Woven
A ritual of belonging for queer men
Sicily ยท July 23โ26, 2026A four-day immersive ceremony
Apply NowWoven invites queer men from different traditions, lineages, and ways of being, weaving a beautiful tapestry together and remembering our role and medicine. Each of us a thread. Different colors, textures, flavors, stitched into something much larger. Held at the feet of the largest active volcano in Europe, focused on liberating expression, exploring erotic innocence, and remembering the wild magic of queer brotherhood.
Gay, bisexual, trans, queer, questioning, gender-fluid, masc-of-center, non-binary. All who gravitate, orbit, or oscillate around maleness on your own terms. You belong here.
"Woven was magical and dreamy. I felt so much queer priest energy. It allowed me to imagine a different world of limitless possibilities."
"When you feel painโฆ fall back into your brothers' love." Ancestor Larry Mitchell
Let's remember how to tend the sacred and each other
For millennia, queer men have walked as medicine keepers, threshold crossers, ecstatics, bridging between worlds and bringing innovation from the margins. WOVEN is your invitation to gather as we were meant to: woven into the living earth, into each other, into the queer lineage that's been waiting for our awakening.
It's time to re-discover a way of relating that allows for true intimacy to bud and belonging to blossom.
Through earth, water, fire, and wind, four guides will hold space for you to reclaim the spiritual technologies for finding home in ourselves, with the Earth and with our brothers.
If the invitation resonates in your bones,
this space is calling you.
This Gathering Is For Queer Men Who:
- Have done foundational healing work and are ready for what comes after
- Feel called to brotherhood devoted to the stewardship of Life itself
- Carry medicine for the collective and are tired of doing it alone
- Are ready to reunite Eros and Spirit in their bodies
- Want to remember their queerness as original medicine
- Are seeking ecstatic co-conspirators
This Gathering Is Not a Fit If You:
- Aren't willing and able to take responsibility for your sexual energy
- Haven't yet begun foundational healing work
- Are currently in acute emotional or mental health crisis. We honor where you are and want you to have the support you need.
- Are uncomfortable with ritual, ceremony, or animist or shamanic practices
- Are looking for someone to fix or save you
Two strands that need each other
Most of us learned early that certain parts of ourselves weren't safe to bring into the open. The tender parts. The wild parts. The parts that held desires we were told were shameful. So we learned to keep them small.
What gets lost is access to your wholeness.
At Woven, two things happen at once. You experience belonging: being fully seen by loving brothers, letting real intimacy in, dissolving the conditioning that keeps you guarded. And you start remembering why you came here. You carry a frequency no one else carries in quite the same way. Your gifts, your desires, your way of seeing are not incidental. They are your calling.
Each strand makes the other possible.
You already carry the medicine. Woven is where it starts moving freely again.
The 4 Elemental Threads
We will travel through the four realms of the elements, weaving ourselves back into the flow of life.
We unbind the breath, the body, the voice.
Liberating Expression Through Ecstatic Arts
When your sexuality is seen as dangerous or a source of shame growing up, you learn to constrict and keep small your expression and creativity. Others learn a form of heightened performance not rooted in our core and authenticity.
In the realm of air we will work with ecstatic arts including dance, poetry, song and breath to unbind our bodies and tongues and allow our true nature to emerge and be celebrated. We will engage in sacred play to create space to be tender, to be ridiculous, to be sexy, to be reverent, sometimes all in the same moment and allow our divinity and humanity to tango together.
We learn to come back together, with ourselves and each other.
Cultivating Intimacy, Right Relationship and Brotherhood
So much of how we relate to each other is shaped by apps and algorithms designed to monetize our relationships and choke out the possibility of true connection. Many of us also carry deep relational wounds rooted in the strategies we employed to survive being queer in hostile environments growing up.
In the realm of fire we will practice the skills needed to come back together within ourselves and with each other. We will learn how to create the safety needed for true risk and transformation, building our capacity to open to the vulnerability that allows for real connection.
We restore desire's trust in us. Eros without shame.
Restoring Erotic Innocence
Most of us are taught to compartmentalize the erotic in our lives and only express it in moments of sexual intensity cut off from the rest of our lives. We are taught through pornography (sexual intensity devoid of context) what desire is "supposed to look like" which often leads us further and further away from our center and what we truly want.
In the realm of water we will learn to restore our desire's trust in us. We will learn to find the version of our authentic eros that lives underneath performance and is curious, wants what it wants and is free of shame. In doing so, we will learn to access the wisdom of the erotic as a blueprint for our destiny. Our sensuality and desire are not meant to be at odds with our spirituality, but rather a compass guiding us on the path of our purpose.
We reclaim the wild queer magic that is our birthright.
Remembering Our Sacred Role and Reclaiming Our Power
So often these threads of sex, art, power and the sacred are deliberately kept separate or only meet in shadowy dynamics. When they come together they have the power to tear down oppressive structures and sing new and ancient ways of being out of the ashes.
In the realm of Earth we will learn from the land and our more than human relatives how to reclaim the power of the wild queer magic that is our birthright and put it in service to our vision and protecting and nurturing our communities.
"In this time of plague, climate and economic crisis, when making plans feels futile and overwhelming, remember this: Imagining your Queer future is a form of prayer."
During our time together you will experience:
Council Circles
Where we witness and are witnessed.
Elemental Rituals
Earth connection practices.
Somatic Practices
To return home to the sensations of body.
Movement, Ecstatic Dance & Playfight
Guided practices for deeper connection.
Song, Storytelling & Poetry
As practices of awakening your authentic expression.
Ancestral Reconnection
Remembering how to honor our queer ancestors.
Erotic Brotherhood Rituals
Guided by consent and clear non-sexual boundaries.
Ceremonial Medicine
Cacao, hapรฉ, and local medicine allies.
Ritualized Nudity
As practice to be confident in your skin.
Silence, Nature & Rest
Time for integration.
You leave feeling less alone, more alive, and woven into something much larger than yourself. The medicine you've been carrying in secret starts moving through you freely, the way it was always meant to.
What brothers say after Woven
"I came in with a lot of hesitations but an open and brave heart. The thing is, the space was so beautifully crafted that being brave came easy, and any moments that brought up anxiety, I felt held through them."
"I was shown how much capacity I have to love, and when I don't shut it down, I just fucking shine. Not in comparison to others, I just noticed this exuberance in myself, this radiance."
"Since Woven I'm moving through the world with a cracked open heart. More sensitive, more authentically expressed, and with more hope."
"I felt my own resistance to opening up, and also felt beautiful connections and trust begin to emerge. The environment was incredibly inclusive, welcoming, and non-judgmental. There is so much truth and authenticity in what all of you are creating. I felt seen and celebrated by my Woven brothers."
"I realized I have been in a constant state of fight/flight. It was nice to leave more open to giving and receiving love. I feel more light, like I was able to leave different emotional weights I have been carrying."
"For so long, I felt like a loose thread, blowing in the wind, wondering where my color and texture would add something of value and beauty. You saw me, called out, wove me in to what you are creating. Intertwined with the other threads, I felt held, safe and loved."
"Queer is less a thing one is than a thing one does. To be queer is both a refusal to accept the world as it is and an embodied practice of living towards a better one." Langston Kahn
Gay describes who you sleep with.
Queer describes how you move through the world.
When we say queer, we mean something older and wilder than a sexual identity.
We mean the ones who have always lived at the edges of what society called normal, and who discovered, there at the edges, a magic the center had forgotten or never known.
We use the word queer deliberately as an invitation into radical wholeness.
We bring into the center of the circle everything that has been relegated to the shadows. The homoerotic. The soft. The wild. The sacred.
Queer is anti-assimilationist. It does not ask permission. It does not seek approval or validation from systems built to exclude us.
It says: a world where we are truly free is a world where everyone gets to be more free. That's our cosmology.
We are creating a space where we can release the objectification of each other and the subtle hierarchies and conditioning often found in gay culture that teach us to adopt false masks or cut off parts of ourselves to fit in or be seen as desirable.
All of you belongs here.
At the feet of
Mount Etna
Sicily has always been a land of cultural weaving. Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans, and the indigenous Sicani and Siculi all left their hands on this island.
Long before any monotheism arrived, the island held its own mysteries: fertility rites at Demeter's altars, the Trinacria's three running legs, and the prehistoric Grotta dell'Addaura cave near Palermo contains engravings dated to 10,000 to 11,000 BCE that scholars interpret as homoerotic rituals, depicting men with erect penises in a ceremonial context.
Mount Etna, the largest active volcano in Europe, is alive. The Sicilians call her a mother. She breathes, she warms the soil, she lets nothing here be small. We gather at her feet because the work we are doing wants that kind of witness.
Meet your medicine weavers
Emmy-nominated filmmaker, ceremonialist, and queer men's guide. A student of Shipibo, Mestizo, and Ashaninka teachers in Peru, and former Community Director at Sacred Sons. His work lives at the intersection of queerness, spirituality, and the erotic, drawing on Internal Family Systems, somatic shadow work, mirror work, and ceremonial practice. Co-founder of Brotherhood of Lovers.
A Black, queer shamanic practitioner and teacher specializing in radical human transformation, ancestral healing, and the restoration of an authentic relationship with our emotions. Author of Deep Liberation: Shamanic Tools for Reclaiming Wholeness in a Culture of Trauma. His practice stands at the crossroads of somatic modalities, contemporary shamanic traditions, and initiations into traditions of the African diaspora.
Artist, firekeeper, and community builder who weaves together cultural heritage and spirituality as a pathway towards the reclamation of self. His work with the Queer Sol Collective centers queer embodiment and land based practices in right relationship with Earth. His greatest motivation is to help those who are ready, remember who they are.
A Somatic Experiencingยฎ Practitioner, integrative bodyworker, aquatic therapist, facilitator, and dancer with a somatic-oriented approach to guiding the body toward functional fluidity. His practice is shaped by Axis Syllabus, contact improvisation, aquatic dance, and Playfight. He invites experiences that cultivate an available, responsive body and presence within disorientation and change.
"Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within."
Begin your application
We take this work seriously, and lovingly. Woven invites real intimacy, ceremony, and erotic embodiment, and we want everyone arriving in Sicily to be sharing the same prayer and resourced to meet the depth of what we're doing together.
Tell us a little about you below. Once we receive your application, one of the facilitators will reach out to set up a call. A real conversation, where we get to feel into it together and make sure it's a clear yes for both of us before anything is confirmed.
Four days, three nights, all-inclusive. A limited number of scholarships and work-trade positions are available. Speak to it in your application or in our call.
Fill out the form below. Take your time with the questions, they're an invitation to begin.
One of the facilitators reaches out to schedule a conversation. Time to ask questions, feel into resonance, make sure it's a yes for both sides.
If we both feel it, you confirm your spot. We send a welcome packet and begin the journey toward Sicily together.
Tell us about you
More from the brothers
"The exterior softened and the interior melted. Meeting such beautiful, new souls helped me get back in touch with my own."Adam
"I don't think I've ever experienced that deep safety like I did during our time together. When there's a baseline of safety, there's so much power."David
"Since Woven, I'm speaking more directly to my partner about my needs and desires."Wil
"I was very far away from the person I know I am, stressed about human constructs. I reconnected with my inner strength through brotherhood."Julio
"Safe environment, powerful energy realization."Suresh
"My heart is so much fuller because of the brothers I met and experienced Woven with."Jonathan
"A newfound appreciation for myself that opened my heart to receive others."Felipe
"It's a beautiful space to learn how to give and receive love with other men who value kindness and healing."Juana
"It is a beautiful community with leaders who are in it for the right reasons and it is what you make of it."David
"If looking for safe connections and building trust with queer men, give Woven a try."Fares
"If you want to feel belonging and community, take the leap and go with open arms."Seph
"I gained a sense of belonging that I didn't know was absent. I am permanently changed for the better from this one ceremony."Atasiea
"I felt seen and in community, not for what I could offer but simply for being."David
There is a small, sacred lineage whose history has been obscured, whose gifts have been forgotten.
We are of that lineage.
Across cultures and throughout time, those of us who loved differently, who saw with the eyes of our hearts, who carried the gifts of both man and woman and our wild divine selves, we were the shamans, the priests, the healers, the ones who could walk between worlds.
Colonization, conversion, and centuries of erasure tried to make us forget. But you can feel it, can't you? The stirring. The memory that lives in your bones.
Most queer men have learned to carry our medicine alone, or not at all. There is necessary work that happens when we gather solely in the company of other queer men. Something that dissolves the armor. Something that remembers what the world tried to make us forget.
We are fully committed to co-creating a brave space for queer men to remember ourselves. This kind of ritual technology is ancient, and we cannot do it alone. We acknowledge the ancestors, the queer lineage bearers who came before us, the good, true and wise ancestors of all those who choose to attend, and the rich lineages and traditions of the peoples of Sicily where we gather. And most of all we honor all our more-than-human kin in this work of collective healing.
When queer men stand fully activated in our medicine, devoted to the stewardship of life itself, we tip the scales toward wholeness for everyone.
This is that activation.
The circle is waiting.
You belong here.
Let's weave together.
Before you apply
