Queer Love Tarot Spread
For strengthening & radiating love for self & others.
For queering romantic or platonic expressions of love.
For queering romantic or platonic expressions of love.
1. Self: How best to cultivate and queer my love for myself?
2. Friends & Fam: How best to express love with my closest partners, friends, and family?
3. Enemies: How best to maintain love in the face of adversaries, and those who mean me harm?
4. Cohort: How best to project love out to my community, culture, and generation?
NOTES:
Aw heck yeah love! This spread is for exercising your capacity to love, strengthening your bonds, and keeping one foot in your better nature when less than loving relationships try your patience.
Possessing a queer identity in a world that tries to crush it out of you presents unique challenges and opportunities in the realm of love and relationship. Bigotry can cost us relationships, and shared experience can deliver us to community and chosen family. Of course, biological family members can make the cut for those you keep as chosen family, too. (Spoiler Alert: I’ve got a Chosen Family tarot spread coming up for you all real soon! Keep your eyes on the blog.)
This spread starts at home with love of self. Whenever it occurs in life, and at whatever rate, the metamorphosis through which we come to notice, then accept, then embrace, explore, and express our queerness can be a profound shakeup and a beautiful gateway to greater self-love and understanding. It’s not a transformation that happens once or overnight. It can take a lifetime and longer to deprogram all the nonsense that teaches us to hate and distrust ourselves. Use this card to explore another step in that journey, or to ask how you can lean on the transformational power of queering to better know, accept, love, and trust yourself.
Card 2 asks how you can better express love with the people you most care about. Few relationships are ever truly easy, but this category probably represents the people easiest to love and feel affection for out of the bunch. These are your favorites—the ones who make the chosen family cut.
Card 3 is where it gets tricky. Enemies here may apply to people in your personal life, or those on the national and global stage opposing all of our rights and well being. When you scale back, we’ve all got people denying our humanity and attacking our rights, and encountering those asshats can make it hard, even if just for a moment, to feel any kind of loving at all.
So let’s talk about our serrated-edged feelings. Let’s talk about love crossed with anger. Love and anger are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they can be expressions of one another.
Note that the enemies card asks how to maintain love in the face of adversaries, and not how to love one’s antagonists. While you’re absolutely welcome to ask that question here, it will not be beneficial for everyone. Rather, this is an anchoring question, which evokes others: How do I stay true to myself and my better nature while under attack? How do I keep my rage and pain away from the people I love? How do I defend myself and hold my own space without ceding too much ground to hate? How do I fight my opponent(s) without becoming them? If you’re currently under fire, you might draw an entire spread with a card for each of these sub-questions, and any others that arise for you.
You do not need to love your enemies. If you feel called to, or adhere to a religion that encourages this kind of love, then that is your path and your challenge—good for you. More power to you if you can muster up that kind of love! That is not my path, and not something this spread requires, or even necessarily encourages of its readers.
Many of us are frightened to face the muck of our toughest feelings, and depending on the feeling, that fear can be perfectly rational. Get willing to do it anyway, if you can without sacrificing your health. Anger, grief, and revulsion are natural and powerful responses. Personally, I have difficulty trusting people who claim never to feel these things. Too often, the primary benefit of denying harsh and undesirable emotions within the self is to stroke an ego that believes to feel bad is to be bad. Given the inevitability of feeling bad, this forces the ego into a state of denial, defensiveness, and fragility. From fragility, we do unnecessary harm.
In my book (of unpopular metaphysical opinions), how you carry anger and what you choose to do with it says more about your integrity than whether you feel anger, and how much. What and how you hate says more than whether you hate at all.
That doesn’t mean it’s healthy to pour gasoline on the fire, but meet yourself where you are, listen to what your anger has to say about what is and is not acceptable, and through that embrace, reckon with how to hold to your center and your love. Anger is an arrow. If it points to what you can’t abide in one direction, it probably points to what you most love and feel called to protect the other way.
Finally in card 4, check out how to project love through broad social circles. What do you have to give to your community, your fellow queers, your generation, and the next? You may ask this openly, or specify a particular broad group to speak to. The answer could take the form of an archetypal energy pattern, an action, or a project.
VARIATIONS:
Friends & Relations: Stretch card 2 into multiple categories as needed. You might need to draw separate cards for strengthening connections and expressing love with lovers, partners, friends, or family.
Name Names: Point cards 2 or 3 to individual relationships by choosing a signifier, or by writing or stating the name in question before shuffling and drawing.
More Queerer: Draw a pair of cards for each of the four categories: one to better cultivate your love and relationships, and one to better queer your love and relationships.
Happy card-slinging, love buckets! Have fun. Keep being. Be well.
2. Friends & Fam: How best to express love with my closest partners, friends, and family?
3. Enemies: How best to maintain love in the face of adversaries, and those who mean me harm?
4. Cohort: How best to project love out to my community, culture, and generation?
NOTES:
Aw heck yeah love! This spread is for exercising your capacity to love, strengthening your bonds, and keeping one foot in your better nature when less than loving relationships try your patience.
Possessing a queer identity in a world that tries to crush it out of you presents unique challenges and opportunities in the realm of love and relationship. Bigotry can cost us relationships, and shared experience can deliver us to community and chosen family. Of course, biological family members can make the cut for those you keep as chosen family, too. (Spoiler Alert: I’ve got a Chosen Family tarot spread coming up for you all real soon! Keep your eyes on the blog.)
This spread starts at home with love of self. Whenever it occurs in life, and at whatever rate, the metamorphosis through which we come to notice, then accept, then embrace, explore, and express our queerness can be a profound shakeup and a beautiful gateway to greater self-love and understanding. It’s not a transformation that happens once or overnight. It can take a lifetime and longer to deprogram all the nonsense that teaches us to hate and distrust ourselves. Use this card to explore another step in that journey, or to ask how you can lean on the transformational power of queering to better know, accept, love, and trust yourself.
Card 2 asks how you can better express love with the people you most care about. Few relationships are ever truly easy, but this category probably represents the people easiest to love and feel affection for out of the bunch. These are your favorites—the ones who make the chosen family cut.
Card 3 is where it gets tricky. Enemies here may apply to people in your personal life, or those on the national and global stage opposing all of our rights and well being. When you scale back, we’ve all got people denying our humanity and attacking our rights, and encountering those asshats can make it hard, even if just for a moment, to feel any kind of loving at all.
So let’s talk about our serrated-edged feelings. Let’s talk about love crossed with anger. Love and anger are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they can be expressions of one another.
Note that the enemies card asks how to maintain love in the face of adversaries, and not how to love one’s antagonists. While you’re absolutely welcome to ask that question here, it will not be beneficial for everyone. Rather, this is an anchoring question, which evokes others: How do I stay true to myself and my better nature while under attack? How do I keep my rage and pain away from the people I love? How do I defend myself and hold my own space without ceding too much ground to hate? How do I fight my opponent(s) without becoming them? If you’re currently under fire, you might draw an entire spread with a card for each of these sub-questions, and any others that arise for you.
You do not need to love your enemies. If you feel called to, or adhere to a religion that encourages this kind of love, then that is your path and your challenge—good for you. More power to you if you can muster up that kind of love! That is not my path, and not something this spread requires, or even necessarily encourages of its readers.
Many of us are frightened to face the muck of our toughest feelings, and depending on the feeling, that fear can be perfectly rational. Get willing to do it anyway, if you can without sacrificing your health. Anger, grief, and revulsion are natural and powerful responses. Personally, I have difficulty trusting people who claim never to feel these things. Too often, the primary benefit of denying harsh and undesirable emotions within the self is to stroke an ego that believes to feel bad is to be bad. Given the inevitability of feeling bad, this forces the ego into a state of denial, defensiveness, and fragility. From fragility, we do unnecessary harm.
In my book (of unpopular metaphysical opinions), how you carry anger and what you choose to do with it says more about your integrity than whether you feel anger, and how much. What and how you hate says more than whether you hate at all.
That doesn’t mean it’s healthy to pour gasoline on the fire, but meet yourself where you are, listen to what your anger has to say about what is and is not acceptable, and through that embrace, reckon with how to hold to your center and your love. Anger is an arrow. If it points to what you can’t abide in one direction, it probably points to what you most love and feel called to protect the other way.
Finally in card 4, check out how to project love through broad social circles. What do you have to give to your community, your fellow queers, your generation, and the next? You may ask this openly, or specify a particular broad group to speak to. The answer could take the form of an archetypal energy pattern, an action, or a project.
VARIATIONS:
Friends & Relations: Stretch card 2 into multiple categories as needed. You might need to draw separate cards for strengthening connections and expressing love with lovers, partners, friends, or family.
Name Names: Point cards 2 or 3 to individual relationships by choosing a signifier, or by writing or stating the name in question before shuffling and drawing.
More Queerer: Draw a pair of cards for each of the four categories: one to better cultivate your love and relationships, and one to better queer your love and relationships.
Happy card-slinging, love buckets! Have fun. Keep being. Be well.
