Welcome to Queerly Devoted

A place for exploring queer devotion

Temperance from my forthcoming deck The Gay Marseille Tarot (spring 2024).

Dear friends,

I’m excited to announce this new space for exploring what it means to be queerly devoted. As many of you know, I’m currently working on a book called Queer Devotion (Hay House 2025) and this space will surely hold thoughts and musings bouncing around my head as I’m researching and writing the book. But more than and beyond that, I want this newsletter to be a place for practicing queer devotion by sharing queer devotion with other queer people and/or anyone who is longing for a spirituality radically outside the condoned spiritual (by)passageways of the status quo. Perhaps people like you.

Here, I’ll share the devotional practices that are sustaining me, the questions I’m struggling with, the books and media that are inspiring and challenging me, and the joys and mishaps of living a life devoted to queerness. I’ll explore queer devotion through tarot, myth, prayer, and ritual, through the magical and the mundane, and through non-traditional avenues such as doing drag, protesting, or writing queered versions of the Orphic Hymns as spiritual practices. I hope to eventually have interview conversations with other queer spiritual folks on here, too, and maybe even host a bookclub one day. Some of my posts will be polished, but most of them will have raw edges and imperfect thoughts as an expression of queer devotion itself. Because queer devotion is a devotion of process, not product; wandering, not arriving; transforming, not codifying.

My plan is for all posts to be free and available to everyone, all the time. Paid subscriptions are available for those who would like to show their thanks by helping support this work on an ongoing basis, but they will not get you access to exclusive content, and there are no guaranteed number of posts per month. I’ve learned from experience on Patreon that when I put monetary pressure or productivity quotas on my writing, it twists it from a joyful and creative labor of love into something obligatory and stressful—a.k.a. content creation. And I’m just not doing that to myself anymore.

So here my writing will center joy, curiosity, experimentation, and imperfection. I will post when it feels good, when I have something to say or share, and only then. My writing will as sporadic or steady, as frivolous or fevered as it wants to be. My writing will be free in more ways than one. (That said, I do need to make a living, so if you are willing and able to subscribe at a paid level, I deeply appreciate it.)

My hope is that this will be a space where I can be a little more candid and a lot more long-form than on my Instagram (@the.word.witch), though I plan to continue being just as active on there. Here, I’ll also be able to write about radical and queer topics without coding them to avoid shadow-bans, deleted posts, or account suspensions, and without having to worry (as much) about imposters stealing my work to scam my followers. I also have an existing newsletter that you can join at my website thewordwitchtarot.com, and that will continue to be the best place to stay informed on new classes, offerings, products, and sales. This Queerly Devoted Substack is not a replacement for that newsletter, but a dedicated separate space for exploring queer devotion in all its strange and mysterious beauty.

I know from experience that finding one’s spirituality as a queer person can be a lonely and discouraging thing, so with this space I want to share information, resources, and ideas, and hopefully build some kind of community to make that experience less solitary. Though I’m writing a book on queer devotion, I want to be clear that I am very much a seeker, too. I am learning, growing, and changing my mind all the time. That too, I believe, is part of being queerly devoted: emphasizing gnosis over gurus, inquiry over dogma.

So here, I want to invite questions, discussion, and respectful disagreement. I want to share my ideas because I believe that ideas are seeds that need to be free in order to cross-pollinate, germinate, and grow. I do not have all the answers (no one does), so I also want to amplify the work of people who challenge me, inspire me, and have different views than me. I want to turn my own mind upside down and inside out as I pursue this transcendent and embodied thing called queer devotion.

Spirituality can be described as believing in things felt but unseen, even though the empirical, scientific world tells us there’s no proof. If you think about it, queerness—that deeply felt knowledge that we’re different than who the world says we are, that we’re so much more than what the world says is possible—is something spiritual indeed.

I’m happy you’re here to explore it with me.

Queerly devoted,

Charlie