkled at us. 'Miss Mai!' she said. 'Wonderful. You're just in time.' She let us in." Horace took a long swallow of his drink. "She was quite naked. Between thirty-five and forty, rather too-big breasts for her height, but otherwise in good proportion."

...

" 'You'll have to undress' Fritzi told us. 'We have ten cabanas each with toilets, showers, a large bed and even a television. The damned place is a regular motel.' "

"We followed her undulating behind as she led us through an enormous flower garden. In the shadows created by diffused lighting we could see the second story of the house almost at ground level on the near side of a pool. The house was nearly four hundred feet long, bisecting the rectangle of the enclosure. Frank Lloyd Wright style, the first floor conformed to the slope of the mountain, facing into twin, kidney-shaped swimming pools and a patio lighted by flaming torches. ...

"We could see men and women swimming in one of the pools or sitting around the edges. They were all naked. Fritzi took us to a cabana, found a room and told us to hurry ...

"Sylvia and I stared at each other, both of us ready to admit while we were undressing that the better part of valor would be to run for the car, and hightail it back to our little world."

Horace smiled at Nancy. "Beyond our own harmless pool party, and our half-cockeyed excursion into nude bathing, I had never been naked in a mixed group before. I felt like a novice entering a nudist camp. As I think about it now, the whole arrangement was matriarchal. You might call it a new form of female permissiveness. This group believes in giving their husbands sexual variety within their group but controlled by a strict code of rules and regulations. ...

"The woman named Catherine ... explained. 'There's nothing written down,' she said. 'You might say our rules and customs have evolved through experience, some of it sad, some of it quite ugly. Take drinking. We've found that liquor and good loving don't mix very well, and since our prime purpose is to have sexual fun, none of us drinks more than one or two, largely to get rid of our inhibitions, of which there aren't many left. Basically, the females are in command. We make the arrangements. If we have any philosophy, it shakes down to the idea that we want to stay married. With all our various marital faults and disagreements, we feel that divorce is no answer, though some of us have come pretty close to it. We've seen friends go through numerous divorces and remarriages, and still they come apart at the seams. While we don't think sex is all there is to life, we think that there's a natural male drive and probably a female one to experience sex, and through it friendship and communication with more than one person of the opposite sex. ...'

"One of the men, who identified himself as Harry, agreed. 'But there are areas of control on which we have a common accord,' he told us. 'You may have read about wife-swapping and the degraded, sleazy business it usually degenerates into. We've limited our group very carefully to exclude anyone interested in sexual deviations. Peter calls us HOPE, for Happy Orgies People Enjoy. Hence there is no interest in homosexualism, lesbianism, sadism, or fetichism, or in wearing clothes or in being partially clothed merely to titillate each other. Since we always approach each other early in the evening as naked human beings, and play together for hours before any actual lovemaking, you might say that we're a logical extension of the nudist philosophy, though I doubt if any dedicated nudists would agree. ...' "

... bring the television out near the Sheas' swimming pool on Saturday night and watch the movies with the kids, while all of us, comfortably naked, swam, talked, and good-naturedly exchanged acrid comments about the drama we were only half watching. ...

"David seems lost in his thoughts." I smiled at him. "I think he should take us along with him into outer space."

He twinkled at me. "The truth is that I'm happy, and I'm surprised at the simplicity of happiness. It's the four of us, together here, indolent, content with the fact of each other's existence." He laughed and waved toward the top of the hill. "I don't know who the neighbors two streets above us are, but they've been watching us down here, either in awe or shock, for the past two hours."

"My God!" Tanya scowled at him. "You should have told us. I didn't realize they could look into this yard. One of these days we're going to be raided."

I agreed with her, though the men seemed unconcerned about our casual family nudity. Tanya and I had carefully cautioned the children not to make it a subject of discussion among their friends in the neighborhood or at achool.

"We know," Susan had told us haughtily. "We're not stupid!"

"Do you think we are?" Tanya had asked.

Jimmy shook his head. "I think it's fun," he said. Mitch agreed. "The Materi kids never saw old lady Materi in her birthday suit." He laughed. "I think Sea and Tan are kind of interesting to look at."

I still had my doubts, but Horace insisted it was healthy for the children to grow up with a calm acceptance of us as quite human beings who sometimes found it convenient to be naked.

... I watched Sylvia and Jun Makura, who had arrived at seven o'clock and calmly joined the kids, swimming naked and happily with them in the pool, while Horace, David, Tanya, and I, all still properly dressed for a backyard barbecue, couldn't make up our minds whether to join them, and thus be faced with the problem of welcoming Peter and Fritzi in our birthday suits. "If the Albertis arrive half crocked," I said to Sylvia and Jun, "you both better put on your clothes in a hurry. There's going to be no S.O.S. party in this house!"

Sylvia, who had been helping Horace and David tuck the children in bed in the Herndon house, where we decided they would be out of the confusion of the party, had just pattered across the lawn between the two houses, her perfect brown breasts swaying lightly against her chest. I wondered how Horace or David could resist the temptation to touch. Tanya didn't seem to be bothered with Sylvia's assumption of our maternal duties.

... Fearing the imminent arrival of the Albertis, we watched them frolic. Strangely, I felt more inhibited dressed than I would have undressed.

Squirming out of my soaking clothes, I was caught between tears and laughter. Peter insisted that my aggression proved that I really liked him. He doubled over with laughter as he piled his clothes in a soggy heap. ...

Tanya, who was proudly showing her belly to Peter, explained that at the moment her baby wasn't kicking. ...

Just as our nervous tension had quickly given way to the hilarity of our dunking, so our natural gaiety now swiftly merged into a deep interacting personal interest in each other's ideas. I was both surprised and exhilarated. Beyond our two-family nudity, it was my first experience with a larger group of men and women who were naked together. Tanya and I discussed it later. From the female standpoint perhaps there was some sexual interest and a comparison of the male penises, all of which were a little shrunken from their exposure to the cooling night air, but there was something else, too. There was an engulfing sense of wonder, as Sylvia had pointed out, at the essential fragility of the human being and his inability, shorn of clothing, to pretend or role-play something he really wasn't. Perhaps the deep reason that nudity has become popular is that we are living in an age when no man accepts another as infallible. We have the faint perception that man, without clothes, is quite humanly vulnerable. With nothing to lean on, he begins to recognize the universal human interdependence. We should make war naked.

Everything starts somewhere. Yesterday I read Phil Tenhausen's news release on the National Premar communes, and lightning struck! I knew I had found the missing link. I could take Phil Tenhausen's proposal one step further and blend it into an idea that Rais Daemon and I had been toying with three years ago when I bought this tenement house. A total scheme that will create new kinds of cities. Urban educational environments that would involve the younger generation with lower-income America. We could blend youth and the unmeltable ethnics into a new, exciting forward-looking America.

...

Last night, when Merle and I finally got to the Tenhausens' home in Auburndale, it was about eight-thirty. Phil greeted us at the door naked - reminding us that the poet William Blake often surprised visitors by welcoming them without clothes. It either flipped their brains, or they joined their host, undressed, and discovered that, naked, communication proceeded on a different level. Phil invited us to the screened back porch and introduced us to the Abernathys, Claire and Mark. The porch overlooks their back yard, which is filled with pine trees and birches. You can see the edges of the Charles River in the distance. I shucked out of my jeans and T-shirt in a split-second. Merle wasn't so enthusiastic. She grinned at Claire Abernathy, also naked, and said, 'It ain't so easy being black when everyone's white.'

'Or being green.' Mark Abernathy, who is a psychiatrist, smiled at Merle. He wears a beard that makes him look like a Civil War general. 'Don't undress at all if you don't want to,' he told her. 'Being naked is just that - being. You'll note that Margaret is wearing a dress that just covers her naked behind. Tonight that's being for her. Being sexier, maybe half-undressed. Or maybe she's chilly. We'll have a more sparkling world when we've learned how to enjoy each other, just being, and we don't demand consistency from our friends. Why shouldn't a person's style of being vary from one day to another, to suit his own needs?'

... Bren Gattman ... was handing out mimeographed room and work assignments. Mine read: 'Andrea Pillisuk. Room 10, O'Day House. Roommate, September through March, Joseph McDonald. Work assignments: September through December, typist, clerk, Buchanan Manufacturing Corporation; January, breakfast detail; February through March, supper detail.'

Typed below this it says: 'Twenty-four of the Premars in this commune have work assignments for the next thirteen weeks. Premars on work assignments are not required to perform kitchen duties, which will be handled by Premars during their alternate thirteen-week study programs. Both work and study assignments will be discussed in detail with all Premars during the next few days. Tonight, after dinner, all Premars will meet in the dayroom, naked. In each room you will find your own Turkish-towel bathrobe. If your room is in either O'Day House or Blanc House, you must wear this robe to the meeting. If your room assignment is in this building, Gattman House, you can arrive at the meeting without your bathrobe. The communal bath, for all Premars, is in the basement of Blanc House. This bath is Japanese-style. You must wash and hose yourself thoroughly before sitting in the tubs. Premars who do not live in Blanc House must wear their bathrobes going and coming from the baths. Questions will be answered at our first Human Values get-together this evening.'

I ate dinner (spaghetti and meat balls) with three other kids, who were talking hilariously about this nuttiness of being naked together. Afterwards I sneaked back to the second floor of the O'Day House, just two houses away from the dayroom. Joseph McDonald, thank God, still wasn't in Room 10. My room! But there was no damned privacy! Two beds, two desks, two dressers. Down the hall there were three other rooms just like it, and a bathroom with three hoppers with doors on them, three sinks, three washstands, and three urinals. I guess if a girl wanted to watch a guy take a piss she could, but girls still could pull down their pants and sit without being watched. In the front part of the two bedroom floors as you come up the stairs, there's a sitting room with a TV and a few chairs, and a bulletin board with the rules of the house.

I managed to get out of my clothes and into the bathrobe just as a guy walks into the room and introduces himself as Joe McDonald. I actually felt mvself blushing! I just couldn't look straight at him, so I didn't discover until later on that he really looks like a mouse.

'Hi,' I said as I was leaving. 'See you later. We're supposed to be in the dayroom at seven-thirty - naked! I'm on my way,' As I walked into the dayroom in the tenement house next door, clutching my bathrobe around me, wondering what in hell Joe McDonald and I would talk about later, I saw some of the kids had arrived already and were sitting naked on their bathrobes. It wasn't easy, but I let mine slide off and plopped down on it. Soon there were forty-eight of us, all looking silly as hell sitting on the floor leaning on pillows. Watching us arrive were our communal parents, Bren Grattman, Ellen O'Day, and Merle Blanc, naked as jaybirds, too. We were all ready to swoop the first loop on the Premar roller-coaster.

Bren was lounging on a little platform that separated the day-room from the dining room behind it. Ellen and Merle sat on either side of him using pillows and the platform for a back rest. There were a couple of hundred pillows flung around the room. There were no chairs. The way the girls were squirming and clasping their knees together, I knew most of them (including myself) were as uneasy as hell. No matter how you held your legs, some guy could see all the way up between them. The only solution was to stare back at them, or glue your eyes on their penises. It was funny, really. A lot of guys had little erections when they dared to look, and you could tell that most of them were just as jittery as the girls were.

I decided to concentrate on Bren's penis, which is circumcised and kind of thick. At least his seemed more remote than the ones belonging to guys sitting buttock-to-buttock with me. Anyway, it wasn't long before most of us tuned in to Bren's words and were less conscious of our nakedness. In case whoever reads this thinks I'm a genius and remembered everything Bren said, you're wrong. Bren had a tape going, and I copied it all down later to give to Ma. She'll be shocked out of her britches - but she'll love it!

'First, I want to tell you where you are, and why we are all here together naked. ...

'... Our neighbors in Topham's Comer are eventually going to be our friends, but that isn't going to happen easily. One thing these people don't do in their homes is walk around naked. Being naked together, for most Americans, is generally associated with having sex, and having sex for your fathers and mothers and your next-door neighbors, here in Dorchester, is something they're not supposed to do until they are married, and then they do it, as a rule, with the lights out, and quickly.

'I'm making a point of this because if our neighbors here could see us now they'd be shocked out of their skins. In fact, Ellen O'Day, whom you've all met, is probably almost as embarrassed at being naked in this group as any of you. Ellen, you're blushing! She is the daughter of Dancer O'Day, one of the city councilors in Boston. Dancer thinks all young people should act his age. ...

'While I know some of you are a little queasy at being naked for the first time in the presence of the other sex with the lights on, we have good reason for imposing this on you. We're going to make you openly, joyously aware of your wondrous body, and of the amazing and wondrous bodies of your friends of both sexes at Premar. And in the first few weeks of the Human-Values seminar we're going to refocus sex and human loving for you in such a different perspective you'll soon wonder why any people are afraid of discovering each other as complete naked human beings. And when I say "naked", I mean stripped bare, literally and figuratively, because we'll also be teaching you to expose your innermost thoughts to one another.

'So we are asking you to be careful. The only nudity permitted in the National Premar Communes is inside these houses, where we hope it becomes so natural you men may never have to buy a Playboy or Penthouse or Out magazine again, and guys like Burt Reynolds, who pose naked for Cosmopolitan, will go out of business because every male here is just as well endowed, as the girls can see for themselves when your hands aren't covering your penises and testicles.'

'Okay,' Bren said. 'I'm coming up for air. We haven't covered half the possibilities open to a Confamiliaum. The main thing we want to accomplish is to convince you that it's an approach to a new, exciting, cross-generational style of life which could help people live fuller and more exciting lives. We believe, for example, that Confam with mixed ethnic groups such as this one has a great potential for sharing the cultural aspects of different backgrounds, such as cooking. In the swimming-pool areas, where the confam should permit nude swimming, and in the communal baths, where members can gradually be encouraged to enjoy communal bathing, naked, the great hurdle of sex education - the physical difference of the sexes - can become a normal unembarrassing part of life.'