Spirituality and Ethics

As gay men, many of us remain simultaneously aware of our strengths in friendship and loving actions, yet distrustful of imagining any larger purpose, pattern, or lesson in the ways we live our lives.

Across time and cultures, many societies have long viewed gender-divergent men as channeling beauty, ritual and sacred wisdom into culture. In fact, our work may go far deeper.

Manifest Love explores the idea that gay men may also function to channel a kind of love into culture, a love beyond Eros to caritas, a radically transformational form of social communal relation. That is, that the values, practices, rituals, and norms of our gay male worlds are an experiment in a new kind of beloved community.

Manifest Love takes seriously the possibility that gay men are evolving a set of ethics that embody some of the values most important to society, yet which remain largely unseen or unappreciated by gay men ourselves, as by the straight world.

Is this spiritual work? Spiritual is as spiritual does. It's time to understand the deeper, culture-changing practices gay men bring societies in which we live, and to ask whether, in ways we barely see, all of us-- gay and straight-- are present at the creation of a set of transformative ethics, one we call Manifest Love.