It's a wonderful life: author David Nimmons shares his vision of the community he believes we can be—and already are. . - books - book review

The next time you're packed into a sweaty dance club, gyrating with hundreds of men--or watching the action in Queer as Folk's fantasy club Babylon--look around and absorb what's really going on beneath the pounding music and layers of skin and sex. You might see what David Nimmons does: "[The gay world] looks like an experiment in a free-living spirituality," he says. "The values so beautifully attested here are precisely the values the spiritual traditions teach."

In his new book, The Soul Beneath the Skin: The Unseen Hearts and Habits of Gay Men, Nimmons proposes a startling theory: Far from being the self-involved creatures of popular lore, contemporary gay men have created a powerfully spiritual subculture. In short, Nimmons--a New Yorker who has served as both president of the city's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center and as director of Education at Gay Men's Health Crisis--exposes the strengths of gay culture that hide in plain sight below a layer of self-deprecation. "We've gotten really good at telling the `warts and all' part of [our] story--a very narrow slice of the story--and taking it to be true," he says. "We owe it to ourselves to tell the whole story. We're living our best values; we're just not naming them."

The Soul Beneath the Skin makes those values explicit: "Our levels of public violence are vastly lower," writes Nimmons. "We volunteer more often. We are redefining gender relations. We have distinct patterns of caretaking, We are pioneering a wide range of untried intimate relationships."

Using statistics, interviews, and anecdotes, Nimmons argues that gay men are more responsible and cooperative than most of us believe. Analyzing such gay institutions as the "bitchy queen," he writes: "She gives us strength and power and social protection. [But] we haven't elaborated on equally robust archetypes centered around kindness."

And bliss. Our willingness to pursue it is another of our strengths, Nimmons writes--referring back to what he calls the "communal catharsis" of the dance floor. Witness this passage, in which one man talks about his perfect dance moment: "A couple hundred of us were dancing on a big esplanade over the ocean. It was 1993 or so, so the DJ was playing Pet Shop Boys' `Go West,' all about hope and getting through hard times with each other. I looked around and so many guys were dancing, smiling, but with tears on their cheeks, caught in the light of the setting sun. It was so indescribably beautiful. I wept, knowing how much we were all facing in our lives. For us to have come there ... felt so valiant, as if by facing death through dancing together, we would get through it somehow."

Nimmons intends to help gay men see the beauty of their own tribe. "If you're acculturated into a society that says you'll be a certain way with each other," he says, "and that way is callous, shallow, and drug-obsessed--then that's what you become."

Habib wrote about Cootie Shots in the April 16 issue of The Advocate.

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