At a house party recently, I met a couple who, in their spare time, breed exotic praying mantises to sell on the internet as pets. This started a couple of years ago, when Sarah discovered some Carolina mantises in her outdoor pots. She started reading up on rarer varieties, and now she and her partner, Eric, have as many as a thousand baby giant Asian mantises at a time, ready to express-mail to buyers for $10 apiece.

As Sarah told me all this, she was lying across Eric's lap wrapped up in a tan-and-black checked blanket, but otherwise totally naked: tall and slender with black hair in two long braids, an eyebrow ring, and different fairies tattooed on each shoulder. Eric, blond with an easy smile, was naked too. He kept reaching to touch her butt. She kept blocking him. Meanwhile, in what was only just starting not to seem like a bad dream, I was partially naked, too. Surrounding us, in a living room in northern Virginia, were a bunch of other naked and mostly naked people, talking about—mostly—normal things: praying mantises, Donald Trump, the best wineries in Leesburg, how to dry fresh rosemary sprigs, Donald Trump.

Over the past few months, under our new president, Washington's famous divides—race, class, gender, sexuality, politics—seem to have hardened more than ever before. Clothing here often feels like a marker of those fault lines, a way of tracking not merely class and professional status but also more obscure fissures: the spiffed-up outfit of a congressional aide about to move to K Street, the floppy-to-fitted suit spectrum that seems to mirror the right-to-left political spectrum, the minutiae of patriotic ties, lapel pins, and silk scarves. I came to the nudist party at least in part as a participant, not just a voyeur, to see what might happen if some of those markers of division were temporarily removed.

The naked dinner party takes place on about a monthly basis in a well-to-do Virginia suburb, on a quiet winding street. This past winter, I went twice. Before the first party, I got coffee with the host, "Steve": an older ("mature," he told me) man who dresses stylishly but conservatively, that afternoon in bright red plastic-framed glasses, an oatmeal cable-knit sweater over a yellow checked shirt, and khakis. When I rang the bell at the first party, the door cracked open and Steve poked the top half of his face around the side. He was wearing the red-framed glasses. As I came in, clutching a bottle of wine, I saw he wasn't wearing anything else. Extremely conscious of my February layers, I trailed him into the dining room.

I came to the nudist party at least in part as a participant, not just a voyeur, to see what might happen if some of those markers of division were temporarily removed.

The room was filled with naked men and canapés: a group of guys, mostly about Steve's age, standing around a long table covered by plates of deviled eggs; chips and salsa; and chopped-up vegetables. Steve introduced me. I tried not to stare at their penises, and failed.

"You want to go change?" Steve said. There's an upstairs bedroom he reserves as a changing room: an older relative of Steve's used to live there, and it was cluttered with pill bottles, relationship self-help books (The Five Love Languages), and small heaps of clothing. I went upstairs and removed some, although not all, of my clothing, got my towel out of my bag—Steve had told me it's "nudist etiquette" to bring your own towel, to protect the host's furniture from your butt—then came back down to mingle.

Mia Feitel

America's nudists have long operated in the shadows—so to speak—but the practice today has some mainstream recognition. Since the 1930s, the American Association of Nude Recreation (AANR) has operated as an advocacy and travel-guide umbrella organization, guiding nudists to family-friendly beaches like Gunnison Beach in Sandy Hook, New Jersey, or Pine Tree Associates, a club in Maryland where you can find young kids and middle-aged women in platform sandals enjoying the breeze unfettered. And although nudist groups tend to be on the older side, the internet is today enabling connections that would have been unimaginable to past generations.

While D.C. doesn't have a naturist scene on par with Florida, or even New York, it does have a couple of official nudist groups: the Potomac Rambling Bares, a group that's been around since the 1980s and organizes activities that range from game nights and Super Bowl parties to trips to local clothing-optional beaches and campgrounds; and the D.C. Starkers, a nonsexual nudist group for gay men. When Steve moved here six years ago from New York City, he tried the Starkers. An inveterate kibbutzer, he was also getting together with people through Meetup, the online networking site that connects people based on IRL interest—he currently belongs to 32 different groups, ranging from hiking clubs to swingers groups to bisexual support groups. A year or so ago, he started his own group: "I wanted control over the people who were in it."

The first questions friends asked when I said I was going to a nudist dinner party were, generally, about erections.

Because of the range of Steve's interests, there was a wide variety of people gathered around the dining room table and the fireplace in his living room—temperature regulation being key at a nudist party. I met a beefy guy covered with Japanese tattoos who turned out to be a State Department contractor, and another man who got into nudism through working nights as a model for art students. Steve's hiking friends come sometimes, although he said they don't take their clothes off. (It's technically a "clothing-optional" party, and people were in various stages of undress.)

I also met a dom/sub pair Steve had met through a swingers group. The dom was a buxom blond woman wearing a rabbit-fur wrap around her hips and a long bead necklace; her sub was a retired Virginian lawyer with a stiff-shouldered gait. She related to me her long and eventful sexual history, going back to her first threesome at age 18. Her partner, meanwhile, had been married to one woman, with kids, for much of that time. "When you were doing that, I was in church," he said at one point, gazing at her with captive fascination. She smoothed his neat wedge of white hair and smiled.

Eric, the praying mantis salesman, was a devoted nudist. It all started several years ago, through a forum for fans of Toyota Scion cars, when someone posted about a trip to a clothing-optional campground. "I made internet friends with this guy and went to stay with him in his camper," Eric said. "He turned out to be really creepy." Nonetheless, the experience made him realize he loved nude camping. Now he and Sarah, who are both bisexual, often go to a nearby LGBT nudist campground together. They're not so into the more AANR-standardized, family-oriented nudist stuff. "Can't make so many dick jokes," Eric told me.

The main trip-up for outsiders about nudism is the question of sex. While Scandinavians hop into coed saunas and French women go topless on the beach, Americans still haven't fully gotten their heads around the practice of taking clothes off socially. Although police don't raid nude beaches the way they did up through the '50s, the practice still remains, for many, shrouded in a number of taboos and misconceptions: primarily, that nakedness is inherently sexual.

This is one reason why nudists are, as Eric said, "a punch line in the mainstream"—there's kind of an automatic giggle effect at the image of elderly nudists perched around a campfire. The first questions friends asked when I said I was going to a nudist dinner party were, generally, about erections. (For the record, in the two parties I went to, I saw one, across the room. The guy in question sort of swatted at it and kept talking. The general practice, according to one man I asked, is to take a walk to cool down or put on a towel.) But for nudists, there's nothing fundamentally erotic about the naked body; clothes make it erotic. "Nudist clubs are far less sexually charged than places where bikinis, thongs, or other provocative clothing are worn," according to the AANR website.

Steve's party wasn't exactly an AANR gathering with little naked kids running around playing hacky sack. While the group is studiously nonsexual in all its packaging (except for those Steve personally knows, single men are banned, and Steve once kicked out a couple for having sex in his bathroom), many of the participants knew each other from other, more sexually oriented groups. Perhaps because of this, I sensed some underground currents, especially watching certain conversations. Moreover, because we weren't on a beach but in a living room, it had that kind of '70s suburban wife-swapping party vibe—I kept waiting for Sigourney Weaver to break out the key bowl.

Mia Feitel

And yet, maybe an hour into the first party, I began to forget that everyone was naked—or at least, their nakedness began to feel less shocking and strange, more just a basic fact of the party, along with the adult-contemporary soundtrack and the Gustav Klimt reproduction on the living room wall. I found I was looking mostly at people's faces, instead of sneaking glances at their private parts; I (mostly!) forgot my own anxiety over what I was wearing, or not.

There's a utopianism to nudism that is extremely beguiling, perhaps especially for women. Right now, American women are being told we're too sexually threatening to eat dinner alone—fully clothed—with the vice president. So to stand around a living room for a few hours, naked, with straight men, and just talk about your kids or current events, and not be treated like some shameful vortex of sexual witchery, is actually quite revolutionary. I spoke to one woman named Lisa who'd met Steve through a swingers group. She says she feels uncomfortable these days at swinger parties—she has to put on little lingerie outfits, it's kind of a scene. But at Steve's parties, she can just relax. "I'm not so worried I'm landscaped properly," she told me, and leaned forward in a joking way to inspect her pubes.

There's a utopianism to nudism that is extremely beguiling, perhaps especially for women.

"I have a small dick," 70-year-old Maryland minister and writer Robin Gorsline told me, reclining comfortably on an elbow across one end of the living room couch, long earrings dangling from each ear. "Very small." This used to shame him. Through nudism, however, he learned to love his body. A former Episcopalian seminary student, he's now ordained in the Metropolitan Community Church, an international church that serves the LGBT community. "As a spiritual person, I think this is our natural state, how God wants us," he said.

The healing potential of group nudity, several people told me, had been especially important over the past few months since Trump's election. Gorsline said, "[Trump] feels irrelevant here." One side benefit of being naked, he pointed out, is that you can't constantly be checking the news on your phone. A number of people noted how rare it was even to be talking about work at Steve's parties. Despite being quite intimately acquainted, they said they often didn't know what the others did professionally. (This is, I can report, extremely rare in Washington.) A man with a short white buzz cut—a former Marine who'd worked as an air traffic controller—told me, with evident relief, that there's no "rank," no "social hierarchy," when you're naked.

The utopianism of nudism is not without its gaps, though. In the kitchen at the second party, I asked a group if they felt nudism was a "refuge" from Trump-era D.C., and everyone nodded. Mike—in his mid-twenties with long dreads, wire-frame glasses, black athletic socks, and a warm, gentle smile—said, "It's a refuge from a lot of things." When I pressed, he told his story: losing touch with most of his family, not meeting a single out gay man at his historically black college, spending most of his teenage and early twenties in search of a new community, largely through Meetup and online dating sites. I asked if he'd finally found it, and he waited a long time before answering. As he paused, his face seemed to close off. "Just based on how long I have to think about that, the answer is probably no," he finally said. In the meantime, he told me, standing in Steve's kitchen in the midst of a large group of naked bodies, "I don't get too attached."

Mike's difficulty finding a place either among the African-American community or the alternate lifestyle community—which, at least judging from Steve's party, is largely, although certainly not all, white—was a reminder of how fraught any group can be for people existing on the edges. Steve himself is a complicated person, at times motivated by an intense loneliness. As I sat with Sarah and Eric at the second party and learned about the care and feeding of praying mantises, Steve was just a few feet away, hunched on a low stool in front of the fireplace, clasping his knees and staring at the carpet. Afterwards, I asked why he'd looked so down.

"It wasn't a good party," he told me. "I was thinking, I wish I didn't have to do this." Steve has traveled a winding sexual pathway, driven by both a need for variety ("I realized I was bored with a strictly gay lifestyle") and a lack of understanding from those closest to him. He's made a number of close friends through his Meetup groups, but his sexuality remains a struggle: "You can't choose what you are, but what I am is a more difficult choice than one way or another—in my opinion." Like all parties, Steve's parties attempt to offer light in darkness. And right now, and for certain people in particular, that darkness might just feel darker than ever.

Britt Peterson is a writer and editor based in Washington, D.C.