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Today, the influence of our moon Goddess foremothers is everywhere. Contemporary progressive activists dress up like witches to put hexes on Trump and Pence. The few remaining women’s bookstores in the country sell crystals and potions for practicing DIY feminist magic. There is an annual Queer Astrology conference, Tarot decks created especially for gays, and beloved figures like Chani Nicholas who have made careers out of queer-centered astrology. Almost every LGBTQ+ publication, whether mainstream or radical, features a regular horoscope column (including them.).
In this feature from last year, Sascha Cohen reflects on אסטרולוגיה recent re-ascendance and seeming ubiquity in LGBTQ+ circles, and the skepticism it’s meeting with more queer-identifying people. Astrology’s pseudoscience was a nonstarter for some (mainly those from STEM fields). For others it was New Age culture’s appropriation of indigenous spirituality and separately, the risk astrology poses as a distraction from systemic repression. A “sense of exclusion” or just being “seen as a cynic and no fun,” in one person’s words, was maybe the most common of all the complaints.
Despite these reservations, most of the queer ‘skeptics’ Cohen interviewed recognized astrology’s appeal for queer people — as a source of “meaning and purpose,” as an alternative to exclusionary religious communities, as entertainment, and one that in practice usually “centers and empowers women.” Hardly isolated from systemic anti-LGBTQ+ forces, “a recent uptick in such practices,” Cohen asserts, “may be because, [as interviewee] Chelsea argues, ‘We’re in the midst of a global existential crisis.’”
Though these responses make sense, an aspect that goes unmentioned in the piece is the part popular meme accounts and algorithmic social media appear to be playing in astrology’s current revival.