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The peacefulness of our Pride Days and other mass gatherings is really quite striking. And no, I'd never really given it much thought before. Nimmons cites several studies and police department stats from large American cities to back up the point. Here, where I live, there's a fireworks festival every summer down at the water: on three or four evenings over a couple weeks, thousands upon thousands of folks head down the big gay street toward the water to watch the show. On those evenings, the big gay street ceases to be queer space. You would not believe the difference in the neighborhood's energy! It is not safe to be out and about; young straight men from the suburbs descend on our peaceful queer enclave; while I've never heard of any specifically anti-gay violence, each year there are several disturbing incidents of rioting and gang fights and vandalism. It's sickening. This year, as the crowds made their way back from the water after the show one night, a group of guys surrounded a slow-moving car with a guy and a girl inside, jumped up on it and kicked and and rocked and banged up the car, completely terrorizing the couple and vandalizing the vehicle. (Apparently it was totaled.) One other fireworks night this summer there was a mugging right outside my building. There's a fireworks show the night before Pride Day and it's like night and day, the difference in the energy between the "general" crowd Saturday night and the gay throng all day Sunday . So yes indeed there is something about the way we gay guys (and, in this case, lesbians) are together. Compared to any other kind of large gathering of any other kind of folks, our get-togethers are characterized by a remarkable absence of public violence. And this is also true of our nightclub scene; fights almost never happen in gay bars. What does that say about us? Nimmons asks. Especially when we consider the alarming incidence of violence perpetrated upon us: The national media over the past years have carried stories about two Laramie men who left Matthew Shepard to die on a Wyoming fence; the assailant who beat James Zappalorti to death on a lonely Staten Island beach; the two God-fearing Alabamans who took Billy Jack Gaither to a remote forest in Coose County, Alabama, beat him to death with ax handles, and burned his body on a pile of tires; the hunter who stalked and gunned down a lesbian hiking with her mate on an Appalachian trail; the gang of several men who lured Julio Rivera into an alley in Queens and killed him with a claw hammer; the Vietnam veteran who was so ashamed that his last name was "Gay" that he opened fire in a Roanoke bar, killing Danny Lee Overstreet and wounding six others; the two Nebraska men who shot Brandon Teena to death in a weedy field; the New York man who shot and killed his nineteen-year-old stepson, Steen Keith Fenrich, for being gay, and then wrote "Gay Nigger #1" on the boy's decapitated skull; the two teenagers in Fairmont, West Virginia, who stomped Arthur Warren to death, then drove over him repeatedly in an effort to mask the crime; the Oregon man who murdered a lesbian couple in their pickup truck; the two young men in Happy Valley, California, who entered the home of a middle-aged gay couple who had befriended them and killed the middle-aged men in their bed; the gang of Idaho men arrested by the FBI as they attempted to blow up a Seattle gay bar with pipe bombs; the two Oregon men who firebombed a Portland home, burning to death the young gay man who lived there; the three men in Tyler, Texas, who took twenty-three-year-old Nicholas West to a remote gravel pit and pumped nine fatal gunshots into him. "The ghastly chronicle goes on," Nimmons continues. "Yet in the same sampling period, the same national database contains no article about an event where a gay man, whether singly or in a pack, murdered a heterosexual for being that way." In fact, after the Matthew Shepard murder, several American gay organizations came out to oppose the death penalty for the two young men who killed him. What does this say about us? Nimmons reminds me what I've always known intuitively; I'm a peaceful person, and that has a lot to do with my homosexuality. And he's right: we don't talk about—celebrate—that enough. However, he loses—even perturbs—me somewhat in his attempt to address spousal/domestic violence within queer relationships. Nimmons seems to be offended by some mainstream media reports of our relationships being more prone to violent abuse than heterosexual couplings; in fact, he cites credible studies that argue the level of violence is no higher in homo relationships than hetero. But there's something a bit too defensive in the way he addresses this; he sounds too eager to "prove" the theory that gay men are a gentle folk. While Nimmons does acknowledge that any incidence of domestic abuse is too much, the rhetorical spin he puts on the fact that we beat up our lovers no more than husbands beat their wives doesn't quite sit right with me. If we are oodles more peaceful in public than almost anyone else but as likely to be violent with our beloveds as straight men are, what, I wonder, does that say about us? Or about couplings, period? I have no idea, but whatever it says does not tidily fit into Nimmons' overarching synthesis. It's an important topic—I have gay friends who have been in physically abusive relationships, and I think it's statistically more likely that any gay man or lesbian will suffer violence at the hand of a lover than of a homophobic thug (as it is more likely that a straight women will experience violence at the hand of a spouse/boyfriend than a stranger). So it's an important topic, one I'm disappointed gets short shrift in this book. Nimmons also argues that we gay men are likely to be freer of prejudice than straight men. Interesting. The studies he cites sound credible, and it rings true that gay men are more accepting of other alternative sexual lifestyles than mainstream folks are, and also that we're less likely to be sexist. But I've certainly encountered sexist gay men, and in my extensive queer travels I have also come across a lot of racist homos, especially as racism manifests erotically. So I'm not so sure about these particular claims. Nimmons' chapter on "caring" focuses on how gay men have responded to the AIDS epidemic. It is quite a remarkable story, one already in full swing when I came out in 1986. Far more than family, dying gay men turned to their gay male friends for support and care-giving, and we queers responded in a way that, sociologically-speaking, was quite remarkable for our gender. Apparently, there are no male precedents for the emotional support, comfort and assistance with instrumental and basic activities of daily living which we provided our brothers dying of AIDS. He also cites studies showing that over the last fifteen years volunteerism has been on a downward slide across America, yet gay men have been volunteering (and not just with "gay" causes) in increasing numbers: "uncommonly large numbers of [gay] men manifesting the finest and most humane values on an unexpected scale". Have you ever taken the Myers-Brigg personality test? I'm an INFP – an "introverted-intuitive-feeling-perceiver"; apparently, that's a very gay score: "Certain personality types—notably those involving "intuition-feeling"—occurred between three and ten times more often in the gay sample than would be predicted in the general population." Not only that, but "gay men were up to fifteen times less likely to be found in categories involving extroverted sensation-feeling." (Read more about the Myers-Briggs test if you're interested; terms, such as "extroverted" and "introverted," have very specific meanings in this schema.) And those differences show up, Nimmons goes on to point out, in the occupations we choose: recent U.S. censi of same-sex partnered households reveal that we are: 3.6 times more likely to manage service organizations; about five times more likely to be a registered nurse; four times more likely to provide some sort of caretaking as a therapist (respiratory, occupational, speech, psychological, or physical); more than fourteen times as likely to teach education or kindergarten; twenty-seven times more likely to do private home care; ten times more likely to cook; twenty times more likely to do personal care like cosmetics or hair; five times more likely to be a special education teacher; thirteen times more likely to be a librarian ; more than seven times more likely to be a designer, a writer, or teach theology than men in opposite-sex partnered households. Gay men are definitely "into" service and caretaking occupations. What does that say about us? And as I was reading, I began to wonder where Nimmons is going with this. Sometimes I was uncomfortable with the "we're so wonderful, more wonderful than heteros" kind of case he seemed to be building. But yet he makes some good points, points worth consideration, and he's right that a lot of these differences are not often enough remarked upon. "How often have you read headlines about gay men's uncontrollable urges to…volunteer?" We are not a perfect people, and for all our differences from straight people, queers share a lot of basic humanity with everybody else on the planet. But we do have unique qualities, characteristics—whether innate or socialized—that we can offer. So, if Nimmons can argue that we have special strengths, gifts to offer the world, will he also go on to admit that we have unique weaknesses, flaws, "issues"? He writes that yet "even as our private acts may brim with nurturance and caretaking, altruism and generosity, bliss and communal intimacy, all too often the shared public habits of gay worlds bristle with attitude and exclusion, loneliness and looks-ism, defense and disrespect." That's certainly true. He promises to address this "disconnect" in Chapter 9. Stay tuned. With important exceptions noted above, so far I love the ride David Nimmons is taking me on. While my fascination with all matters erotic may imply a belief that gayness = sex, I do not actually believe that, nor, in fact, do I live my life that way. Nonetheless, for better or worse I do tend to fixate on the sexual aspect of queerness—of life—and this book reminds me there are other wonderful aspects to being a big homo.
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