Content Warning: This post contains adult sexual content intended for readers 18+, including nudity, kink, exhibitionism, and explicit discussions of desire.

Phase 1: Clothed

Simon occupies a strange altitude in the professional world: high enough to shape decisions, but not enough to be in the spotlight. Mid 40s, liberal arts background with a graduate degree in cultural studies, decades in the nonprofit sector, and currently positioned as the right hand man to the leadership team of his company. If you have ever attended a conference, read a policy brief, or watched a public health initiative roll out smoothly, someone like Simon was probably behind it.

His résumé is less a straight line and more a constellation. Business support. Accounting oversight. Training design. Strategy. Electoral work. Policy. Website design. He has done it all, except he never pursued the PhD that once seemed inevitable, a decision he describes without regret. “I like doing things,” he said. “Not just studying them.”

He edits more than he writes. He builds more than he brands. He has no interest in being a public figurehead and seems almost allergic to the performative leadership style that dominates higher education and nonprofit spaces. Direct reports trust him. Executives rely on him. It suits him perfectly.

Work stays at work. Personal life stays personal.

Phase 2: Mostly Clothed

At 5’10” and about 185 pounds, Simon reads as solid, grounded, quietly self possessed. The kind of man you imagine hosting a dinner party where the food is excellent, the wine is thoughtful, and the conversation never drifts into performative outrage. He has been with his husband for more than two decades. They share a home, a dog they adore, and the comfortable chaos of being the “fun uncles” to nieces and nephews.

His hobbies include cooking elaborate new recipes, visual arts projects, long hikes, and reading. Which makes the existence of his longest running social group feel both perfectly logical and completely surprising.

For most of his adult life, Simon has belonged to a gay social nudist club.  One that participated in all of these activities. 

It is less about spectacle and more about community. Gatherings where clothing is optional or absent, conversation flows easily, and bodies are treated as normal rather than remarkable. The environment, he says, stopped feeling shocking years ago. Now it feels comfortable. Familiar. Even grounding.

His upbringing complicates that ease. Raised Catholic, he absorbed the familiar cocktail of guilt based sexual messaging that lingers long after belief itself fades. Desire framed as temptation. Pleasure framed as something to manage, confess, or compartmentalize. You do not have to practice the religion for the reflexes to stick.

A typical weekday looks almost aggressively ordinary: wake at 7:30, coffee on the way to work, back to back meetings, lunch squeezed between obligations, more meetings, home by evening, wind down by 9, read, sleep. If you met him professionally, you would never guess that anything about his private life deviates from standard respectability.

That is, of course, precisely how he prefers it.

Phase 3: Unclothed

Simon describes himself as a social nudist, but not in the sun drenched, volleyball playing, retirement community sense. For him, nudity is less about nature and more about exposure, the psychological charge of being seen. Not necessarily touched, not necessarily pursued, simply acknowledged.

The club is not purely social in a neutral sense. There is an undercurrent. A room of naked men creates a subtle electricity that hums just below the surface. Compliments land differently. Eye contact lingers. Encouragement matters.

Earlier in life, that appetite for exposure spilled into riskier territory. Online classifieds. Anonymous meetups. A bar incident where his clothes disappeared into the night, leaving him to navigate the city essentially naked with a stranger, eventually returning home in borrowed gym shorts.

Travel amplifies the pattern. New Orleans comes up more than once. Leather bars. Coat checks that accept more than coats. Spaces where anonymity and permission intersect.

At home, the energy turns inward. Simon speaks openly about daily masturbation, extended sessions of edging, what online communities call gooning. His favorite feature on a body is not a face or a particular anatomy but the torso, the canvas of vulnerability, strength, softness, and age all at once.

And then there is the concept he introduced almost casually, as if mentioning a new fitness routine.

Downshifting.

Not a clinical term. Not exactly a kink either. More a mindset. A deliberate lowering of external demands in order to devote time, energy, and attention to physical pleasure. Working less, scheduling less, expecting less from the outside world so that the internal world, specifically the body, can take center stage.

During our call, his husband was out of town. He had no meetings, no obligations, no plans. When we hung up, he mentioned he would likely remain naked for the rest of the day, drifting between reading, resting, and prolonged solo intimacy. Not as a frantic binge, but as a kind of intentional immersion.

It did not sound chaotic. It sounded curated.

Whether that crosses the line from indulgence into compulsion is a harder question. Simon frames it as choosing where energy goes.

Takeaway: Where Does Life End and Desire Begin?

I went into this conversation expecting another nudist profile, interesting, yes, but predictable. What I got instead was a portrait of someone negotiating the boundary between ordinary life and erotic life.

Simon is not reckless. He is not dysfunctional. He is highly successful, deeply partnered, socially connected, intellectually engaged. And yet a significant portion of his private time revolves around masturbation in a way most people would never admit, let alone design their schedule around.

Is that self care? Is it escapism? Is it addiction with better vocabulary? I genuinely do not know.

We talk a lot about work life balance, about burnout, about mindfulness apps and productivity hacks. Very few people talk about erotic life as a parallel domain that can expand to fill whatever space you give it. Simon has experimented with giving it a lot of space.

Whether that is liberating or limiting may depend on what you believe a life should orbit around.

If nothing else, the interview forced me to confront an uncomfortable question: most of us accept that careers, families, or creative pursuits can become the center of someone’s world. Why does it feel so different, almost threatening, to imagine pleasure itself occupying that role?

Maybe the real boundary is not between normal life and erotic life at all.

Maybe it is between what we are willing to admit drives us and what we pretend does not.