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Naked party time

By Mubarak Dahir

"This is your first time here, isn't it?" the handsome, bearded man with the hairy chest is asking me.
He isn't the first to pose the question on this particular evening. Several guys have already made the same query. All of them seem to have that knowing look in their eyes when they ask, as if they are either somehow proud of themselves or smiling to themselves (or maybe both) at picking out a newbie.
They needn't have been so pleased with themselves. Turns out, I am not hard to spot as one of the uninitiated. Apparently, the way I am standing is a dead give away.
I am leaning with my back against the wall and with my towel draped over my shoulder, letting it purposely, strategically drape itself over my belly and between my legs.
It is all that stands between my private parts and the humid summer night.
The rules of the party are quite clear about towels around the waist: they are not allowed.Ê This is a naked party, and being wrapped locker-room style around the waist is a no-no.
I get a crash course on the rules before I arrive, from a friend who tells me about the party and persuades me to go. (Granted, he didn't have to work that hard to convince me.)
These gatherings aren't just about sex, the friend assures me, a bit too seriously I think. But he can tell I am skeptical.
"When everyone is walking around without their clothes on, without the implication of shame that covering the body suggests, it's very freeing," he says. "Gay men suddenly can relate to each other on a very different level. It's liberating."
I want to be liberated.
So I drive the half hour from Fort Lauderdale to Miami on a Saturday night in search of emancipation.
When I arrive at the elegant and expansive home where the party is being hosted, I am greeted at the door by a large man sitting behind a small wood table, wearing nothing but his white briefs. At the entry, I sign a release that I don't even read, but I imagine says something to the effect that I pledge I am not a police officer and I won't hold anyone liable if I do something stupid, like slip and hurt myself.
Then I am motioned into the long kitchen, which is acting as the changing room. Here, men are stripping down and putting their clothes in the bags we have all been instructed to bring with us. I follow suit, taking off my shirt, then my shorts, then pausing. I think about that release I just signed, and the real possibility of skidding on, um, slippery floors. My shoes, I decide, are staying on.
The two men hosting the party, a couple, have rather deftly turned their spacious home into a play area for about a hundred naked men.
One room has been emptied of furniture, and of most of the lighting, too.
I timidly peek in, but I don't linger.
Not that I am a prude. In fact, I have always been jealous of men who can engage in this particular kind of fantasy sex, which combines the public and group encounter.
Unfortunately for me, I am no good at either. I blame my parents. My father is Muslim, my mother was a good old-fashioned Southern girl from Atlanta. Both of their upbringings dictated the utmost modesty. I was raised with the notion that sex was something you hardly even talked about in public, much less did there.
It was going to take a lot more than a sweaty dark room to free me from years of that kind of repression.
But I am less interested in the sex room than I am the other spaces, anyway. Dark rooms are predictable. I know how gay men behave and react in them.
I am more curious to find out how we might act and react to each other with our clothes off and the lights on. Will it, I wonder, be the liberating experience my friend described?
To find out, I venture into the other areas of the house, the public spaces that are for a different kind of socializing than in the dark room.
In the living room, the couches are covered in sheets and pushed to the sides of the walls. Men circulate between this vast open space and the kitchen, where food stuffs ranging from pizza to deli sandwiches to sushi are laid out. From there, other men pass in and out of the house, from the kitchen to the pool area.
I walk out to the veranda, push up gently against the wall and let my towel drape in front of me.
All kinds of bodies parade past me, from the brawny and muscular to the flabby or skinny, from tan and buff to white and pasty, from well endowed to the less impressive.
As men come up and talk to me, I pretend not to be utterly conscious of our collective nudity. With each new encounter, I feel myself straining to keep my eyes above the guy's waistline.
Every time someone comes up to talk to me, my mind screams: "Don't look down! Don't look down!"
After a couple awkward fumbles, I don't even try the handshake thing anymore. You get the idea.
All this desire right out in front of me, and there I am, self-consciously covering my private parts and politely pretending I don't really notice all the bulging manhood that is liberated right in front of me.
This isn't liberating, I think to myself. It's exhausting!
When the night is over, I go back into the kitchen and pull on my T-shirt and shorts.
It's then that I am truly thankful for how I luckily draped my towel for most of the evening.
Everywhere the towel wasn't covering is dotted with itchy mosquito bites.

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