The Reluctant Exhibitionist

by Martin Shepard

  AN EXPLORATION OF SEXUALITY WEEKEND

  The heterosexual/homosexual aspects of our sexual interest/avoidance will be explored in a group open to heterosexuals, homosexuals, and bisexuals of both sexes.

  It is designed to help people come to terms with the polarities inside themselves and to foster personal growth and understanding of others. A variety of verbal and nonverbal techniques will be employed.

  fee: $100

  The session began on Friday evening when I asked the six men and six women why they came and what they hoped to get out of the session. I was unprepared for their responses.

  “I came because it was my only free weekend.”

  “I came because you’re a doctor and my insurance company will reimburse the costs.”

  “I read your books and I wanted to see you work.”

  “I wanted to go to a theater games workshop, but when it was cancelled I decided to come here.”

  And so it went. Not one of the twelve expressed any interest whatsoever in the stated purpose of the group. The only honest answer came from a reporter from a national news magazine who said he was here on assignment to do a story on the encounter group movement. Finally someone asked me what I thought.

  “I think you’re all acting like a bunch of blushing virgins. Although the brochure made it clear that this was to be a weekend of sexual exploration—and I presume that’s why you came—you all act like you’re here to pick daisies. Not one of you seems willing to accept responsibility for your curiosity.”

  With that, I asked everyone to introduce himself briefly and spend five minutes apiece explaining his sexual experiences and preferences. Then I asked them all to undress, break up into groups of four (two men and two women to a group), and lie down, one at a time, while the other three massaged them. “If you want to get in touch with your curiosities and avoidances, this is the best way I know of. Massage every area of the person’s body. If you are being massaged, see what areas feel uncomfortable. If you are massaging, see what anatomical parts you tend to avoid.”

  In the discussion that followed the hour of massage it turned out that everyone felt much more relaxed, but almost none of my blushing brides had dared make contact with anyone’s genitals.

  Saturday’s morning and afternoon sessions were somewhat better. People began to know and trust one another. They started to let their desires hang out. We played the “Sexual Metatheater Game.” Everyone had a turn as “Director,” during which time he was to ask from the group whatever he wished from them. The others were to try to cooperate whenever possible. After finishing, the Director chose his successor.

  The first Director asked us all to undress and hug one another.

  The second, Joseph, an incredibly inept, skinny postal employee who had never been laid, asked several women if he could touch them. He handled them as if they were hot embers. His touch was both spastic and spooky. Most of them moved away after a few moments of his handling their bare shoulders or backs. The rest of his time was spent getting some feedback about how and why he turned women off.

  Lisa, the only woman there whom I was attracted to, asked Eric, the reporter, if she turned him on when her turn came. He answered in the affirmative. She passed the Director’s hat to Jane.

  Jane had been in therapy for years trying to overcome her lesbianism. She was easily the most compassionate person there. She herself had suffered much in life, and this awareness of the pain of isolation and ineptitude made all fellow sufferers brothers. Her kindness extended even to Joseph. She let him touch her—in his jerky way—for as long as he wished. She also asked Eric whether he found her attractive. When he said that he did, she asked him to accompany her to her room for a fuck. The two of them left.

  The next Director was a married woman who wished to touch and caress another woman’s breasts.

  Shortly after Eric’s return, he was given the hat and had us all dress again.

  “Now go over to the person you are most attracted to and undress him.”

  I sat in front of Lisa and began to undress her. It was the most exciting moment of the day. It has never failed to amaze me that a room full of naked people is not particularly erotic. Yet Eric’s suggestion that we unwrap these human packages set the juices flowing.

  Lisa was a stocky, Rubenesque schoolteacher in her late twenties. Her face, while scarred from childhood pox, was nonetheless pretty—set off by brown, warm, limpid eyes that kept staring out at me throughout the undressing. When I removed her blouse her large and virginal breasts hung a scant foot from my lips. Her stomach, hips, and thighs were also quite full and reminiscent of primitive carvings of fertility goddesses. When she, smilingly, got around to removing my pants, my organ was in full bloom.

  “Now do whatever you like,” said Eric. Lisa straddled me and began to whip me gently with her long, long hair.

  Al, a rigid, guarded executive type, now took the Director’s turn and had us all run outside in the field. Running through the tall grass behind the house with our clothes off, within sight of the road and an occasional passing car, feeling the grass brush against thigh and cock, seeing the clear blue sky capping the surrounding mountains, sensing the late afternoon sun, warm buttocks and back, breathing in the fresh, clear, country air produced an effect of great freedom.

  With whoops and whooshes we scampered around until we fell exhausted in an eccentric circle. Eric jotted down his first notes of the day after having been sexually on demand all afternoon, and the conversation fell into “what should we do for tonight’s session?”

  A number of ideas were bandied about, but most seemed dull and uninteresting compared to the exhilaration we were now feeling. The question was put to me.

  “I don’t really care. Whatever way you’d like it to go is all right with me. I still have the feeling that people are too self-conscious about what they’d like from others and that there are still some things that people would like to get into—parts they might want secretly to touch, smell, lick—if only they weren’t afraid of being thought odd.”

  They all seemed to be listening attentively, and so I continued. “So I thought one thing we might do would be to take off our clothes, get in a circle, and come to the middle of the room in a huge pile-up—one of the typical Esalen pile-ups—except that, one, we’d be nude and, two, we’d have the room in total darkness so that people would feel free to touch and feel and do what they like. Then after half an hour I’d turn the lights on again and we’d discuss our experiences.”

  “Oh yeah.” “Oh great.” “That sounds good,” came the nearly unanimous response. And that was the beginning of my undoing.

  We met after supper in the attic. I covered the windows with sheets to keep out the moonlight. Two people were absent—the fifty-five-year-old woman who wanted to be at theater games, and Eric’s girlfriend, who had accompanied him to the workshop. She didn’t want to group or grope with anybody but Eric. And while she ordinarily would have been jealous of Eric’s involvement with another woman, she, being enlightened by modern medical science, felt it was quite all right for Eric to fuck anyone here. Because it was “therapeutic.”

  So the session began. We formed our circle, the lights went out, and we came to the center. I had truly thought it would be an opportunity for the secret homosexual to touch a prick or for the secret lesbian to do her thing.

  What actually happened was that everyone felt for the face most familiar and all went off, two by two, to have an old-fashioned orgy. I found myself face to face with someone I thought to be Lisa. Yet I wasn’t sure if it was she or the married tit-toucher. And I was prepared to get closer only if it were Lisa.

  While I was trying to determine who it was, another man joined us. Later I was to realize it was Eric. He and my uncertain Lisa began to embrace and I was pushed aside. Holding on to a thigh, I felt her lie back, soon to be covered by Eric. I hesitantly touched her cunt, still unsure that it was really Lisa, and then felt Eric’s foot kick me away as he mou
nted and joined her.

  Moans and scurrying sounds filled the darkened room. I groped about, touching bodies on the floor. Some people seemed to be scurrying for refuge to the corners. Others were nervously giggling.

  I sat there in the middle of the room feeling confused and increasingly shitty, trapped by my own suggestion and not liking what was happening at all. For one, Anthos depended on good publicity and a proper image. And here was I, with a magazine reporter in our midst, having a rather tasteless orgy. Well, perhaps the fact that he was humping so steadily himself would keep him from exposing the seaminess of the operation. And the seaminess was directly related to my feeling more like the madam of a whorehouse than a psychotherapist. I was earning my fee for the weekend by supplying fucks. And I was such a clever madam that I didn’t have to supply bedmates. I got the “marks” to fuck each other.

  My thoughts were interrupted by a woman’s kisses. It was Jane. Immobilized by my mounting anxiety, enmeshed in circumstances of my own choosing. I felt her head slide down my chest and over my belly and rest against my groin. Her mouth opened and encircled my cock but her uncovered teeth rubbed irritatingly against its head. “Probably doesn’t know how to give a blow job,” I thought. My body twitched as her teeth became rougher, and that must have cued her, because the sucking became smoother. My cock stiffened.

  I felt empathically for Jane, although I wished I were a thousand miles away by now. “She’s endured so much heartache … she’s so damned generous … I ought at least to reciprocate.” With more pity than passion I twisted about on my side to face her pussy. My nose and lips went into her, but with my first inspiration I nearly expired.

  The sharp, acidic, sweaty smell emanating from her crotch was unbearable. My lips released their grip and my head rose. I was afraid of offending her and so, filling my lungs with fresh air, I went down again, being careful not to breathe. Yet the awareness of this foul discharge coating my lips and chin and tongue and nose made me back off again.

  I inserted my hand into her this time and tried to make the most of a rotten situation. Her mouth kept sucking me into her, insistently and with a steady force. I could feel the orgasm coming. Should I leave it in her mouth? Would the gushing fluid offend her? Would it sour her toward men? I moaned to signal my heat, but she did not relax her suck. Indeed, her head bobbed up and down more rapidly, and with her hands she grasped my buttocks to pin me into position.

  Throwing caution to the wind, out of my mind with the passion in my cock, I dove headfirst into that cesspool of a cunt and licked, swallowed, and sucked it dry while I exploded again and again, full-force deep within her throat.

  With the first burst, consciousness returned. I raised my head for air. The problem of how to disentangle and not offend her was solved when another male figure approached us, kissed her, and climbed on top of her sweaty body as I beat a hasty retreat.

  I lay there in the corner of the room for a while. If only this were a dream from which I could awaken.

  Joseph walked over and started to jerk his hand over my body. I froze and lay there as unresponsive as a corpse. Luckily he went away. I had committed myself to endure the rest of the nightmare passively, but truly wished to be left alone.

  Another switch-hitting male came over to me and patted my still body. Again my unresponsiveness worked and he moved on.

  Some time later I turned on the lights and we all talked of what it was like. I began:

  “I’m sorry that it all happened. I feel lousy. This was the first time in years that I got sexually involved when I didn’t really want to be. Jane, you have an odor that might drive some men to ecstasy, but it turned me off in spite of my liking you. My best moments were spent alone.” I said a few more things and then I stopped. I was literally and figuratively left with a bad taste in my mouth. I sat there for another hour while the others talked, but I didn’t hear a word that was said.

  When the group broke up, I quickly left for the kitchen to share my woes with other members of the Anthos staff. We smoked some dope. I gargled with white wine, returned to my room, and gratefully fell asleep.

  At our final meeting Sunday morning, a number of those in the group talked, at my guilty insistence, about what the weekend meant to them. They said mostly positive things, but I felt it was done to reassure me. Again I barely listened.

  After lunch, before driving back to the Hamptons, I went for a walk in the hills with Lisa. I thought that a good and honest fuck in a wooded paradise might straighten my head out. After all, if one is thrown by a horse, the best thing to do is to remount. Once more the fantasy was not realized. Biting flies and mosquitos bit our asses and legs and backs. We rolled about on twigs and rocks and pine needles. I had trouble getting it up and in, and when I did I came before either of us could really enjoy it—all this is spite of her having the most pneumatic cunt wall that I could recall.

  What went wrong with the weekend? Well, I could see now that the job of the therapist is not to do the dirty work for people. If they want an orgy, that’s fine—but let them struggle to set it up themselves. Making things too easy does not help people grow or change.

  The art must lie in making people aware of the gap between their desires and their cowardice in asking to have them fulfilled. That is the growing space. Putting them in touch with their desires through touching and rubbing and stroking is proper enough. But the consummation of their hopes and wishes is something they must bring about by themselves.

  Growth is bravery tempered by responsibility.

  This fiasco taught me much. Yet I wish there were easier ways to learn things.

  Thursday, July 16

  Eleanor and Manolo Benton run an art gallery in town. Eleanor is a good summertime friend. As she is meaningful to me I would be somewhat pained if she thought ill of me. I dropped in this morning to chat with her and Manolo.

  “Hi,” she greeted me. “Come on in and have a cup of coffee with us.”

  They were both in bathrobes and were about to settle down for a light breakfast—Manolo, a tall and gracious goateed man of sixty-five, who looks twenty years younger, and Eleanor, his handsome, cheery, blond forty-five-year-old wife.

  “I met someone who attended a group you gave last weekend,” she said with a smile.

  I cringed, said not a word, and waited for the ax to fall. If Eleanor had heard of those strange goings-on, her inquisitiveness and openness with me would surely lead to her asking more. Would I continue to hold her respect, or would I be written off as the Hedonist of the Hamptons? Yet it was not the sexuality that I was ashamed of. Rather, it was the artless, and, for my money, untherapeutic, way it came about.

  “She said that it was a really great weekend and that she got a lot out of it.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief and didn’t dare ask who was it or what she had said.

  Monday, July 20

  Incredible feedback number two came on the tennis courts this morning, and with it a mind-blowing question.

  I played three sets of doubles with a pick-up partner whom I did not know. After the game he asked me what I did. I told him that I was a psychiatrist and a group leader.

  “Incredible things, groups,” he said. “A friend of mine went to some sort of sexual group the week before last and came back ecstatic. She had been working unsuccessfully with a private therapist about getting out of her lesbian bag and into men. Well, not only did she feel great about making it with a couple of men that weekend, but she was extra proud of having blown the group leader.”

  I nodded politely and then shook my head in incredulous disbelief. I was dumbfounded to realize that this act brought Jane pride and satisfaction.

  Could it truly be that what I felt to be pornography was seen as progress by others?

  Wednesday, July 22

  The erotic seeds that were sown at Carol’s house sprouted in the early hours this morning. It surprised me that they did. Not that I underestimate the power of living a sexually open and provocative li
fe. It was just that Carol seemed unwilling—for some tritely conventional reason—to explore the possibilities of either an affair or an occasional fuck with her friend’s husband.

  I had called her a week after that first meeting with Vincent, telling her that I found her most attractive and would like to see her. While I take full responsibility for my desire and for the phone call, I honestly don’t remember whether the idea came from me or from Eivor.

  “I don’t think I should see you,” she said. “I don’t think Eivor would like that.”

  “You’re wrong. She wouldn’t mind. To be utterly frank, she hasn’t been interested in going to bed with me for several days now and has repeatedly told me to stop bothering her and to discharge my sexual energies elsewhere.”

  “But she loves you very much.”

  “I’m not so sure about that. She certainly doesn’t this week. It’s been very up and down with us. If you think I’m bulling you, why don’t you make it a point to see her on the beach and ask her yourself how she feels about me?”

  “Still, I’m her friend.”

  “Eivor likes you, too. In fact, when I jokingly told her that I didn’t know of anyone else who would help relieve me of my tensions, she said ‘Why don’t you call Carol?’”

  A pause. Then, “No, I couldn’t. I like you, but I don’t think it would work out.”

  Last night we had had some people over for a dinner party. Eivor had invited Carol and her husband, but Carol declined as Jim, her husband, was in the city during the week and anyway she was entertaining several house guests.

  At eleven thirty, just as our gathering was starting to break up, the phone rang. I answered it. It was Carol.

  “How’s your party going?”

  “Fine.… Hey, it’s such a nice surprise to hear from you. Why don’t you come on over?”