The serendipitous blooming of sacred datura flowers, two radiant blossoms appearing precisely at midnight during a full moon wedding, marked a profound moment of natural magic for the authors. These toxic nightshade plants, cultivated from seed, unfurled their beauty for the first time on an occasion of deep personal significance, a spectacle the authors playfully attributed to a queer underground coven of soil microbiota. This unexpected botanical display occurred a year after they had carefully sown the deliriant seeds of Datura wrightii, a native plant known for its potent psychoactive properties, into their garden.

The following morning, the deep-throated flowers, having likely served their nocturnal purpose with numerous sphinx moths, drooped gracefully. Amidst the cleanup of a festive gathering, involving the clearing of tables sticky with churro sugar and the disposal of empty Mexican lagers, a poignant discovery was made: a juvenile cottontail rabbit, its chest bleeding, lay as if in sacrifice. The small creature was likely a victim of a recently hatched rattlesnake, a predator that had perhaps overestimated its prey. Though offered water, the rabbit succumbed by the time the last chairs were stacked. A tender ritual followed, with the kit transported to a wash basin, its eyes gently covered with dried chia seeds, forming a small, heartfelt memorial of quartzy granite and datura leaves. This act of honoring the departed, a practice the author had frequently performed with other deceased animals, represented a conscious effort to guide their nonhuman neighbors into the spirit world.

Weeks later, these vivid images—the ethereal white blooms of the datura and the departed cottontail—intertwined in the author’s mind as they descended over 4,000 feet down the Twentynine Palms Highway to visit the Palm Springs Art Museum. Their destination was the museum’s current exhibition, "A Queer Arcana: Art, Magic, and Spirit," a compelling showcase featuring over a century of LGBTQ+ artists who have explored themes of spirituality, magic, and the esoteric in their diverse works, including paintings, sculptures, performances, and photography. This exhibition is not an isolated phenomenon but rather a notable recent entry in a growing trend that highlights alternative spiritualities within contemporary culture. Similar thematic explorations have recently been observed in "QUEER MAGIC" in Santa Fe in 2023 and "Sci-fi, Magick, Queer L.A." in Los Angeles in 2024, underscoring a burgeoning interest in these intersections.

Many of the artists featured in "A Queer Arcana" possess deep connections to the American Southwest and California, regions characterized by their dramatic landscapes, which have long attracted spiritual seekers. The exhibition art often incorporates elements of these spiritual geographies—vortices, boulder fields, and the profound darkness of desert skies—found in iconic locales like Joshua Tree, Sedona, Arizona, and Crestone, Colorado. These natural spiritual landscapes are frequently juxtaposed with a body-centric and fantastical imagery, artfully piercing the perceived "thin veil" that separates the physical and spirit realms.

Examples within the exhibition powerfully illustrate this thematic convergence. Telluride-born artist Ingo Swann’s 1986 painting, Proto Adam, depicts a galactic go-go dancer emerging from a desert river, evoking a sense of cosmic rebirth within a terrestrial setting. In contrast, artist Clarity Haynes’s 2022 piece, Altar for Laura Aguilar, is a pastel offering dedicated to the late photographer Laura Aguilar, whose seminal nude photography, often set against stark desert backdrops, explored themes of the body, identity, and the natural world. Other works employ a more subtle approach; Eric-Paul Riege’s chestplate [3] (2026), a black-and-white textile, intricately weaves traditional Diné beliefs with his personal experiences of queerness, demonstrating a sophisticated fusion of cultural heritage and individual identity.

The exhibition further showcases a provocative range of artistic expressions, with 35 artists presenting works that delve into themes of cosmic sexuality, occult gatherings, and even imaginings of aliens whose physical forms possess an almost sentient quality. Complementing the visual arts, a collection of magazine archives offers a window into historical explorations of witchcraft and new age goddess worship, providing further context for the exhibition’s broad scope.

As curator David Evans Frantz articulated 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 resonates deeply throughout the exhibition. Upon entering, visitors are greeted by large text referencing the influential work of queer Chicana poet and theorist Gloria Anzaldúa. Anzaldúa, who described herself as a "spiritual mestiza," viewed spiritual seeking as an inherently queer way of engaging with the world and the infinite, a perspective that serves as a foundational concept for the exhibition.

The immersive experience of the exhibition continues with Edgar Fabián Frías’s video installation, Give Us Home Spider: Ritual 5: TXI Cement Quarry, Bloomington, CA (2017). As the author donned headphones and focused on the screen, they became captivated by this work, which functions as an open portal into a powerful ritual. Frías, who identifies as a brujx – a gender-neutral Spanish term for a practitioner of magic – and is a descendant of the Wixárika people, organized a series of rituals across Southern California to confront environmental racism and health disparities. The quarry featured in the video is located approximately half a mile from Frías’s childhood home, a site that exposed their community to hexavalent chromium, a toxic chemical linked to cancer and autoimmune diseases. The video documents Frías and thirteen other healers, adorned in vibrant fluorescent attire, participating in a ritual that involved playing a drone pipe to techno music, digging holes in the earth, vocalizing, and consuming pomegranates—a symbolic act of nourishment and connection to the land.

This ritual, performed nearly a decade ago, carries a striking prescience, particularly in light of recent environmental concerns. As smoke from the Lineage Fire in Los Angeles’s Boyle Heights drifted across Southern California, carrying toxic fumes from a damaged food-storage empire, Frías’s work serves as a potent reminder of the necessity to confront past harms in the present to forge a more intentional future. Regardless of individual spiritual beliefs, acknowledging the damages inflicted upon both people and the Earth is paramount. This acknowledgment can offer solace and empower action against injustice, sometimes beginning with a simple pause to honor the brief existence of a desert cottontail.

The "A Queer Arcana" exhibition is not a product of spontaneous magic but rather the result of deliberate curation and the convergence of ancestral wisdom and contemporary community. The artworks and artifacts within the exhibit act as conduits, whispering from an liminal space to remind contemporary audiences of the importance of connection and the ongoing struggle against not only queer repression but all forms of oppression. Today, these voices invite us to engage in acts of resistance, from challenging city councils approving environmentally detrimental data centers to creating protective circles of salt around our creative spirits to shield them from the homogenizing influence of AI-generated content. Furthermore, the exhibition advocates for forming vital coalitions with our nonhuman neighbors.

The visit coincided with another significant ritual: the observance of the Summer Solstice. Within the museum, displays of queer tarot decks, including the work of trans activist Rachel Pollack, offered guidance. For the author, a Libra Sun and Scorpio Moon, who has grappled with indecisiveness and long-held grudges, the practice of quarterly tarot readings has been instrumental in finding clarity. Their personal cosmology is deeply interwoven with nature, encompassing Milky Way worship, grounding Qi Gong practices, an appreciation for birdsong, and ceremonial river cleanses. A significant component of this personal spiritual framework is their MotherPeace deck, a pioneering feminist and queer tarot deck that significantly influenced the evolution of tarot practices in the 1970s.

On this longest day of the year, the author drew a round, moon-shaped card from the deck. The revealed card, the "Son of Cups," was described by one of the deck’s creators as representing "meditative awareness." The imagery depicted a naked man floating serenely on the sea, playing a flute, with seagulls singing nearby. Beneath him, large datura flowers unfurled like sails, echoing the symbolic power of the plant and its connection to spiritual journeys.