Not everybody is interested in becoming a queer studies scholar. But everyone can benefit from having a better understanding of queerness and queer theory.

Queer: A Graphic History was written by Meg-John Barker, illustrated by Jules Scheele, and published in 2016. It is a friendly, heavily-illustrated introduction to queer theory, a branch of study formed in the early 1990s. But even more than that, it’s a handy, easy-to-understand introduction to the complexities of the concept of queerness. I recommend this book for people who are trying to get their heads around queer identities, the word “queer,” and queer vocabulary, and want to dive a bit deeper than an online article.

As a queer magickal practitioner, Lee Harrington’s and Tai Fenix Kulystin’s anthology Queer Magic: Power Beyond Boundaries was a revelation for me.

My copy of this book is so marked up with underlines and notes in the margins, it’s become a personal artifact of my own journey as a witch grappling with my gender identity. I had so many “aha” moments reading this book, it helped shape me, my sense of self, and my witchcraft in ways I can’t even quantify.

A collection of essays, interviews, poems, and artwork, Queer Magic is more than just an academic journal on the intersection of queerness and paganism: it’s a crystalized moment in time, an anthology of experiences and feelings of queer magickal practitioners in the late 2010s: one that will be referred to and, I hope, regularly expanded upon with additional volumes in the decades to come, as our cultural understanding deepens.

Among the highlights for me:

• Yvonne Aburrow’s “Inclusive Wicca Manifesto.” Wicca should welcome people of all abilities, gender identities, sexual orientations, ages, and backgrounds. Aburrow offers practical ways in which to make a welcome environment for all witches and aspiring practitioners within your community.
• Maisha Najuma Aza’s “Queering Tantra: A Queer Black Woman’s Perspective.” A queer black lesbian activist shares her experiences with Tantra and celebrates its life-changing power.
• Pavini Moray’s “The Glitterheart Path of Connecting with Transcestors.” Connect with the transgender people who came before and those who will come after you in a similar way in which you’d work with your blood ancestors and descendants.
• Orion Foxwood’s “Queer-Fire Witchery: The Rainbow Flame That Melts the Soul-Cage, The Emerging Fluidity of Consciousness.” It’s crucial our magickal work and communities be intersectional and affirming for people of all walks of life, because these paths are made by and for those who have been disempowered by society. The cruelest trick would be to welcome in the marginalized and then tell them they can’t do magick unless their work mimics the shapes of the oppressions they are trying to escape from.
• Susan Harper’s “For Thou Art Goddess: Creating Affirmative Goddess Community.” Our communities must go beyond welcoming and instead be affirming and co-creating with the marginalized, and this essay outlines specific ways to tweak our language and our rituals to do so.
• Ivo Dominguez, Jr.’s “Redefining and Repurposing Polarity.” Too many magickal practices are stuck on binary polarity as a means to generate energy. Polarity is much more nuanced than that, as explained in this essay.
• Yin Q’s “Blood, Body, Birth, and Emptiness: Queer Magic in My Life and Work.” BDSM and magickal practice intersect in unexpected ways.
• Sam “Eyrie” Ward’s “The Maypole and the Labyrinth: Reimagining the Great Rite.” Rethinking the symbols of the Great Rite in new, nonbinary ways.
• Steve Kenson’s “Queer Journey of the Wheel.” Reimagining the Wheel of the Year in a queer context.

(Did I just highlight half the book’s contents? Um, yeah.)

Simply put: This book is a must-read and must-own for queer magickal practitioners, and for those who wish to make their magickal communities more open, inclusive, and affirming to queer people.

I fell in love with Tarot and Qabala at almost the same time, and by pure coincidence the first Tarot deck I purchased was one with the ten spheres of the Tree of Life embedded in the art of the Major Arcana cards (Ellen Cannon Reed’s “The Witches Tarot,” which I purchased around the same time I read her book “The Witches’ Qabala”). I’ve spent the last several years studying the intersections between Qabala and Tarot, as each can lend insights to the other. Qabala acts as the “operating system” of most modern Tarot decks.

Still, like with Qabala, I have struggled with the heteronormativity, patriarchy, gender binarism, and agrarian-focus depicted on most standard Tarot decks. Where do I see myself, a queer outside the gender binary who has lived their whole life in metropolitan communities, within these cards?

Despite the fact that many of the queer people in my life use Tarot as a personal growth and spiritual tool, and though many top books on Tarot are written by queer authors, and though many queer-centered Tarot decks have been released in recent years, the world was lacking for a book specifically about viewing the Tarot through a queer lens until Cassandra Snow’s 2019 book, “Queering the Tarot.”

It’s rare that I sit down to read an entire volume of poetry in one sitting; rarer still that I feel deeply connected to it. Trey Moonwood’s The Gorgon Verses: Poems for a Queer Mythology ticked several boxes of my various passions: 1. queerness; 2. paganism; 3. the beauty of the natural world, and 4. evocative words.

Moonwood’s poetry balances lush imagery and wordplay with a pleasing economy of words, while expressing ancient and primal truths in modern tongue and context. It’s sensual and often heart-wrenching, particularly as the verses explore the pains of coming to terms with one’s queer identity:

What absence yawns so wide
that I cannot but enter into its cavernous mouth
and make from tomb
a cocoon in which to dissolve
and return whole at last
and home?

“Foretelling,” Trey Moonwood