America in 1956 seemed besotted with Peyton Place and the Kinsey Report and the boom in nudist colonies and the theories of Dr Freud. But schoolgirls in the Minnesota city of Brewer were homing in on their own sweet goal: seeing their male classmates stripped to the buff. Their male classmates nude. In their birthday suits.
And more than that, nude- and humiliated. Shamed to the core.
The boys blushing, stammering, shuffling in their shame. Naked as jays, with females looking on, gasping and giggling.
It was a wicked passion of the girls at Grover Cleveland High.
It had been ignited by drama teacher Miss Cuff's musical on cowgirls and Indian braves which the boys were now rehearsing under her gimlet gaze. They were nude apart from those short, narrow flaps attached to elastic bands around their waists, what English teacher Ada Braithwaite referred to as their "teensy weensy loin cloths."
At rehearsal, as they cavorted and pranced and padded around the auditorium, those petite flaps swung sideways and revealed everything. Front and back. Oh, it was embarrassing! Even when the flaps were in place their pubic bush was fully revealed, and that alone was terrible. But their gluteal creases were also on display- those hillocks where upper thighs met buttocks. And also the lower part of their intergluteal clefts- their very cracks- they too were quite uncovered. They were very, very embarrassed 18 year olds.
And that was just the start. Miss Cuff had only to make them stop, stand in line and sing...and it was hilarious! Their 18 year old pricks began, one after the other, reliable as clockwork, to stiffen and stand up, shoving the flaps to one side. This produced gasps and giggles from the females. This was a delicious moment for the teacher, for her lady colleagues and for the privileged girls who had won the right to be present- often by begging to see how a brother was coping. "Oh please, Miss, I want to be able to tell Mom what he looks like!" A girl's presence invariably made boys turn sick when, emerging shyly, they caught her blazing, greedy stares. Oh no, not her! A sister, a sister's friend, the ugly girl up the street!
Teachers beamed, the girl blushed and giggled, the boys reddened close to tears.
Meanwhile Miss Cuff had decreed that the boys looked ridiculous with tan lines, white from waist to mid-thigh, as a result of wearing swim trunks when swimming at the lake or doing the gardening with shirts off. She told them to spend time in their gardens in their Indian gear, getting "a natural all over tan...even without any gear at all." She added this last phrase guardedly, knowing the electric effect it would have. She cunningly included it in her note to mothers. She wrote:
"If boys in this performance present themselves with perfect, deep tans I think we can achieve a verisimilitude to be envied by any other school productions. So I suggest your son spend time in the garden unembumbered by clothing, as if he were swimming at the YMCA or a school swim class, only this time outside soaking up the beneficial rays. I trust you can take relevant steps to protect his modesty but stress nonetheless the need for the all-over tan. If a female neighbour or relative sees things she would not normally, then all I can say is: you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs. Remember, your son has got to look the part, a Red Indian brave."
Rodney's mother was quick to move. Her interest in her son's participation in Miss Cuff's frolic was cloyingly eager. She decreed that the following afternoon, after school, he switch into his Indian gear, and get out in the sun, and she told him to bring friends home to take advantage of their sprawling backyard. It was certainly big- with its near-derelict outdoor laundry, their old oak tree, the half-hearted attempt at vegetable plantings, the wood shed where Rodney's late father had paddled him and the half-rotted away paling fence that sheltered them from the lane. Beyond the lane, the bakery and car repair of inner city Brewer.
"You and your friends can be playful young Injuns there, soaking up the sun, and nobody will notice," said his mother, making Rodney shrivel.
So here he was the next afternoon with Stevie Lynton and Mark Sullivan stripped down to their cute little flaps and bare feet, tip-toeing through Rodney's house into the back garden. Truth was, his friends had been relieved to join him and strip down at his house. His was the biggest backyard with all those nooks and crannies to shelter in if a female appeared. Besides, as far as Stevie was concerned, being glimpsed by another boy's sister and mother may have been a little bit exciting.
Stevie was a short, hairy nervous little fella, with frightened darting eyes. He featured a truncated, narrow prick. The boy was a side-kick of Rodney's, and similarly aroused by the notion of dressed females looking at males without a stitch.
In fact most Saturday afternoons Stevie was now being made to strip by his two older sisters and their maid, while his mother was out at bridge. Strip and parade and pose and slip on the girls' underwear and, finally, sit spread-legged on the floral sofa- yes, thighs spread wide- and have the girls flash him folded pages of the Scandinavian nudist magazines that the maid had found in his cupboard. The females would watch with grins as their brother became more and more agitated at the black and white pics of boys his age naked with big-busted older women or cheeky confident girls, especially boys with small members like Stevie's...and he would become more and more excited...even start to breath hard, pant a little...till he could not resist pleasuring himself...fingers of his right hand busy at work on his little member...quite the little monkey in the throes of passion...with the females looking on grinning, laughing...and his fingers would work faster at his small, rampant penis...and with some even faster, more urgent, monkey-like rubs he would explode...trails and gobbets of white fluid shooting skyward and falling to spatter all over his tummy and chest, even dangling from his chin.
The three females would fall about, he would slump shamed.
Stevie was coming to dread those Saturday afternoon sessions. Dread them, and long for them. But what a bonus, thought Stevie, to have other sets of female eyes humiliate and shame him. Laughing when they saw his miniscule cock or thick body hair. He shivered all over. Hell, even walking through a strange house, out of Rodney's bedroom and down the hall, in this near-naked state, he was dreaming of being looked at, and laughed at, by females.
As a result Stevie's little penis was at attention, thrusting his flap forward. And that was just the moment when Rodney's mother walked right into them at the back door. My son and his buddies, she thought. Here to get sun tans...in their sweet little loin cloths the ladies have forced them to dress up in! Almost totally naked! Delicious, she thought, just delicious.
"Goodness, what have we here? Three Indian braves...stripped for battle, too!"
Her eyes narrowed as she looked them over.
And she noticed the thust in Stevie's groin, flap sticking out at her.
She would now have fun, she resolved, at their expense.
"Goodness, Stevie, you do seem to be looking forward to the sun!" She made her voice sound June Alyson-sweet. Her tone made him go weak in his tummy.
The boy blushed fire-engine red.
And his insides melted.
Mrs Ricketson is looking at my erection, he thought, seeing me stiff.
She switched her eyes to Mark Sullivan, the school swimming champ, his long, agile physique on display with his burst of glistening black pubic bush flaring above the string. Rodney's mother let her gaze linger on it. The boy saw where her eyes were trained. He blushed and wilted. Then she looked lower. She saw two pigeon eggs in the roomy scrotum dangling below the frontal flap. And she could see a mushroomy penis head, foreskin retracted, below the flap.
His stomach turned, at the notion of the lady's eyes roaming over what was revealed of his cock and balls and pubic hair.
"And Mark, you're not leaving much to the imagination!"
The big athlete looked away, burning red.
She drew on another observation, designed to make the boy shrivel up.
"You're just like the photos," she said, and paused to let it sink in.
Those photos!
"You know, the ones your Mom showed me, of the last swim event?"
Mark clenched his eyes and groaned.
Those photos! The photos his Mom had snapped when he was naked at the swim meet in front of all the town's moms and the aunts and neighbours. Him, standing in his birthday suit. Him, half erect, then with a full-blown boner. Snap. Snap. Snap.
Photos- installed in a family album.
And his damn Mom has shown them to Mrs Ricketson.
"Well, out you go. Two hours of sun left."
She smiled indulgently, standing in the doorway holding open the fly-screen door to let them file past.