What is your favorite speedo/Go-to suit?

[cjkreitz]

As a younger member on this board, not many guys I know are wearing speedos. I have about 12 pairs, and I try to rotate them, but I always end up wearing my oldest suit. A black pair of Nike Core Briefs with the lining cut out. Size 30 (I'm a 34 in most other suits so these are really broken in). They just fit perfectly and theyre so comfortable without the lining. SO, do you guys have a suit like this...that you always wear because it just fits so great?

[valorian2]

I have around a dozen suits too and I rotate through them every day when I do laps. I think that I probably look the best in my navy and red Xtra Life Lycra Rapid Splice Speedo. But after spending a morning at the beach wearing my Aussie Bum Superhero brief, I have to say that I think it's probably the most comfortable and definitely one of the ones I look forward to wearing most.

[SwimTeamSpeedo]

I have a very large collection, but find that I do my swim workouts in a couple of Turbo suits, a Speedo "Color Shards" suit, and a couple of pairs of bold print suits by Tyr and Speedo. I like Turbo and Hard Core Swim/Polo suits for hanging out at the lake or on the boat. For laying out, I have several really narrow side suits that I love to lay out in. I also really like Funky Trunks for hanging out at a cookout or something.

[Bede735]

I've scaled down to 4. I've had 2 Speedo Endurance suits for years, but I seem to have stopped wearing them. I'm alternating between a Hom micro-brief and a Bogner at the moment, which are a little briefer than the Speedos.

[sebbie]

STS tends to favor the brands/colors of suits he puts on his characters in his stories!

[Dooley67]

My go to suits are Turbos or Sportis because of how they fit, how they make me feel, and how great they are in the water. I've worn them on the beach and for swimming laps at the pool.

D67

[SwimTeamSpeedo]

Yes, Sebbie, i do shadow my suit tastes in most of my characters. Life often imitates art, or the other way. I have also put some in board shorts and jammers, however. In my current story Alex and Patrick even tried thongs, which I never wear.

STS

[sebbie]

Maybe you are acting out some ideas you secretly would like to try, but for whatever reason you don't quite dare!

[SwimTeamSpeedo]

No, not really.

[sebbie]

You managed to raise a most interesting question, the question being what guys can be comfortable wearing a thong and what guys cannot.
I do not shop the women’s underwear section in stores, but I have notices that thongs for women are very common, even among mass market merchandisers such as Walmart and Target. Thong underwear for men has been getting more and more difficult to find at the bricks-and-mortar retailers. This may very well reflect decreased popularity of the design, which seemed to hit a peak in the US in about 1990. It used to be, for example, that Jockey USA marketed several different designs for men and these were easily found in the stores, but all of those have disappeared in recent years. Kmart carries cotton thongs for men under the Joe Boxer label, even as competing mass marketers Target and Walmart have abandoned the style for men entirely.

The swimsuit issue is even more interesting. Women seem to have moved away from thongs at least at mass-market places, but instead seem to be buying ever tinier and skimpier bikini brief suits, as these seem to be pretty much everywhere in the stores, and many of these are made of very little cloth for sure. Skimpier appears to be better in the Female swimwear world. I think many women buy these suits to provide incentive to get in shape and lose some weight. If this doesn’t happen, the suit never comes out of the drawer. My casual observation is that there are many more tiny suits hanging on racks in stores than there are women wandering around the store of a size and shape looking to wear them, so why do the merchants stock so many of these? An interesting question!

Men’s thongs as swimwear are even more interesting. For a brief period in the early 1990s, I could wander right into the store that is now Macys and buy a men’s swim thong off the rack! They were so small the sales clerks seemed nearly embarrassed selling them. I went right ahead, anyway. What is interesting to me is why men were ok with this in the early 1990s but not today?

If this discussion was about women’s swim thongs and the women who wear them, we would not be discussing the sexual orientation of the women involved. That in itself is interesting. Why is that?

So, STS puts his two gay male characters in his story each in swim thongs, and to a certain degree teasing each other with their suits, when they are together in private. But wearing these suits at a pool or beach needs to be considered very carefully, if at all. Part of this is modesty, but part of this is simply as the thong wearing labeling them as gay if they show up at an event together both wearing thongs. For men in a male-female relationship, a thong for the guy is ok but only if the wife or GF approves, and the situation is not too public, say a cruise on a small boat!

So, swim briefs have the same problem, to to a lesser degree. A guy wearing a brief with his lady is fine. Two guys both wearing a swim brief raises questions about sexuality. Could these guys be gay or are they simply athletic swimmers. Who knows? There are no labels. People just assume what they want to assume based on a lifetime of accumulating values. Competitive male swimmers have no problem (mostly no problem) wearing swim briefs with others. It’s just part of the sport. This is generally not the same for the casual beach goer or swimmer. People are going to draw CONCLUSIONS about my sexuality right or wrong, based on what I am wearing. Best not to press the envelope.

Can or will this all change? Is a nation that now accepts gay marriage going to continue to make core assumptions about the sexuality of a person basis on what the person wears at the pool or beach? That is an interesting question. Might we be moving into a world in which a guy’s sexuality is not inferred by his choice of swimwear? Will any of the straight male characters in any of STS’s stories ever show up in public wearing a thong regardless of sexual orientation? Stay tuned! I am curious as to how STS copes with this swimwear culture.