Intro -- My Name is Lee

My name is Lee. I am female. That name has caused some confusion, but I hope that if you were to see me that you could tell, even though I am relatively tall and have small boobs.

I was born in 1951 (in other words I will soon be 59.)in DuPage County, Illinois, the oldest of three children. When I was older my parents told me that I have they had determined to name me Lee regardless of my gender. Had I been a boy I would have been Lee Daniel, but since the doctor didn’t see a penis when he pulled me out, they named me Lee Ann. [My mother had an aunt named Ann whom she adored greatly. My paternal grandfather was named Daniel. My brother Lowell ended up with the Daniel.]

Being named Lee Ann instead of Leann or Leanne has sometimes caused confusion and had led me to get on some interesting mailing lists sometimes, especially from people who insist on organizing contact information as First Name -- Middle initial – last name.

I think I have surprised a few job interviewers when they have just see “Lee A” on my CV.

My father immediately gave me the pet name of “Leelee,” but my mother has used the simpler “Lee.” One of my good childhood friends called me “Lee-girl” because we were about second grade and there was a boy in our class named Lee and she called him “Lee-boy.” We were seven years old and I guess that makes sense, but she is still my friend and she still uses it and has spread its use to others. Some others from my childhood days still use it too.

I picked bad husbands twice, but I have picked up some good relatives in the process. I remain in good contact with my stepdaughter from my first marriage and her children who call me “Grandma Lee” and with my brother-in-law and his daughters from my second. The daughters are grown and gone now but we stay in contact and they call me “Aunt.”) Until her death I considered his wife one of the best friends that I had acquired in adulthood.

Additionally, since I have been married twice and divorced twice, I have come by a variety of legal names and I have picked up different nicknames. My stepdaughter from my first marriage calls me “GG,” short for something that her father used, and her kids call me ‘Grandma G.” My nieces from my second marriage and their kids call me “Aunt Lee.” My brothers’ kids do the same. A woman I worked with used to call me “Shorty” because I am 5’10” and she likes the irony. I guess that I am used to answering to a lot of things.

I have spent my adult life in Wisconsin (mainly around Madison) and Minnesota. My principal residence now is in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, in a house my second husband and I bought when we were together. However, since I have been working in the private sector for “Devfabricators” in east central Minnesota, for the last few years (and probably will continue doing so for a few months more) I have rented a cabin in Wisconsin near that job and stay there most weeknights. Members of my extended family are living in my house and taking care of it and I usually am there on weekends.

I have been a consultant and a teacher, usually for one of the several colleges and universities in our area. I have two masters’ degrees but no doctorate and I have never been on a tenure track any place. I guess I just have not been ambitious enough.

We bought our house because my husband’s brother and family lived across the street and the sleaze was having one of his rare periods when he seemed to want us to think that family meant something to him. His brother and sister-in-law were wonderful people and we remained close even after the sleaze was gone. Unfortunately, his brother’s wife died a few years ago. She was one really good woman. Their daughters were teenagers then and they are still close to my heart. And my brother-in-law is a good neighbor.

Intro -- my exposure to nudity and nakedness

I was born in 1951. My brother Lowell was born two years after I was and my brother Larry was born in 1957. I had a sister stillborn in 1956.

I was exposed to nudity at a very young age. I was born naked and my mother wasn’t wearing much on her bottom at the time, either. Of course, some of the greatest of prudes can say that much. But my parents seemed to have different thoughts on nakedness and nudity than most parents back then did. (From what I can tell, probably than most parents these days to too. Attitudes still have not changed much.) Actually, my parents may not have been so different in their thinking about when to be naked as much as they differed in when to dress and when to undress. But this may just be too much of a semantics thing for here.

Simply stated, my parents seemed to believe that we put on appropriate clothes for a reason and we take them off or change them for a reason. When there is no reason for a change, we don’t do one. It’s really quite a conservative attitude when you look at it that way.

I remember that when I was very small that after giving me my bath my mother would send me to the kitchen for a snack before sending me to bed, never bothering to put pajamas on me if the house was warm. When I was about nine or ten years old, I saw a pair of shorty pajamas in a catalog and asked my mother why anybody would want something which provided so little warmth. It had never occurred to me that people wore things to bed for reasons other than to stay warm. (When I was a little older she showed me a catalog which showed adult bed wear items and suggested some of the other reasons besides warmth that people wish to wear them.)

If our house was warm enough and nobody else was around, any of us in the household might come out of the shower or bath and not get dressed until getting ready to go somewhere.

My parents were not nudists or naturists or exhibitionists. They were dressed a lot more often than they were not. This was in the 1950s and 1960s and they went so many places and so many people came and went from our house that there were so many reasons to be dressed. They did not dress for the sake of being dressed and they did not undress just to be naked. I guess I think pretty much the same way they did, but somehow I seem to spend more time naked or topless. But with five people sharing a house and guests coming and going, we had more occasion to dress than I do living by myself. When I was a child we all had places to go in the morning. Although it is not the case right now, during most of my adult life, I have had days when I do not have to go to work and now that we are in the internet age, sometimes I even could avoid going in to work in person for a few days at a time.

I have kept a robe by the front door in case I have to answer it and for my morning reach for the newspaper. I do not always have one by the back door mainly because the few people who come to it are usually people who are not fazed by my nakedness. My most frequent back door visitor is Pat, my girl friend from childhood. I have been naked with her many times at various venues since we were girls and have been in her hot tub with her and her husband many times.

Intro -- Four Fearsome Females

There were four of us girls growing up who were together all the time from grade school on – Mary, Clarice, Pat and I. We called ourselves the “Four Fearsome Females.” We did everything together and went to the same places, ate and slept in each other’s houses a lot. Maybe the fact that all of us had brothers and no sisters had something to do with things. (Actually, Pat has a sister but she is fourteen years older than Pat and was not around.) We always said we would be together forever and to a large degree we have. Clarice is no longer living, having fallen victim to breast cancer when we were in our mid-30s, but the three others of us were all on hand with her husband and son when she went. I see Pat often since our professional meanderings have put us about ten miles apart. I don’t see Mary as much since she now lives in Arizona and I am in the Midwest, but she isn’t likely to leave my life as she married Lowell more than thirty years ago. And of course in this day of email and low-cost long distance we still communicate almost daily.

We were all raised in upper middle class families in the post-war era in the western suburbs of Chicago. Pat and I attended the same women’s college in the East for a couple of years until I transferred to Ohio State. I just couldn’t take the rich bitches I was going to school with or the female-only environment. Pat managed to stick it out longer, but she came back to the Midwest as soon as she finished there.

Intro -- my exposure to nudism

For a person with so much experience being naked, I have had only a little experience with nudism or naturism. I have never minded being naked, even when other, clothed people were around, but somehow I just never saw a point in going some place just to take my clothes off. Maybe some bad experiences have influenced my attitude too.

My first husband was a nudist. At least that is what he called himself, but in retrospect, I think he was more a swinger wannabe who never bothered to question whether his wife might think differently. While we were married, we did visit a few of nudist resorts and free beaches in the Midwest, in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Indiana specifically, and a beach in California once. One of the nudist resorts seemed to be more a place for swingers than nudists and I guess I saw some of that attitude in all of them, although that may have been because I was looking out for that. My husband’s daughter, who is about four years younger than I, accompanied us a few times. While he and I were on a business trip (for him) to Australia we visited a couple of nude beaches.

There are at least two pictures taken of naked me from when I was in Australia which have made the internet. There may be more, but I have seen just the two. I’ve never seen either picture large or well-defined, just as two small black-and-white, low-res pictures of me and the wife of one of my then husband’s business associates taken while we were at a nude beach. I remember when it was taken, by some creepy guy who had a camera where there weren’t supposed to be any cameras. My husband had stepped away, but neither I nor the woman I was with or her husband who was there made any objection at the time or attempted to seize the camera and the guy just walked away. I really did not think about the pictures for years. They were just pictures of two women sunning together. Nothing sexual was happening or even implied. But somebody who was a friend of Pat’s and an acquaintance of mine saw them about six years ago and emailed them to her asking if I was one of the subjects. She never gave the man an answer, but did forward the pictures to me. (Because of the size and poor definition of the pictures, even Pat had not been completely certain that it was me.) I don’t know the pictures’ history, how they were developed or scanned or in what places they may have been published. I am not ashamed of the pictures but it does irritate me to think that somebody has probably been making money from the picture. Probably not a lot of money on two small black and whites, but that they would make any frosts me.

I’ve poked around a lot of sites including several of the phony sites that call themselves “nudist” looking for those pictures and have found one or the other or both in a few places, but have not been able to learn much more of how they have been circulated. This searching probably represents a waste of time since I do not imagine how I could ever get a dime for it since whoever published then probably did so beyond whatever statute of limitations exists in whatever jurisdiction the distribution took place. I have lost contact with the Australian woman. She divorced the man she was with, so don’t know what name she might be using or where she might be. I do not know whether she has seen the pictures.

Intro -- my sexual attitudes

Since I was born in 1951, I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, reaching adulthood at the height of the sexual revolution. If you liked sex it was a good time to grow up. We had the pill and nobody had ever heard of HIV or AIDS.

I attended a snooty women’s college for two years. I consider myself straight even though I doubt if anybody is truly, naturally, completely straight or conversely, truly, naturally, and completely gay, and my college experiences reinforce that opinion. I have been divorced twice, but I do not consider men in general to be enemies, just the two jerks I married. I have had to come to grips with the fact that I am not a good chooser of men. Being single does not bother me as much as my being single seems to bother some of the people I know. But I just remember that there are always miserable married people who feel that everybody else should be miserable and married too.

Much of my professional study has been in American and Canadian families and family organizing and structure. I have become a firm believer in allowing gays and lesbians the right to marry and I have become convinced that society does better when marital fidelity is maintained. I believe that infidelity is causing us more long-term problems than chemical dependencies or screwed up finances have caused. But I also know that sexual drives are not the same for everybody and that mine is relatively low, so it is relatively easy for me to make statements which people with stronger drives may have trouble living with, so I tend to limit such statements to academic environments.

And despite my present attitude there were a lot of things that I did when I was younger with both men and women, especially before my first marriage and I suspect that I would likely do many of them again under the same circumstances. We do not always do what our better senses tell us.