At midnight during our full moon wedding, the sacred datura we planted from seed offered two blossoms. We didn’t expect our toxic nightshade to burgeon so beautifully for the first time on such a special occasion. It was pure magick, perhaps concocted by a queer underground coven of soil microbiota. A year before, we’d cracked open Datura wrightii’s spiked capsule and spread its deliriant seeds around our garden.
The deep-throated flowers drooped the next morning after a busy night with numerous sphinx moths. While pouring out flat Mexican lagers and scrubbing churro sugar from sticky tables, I found a juvenile cottontail with a bleeding chest, lying as if sacrificed, likely the victim of a recently hatched rattler biting off more than they could swallow. I offered the rabbit water, but by the time all of the chairs were stacked, they had crossed over. I transported the kit into our wash and covered their eyes with dried chia, forming a small memorial of quartzy granite and datura leaves — a ritual I’d often performed with other dead animals, helping deliver our nonhuman neighbors into the spirit world.
Overlapping visions of the white blooms and the departed cottontail projected in my mind weeks later, as my husband and I dropped more than 4,000 feet down the Twentynine Palms Highway to visit the Palm Springs Art Museum. Its current exhibit, “A Queer Arcana: Art, Magic, and Spirit,” showcased over a century of LGBTQ+ artists who had explored those themes in their paintings, sculptures, performances and photography. It’s just the most recent in a trend focused on alternative spiritualities, including “QUEER MAGIC” in Santa Fe in 2023 and “Sci-fi, Magick, Queer L.A.” in 2024 in Los Angeles.
Many of Queer Arcana’s artists have deep ties to the Southwest and California, and the vortices, boulderfields and dark skies that have long drawn seekers to places like Joshua Tree, Sedona, Arizona, and Crestone, Colorado, appear in their artwork. These spiritual landscapes are often overlain by a body-centric and fantastical imagery that pierces the “thin veil” between the physical and spirit realms.
Telluride-born Ingo Swann’s 1986 painting Proto Adam shows a galactic go-go dancer breaching a desert river, while in Altar for Laura Aguilar (2022), artist Clarity Haynes’ pastel offering for the late photographer features images of Aguilar’s nude photography. Other artwork is more subtle, like Eric-Paul Riege’s chestplate [3] (2026), a black-and-white textile that weaves traditional Diné beliefs with his own experience with queerness.
The 35 artists in the exhibit also depict cosmic 69s, occult gatherings and aliens so well-endowed that their appendages seem to have gained their own consciousness. A set of magazine archives documents witchcraft and new age goddess worship.
“Queer artists, activists, and cultural producers have long sought spiritual practices outside the mainstream to affirm their identities, build community, and envision new ways of being in an often-oppressive world,” curator David Evans Frantz wrote in a news release. When we walked into the exhibit, large text on a wine-colored wall referenced the work of queer Chicana poet and theorist Gloria Anzaldúa, “who described herself as a ‘spiritual mestiza’ and understood spiritual seeking as a queer way of engaging the world and the infinite.”
When I sat on a stool and put on headphones, directing my attention to a TV on the wall, I became hypnotized by the open portal that was Give Us Home Spider: Ritual 5: TXI Cement Quarry, Bloomington, CA (2017) by Edgar Fabián Frías.
As a brujx — a gender-neutral Spanish term for a person who practices magic — and a descendant of the Wixárika people, Frías organized a series of rituals across Southern California to address environmental racism and health disparities. Frías grew up about half a mile from the quarry featured in the video I was watching. The quarry exposed their community to hexavalent chromium, a toxic chemical compound that can cause cancer and autoimmune diseases. Frías and 13 other fluorescently dressed healers took part in the ritual, one playing a drone pipe over techno music as others dug holes in the earth, cackled and ate pomegranates.
“Queer artists, activists, and cultural producers have long sought spiritual practices outside the mainstream to affirm their identities, build community, and envision new ways of being in an often-oppressive world.”
This happened nearly a decade ago, and I found it prescient, especially as smoke from the Lineage Fire in Los Angeles’s Boyle Heights drifted across Southern California, spreading toxic fumes from a food-storage empire. Frías’ ritual reminds us to address the past in the present for a more intentional future. No matter our spiritualities, it’s important that we acknowledge the harms done to us and the Earth. At the very least, we can provide ourselves some solace by combating denial, and spark meaningful ways to fight injustices. Sometimes that may even just mean pausing to recognize the short life of a desert cottontail.
“A Queer Arcana” did not appear today by magic. It and other similar exhibits are intentional gatherings of ancestors and modern community members, whispering from the in-between to remind those listening today to connect and to fight not only queer repression, but all repression. Today, they invite us to hex city councils approving data centers and pour circles of salt around ourselves to protect our creative souls from the malevolence of AI-generated slop. To form coalitions with our nonhuman neighbors.
Our visit fell at the time of another ritual: observing the Summer Solstice. Displays of queer tarot decks in the museum, like the artwork of trans activist Rachel Pollack, instructed me to pull from ourdeck on the longest day of the year. Much of my own spirituality has been formed by nature: Milky Way worship, grounding Qi Gong, birdsong and ceremonial river cleanses with the bros. But as a Libra Sun and Scorpio Moon, I’ve found quarterly tarot pulls helpful in alleviating my chronic indecisiveness and epic grudges. Our MotherPeace deck, one of the first feminist and queer decks to alter the course of tarot in the 1970s, is another component of my own cosmology that I’ve assembled.
I pulled the round, moon-shaped card and flipped it over, revealing the “Son of Cups,” a card one of the deck’s creators wrote represented “meditative awareness.” The card depicted a naked man floating with his legs crossed on the sea as he played the flute. Seagulls sang beside him. Below, large datura flowers unfurled like sails.
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This article appeared in the September 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “How to construct a queer cosmology.”