The emergence of two sacred datura blossoms on a wedding night, a plant known for its potent toxicity, marked a moment of profound beauty and unexpected synchronicity, mirroring a broader cultural shift towards exploring alternative spiritualities. This personal experience, where a seemingly poisonous nightshade bloomed for the first time on a significant occasion, offered a potent metaphor for the reclamation and reimagining of spiritual practices within queer communities. The seeds of Datura wrightii, gathered from a spiked capsule a year prior, had quietly transformed the garden into a space of wonder, hinting at the unseen forces, perhaps even a "queer underground coven of soil microbiota," that influence the natural world.

The morning after the wedding, the delicate, deep-throated datura flowers, having served their nocturnal purpose with sphinx moths, drooped under the desert sun. Amidst the lingering remnants of celebration – spilled Mexican lagers and sticky churro sugar – a stark encounter with mortality occurred. A juvenile cottontail rabbit, its chest bleeding, lay as if offered in sacrifice, a likely victim of a venomous encounter with a recently hatched rattlesnake. Despite a gentle offering of water, the small creature passed away before the last of the tables were cleared. A makeshift memorial was created: the rabbit’s body was placed in a wash, its eyes covered with dried chia seeds, adorned with quartzy granite and datura leaves, a poignant ritual of passage for a nonhuman neighbor, a practice the observer had often performed to guide departed animals into the spirit world.

Weeks later, the lingering images of the ephemeral white blooms and the departed cottontail intertwined in the mind’s eye during a journey to the Palm Springs Art Museum. The exhibit, "A Queer Arcana: Art, Magic, and Spirit," presented a compelling century-long survey of LGBTQ+ artists who have delved into themes of magic, spirituality, and the esoteric through their paintings, sculptures, performances, and photography. This exhibition is not an isolated event but part of a burgeoning trend that highlights a growing interest in alternative spiritualities, evidenced by similar thematic explorations such as "QUEER MAGIC" in Santa Fe in 2023 and "Sci-fi, Magick, Queer L.A." in Los Angeles in 2024. These gatherings underscore a collective yearning to connect with deeper meanings and identities beyond conventional frameworks.

Many artists featured in "A Queer Arcana" share deep connections to the American Southwest and California, landscapes rich with spiritual resonance. The vortices, vast boulder fields, and intensely dark skies of places like Joshua Tree, Sedona, Arizona, and Crestone, Colorado, have long drawn seekers of spiritual enlightenment, and these potent environments are frequently depicted in the artists’ work. This connection to place is often interwoven with a body-centric, fantastical imagery that suggests a permeable boundary between the physical and spiritual realms, a concept often described as piercing the "thin veil." The artwork explores a rich tapestry of visual language, where the tangible world dissolves into the ethereal.

Within the exhibit, Ingo Swann’s 1986 painting Proto Adam, originating from Telluride, Colorado, depicts a galactic go-go dancer emerging from a desert river, evoking a powerful, otherworldly genesis. In contrast, Clarity Haynes’s 2022 piece, Altar for Laura Aguilar, is a tender pastel offering to the late photographer, incorporating imagery from Aguilar’s evocative nude desert self-portraits, celebrating the vulnerability and strength of the human form in nature. Eric-Paul Riege’s chestplate [3] (2026), a subtle yet profound black-and-white textile, masterfully weaves traditional Diné beliefs with his personal experiences of queerness, demonstrating how heritage and identity can be expressed through contemporary artistic mediums. The exhibition showcases a diverse range of artistic expressions, from the overtly symbolic to the quietly introspective, all united by a shared exploration of the mystical.

The artistic expressions within "A Queer Arcana" extend to more overtly fantastical and even erotic imagery, featuring cosmic representations of sexual union, depictions of occult gatherings, and fantastical beings. One particular collection of magazine archives documents a historical engagement with witchcraft and new age goddess worship, providing a glimpse into past movements that sought spiritual empowerment outside patriarchal structures. These elements collectively suggest a desire to explore and celebrate aspects of existence often suppressed or relegated to the shadows by mainstream society, embracing sensuality, ritual, and the unconventional as pathways to spiritual understanding.

Curator David Evans Frantz articulated the exhibition’s core premise in a press release: "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 sentiment resonated deeply upon entering the exhibition, where large text on a striking wine-colored wall referenced the work of queer Chicana poet and theorist Gloria Anzaldúa. Anzaldúa, who described herself as a "spiritual mestiza," understood spiritual seeking as an inherently queer way of engaging with the world and the infinite, a perspective that challenges traditional notions of identity and belonging.

A particularly captivating piece within the exhibit was Edgar Fabián Frías’s 2017 video, Give Us Home Spider: Ritual 5: TXI Cement Quarry, Bloomington, CA. Wearing headphones and focusing on the screen, the viewer was drawn into a mesmerizing ritual performance. As a brujx—a gender-neutral Spanish term for a practitioner of magic—and a descendant of the Wixárika people, Frías organized a series of rituals across Southern California to address environmental racism and health disparities. The video captured a ritual held near a quarry that had exposed Frías’s childhood community to hexavalent chromium, a known carcinogen. In the footage, Frías and thirteen other healers, adorned in fluorescent attire, engaged in a performance involving drone pipes, techno music, the digging of holes, vocalizations, and the consumption of pomegranates, signifying a powerful act of remembrance and resistance.

This ritual, performed nearly a decade prior, felt remarkably prescient, particularly in light of recent environmental crises such as the Lineage Fire in Los Angeles’s Boyle Heights, which released toxic fumes from a food-storage facility. Frías’s work serves as a potent reminder of the necessity to confront historical injustices and their ongoing repercussions in the present to forge a more intentional future. Regardless of individual spiritual beliefs, acknowledging the harms inflicted upon communities and the Earth is paramount. This acknowledgment can offer solace and empower individuals to combat denial, sparking meaningful avenues for fighting injustice, even if it begins with a simple act of recognizing the fleeting existence of a desert cottontail.

The "A Queer Arcana" exhibition did not materialize by chance; it represents a deliberate convergence of ancestral wisdom and contemporary community. These artistic gatherings act as conduits, whispering from the liminal spaces between worlds, urging listeners to connect and to actively resist not only queer repression but all forms of oppression. Today, these artists and their work invite us to challenge oppressive systems, from advocating against data centers approved by city councils to employing protective rituals for our creative spirits against the onslaught of what is described as "AI-generated slop." They advocate for forging alliances with our nonhuman neighbors, recognizing our interconnectedness with all living beings.

The visit to the museum coincided with the Summer Solstice, a time of ancient ritual and natural observance. Within the exhibit, displays of queer tarot decks, including the work of trans activist Rachel Pollack, offered guidance. For the observer, whose spirituality is deeply rooted in nature—from Milky Way worship and grounding Qi Gong to birdsong and ceremonial river cleanups—tarot has become a valuable tool. As a Libra Sun and Scorpio Moon, quarterly tarot pulls have proven instrumental in navigating chronic indecisiveness and long-held grievances. The MotherPeace deck, a groundbreaking feminist and queer creation from the 1970s, is a significant element of their personal cosmology, a testament to the evolution of spiritual tools.

On the longest day of the year, a round, moon-shaped card was drawn from the deck: the "Son of Cups." This card, described by one of its creators as representing "meditative awareness," depicted a naked man floating serenely on the sea, playing a flute, accompanied by singing seagulls. Below him, large datura flowers unfurled like sails, a powerful image that seemed to echo the personal experiences of the observer, linking the cosmic to the terrestrial, the mystical to the mundane, and the personal to the universal.