From “Enticingly Unnaked”

When I arrived, I was ushered upstairs to a room that had a bed in it but was mostly a study, I thought. Lots of bookshelves and books. Guys were leaving their clothes in there on a studio couch. I stripped and left my gym clothes there too. Open double doors led into a large bedroom on the back of the house. Beyond that was a balcony overlooking the beach, and the noise from there led me through the bedroom and out onto the balcony.

There were a couple of dozen guys down there, all naked, and most of them well muscled and cut. A few horses too, including a couple of black guys talking with George Garnett. They were real bodybuilders and both were covered in tattoos. I didn’t recognize them as students and guessed that they were from the city. They certainly were hung, both of them. There were several down there, as a matter of fact, that I didn’t recognize as students.

The beach was quite private, which I suppose was why we were permitted to do this here. . . . What I could see from the balcony was that, although there was a volleyball game going, some tanning on towels on the beach, and a few guys out in the water, the more private areas already were being put to use by couples copulating. It wasn’t just going to be a Nude Day celebration, it was going to be an action party. That was just fine with me if Chad Simmons was here.

I looked carefully at those down there, but I didn’t see him. I paused to contemplate what I did see—what the party was supposed to be about. Did I find it more arousing, more sexy, to see guys nude rather than clothed? It helped in the shopping, I guess. I could see what was hanging and how fluid they actually were in movement, how comfortable they were with their bodies. It certainly stirred me to see what those two black dudes were packing—and how their tattoos flowed across their bodies and undulated as they used their muscles. I admit I wouldn’t mind a private meeting with either one of them. But did I really see the nude guys down there as more sexy without Speedos? There was something to be said about the mystery of anticipation and hidden possibilities, I thought.

When I turned to walk back through the bedroom and down the stairs, I noticed the décor of the room for the first time. It was a man’s room. The walls were a dark green in a suede texture and the other color accents were brown and gold. The walls were covered with prints, lit up by track lighting. They seemed to be Oriental studies of ornately clothed figures in ancient costumes. The Oriental motif was followed elsewhere in the room as well. I was surprised about the artwork. This seemed to be the master bedroom. I expected that Chad’s bedroom would have nude male figures on the wall—most of them probably painted by him.

Maybe, though, this bedroom had been decorated by his lover and Chad had decided not to change anything.

I approached one of the walls closer and saw that they were all Japanese wood block prints. And further, that they were Shunga pillow book art from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I had been exposed to these in a class at SCAD. Pillow books were essentially sex manuals. These were distinctive in that the figures in the wood block prints all appeared to be males—in couples. And they all were having sex of some sort. In keeping with the technique, the figures mostly were clothed, with just bits of flesh here and there exposed—rather more than less in some of the prints. But it was clear that they were all having sex and that, walking around the walls, I could get a clear picture of the various sexual positions for male-on-male sex that were practiced at that time. I also “got” that the arousal of sex could be conveyed with just the expressions on their faces and the entwining of their clothed bodies. I didn’t have to see naked * * * * in hole to “get” it.