I was raised as a Jehovah's Witness. If you know anything about that organization you already have some sense of what that means, but let me be specific about the part that's relevant here. The elders of that faith were obsessed, and I don't think that's too strong a word, with the sexual behavior of their members. Not just whether you were gay or straight, though being gay was absolutely unacceptable and not open for discussion. They went further than that. They had opinions about what married heterosexual couples were permitted to do in their own bedrooms. They had mechanisms for enforcing those opinions. They had a whole architecture of shame built around the human body and what it was allowed to want, to feel, and to do.
I left that world. It took time and it took mental work, and some of what was built into me during those years I am probably still finding and dismantling. But I left. And in the years that followed, Roberto and I did what so many gay men do after they've walked away from the thing that was supposed to define them, we figured out who we actually were. We grew into ourselves, into our relationship, into a life that was ours rather than one that had been handed to us with a list of rules attached. So when we eventually found ourselves standing on the grounds of Twin Ponds Lodge for the first time, a clothing optional, sex positive, proudly gay space in the woods of Maine, something clicked into place. Running this place isn't just a business. It's an act of reclamation.
But here's what I want you to understand: you don't have to have been raised a Jehovah's Witness to be carrying this weight. You don't have to have been raised religious at all. The shame that so many of us feel around our bodies, around our nakedness, around our desires and the specific shape they take, that shame has been so thoroughly woven into the fabric of western culture that it operates invisibly, like background noise you stop hearing because it never stops. It is in the language we use. It is in the laws that have been written and repealed and written again. It is in the way we talk about sex as something that happens behind closed doors, in the dark, between people who have earned the right to it through the correct kind of relationship. It is in the instinct, and maybe you've felt this yourself, to feel vaguely ashamed of your own naked body even when you are completely alone.
That didn't come from nowhere. It came from somewhere very specific.
The idea that the human body is something shameful, something that must be covered, something that in its natural state is dirty or indecent or an occasion for sin, that is not a universal human idea. It is a colonial one. It arrived in cultures around the world carried by missionaries and administrators and soldiers who were themselves operating under a theology that had decided, somewhere along the way, that flesh was the enemy of spirit. That desire was weakness. That the body was something to be controlled and suppressed and if possible transcended. They brought that idea with them wherever they went and they imposed it, sometimes gently and sometimes violently, on people who had not previously organized their lives around it. And here we are, centuries later, still living inside the architecture they built.
For gay men this cuts especially deep. We have spent our entire lives being told that our desires specifically are the problem. That what we want is wrong, is sick, is sinful, is an abomination. Most of us have done enormous work to get free of that, to arrive at a place where we can say clearly that we are not broken, that there is nothing wrong with us, that who we love and how we love is not a moral failure. And yet. Even within our own community, even among men who would never describe themselves as religious or conservative, that old shame has a way of showing up. It shows up when gay men judge other gay men for being too sexual, for being too open about their desires, for visiting places like Twin Ponds Lodge and not keeping that part of their lives properly hidden. It shows up when someone dismisses a sex positive space as "just a sex club" in a tone that makes clear they consider that a verdict. It shows up when nudity is treated as something that needs to be justified or defended rather than simply accepted as the most natural state a human body can be in.
Think about that for a moment. We live in a world where the clothes we wear all day, on the subway, in the office, in every public space we move through, are considered clean and appropriate, while the body underneath them, the one we were born with, the one that has never been anywhere except inside those clothes, is considered something that needs to be covered. The naked body is treated as inherently indecent while the fabric wrapped around it is neutral. That is not a logical position. It is a theological one, and most of the people who hold it have never once examined where it came from.
Roberto, Evan, and I, together with our members, have been building Twin Ponds Lodge into a place that operates from a completely different set of assumptions. Here, the body is not shameful. Desire is not shameful. Being a sexual human being is not shameful. Nudity is not an act that requires courage or justification.At Twin Ponds Lodge clothing optional means exactly that, one hundred percent of the time, in every space, on every part of the property. You can dance naked. You can hike naked. You can sing karaoke naked. You can sit down to dinner naked. There is no space here where your body is unwelcome in its most natural state. Because your body is not dirty. Well, your hands might be dirty, so make sure you wash those. But the rest of you? Just fine exactly as you are and nudity is simply an option, available to anyone who wants it, on their own terms and their own timeline. And the sexuality of this space, the parts that some people use as a reason to dismiss it, those are not something we hide or apologize for. They are part of what it means to be human, and we treat them that way.
If you are still carrying shame around your body, around your desires, around who you are as a gay man — I want you to know that shame was given to you. You were not born with it. It was placed on you, deliberately, by people and institutions with an investment in your compliance. You are allowed to put it down. You are allowed to decide it was never yours to carry in the first place.
