Sex Histories	Sex Histories Archive

A constable in Toorak, Australia, found a 36-year-old man "without any clothes on" in a hotel arcade and arrested him for "obscene exposure," says a clipping from an unidentified paper in Melbourne, Australia.

The nude's "defence counsel" claimed his client had stripped because of "the heat of summer" but the magistrate seemed more inclined to attribute the nudity to sexual heat; the defendant, he said, "had been in court before for a similar offence." The magistrate fined him $1,000.

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If the defendant was a man of some means his "obscene exposure" was probably worth $1,000 to him; exhibitionism is a breath-taking, knee-trembling thrill. It's an aesthetic experience to watch too.

Moreover, the story concocted by the "defence counsel" in this case is so imaginative it too seems worth any fee the defendant had to pay him. The lawyer claimed that his client came to the hotel late one afternoon for a drink, "felt so affected by the heat of the day he went into a small room off a darkened passageway on the first floor and stripped off. When he returned to the passageway to stand in the slight breeze the door slammed shut and, unable to open it to get his clothes, he went down to the arcade in search of someone with a key.

That is where the constable found him.

The lawyer's story is as enchanting as it is incredible. But if millions of men all over the world were to similarly strip when the weather or their nuts get too hot, the practice could become established. But men won't do that without leadership. What is needed is literally thousands of more men like the nude in the Australian arcade to lead the way.

Author Profile:  Boyd McDonald

Born in 1925 in South Dakota, Boyd McDonald entered Harvard as a high-school dropout after serving in the army in World War II. Jobs with Time, IBM, and several Wall Street firms preceded Boyd's career as a chronicler of gay sex. He was the founder and editor of Straight to Hell (alternatively the Manhattan Review of Cocksucking), and later published a number of anthologies of true sex histories. Boyd died in September 1993, two months after completing his final book, Scum.