Sa’di of Shiraz (d. 1292) lived a long and full life. He came to be described as many a moralist, a humanist, a humorous teacher, a versifier, a great lyricist, a legal conformist, a panegyrist, and a mystic of the first order. Indeed, the rainbow of his life experiences has had too many colors for the conventional charts of expectations developing over the centuries. While most critics have testified to the diversity of his approach to art and life, at times, his openness to the full range of human experiences has earned him harsh criticism or a respectful silence to avoid criticism. Among Sa’di’s controversial experiences are his unabashed use of homoerotic themes and images particularly in autobiographic episodes in the Gulistan and in some of the ghazals. While the Gulistan’s episodes are a combination of fact and fiction, some episodes, even if fictitious, validate Sa’di’s acceptance of the value of homoerotic beauty and love. In this paper which is based on a chapter from a monograph I am currently writing on the lyrical legacy of Sa’di of Shiraz, I demonstrate through close readings of Sa’di’s poems, that his vision of beauty and love do not erect a barrier between the physical and the spiritual. From this perspective, all creation is beautiful and therefore lovable. Homoerotic love and beauty are part of the bigger continuum of human experience. Sa’di’s contemporaries, and many later hagiographers and anthologists, do not seem to have seen a conflict between his non-heteronormative expressions of love and his religious, ethical stance. I also touch on the fact that the 20th and the 21st century critics (i.e. Ahmad Shamlu the prominent Iranian poet in Persian, and Cyrus Zargar in his recent monograph Sufi Aesthetics in English) take a different approach to this issue. They either ignore Sa’di’s (and other Sufis’) references to homoerotic love or justify them as purely abstract, universal, and mystical.