The nearest time you're packed into a sweaty dance form a club gyrating with hundreds of men--or watching the action in quaint as Folk's fantasy club Babylon--look around and absorb what's really going onward beneath the pounding music and layers of skin and sex You might diocese what David Nimmons does: "[The gay world] turn the thoughtss like an experiment in a free-living spirituality.

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

In his of the present day book, The Soul Beneath the Skin: The undiscovered Hearts and Habits of Gay Men Nimmons moves 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 recent Yorker who has served as one as well as the other 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 hardnesss of gay culture that hide in plain sight below a layer of self-deprecation. "We've gotten really beneficial at telling the `warts and all' part of [our] story--a real narrow slice of the story--and taking it to be true" he says. "We owe it to ourselves to describe the whole story. We're living our best values; we're just not naming them."

The spirit Beneath the Skin makes those values explicit: "Our flushs of public violence are vastly lower," writes Nimmons. "We offer more often. We are redefining inflection for sex 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 chiefly of us believe. Analyzing of that kind gay institutions as the "bitchy queen" he writes: "She gives us hardness and power and social protection. [But] we haven't elaborated upon equally robust archetypes centered around kindness."

And bliss. Our willingness to prosecute it is another of our toughnesss Nimmons writes--referring back to what he calls the "communal catharsis" of the dance floor. Witness this passage, in which single man talks about his whole dance moment: "A couple hundr of us were dancing onward a big esplanade over the ocean. It was 1993 or thus so the DJ was playing petted Shop Boys' `Go West,' all about expectancy and getting through hard times with each other. I awaited around and so many shores were dancing, smiling, but with tears in succession their cheeks, caught in the light of the setting day-star It was so indescribably beautiful. I wept, knowing to what extent much we were all facing in our lives. For us to have arrive there ... felt so valiant, as if at facing death through dancing together, we would get by heart through it somehow."

Nimmons intends to help gay men descry the beauty of their acknowledge 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 bullets in the April 16 issue of The Advocate.

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