The Soul Beneath the Skin: The Unseen Hearts and Habits of Gay Men - Softcover

Nimmons, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 031232040X ISBN 13: 9780312320409

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2003

Synopsis

One of Publishers Weekly's Best 50 Nonfiction Books of the Year, this is a clear-eyed look at the unseen patterns of gay culture. It turns out that the gay community's own picture of itself is as biased and inaccurate as the straight media's impression

About this title

About the Author:

Dave Nimmons, founder of Manifest Love, has been a gay leader in New York since 1983. He served as President of New York's Lesbian & Gay Community Services Center for six years, for three years directed HIV prevention and education at Gay Men's Health Crisis, and is an internationally-known HIV prevention theorist.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

1UNSEEN HEARTS AND HABITS“You meet the most interesting people on Christopher Street.”—Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Wonderful Town, opening number

If you have ever had a hunch there was something special or different about gay men; if you have by turns felt you are glad to be gay, yet found yourself disappointed by the forms “gay community” takes; if you have wondered, “Is this all there is to us?”; if you have sometimes wished men like us could be different with each other; if you have craved more affection and tenderness in your gay social world, but weren’t sure how to get it, this book may offer some new answers.The story begins at a place called The Loft. Even if you have never set foot in it, you’ve been there. You enter past the Herb Ritts monochrome of that begrimed mechanic and his oversized tire (one wonders: Does some poor customer await in a gas station front office somewhere, ever hopeful?). Your eye catches the array of sassy bumper stickers (“I’m not a slut—I’m just popular”), the assorted condoms nestled beneath the rainbow baseball caps, and then settles on a fitted T-shirt ($42.00) stretched across the ample pectoral acreage of a mannequin seemingly on steroids. The display confronts the shopper with a daunting sartorial choice: Will it be the “Nobody knows I’m gay” muscle-shirt in gray, or the “What Daddy wants, Daddy gets—I’m Daddy” tank top in black?The Loft’s big claim to fame is its address: 156 Christopher Street, Greenwich Village. That puts it about one hundred yards from the Stonewall bar; you know, the site-of-the-uprising-that-marked-thebeginning-of-an-out-and-proud-visibly-organized-gay-community. The place the tour-bus driver points out to illustrate an upbeat urban fable of how the spangled fairies bested New York’s Finest (conveniently separated in his user-friendly narrative). “Two days of street skirmishes” ... blah, “riot police” ... blah, “drag queens” ... blah blah. In his mythic narrative—easily framed as our Boston Tea Party, in nine-inch heels—it took those two days, give or take about a quarter century, for that social movement to morph into an entity shorthanded as “the gay community.” Which, of course, is why this straight married bus driver from Newark knows to tell this story at all.The Loft is one of those places where the community he refers to goes to buy its boxer shorts and muscle T’s. This is where one comes to scratch the itch for a box of penis-shaped pasta, locate a cowboy-with-a-rope birthday card, or find that special lube gun shaped like, well, a lube gun. If you can’t find what you want at The Loft, try Rainbows and Triangles on Manhattan’s Eighth Avenue, Gay Mart in Chicago, A Different Light in Silver Lake, Castro Gulch in San Francisco’s Castro, Lobo in Houston’s Montrose. In Boston, your receipt will read Copley Flair; in Raleigh, White Rabbit. In Portland, Maine, it’s Drop Me a Line, and in Portland, Oregon, Rainbows. You’ll find such venues from Seattle to St. Louis, from Atlanta to Anchorage, in Columbus, Chicago, Des Moines, Phoenix, on rue de la St. Croix de la Bretonnerie in the Paris Marais, on Madrid’s Chueca Plaza, lining Amsterdam’s bustling Regulierstraat.That familiarity is, in fact, the point. You can count on finding the same iconic inventory: a faux-outrageous jumble of carnality, Carnivale, and kitsch that mocks one set of bourgeois values even as it re-inscribes another, onto refrigerator magnets, coffee mugs, baseball caps, and keychains. Whether the address is L.A. or London, the display window offers an accustomed iconography of rainbows and triangles, flags and flesh. On the shelves inside, the saints repose in their accustomed niches. St. Tom of Finland, St. Quentin of Crisp, St. Raymond slaying the Dragon. In stacks by the door, you can be sure to find the local bar rag, with newsprint pages and a glossy cover bearing the charmed face or body of a someone who can’t recall where he was when John Lennon was shot because, well, he wasn’t. You can close your eyes and know by feel which page will have the bar and dance clubs listed, which the personals, and where you’ll find the smudgy thumbnails of doe-eyed escorts hawking their cockles and muscles like so many Victorian street girls.This place is a cultural outpost, as certainly as East L.A. bodegas sell rice, beans, and Virgin Mary calendars, as self-assuredly as Rodeo Drive boutiques offer water-processed decaf and Bed-Stuy barbers vend’fro combs and African flag decals. These emporia, whatever their locale, are boutiques of belonging. Here is where you say Calvin, and nobody within earshot thinks Hobbes. In such places, inventory shades into affirmation, brands become bromides. Be an International Male. Don’t Panic. It’s good 2(x)ist. Help yourself to a Lifestyle on your way out. Places like The Loft are the purveyors to a culture inventing itself. They stock the retail inventory that a stirring new population, a novel kind of urban man, has come to claim as his own.From the soft-core posters in each dressing room to the underwear boxes, all seems to suggest that what lies beneath the skin is ... just more skin. The very walls speak in an eloquence of muscles and flesh, whispering a thousand seductions to one killing illusion: that this detritus, this skintight swirl of testosterone and camp, has something essential to do with what you’re made of.But shopper beware. Retailers of rainbows are rarely what they seem. If only what was most powerful in this place was merely skin deep. In truth, what most counts here is not what hangs inside the window, but what strolls on the streets beyond it. Because whether this store is in Madrid, Silver Lake, or Madison, it demarcates homospace. Look in its mirrors and you peer into an enchanted looking glass. This place is an entry portal to the world’s newest culture, a tribal homeland where the defaults and protocols of social life shift subtly, and where new rituals and norms hold power. It is a place of different rules and language, where customs and values are not what they seem.It matters little if you are gay, straight, or somewhere in between. Cross the threshold, walk past the Bears 2002 poster, and step out onto Planet Gay. Here, the clothes fit right, the men are men, and the Joint Chiefs are nervous. Glance back over your shoulder. Your one clue was that T-shirt in the window: “You’re not in Kansas anymore.” Nobody in this shop has been in Kansas for a while now. Memo to the Joint Chiefs: You have good reason to worry.
Some people say we’re just the same as straight people except for what we do in bed. I say what we do in bed is the only place where we’re the same.—Harry Hay, founder, Mattachine Society

In the early 1950s, when homophile leader Harry Hay got up to speak before a room of Mattachine Society activists, few of those listening could have imagined how profoundly the following five decades would confirm his words. By the time, more than a quarter century later, the French philosopher Michel Foucault could speak of “developing a way of life,” one group of American men had been doing just that, and calling themselves “gay.” (Readers with an interest in Queer Theory might want to glance at the theoretic note on page 221 about the use of “gay” in these pages. For less academic types, who hear the term gay subject position and think “doggie style”—go pour yourself a drink and we can get started.)In the last fifty years gay communities from Mendocino to Maine have undertaken a range of profound, spontaneous social experiments. These men set simmering a series of radical cultural transformations, scarcely recognized and even less understood, even by themselves. Few could imagine all that this set of experiments would come to mean.As they grew, these innovations were not very evident. Under the shadow of a plague, many of these changes bubbled unseen. Cultural practices and rituals that first glimmered on blocks with names like Christopher and Castro began to sprout in towns with names like Liberty, Tennessee, and Ukiah, California. As they did, they left their imprint on America’s life. The innovations taking shape in these male communities would come to shape mass cultural institutions from prime time to the Pentagon. They put into play fundamental assumptions and givens about how men work. Now these changes and shifts reverberate in the larger American society, bringing the potential to redraw the map of American maledom.Yet the power of the cultural experiments now taking shape in these communities of men has been little recognized, either by those of us who participate in them or by society as a whole. These changes have largely drifted in below the cultural radar. Their import has been obscured by a set of truths commonly held to be self-evident. Most who (for better or worse) take an interest in commenting on gay lives have adopted an all-too-familiar conventional narrative. As a consequence, that one-dimensional view has been accepted by many of us—gay as well as straight—as our accurate, if depressing, story. You know: that we live in a bodyobsessed, shallow, sexually profligate, consumerist culture. That gay cultural values inculcate competition and isolation, narcissism and hedonism. That our community practices—especially in gay enclave cities and neighborhoods—recapitulate a ruthless competition of the flesh as they discourage any true intimacy of the heart. Most of all, just in case you’ve missed it along the way, the inevitable moral of the story is that, if gay men don’t pay heed, we will party, dance, and sex ourselves into an early oblivion.Most of us have at one time or another wallowed at the trough of this conventional caricature. If we are gay, we roll our eyes about our fellowmen: “You know how gay guys are,” we smirk. Sometimes feelings boil into hurt, despair, or bitterness at how “gay men” seem to treat each other. We bemoan the “lifestyle,” wonder if we will be happy. Will we find a place that feeds our hearts and hopes in this thing called gay? If we are straight onlookers, we may be the parents who fret over a son’s safety, the siblings who wonder at our choices, the friends and colleagues who cluck and matchmake and shake their heads.The pages ahead propose that this particular fairy tale is profoundly incomplete, and that a careful reading of facts supports a far different conclusion. As we will see, a wealth of evidence powerfully contradicts this narrow version of gay male lives. That evidence includes a growing body of fact from public health and epidemiological studies, sociological and psychological inquiry, marketing and public opinion surveys, anthropological texts, and ethnographic studies. More powerfully, it arises in personal stories, anecdotes and community knowledge, the lived experience of these communities of men. It echoes in the range of cultural practices and new kinds of institutions gay worlds have developed. Taken together, the facts raise the distinct possibility that all of us—gay and straight alike—have overlooked the most telling aspects of the story. Along the way, we may have unwittingly adopted a shared view of gay men and our habits that obscures a set of far deeper, more important truths about the experiments now going on in these lives and communities. In short, we may have profoundly missed the point of us.A radically different interpretation awaits. We need to remain open to the possibility that this accustomed gay narrative is both factually incomplete and grossly misleading. That, at best, the stories told by and to ourselves, by and to the larger culture, are stunningly incomplete and inaccurate. That, at worst, our accepted narrative bristles with unexamined, willful, deliberate distortions. For complex reasons, and at great cost, we have allowed ourselves to see only a part of the story about ourselves and our ways of life.Much empirical evidence suggests that self-identified gay men are engaged in a striking range of cultural innovations in social practices. Our levels of public violence are vastly lower. We volunteer more often, demonstrating levels of altruism and service quite distinct from other men. Our patterns of intimacy and interpersonal connectedness take new forms. We are redefining gender relations in powerful and novel ways. We have distinct patterns of caretaking in sexual and communal realms. We are enacting new definitions of public and private, family and friends, as we are vastly transforming relations of pleasure, community, and authority. We are pioneering a wide range of untried intimate relationships, with new forms, rituals, and language.The chapters ahead chronicle some unseen habits of identified gay male cultures. They rely on words and stories from many men talking from their own lived experience, as well as on the scholarly literature. Whether you are a gay man or just care about one, you are invited to step through the looking glass into a new world and to take a clear-eyed look at what is to be found there.These pages offer our story, half-told. They document a set of social innovations and experiments the likes of which have no clear precedent in our culture. Taken together, these experiments compose what can only be termed a distinct new code of male love and nurture.Collectively and individually, however, we do not always realize the full potential of these experiments. All too often, adopted gay cultural habits can rub our hearts raw, leaving us feeling more lonely, isolated, and wounded than we would like. We confront that problem in the book’s final chapters. There, we examine our world, half-made, moving beyond data to discern the larger meaning of these cultural experiments. Those pages examine the notable chasm between the public aspects of gay culture and our unmet needs of heart and soul.If you are a gay man, the first chapters may surprise you. You may, at times, wonder just what gay terrain is being mapped, especially if you have not experienced all that is being described. The later chapters open a radically different view of gay male “community,” one where we find more sustaining ways to be with and for each other. They offer one vision of how we will build the kind of gay world we most wish to inhabit. That is, where the practices and habits, the language and debate, the customs and rituals, the institutions and organizations, better reflect our values and hopes, which now so often go unmet. Especially if you are wondering if this book speaks to your own personal experience, I hope you will take the time to read chapter 9 before you decide.Throughout, one cornerstone fact remains. Coming out and into gay community is at its core an impulse of hope. It is a dream shared, of finding an intentional community of like-hearted men. We were drawn into this thing called gay, and found ourselves originally called to each other, in pursuit of a dream of love. Although that hope may often feel betrayed and bruised, we have a unique opportunity to adapt our shared cultures to more truly celebrate and deliver on that hope.That undertaking is the heart and soul of this book, and of the movement called Manifest Love that is now growing among gay men in various locales. It holds that, far from inhabiting an ethical wasteland, we are evolving a new community whose practices are without any clear modern precedent, one whose core values resonate deeply with a range of spiritual traditions. Our communities of men are experimenting with entirely new forms of public life, with a potential to radically change ideas of power, love, and the natu...

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 031232040X
• ISBN 13: 9780312320409
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 276