My last boyfriend, "G" (not his real initial) didn't enjoy making or sustaining eye contact. Eventually I couldn't help asking him why he always averted his gaze when I looked him in the eye. "Too much intimacy," he replied, his jokey tone not entirely masking his truthfulness. Locking eyes with someone is an infallible way of flushing secrets from the psyche, or noting their absence. "We've been sleeping together for seven months and you're bothered by intimacy?" I said. Shortly afterwards we broke up.

His evasive glance, of course, was only a symptom of our disharmony, but one fraught with significance for me. I happen to be an eye contact junkie. Even (or especially) in a large city where people tend to avoid one another's gaze, it is marvelous how much ease, trust and affection can be generated by reciprocally offering the fully present eye. Such an encounter may be fleeting or prolonged, chaste, ambiguous, or blatantly sexual, but it always boosts vitality.

I think I inherited this penchant from my maternal grandfather, who died when I was three. I have only a dim memory of a bedridden man with a long white beard and yellow fingernails (from years of pipe-smoking), but my childhood was filled with the reminiscences of relatives whose lives had been enriched by his high spirits and prankish good humor. Not long ago an older cousin told me a story I'd never heard before: as a ten-year old he was walking through downtown Washington with my grandfather, and was struck by the old man's custom of saying hello to everyone they passed. "Grandpa," my cousin asked, "do you know all these people?" The answer, of course, was No. "Then why do you say hello to them?" My grandfather replied, "Because God made them all. He loves them and so do I."

With genes like that, it's no wonder that I was exasperated by a lover given to gaze aversion. Indeed, true soul kinship was so lacking in the relationship, I realized that I was staying in it only out of fear that I might not find another. Given my prior history, this fear was certainly plausible (in thirty years of "out" adulthood before meeting "G" I'd had reliable squeezes for a total of six months--6 out of 360), but at the same time I knew it was a lousy reason to stay with someone. Gearing up to call it quits took a few weeks, but I've regretted only the necessity, never the decision.

But I also regret that once again I'm single. My experience with "G" convinced me that a deeply flawed relationship is no better than none, but our first happy months together reminded me that I like having a boyfriend a whole lot more than not having one. So now I spend a lot of time thinking about sex, and looking for intimate contact that includes sex but also fosters communication and well-being on a deeper level. This is where eye contact comes in, as distinct from the institution of Anonymous Sex. I have indulged in the latter (usually in desperation) and wouldn't presume to moralize about it, but I just don't enjoy it. My very first time in a gay bathhouse (in the dim and distant Seventies) I was amazed to encounter someone who reached for my dick before he had even greeted me, and the passage of time has made that custom more familiar but no less peculiar, like so many other contemporary rituals of cruising. Call me corny, but the first non-verbal thing I want to do with an attractive man is hug and kiss him; the last also, and gaze and gaze.

But the eye can also betray, especially when divorced from the heart. The Bible says as much, but I've learned it more readily at the gym (which is after all a sort of secular Bible for gay men). The locker room is where I discovered Hanan's Law of Gross Obstruction, which states that whenever you are checking someone out at a distance, especially when they are about to remove a strategic article of clothing, anyone who steps between you and the object of your interest will invariably be less attractive than the person they've blocked. I've learned that my grandfather's custom of offering a friendly greeting to all God's children can be read as a threat when the children are in their birthday suits. I've learned that silence can have weight, particularly when observed in a steam room full of towel-clad men with the same thought in their minds but mostly furtiveness in their eyes.

My gym's steam room is at one end of a long corridor lined with shower stalls. The stalls are walled to a height of five and a half feet, obliging the shortest of us to create a spontaneous choreography of heads popping up on tiptoe for a better view. Each stall has an opening about eighteen inches wide, and men reveal perhaps more than they intend about themselves as they pass along the route. Some walk comfortably along without a glance into the narrow openings; others do the same but with a severe gait, tense with denial, and the occasional stolen peek. Some slow down for a glimpse of every available naked body, usually starting at crotch level and tilting upwards from there if sufficiently inspired. A small minority looks at faces first. Interest or disinterest registers immediately and conclusively, as the pace either slackens or proceeds. I know just how it's done.

Once inside the steam room, body language becomes more elaborate. Sometimes acquaintances find each other (or enter together) and chat away in English, Spanish, Russian or Korean as if they were in a social environment of no special consequence, often to the annoyance of the less conversational. Some walk in, quickly check out the goods and go right back out the door. Window shoppers, I call them. Some sit on the two tiers of benches or stand along the opposite wall, eyes fixed firmly ahead until their heads snap toward the sound of the opening door. Others shift their gaze jumpily from point to point like nervous hens. It is the perfect manifestation of what a friend once described as, "Everybody's looking at everybody but nobody's looking at anybody." Of course, when the steam is at full force, bodies are reduced to ghostly silhouettes, like Ginger Rogers' legs sporadically glimpsed in the unswirling of a diaphanous gown. And many a fixed decision is made on the strength of no more than that silhouette.

When eye contact occurs between strangers in this environment, it is seldom casual or friendly. I once met the gaze of a fellow who'd been staring at me (actually, a gaze and a stare are very different things). As nonsexual benevolence (the Namaste Look) began to warm my expression, his grew correspondingly fearful and cold, till he not only looked away but walked away. I was offering both more and less than he was angling for. We all know that accidental eye contact, if not immediately broken, can be disarmed by offering a brusque nod of the head, while earnestly compressing the lips in a silent grunt, creating an acceptably butch veneer. Straight guys are highly susceptible to reassurance of this kind; gay guys may be more wary. The more anxious an occupant is to get some nookie, the less attention he will pay to anyone who doesn't immediately ring his bell. As Ram Dass says, if you're walking down the street looking for a loaf of bread you don't see the hardware stores, and if you want a hammer you don't notice the bakery.

Speaking of tools, penises, of course, have a language all their own, to which their towel-wrapped proprietors may permit visual access, sometimes indiscriminate, sometimes as selective as a Masonic rite. (Woe to the interloper!) You'd think that anyone with the chutzpah to flaunt his erection publicly would not disdain attention, but think again. A steam room differs from an orgy in that anyone can get in, but not everyone is welcome. Sometimes a pair or a threesome will be so fixated on each other that they disregard the presence of others in graphic displays of mutual interest. Naturally this obliges those not involved to be voyeurs (voluntary or not), or pretend to be invisible. Though present they are simply ignored, and yet when a creak and whomp of the door signals a newcomer the delinquent towels snap soggily into place with the mortified haste of French farce. Rarely does a sense of joy surface through the grim determination.

Many's the time in that room I've thought of asking, "Is there a rule here against saying Hello to someone unless you're cruising him?" but I always check the impulse. It would be like farting in church. Nevertheless, it breaks my heart to see so many of my gay brothers denying their common humanity in the name of, what? Maidenly reserve? Doubtful. Fear of rejection? More likely. Disinterest? Distaste? Downright repugnance? Often true. There are men in that gym I've encountered regularly for years who walk past me (and not only me) as if I were invisible, and even when we find ourselves at adjoining lockers make a point of ignoring my presence. The moment I enter the steam room they will predictably leave, and I guess I'll never learn why. For the most part I find such men utterly undesirable, owing not to their looks but their attitude, and I often wonder what qualities they might be projecting onto me, the cheerful nuisance who refuses to pretend not to have seen them. But the fact that occasionally such men, despite their coldness, strike me as hot is undeniable testimony to the power of surface to generate sexual allure.

God knows inner beauty has its place, ah yes! It keeps relationships going whenever the fires of sexual passion dim, but by itself doesn't kindle them. This is the cruel paradox with which all sexually active humans are eventually confronted. It may be one reason why gyms, cosmetics and fashion generate so much more revenue than self-help courses. If I'm in the market for a mate, a person who pleases my eye will nab my interest, even if it fades with closer knowledge. What riches may lie beneath an unattractive surface I will discover only if the context shifts. Allure can steer us to the worst people, as its absence can deter us from the best ones, and the latter instance is by far the harder to overcome, at least where sex is concerned.

I make no claim to exemplary conduct in this area. There are boundaries of age and bulk beyond which I do not lust (feel free to guess the direction), however kindly my disposition or affable my greeting. More to the point, I have never met anyone who found that exposure to a person's admirable qualities reversed an initial non-sexual response. Celibacy may be undertaken by priests of so many religions not merely out of erotic squeamishness but to train their receptors. If peoples' exteriors have no hold over me, I'm that much more likely to focus on what dwells within. If I have a little child's indifference to sex appeal, I may have greater access to the Kingdom of Heaven.

But who wants Heaven at that price? In the extraordinary film "Russian Ark" one visitor to a great museum asks another, "Are you interested in Beauty or merely its representation?" This intriguing koan of a question makes us wonder where is that Beauty that precedes representation, and how is it to be apprehended? By the Soul, no doubt, but who can report of the Soul other than through the medium of the Body? Even the most ethereal of sages must speak, write or otherwise signal through physical reality in order to communicate. Conversely, even the sleaziest steam room slut is ultimately searching for the wholeness that a glimpse of transcendant Beauty can bring.

"Undrape!" Walt Whitman demands of his reader. "I see through the broadcloth and gingham whether or no,/And am around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless, and cannot be shaken away." Surely literal nakedness isn't the point, any more than X-ray vision. Faced with the flimsy terrycloth of the steam room, he would probably say the same, for I suspect he would recognize the place for what it truly is: a cruisy microcosm of the wider world, where fear can compel us to hide what is most beautiful in ourselves, while desire bids us hope it will nevertheless be seen.