Raising Consciousness:Author David Nimmons

June 5, 2002

Raising Consciousness:

Author David Nimmons

Dave Nimmons, author of Soul Beneath Skin will be in Chicago June 6-10 for a reading and booksigning event. The Dave Nimmons booksigning (Thursday, June 6 at Horizons, 6:30-8:30 p.m., 961 W. Montana) will kick-off a new continuing education program Horizons will be offering, with classes that include wine tasting, interview techniques, self-defense, beginning pottery, among others. Contact Horizons Community Services for more information at (773)472-6469 x253. Also see http://www.manifestlove.org.
BY ALEXIS MAISLEN
There's a new kind of social movement that utilizes the natural qualities of gay men of caring and volunteerism to redefine the nature of gay relationships to include caring, limit setting and platonic affection.
Prime-time television shows like Will & Grace capitalize on the image of the sensitive but professional gay man and the straight woman partnering up in friendship and camaraderie. Sociological reports have clearly shown a higher incidence of care-taking and volunteer-related activities among gay men and lesbians.

David Nimmons

"This is a great gay experiment in applied affection," said Dave Nimmons, author of Soul Beneath Skin, current president of New York's Gay and Lesbian Service Center and founder of the Manifest Love organization. So far, groups have been formed in Boston, New York, Minnesota, Atlanta, Providence and San Francisco.
In Nimmons 18 years of working in queer communities, he realized that the story about being gay that gay men tell themselves was radically different from what was going on in the gay male scene. He found the internal gay man and the external gay world at present grossly misleading to both the gay and straight world.
"Manifest Love's work is part social movement, part applied spirituality. Gay men's worlds are becoming social laboratories, pioneering a range of profound social innovations. We have built the least publicly violent male culture known. We have devised new models of caregiving, volunteering, and service. We have invented new forms of intimacy, friendship, and community. We have innovated radically new rituals of pleasure and bliss, for affection and ecstatic communion. We have redefined possible bonds of men with women, and with each other as men," said Nimmons.
Manifest Love is a new kind of project for gay/queer men, designed to help gay men find new ways to be with and for each other. Men who take part get a chance to explore shared patterns, look at values around community, nurturing, and affection. It offers concrete new ways to experience sexuality, sensuality and conduct relationships. By helping frame more nurturing patterns between men, they envision a more sustaining gay community.
Dave Abbott, a member of the Providence chapter of Manifest Love, sees this as the next step to defining gay culture.
"I see Manifest Love as the pragmatic next step in building a healthy community. Naturally, I wanted to be in the middle of it. It's not that ML is HIV focused, rather it's about gay men and what we want and need from each other in the community. Gay Providence has been gripped by so many crises, and always been about survival...which feels like endless work. I get a kick out of ML because it's about building our culture, not defending it from extinction," said Abbott.
Here is a book that finally faces, with candor, openness and integrity, some of the seamy sides of the gay bar culture and cruising scene. It suggests a fresh alternative to finding love, connection and intimacy in the midst of an age facing the dangers of substance abuse, AIDS and STDs.
His book shows clear sociological evidence that gay men routinely have higher patterns of altruism than other communities; show lower levels of public violence; habitually care-take differently in sexual relations; are more likely to volunteer time; and construct intimate relationships differently. Gay male culture is one of the world's richest, most elaborate, and innovative sexual cultures, he says. Gay men evolve new norms of communal intimacy, redrawn social boundaries of public and private and are developing novel forms of relationships with women. He suggests these are ethics lessons that the general society can learn from gay men.
Nimmons suggests that the American volunteer spirit is deeply infused in the gay male spirit. Interspersed within each chapter are sub-quotes by world leaders, sociologists and psychologists that add dimension to his prose.
"'A strong possibility exists that homosexuality is a distinctive beneficent behavior that evolved as an important element of early human social organization. Homosexuals may be the genetic carriers of some of mankind's most altruistic impulses,'" Nimmons quotes E.O. Wilson, Harvard professor and author of On Human Nature.
One action stemming from the formation of the Manifest Love groups and talked about in Soul Beneath Skin is a novel idea to create new cultural paradigms, borrowed from the civil-rights movement yet uniquely tailored to the gay perspective, is the Loving Disturbance. The purpose of a Loving Disturbance is to increase humane values in the gay community, similar to the Random Act of Kindness in the general culture. It's an act that embodies a new, more humane culture. A Manifest Love group may talk about how on the street in a place like Boystown men may only use eye contact when they are interested in sexual activity. To change this, they may decide to hold workshops to teach gay men how to be more expressive with their eyes and ways to communicate friendliness without necessarily meaning sexual activity. A chapter may then take a group of men out to practice what was learned in the workshop. Some chapters have created a volunteer team to welcome newcomers to a gay neighborhood, created a night where bar culture was more affectionate and less sexual, worked on the creation of a social greeting with a creative flare rather than the formal hand-shake or the diva air-kiss.
Some groups have baked cookies and handed them out to strangers walking down the street in a gay neighborhood and treated their best female friends to drinks or dinner just to tell them how special their friendship is.

Back to Archived Front Page / Lambda Welcome Index / Nightspots / Blacklines / En La Vida / Current WCT Issue

Copyright © 2002 Lambda Publications Inc. All rights reserved. Lambda produces Windy City Radio, and publishes Windy City Times, The Weekly Voice of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Trans Community, Nightspots, Out Resource Guide, Blacklines and En La Vida. 1115 W. Belmont 2D, Chicago, IL 60657; PH (773) 871-7610; FAX (773) 871-7609. Web at www.wctimes.com E-mail feedback to outlines@suba.com!

June 5, 2002

Raising Consciousness: Author David Nimmons Dave Nimmons, author of Soul Beneath Skin will be in Chicago June 6-10 for a reading and booksigning event. The Dave Nimmons booksigning (Thursday, June 6 at Horizons, 6:30-8:30 p.m., 961 W. Montana) will kick-off a new continuing education program Horizons will be offering, with classes that include wine tasting, interview techniques, self-defense, beginning pottery, among others. Contact Horizons Community Services for more information at (773)472-6469 x253. Also see http://www.manifestlove.org. BY ALEXIS MAISLEN There's a new kind of social movement that utilizes the natural qualities of gay men of caring and volunteerism to redefine the nature of gay relationships to include caring, limit setting and platonic affection. Prime-time television shows like Will & Grace capitalize on the image of the sensitive but professional gay man and the straight woman partnering up in friendship and camaraderie. Sociological reports have clearly shown a higher incidence of care-taking and volunteer-related activities among gay men and lesbians.	David Nimmons
"This is a great gay experiment in applied affection," said Dave Nimmons, author of Soul Beneath Skin, current president of New York's Gay and Lesbian Service Center and founder of the Manifest Love organization. So far, groups have been formed in Boston, New York, Minnesota, Atlanta, Providence and San Francisco. In Nimmons 18 years of working in queer communities, he realized that the story about being gay that gay men tell themselves was radically different from what was going on in the gay male scene. He found the internal gay man and the external gay world at present grossly misleading to both the gay and straight world. "Manifest Love's work is part social movement, part applied spirituality. Gay men's worlds are becoming social laboratories, pioneering a range of profound social innovations. We have built the least publicly violent male culture known. We have devised new models of caregiving, volunteering, and service. We have invented new forms of intimacy, friendship, and community. We have innovated radically new rituals of pleasure and bliss, for affection and ecstatic communion. We have redefined possible bonds of men with women, and with each other as men," said Nimmons. Manifest Love is a new kind of project for gay/queer men, designed to help gay men find new ways to be with and for each other. Men who take part get a chance to explore shared patterns, look at values around community, nurturing, and affection. It offers concrete new ways to experience sexuality, sensuality and conduct relationships. By helping frame more nurturing patterns between men, they envision a more sustaining gay community. Dave Abbott, a member of the Providence chapter of Manifest Love, sees this as the next step to defining gay culture. "I see Manifest Love as the pragmatic next step in building a healthy community. Naturally, I wanted to be in the middle of it. It's not that ML is HIV focused, rather it's about gay men and what we want and need from each other in the community. Gay Providence has been gripped by so many crises, and always been about survival...which feels like endless work. I get a kick out of ML because it's about building our culture, not defending it from extinction," said Abbott. Here is a book that finally faces, with candor, openness and integrity, some of the seamy sides of the gay bar culture and cruising scene. It suggests a fresh alternative to finding love, connection and intimacy in the midst of an age facing the dangers of substance abuse, AIDS and STDs. His book shows clear sociological evidence that gay men routinely have higher patterns of altruism than other communities; show lower levels of public violence; habitually care-take differently in sexual relations; are more likely to volunteer time; and construct intimate relationships differently. Gay male culture is one of the world's richest, most elaborate, and innovative sexual cultures, he says. Gay men evolve new norms of communal intimacy, redrawn social boundaries of public and private and are developing novel forms of relationships with women. He suggests these are ethics lessons that the general society can learn from gay men. Nimmons suggests that the American volunteer spirit is deeply infused in the gay male spirit. Interspersed within each chapter are sub-quotes by world leaders, sociologists and psychologists that add dimension to his prose. "'A strong possibility exists that homosexuality is a distinctive beneficent behavior that evolved as an important element of early human social organization. Homosexuals may be the genetic carriers of some of mankind's most altruistic impulses,'" Nimmons quotes E.O. Wilson, Harvard professor and author of On Human Nature. One action stemming from the formation of the Manifest Love groups and talked about in Soul Beneath Skin is a novel idea to create new cultural paradigms, borrowed from the civil-rights movement yet uniquely tailored to the gay perspective, is the Loving Disturbance. The purpose of a Loving Disturbance is to increase humane values in the gay community, similar to the Random Act of Kindness in the general culture. It's an act that embodies a new, more humane culture. A Manifest Love group may talk about how on the street in a place like Boystown men may only use eye contact when they are interested in sexual activity. To change this, they may decide to hold workshops to teach gay men how to be more expressive with their eyes and ways to communicate friendliness without necessarily meaning sexual activity. A chapter may then take a group of men out to practice what was learned in the workshop. Some chapters have created a volunteer team to welcome newcomers to a gay neighborhood, created a night where bar culture was more affectionate and less sexual, worked on the creation of a social greeting with a creative flare rather than the formal hand-shake or the diva air-kiss. Some groups have baked cookies and handed them out to strangers walking down the street in a gay neighborhood and treated their best female friends to drinks or dinner just to tell them how special their friendship is.