By Rachel Belle

Listen to Seeking: Young, Naked People

I think a lot of us have similar ideas about what a nudist resort looks like. Well, I’ll tell you what I imagine: a bunch of old, wrinkly naked people laying around in the sun playing cards.

Sharon Anderson lives and works at Fraternity Snoqualmie, a nudist camp in the Tiger Mountain forest. She agrees there are a lot of more mature folks taking their clothes off at her club.

“With an aging population, we need more young folks, more people who have the time and the enthusiasm to spend time here. It’d be nice to have some 20 and 30 year olds that can play along and have a good time with us.”

This is something many nudist resorts around the country are dealing with; they’re losing members and looking for newer, younger ones. But it can be hard to attract the young crowd when there are so many older nudists milling about and the activities aren’t exactly youthful.

Robbe White, 27, started his own group after being unsatisfied with the existing nudist clubs. Florida Young Naturists is exclusively for people between 18 and 30.

“We have close to 200 members now and our events attract anywhere from 200 to 300 people.”

He has skipped over the sun bathing and shuffleboard in favor of yoga, volleyball, tarot card readings, nature hikes, kayaking, drum circles and naked sushi. That’s right. Naked sushi. Robbe says a sushi bar in West Palm Beach is usually closed on Sundays, but they let the nudists in to dine in the buff.

You may be wondering how these people found their way into a naked lifestyle. Robbie certainly wasn’t born into it.

“I grew up in a strict Christian home, so I was always taught that nudity was not okay and I never understood that. My first experience seeing people nude, I was 13 and I went to Jamaica on a Christian Mission trip with my dad. At one of the beaches we went to, there were nude families everywhere and it looked really innocent. I thought it looked really great.”

So what’s the allure of nudism?

“To me it just feels really great to see everybody come together and it’s kind of like you’re one big tribe and nobody is judging each other based on what kind of clothes they’re wearing,” Robbe says. “And it’s just really freeing, there’s a lot of self expression. We do body art and body painting.”

If you want to try out nudism locally, Fraternity Snoqualmie is putting on Nudestock on August 27th, 2011. It’s their annual music and camping festival that’s expected to draw about 500 naked people, many of them families.