Why I Created Manifest Love

Dave Nimmons

Manifest Love grew from the conviction that something big is happening among gay men, though it isn't always visible.

Over two decades, gay men have quietly evolved a set of radical cultural transformations, ones we rarely even recognize.

Gay men's worlds are become 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.

This range of gay social innovations has no parallel in modern culture. It is best understood as a rich and evolving public ethics.

Yet often, our public gay world has lagged behind our best values. It says men must compete, that attitude makes sense, that being loving is uncool, that we cannot publicly embrace our most loving natures. We have grown to believe that we are somehow a danger to one another. So we protect ourselves by drawing lines around looks and age, around color, class, kink. We master the art of keeping distance and keeping options open. Many of us are left hungry for intimacy, confused by sex, distrusting their fellow gay men, betrayed by community.

Today, many of us are struggling, hungry for new ways of being with and for each other.

At this millennial moment in culture, our truest radical act is no longer just to claim our sexuality, but to reclaim our hearts with, and for, each other.

Our mission is to offer a new vision for our lives together as gay men.

We work to bring into our public gay culture the values of love and affection, non-violence and nurture, celebration and sexuality that we demonstrate so abundantly in our private behavior.

That's why I started Manifest Love -- Dave Nimmons