Exhibit A

I’ve been living in Warsaw for nine months now, but until recently I’d never woken up in a bed here that wasn’t my own. When it finally happened, I was completely unprepared: no toothbrush, no change of underwear, no toiletries, and a sudden moment of panic when I realised that I had no idea where to find the kettle.

Luckily I was close enough to my flat that I could get back without having to hop on a tram, so after saying goodbye and stepping out into the sunshine, I was able to enjoy that most deliciously filthy of sexual experiences: the walk of ‘shame’.

When it comes to sex – and to pretty much everything else – the English language is full of misleading terminology. As far as I can tell, cottaging rarely takes place in a cottage. When done correctly, blowjobs involve very little blowing (as a rather sheltered teenager, that one left me with some strange ideas about oral). And as far as I’m concerned, the walk of shame ought to be a walk of pride.

Let’s break it down:

1. You went out for the evening, not expecting to get laid.
2. You got laid.
3. The other person – often a stranger – had the decency to let you stay over, which means that
   1. You didn’t have to get a bus/taxi/etc home late at night
   2. There’s a decent chance you got laid the next morning too
4. And you’re meant to be ashamed of that??

Sure, it’s not always quite so smooth, but for the most part what other people call a walk of shame, I call a pretty fucking good result.

And yet, and yet… It might be misleading, but a part of me likes the idea of a walk of shame. Personally, when it works it’s because it puts the cherry on top of the night of filth I’ve just enjoyed when I embark on one. I like feeling dirty – literally and metaphorically – especially when I know that other people can tell I’ve been out all night. I like opening the front door and emerging onto an unfamiliar street in an unfamiliar neighbourhood, the morning sun a little too bright for my hungover, sleep-deprived eyes, and the taste of someone else’s toothpaste in my mouth.

If I’ve been really lucky, there’s also that ache – the one that comes from sex that’s too rough or too plentiful or, ideally, both. My thighs will burn as I walk down the steps outside her house. My sweat-stained shirt will be buttoned up to the neck to hide the bite-marks. I’ll still be able to feel her hand on my cock, wanking me back to hardness again and again, leaving the skin raw and sensitive; she doesn’t realise that my poor circumcised cock needs lube, and I’m too caught up in the moment to stop for a quick Hand Job 101. I just want to fuck and fuck and fuck and FUCK, and apparently so does she.

The caveat, of course, is that I’m a (straight) man. I get to put on or shrug off sexual shame as I please, because for the most part society doesn’t judge me harshly if I’m promiscuous or driven by desire. No-one wolf-whistles when I dare to show some skin, and I only get called a slut as a joke (or by women bearing down on me with an 8” strap-on). Whether I want it or not, I carry that privilege around with me, not least on the mornings when I stroll through town wearing last night’s clothes and a sloppy, satisfied smirk.

So let’s be clear on one thing: sex is not shameful. Sex is something to celebrate, whether we do it with our partner of 20 years or the person we met last night in the queue for the pub toilets. It doesn’t matter if they looked like Maggie Gyllenhaal when we went to bed and Maggie Thatcher when we woke up the next morning. It doesn’t matter whether the sex was fantastic or terrible – it doesn’t even matter if we were too drunk when we got to bed to do anything other than roll around together before passing out semi-clothed with your head buried in my crotch.

None of that is shameful at the time. None of that is shameful the next morning…unless we want it to be. Like anything else when it comes to sex, shame should be consensual – something for people to adopt as they please (to whatever degree) and to shape to suit their needs. It isn’t – yet – and we need to work on that.

I like to feel dirty, slutty, and well-used; so do lots of people I know, male and female. But when I’m at the counter in M&S, buying a two-pack of boxers and a new shirt before I head into work, and I catch the sales clerk’s eye, I really don’t give a flying fuck what he or she think of me. The shame is a conscious, personal choice, and should only serve to enhance the experience I’ve just had.

Walk of shame: internal fetish, not external label. That’s the only form in which I want to preserve it.

I’ve just got back to Warsaw after a couple of days in Berlin. I went there as a treat to myself: Berlin is my favourite European city, and the opportunity to spend some time exploring Kreuzberg, ticking off some more of the (excellent) museums, and drinking beer in the sunshine was too good to pass up.

On the first afternoon, I went for a walk in the Tiergarten, and was quickly reminded of another awesome thing about Berlin (and about Germany in general): they have an incredibly relaxed attitude to public nudity, at least in comparison to other countries. In the UK, a man lying naked in the park would be viewed as some sort of sex pest, but as I turned off one of the main avenues that runs through the Tiergarten, there he was.

And then there they were. Sprawled out on a lush green lawn, alone, in pairs, or even in small groups, the men and women of Berlin basked in the warm April sun, their clothes piled neatly beside them. No-one stared as they walked past, and there were no signs to warn tourists that they were about to enter an area where – gasp – it was ok to strip off and let it all hang out. It felt relaxed. It felt normal.

It’s not just Berlin, either. In Munich’s Englischer Garten, there’s a large area down by the stream where nudity is encouraged. In Hamburg, no-one bats an eyelid at the sight of someone casually disrobing outside their building. German saunas expect you to be naked during treatments – swimsuits are considered unhygienic and, frankly, a bit ridiculous, given what you’re there for.

There are restrictions, of course. A little digging reveals that, in fact, Munich has only very recently made public nudity fully legal, and has created six areas around the city specifically for that purpose. In most places, you will still raise eyebrows (and almost certainly a few complaints) if you stroll casually through the town centre in your birthday suit. However, my German friends inform me that as long as you’re not forcing your nudity onto other people in an aggressive or political way, you’re largely free to strip off in most big city parks, in the forest, or on both coastal and inland beaches.

I didn’t join the naked sunbathers in the Tiergarten – the hot weather had caught me slightly by surprise (and without suncream), so I was desperately trying to cover up every inch of my pale, freckled skin – but as I left them behind and headed for the Grosser Stern in the centre of the park, I thought about how good it felt to be in a country where, to some extent, nudity is considered normal. We tend to forget that the evolutionary reason for clothing is to protect us against the elements; modesty is a social (and religious) construct, as is body-shame. There is nothing wrong with wanting to cover up, but equally there’s nothing wrong with the desire to be naked, and the Germans (and Scandinavians) understand that better than most. They realise that nudity doesn’t have to be sexual – one you acknowledge that, the reasons for criminalising it begin to seem mildly ridiculous.

Nudity doesn’t have to be sexual, but I’m pretty sure that in addition to creating a more open and tolerant environment, a relaxation in nudity laws (or in attitudes towards nudity) would have a positive impact on our sex lives. That’s not rocket science, of course: the more comfortable we are with our bodies, and with the idea of bodies in general, the better we’re likely to be in bed.

I was 15 the first time I went naked in public. It was on a beach in France, in the middle of a family holiday; on our first day there, I’d noticed that a lot of the bathers didn’t bother with swimsuits, either in the sea or on the sand, so the next morning I sneaked off the campsite, heart thumping in my chest, and went down to the beach to join them. I don’t really know why I did it, except that I was curious, and felt liberated by the time away from school and my hometown, where I was negotiating the most awkward phase of pubescent change, and couldn’t imagine being naked in front of anyone. On the beach, away from my family, and even further away from the girls (and boys) at school, it was different. I only stayed down there for 20 minutes or so, but as I walked along the sand, self-conscious at first and sort-of proud by the time I finished, I realised some pretty important things about myself and my body – things I’d forget many times over the years, of course, but which at the time made me feel a lot better about life.

It was also the first time I really thought about nudity. When I was a kid, they used to draw the big, heavy curtain across the viewing gallery windows at the swimming pool before the weekly naturist session, so I’d been conditioned to view it as something that shouldn’t be public – something to hide away and protect people from. When I took my clothes off down on the beach, all that went away somehow. Suddenly naturists weren’t weird or creepy or perverted – they were just people who enjoyed being naked. If French families in their shorts, t-shirts, bikinis and swimming trunks could relax on the beach next to their naked compatriots, rather than shunting them off to a separate, secluded stretch of sand, maybe people who enjoyed being naked shouldn’t be defined by that at all.

I thought about most of that much later. At the time, and in the immediate aftermath, I was mainly just incredibly horny. Not at the sight of other naked people – it was more the knowledge that they could see me. It was a little embarrassing getting hard in public, but no-one seemed to care, and that felt amazing too. I mean, I was 15, so I did a lot of wanking on that holiday anyway, but for about 48 hours after my trip to the beach I could barely keep my hand off my cock. That was mainly the novelty, I think, mixed in with the first real emergence of the exhibitionism I wrote about the other day.

In Berlin, and in other places where I’ve seen people relaxing naked, with no fear of being stigmatised or shamed for it, I’ve always felt very happy, but I’ve also usually gone away with a bit of a buzz between my legs. Maybe that’s because I grew up in a country where public nudity was considered taboo, so it still carries with it that thrill of the forbidden. If so (and as much as I’d like to have my cake and eat it), the unselfish part of me would like to see that fade with time: yes, being bad will always be hot, but as long as taking your clothes off in public continues to push that button, it will be a sign that as a society we’re still not ok with something that ought to be seen as perfectly normal.

I live at the top of a seven-storey building, right in the centre of Warsaw. It’s quiet – just three apartments on each floor – and right next to a park, two supermarkets, three tram stops, and a bunch of restaurants. My flat has a cosy bedroom, a well-equipped kitchen, a fancy shower, a big living-room, and a log fire. It costs me a fraction of what I’d pay in London for the same amount of space; actually, it costs me a fraction of what I’d pay for half the space.

I love all of those things about this place. None of them are what I love the most though.

Next to the living-room sofa there’s a glass door. It opens out onto my balcony. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll have caught a glimpse of my balcony before. It’s where I keep logs for the fire and the mini barbeque that I’ve sworn to myself I’ll use before I leave. It’s covered, so I can go out there even when the rest of the city is getting wet, and it’s big enough that it feels like a proper outdoor space, rather than an architectural afterthought.

I really love my balcony.

—

Like a lot of people, I reluctantly accept the need to attach labels to my sexuality. Labels are a shortcut – a way to avoid having to explain everything to everyone – and they also help to make us feel less isolated in our desires. We get to put on whichever hat we think suits us best and head out into the world in the knowledge that we’ll find others wearing it too. The hat – the label – is how we recognise them, and how we narrow down the vast pool of potential partners.

My reluctance stems from the fact that quite a few of the labels I apply to myself come with a caveat. Straight? Yeah, sure, but I do like looking at other dudes’ cocks, and occasionally I want to do more than that. Switch? Absolutely…with the right person. With others, I’m a full-on top, and then there are those I only really want to sub for: it’s complicated. Am I monogamous or polyamorous? Vanilla or kinky? Am I a hedonist? A slut? A tease? The answer to all of those is almost always ‘it depends’.

That’s a problem, because with a lot of the hats we put on, we’re not just telling other people ‘I am this’, we’re also telling them ‘I’m not that’. I’m not always comfortable with that level of certainty – I usually prefer to hedge my bets, and leave some of those doors open. Usually…but not always…

I am an exhibitionist. I am not a voyeur.

I enjoy watching people have sex. I enjoy watching my partner masturbate. However, it’s not the act of watching itself that turns me on: it has to have context, and it has to tap into other areas of my sexuality. Tie me to a chair and fuck another guy in front of me, and I’ll be so achingly hard that I might come before you even touch my cock. Not because I get to watch you, but because the kinky submissive in me has a massive boner for that particular kind of power game. I want to hear you moan as you slide down onto his dick, and listen as you tell me how big he is, how perfectly he fills you up. I want to see the look on your face as you come. You can flip it round too. Maybe instead of being tied to the chair, I’m the one in control. Maybe I’ve told you to pick someone up in a club, and now you’re on your knees in front of him, sucking him off while I tell you what to do, his cock deep in your throat, hating and loving it all at the same time.

Watching without context does nothing for me. It’s one of the reasons why I rarely bother with porn. I worry that if I went to a sex party on my own, it would be just like every other party I go to without knowing any of the other guests; I’d end up spending the first couple of hours skulking around the fringes, too awkward to start a conversation with someone and not bothered about watching a bunch of strangers fuck each other, however hot they happen to be.

I’m an exhibitionist because when it comes to being watched, by and large I couldn’t really give a fuck about context. It doesn’t matter whether I’m stripping for someone (or for a group of people), masturbating for them, or fucking when I know we have an audience, I get off on being naked and sexual in front of others. It’s one of the few hats that I’ve tried on, and found to be a perfect fit.

—

By the end of the Second World War, 95% of Warsaw had been razed to the ground. It was rebuilt in fairly piecemeal fashion: first by the Soviets; then by the socialist government Moscow left behind; and finally by the investors and corporations that flooded into Poland after the Berlin Wall fell, and especially after EU membership was achieved in 2004. It means that the skyline is an odd mix of just about anything and everything you might imagine. Warsaw is not a beautiful city – not in the conventional sense – but it’s a city I’ll never tire of walking around or looking at.

My building dates from the 1980s, as do most of the residential blocks around it. The handful closest to my flat are a couple of storeys shorter, so when I go out onto the balcony, all I can see in the foreground are rooftops. As well as a great view over the city, that gives me a lot of privacy: I can do pretty much whatever I like out there, without having to worry about other people seeing me. Not only that, from my lofty vantage point I can peer down into literally dozens of the surrounding apartments.

A voyeur’s dream; an exhibitionist’s nightmare. I often stand naked on my balcony, and while it’s liberating to be able to do that completely consequence-free, there are times when I’d prefer to imagine that someone might be watching me, especially on those occasions when I get hard and start to touch myself.

For that, I have to direct my gaze a little further out, to a building roughly 200 metres away from mine and 15 storeys high. It’s a building I noticed on the day I moved here, because it immediately brought to mind one of my favourite bits of album artwork, from one of my favourite albums: Original Pirate Material, by The Streets.

I love the pattern of lights in the photo; the knowledge that it would be completely different the following night, and different again the night after that. I have the same thing here. When I go out onto my balcony in the evenings and stare across at that building, I see a new picture each time.

It’s too far away for me to know what’s behind each of the windows. It’s also too far away for anyone who lives there to see me…unless they’re actively trying. If they are, I’ll never know about it. I’ll never know who’s standing next to the window with a pair of binoculars, watching me walk around naked. It could be a woman. It could be another guy. It could be a couple, fucking up against their own balcony as they pass the binoculars between them and stare down at me. It could be a group of women, drinking wine and giggling at how soft and small my dick looks in the chilly evening air.

It could be anyone. I find that really hot, because it allows me to project all of my own fantasies onto them. The woman watching me? She’s shy and sexually inexperienced, but since the first time she saw me out on my balcony, pumping my hand up and down over my cock, she hasn’t been able to get me out of her head; each night she takes up her post at the window in the hope that I’ll do it again, so she can mirror my rhythm on her own clit and come with one hand clutching at the curtain to hold herself upright.

The other guy? A top, and probably an experienced one. He casually jerks off while he waits for his boyfriend to come over. They talk about it in bed after they’ve fucked, and the top suggests tracking me down to see whether I’d be interested in joining them. He likes the look of my arse: it would feel good around his dick, he says. As they discuss it, both of them start to get hard again.

The couple? Well they’ve been talking about spicing things up in the bedroom for a while. She quite fancies going to a sex club, while he’d much prefer just to go to a bar and bring someone back home with them. She thinks he wants to see her with another woman, but when he fucks her from behind on the balcony and it’s his turn to squint through the binoculars, what makes his cock twitch inside her is the thought of watching her suck me off, right there in the bed they share.

And the group of women? That taps right into the CFNM fetish that I got so preoccupied with last night. They’re fresh out of university, and drunk on cheap wine and the thrill of being out in the big wide world. There are four of them. One’s gay, but hasn’t told the others, while the rest bounce from one guy to the next, too young to worry about settling down into anything serious. They laugh about sex together, and swap stories about the guys they’ve been with. Who was great in bed; who couldn’t get it up; who lasted all of 30 seconds and then cried when he came. They spotted me by accident, but now they’re having fun inventing a whole history for me and making crude jokes at my expense.

I know I’m an exhibitionist because the idea of being watched is what acts as the foundation for all of those fantasies. It’s the only common theme: it can turn me on whether I’m feeling dominant, submissive or neither; whether I’m thinking about women, men, or a combination of the two.

When I’m naked on my balcony, I get so aroused by the idea that people might be looking at my body, and working it into fantasies of their own, that I often have to make myself come while I’m out there. Sometimes I have my eyes closed, but usually I stare straight over at the pattern of lights, pick a window in my mind, and think about who might be standing behind it.