By now I've met a good number of men at the two gay men's book groups I attend in Manhattan. Forty guys at least. The second group is new and smaller, a dozen of so members (not tiny for a book group, only by comparison to the first group with usually 30 or more).
What is interesting aside from the uniformly smart discussions arising from these groups put together just by chance -- a man hears or reads of the groups and simply shows up -- is how opinions vary. The book i thought everyone would hate turns out to be a hit. And vice-versa. It happens most every time. Bravo for two sides to the story.
There are more surprises. If you happen to meet the guys outside the formal group setting, they emerge sometimes as other people -- sometimes unlikable, more often congenial in a way to which they'd given no clue while you and they were tearing into the discussion of a book.
That happened the other day. A man in the new book group who occasionally smiled but said very little, came when some of us retired to a nearby burger and beer parlor after the meeting. At a table with six of us, he relaxed and joked, and I realized how different a person he seemed, how much fun he was. Doubling the surprise was to learn that the man is a science professor who strays from the conventional image of someone in his profession. He even volunteered to lead the group at a future meeting. No reclusive scientist he.
That fellow exemplifies how smart it is not to form opinions of people with haste, a nasty but not uncommon habit of mine. Sometimes I late realized that my first impression got it right, but not often enough to try to avoid the practice.
Still, what happens if you don't have the chance to get to know someone outside of the place where you've met? Not everyone in the book group followed up the meeting by going for burgers and beer. The impression a man makes in the meeting may be the only way I have to remember him. Be cautious!
I've had that kind of early impression laid on me, too. There's a young fellow in the larger book group who sort of groaned when one night I came out with a negative review of the book we were discussing. "Wouldn't you know it?" he said, looking at me with a frown, as if the role of grouch were one permanently fixed on my name. I took a chance and went up to him to say, "Hey, there's more to me than my opinion of a book." He and I haven't fallen in love, but he at least is on notice that there's more here than my viewpoint of a book.
A book group, where you meet people (men, in this case) for just a defined purpose and with limited time, is a good spot to remember that coins have two sides, and it's smart not to define a person only by how he speaks and what he says about the material at hand. If we're smart and have the chance, we ought to try to flip the coin and see the other side.
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Stanley Ely writes about different groups in "Life Up Close, a Memoir" in paperback and ebook.