Happy Pride everyone.
❤️ Here are three of my favourite LGBTQ+ movies: Pride, about Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners. Torch Song Trilogy, which I saw in my first few weeks at university because the Gay Society did a screening (yes folks, in the 1980s the Lesbian and Gay societies at uni were two separate things). And The Birdcage (which I prefer over the French film it was based on) in which gayness eventually wins over the stiff straights.
More reflections on queerness and intersectionality after the cut. 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️
🧡 I’m a bit late posting for Pride because I’ve been thinking about the horrific discovery at Kamloops. Even though I knew that there were graveyards at residential schools, the news still hit me hard. It’s also Indigenous History Month in Canada so I hope we can all keep Indigenous issues in our minds. Queerness intersects with many other identities, including BIPOC people. Let’s not forget that colonialism attempted to suppress and erase genderfluid identities among Indigenous Peoples (known as two-spirit in Turtle Island since 1990). NB. Non-Indigenous people should not use the term two-spirit to refer to themselves.
💛 As a nonbinary bisexual who has mostly dated men, and who passes for cishet, I have often experienced the feeling of “not being queer enough”, and people often forget that I’m actually queer, so I often find that I have to make more noise about it and come out more often. Being a full-time THEY helps, and having recently started a new job at a company that is really stepping up on diversity and inclusion, I’m now using they at work too.
💚 A big part of the reason that I’m a Pagan and a Wiccan is because I am queer. I figured “All acts of love and pleasure are My rituals” meant exactly what it said. Also as Paganism is life affirming and pleasure affirming, and ancient Pagan cultures celebrated same sex love, why wouldn’t contemporary Pagans? So it was a bit of a shock to discover all the heterocentridm in contemporary Paganism…
💙 I believe that gender is a landscape or an ocean (The River Crow’s image) and so is sexuality. As one of my other favourite queer movies put it, “swim the warm waters of absolute pleasure”.
💜 Queer people are often very creative and have contributed massively to the arts, music, painting, spirituality, the occult, mysticism, and more.
💖🤍💙 Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Our trans siblings are currently under attack in both the US and the UK, and we need to stand with them.
If you enjoyed this post, you might like my books.
Dowsing for Divinity 
Happy Pride, Yvonne. I wanted to comment on the following:
Yes. My own understanding of Pagan sexuality is heavily influenced by the fact that I am a Freyjasman at heart. Serving a goddess who considers sex an empowering thing that is live-giving and and worthy of honor in its own right has been truly liberating to me.
I also love that “all acts of love and pleasure,” especially when you look at the surrounding quotes. I also think it’s a beautiful meditation for considering what it means to live an ethical life.
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Totally agree. 🌈😍
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I was led to this charming blog by a web search that turned up your February article on the “Ardanes” – searching out a specific passage from the second raft of Laws that Gardner introduced. The passage I was looking for is not one you cited (and, depending on your source for the Ardanes, which were later expanded, might not have been present in the copy you referenced).
Short version – upon a time, a lot of damage was done to the ability of Queer folk to participate in the Craft by a particularly homophobic passage in Gardnerian Craft law, that called down “the curse of the Goddess” on any who attempted the practice with those of their own sex.
This actually stuck quite hard, and was still a point of debate as late as my own initiation (in, thankfully, a tolerant and diverse and welcoming coven) in 1987. Many today find the Craft a warmly accepting space for Queer folk, but be aware it wasn’t always so, and remember to honor the elders who defied threats and curses to make it so. Happy Pride, and Blessed Be.
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Absolutely. I’m aware of that passage but always assumed that it was a separate section of Gardner’s Book of Shadows, rather then part of the Ardanes.
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