You don’t have to own a million books to master the cards, but it is helpful to get a few different authors’ takes on interpretations and spreads, since everyone approaches tarot a little differently. To help us apply modern and inclusive thinking to an old occult practice, author and tarot reader Cassandra Snow wrote Queering the Tarot , which is a card-by-card guide to interpreting the cards from an inclusive and queer perspective. Featuring a vibrant rainbow design, and our super-sized Q logo, you won't find a more stylish way to make a statement. The advice it gives is potentially useful; I probably won’t follow all or even most of it, but it’s also a good introduction to viewing the Tarot differently in general.

For a book that purports itself to be about the queer community and teaching us how to queer the cards, I'm confused as to why there are mentions of gender (and sex organs. After ongoing issues with my (now ex-) hosting company, I have lost the entire contents of the Little Red Tarot archive.

While the traditional Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck (that's the popular 78-card deck you're probably picturing right now) shows gendered figures like the Emperor and the Empress and male/female couples like the Lovers, there’s no reason you have to interpret cards that way!

As Snow notes in Queering the Tarot , “while this suit is easy to glare at given its capitalist connotations, we must remember as queer folks that we, too, deserve homes that make us happy and proper compensation for our labor. For example, the Justice card might not be all sunshine and roses in a reading because the institutions that were ostensibly put in place to protect us can (and do) work against BIPOC folks as well as queer ones.Many authors and artists have tried to skirt around this problem by renaming cards or using gender-neutral pronouns for the figures on them, and while those efforts are important, Queering the Tarot goes even further by exploring each card through a queer lens. Overall, I don’t regret reading it - but I certainly didn’t feel seen or represented by it as a queer person.

Snow is a sex-positive, polyamorous, genderfluid person who has a queer-platonic partner and identifies with the kink community, and the book embraces the whole spectrum of sexual, romantic, and gender-related queer identities and experiences. Also by Joan Bunning, this book is an expanded and revised version of Learning the Tarot that’s part of Weiser’s Big Book series.

While it often depends on which deck you’re using, as with anything, your intuition should be your strongest guiding force while reading Tarot.

I think I'd be much less bothered if the author had said the book was more about their own experiences with tarot/being queer, rather than a book of "how to queer the tarot" for everyone in general. I respect the hell out of Cassandra Snow as a tarot reader/advisor, and deeply enjoy following them on social media. A reading can point you in the right direction or reveal knowledge you didn’t realize you had, but it can’t solve all your problems or make a hard decision for you. As someone who's never been in the closet and is surrounded by queer people without even trying, my queer identity isn't affected by the pain that was described in the interpretations of several cards (which I recognise is a huge privilege. The main reason I’ve listened to this three times is I love how Cassandra tells her own story and that of LGBTQ+ people in her card descriptions.Even some of the more frightening cards, such as the Tower, are necessary life experiences that bring us exactly where we should be.