Queer Tarot Part I
By Sam Correia
Maybe your experience with tarot is pulling a card from a friend’s deck at a sleepover, both of you pouring over the guidebook to see if that particular card means that your crush will like you back. Or maybe you’ve had your cards read for you by a tarot reader whose shop you passed while you were taking a day trip to Salem. Maybe you’re a seasoned tarot reader, or maybe you’ve only heard of the Death card. No matter what your relationship to tarot is, I think you’ll enjoy this interview with Boston-based tarot reader (and fellow librarian) Sam Valentine.
I first heard Sam Valentine speak when they were working for the History Project, Boston’s LGBTQ archive. Sam was doing a virtual presentation in 2022 on “The Magic of Queer Tarot: LGBTQ+ Imagery & Imagination in the Cards.” Though now she works for the Public Library of Brookline, Sam is still a practiced tarot reader. We chatted on a Friday morning in May about queer tarot - what it means, how to build your practice, and what tarot can mean for you. As Cassandra Snow says in their book “Queering the Tarot,” “Queering, then, means taking what our society has given us and finding our own way, outside of society’s limits.”
Sam C: How long have you been interested in tarot, and how do you view your tarot practice?
Sam V: So I’ve been practicing tarot for, I would say 7 or 8 years as a personal practice. I started out reading tarot just for myself, and then for close friends. And it has expanded to reading for clients, people I know and people I don’t. And it’s evolved over time. I would say my practice is based in entertainment. I think tarot is a great storytelling tool, and I use a lot of levity and fun to engage with it. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t bring deep messages; I believe that tarot is a tool that can be a fun and playful way to engage with yourself in deeper ways, which has been very healing to me personally and has helped me connect with my clients at a community care level. So I treat it as a tool for interpersonal discussion and growth.
I find tarot to be a really engaging, fun tool that can add to and enhance any personal work that you’re doing. It’s also widely perceived as a spiritual tool, but it doesn’t always have to be that. In fact, if you asked me when I started if it was a spiritual matter for me, I would have said no. I do use tarot to connect with folks who are all along the spirituality spectrum, if we want to call it that. And many folks that I engage with would not consider themselves spiritual in the colloquial sense. But I do think, if you’re a person who has a craving for permission to engage with spirituality, tarot can be a help for opening you up to that. That’s been true for me; tarot can open you to a deeper spirituality than you might have expected. I think for many queer folks, a desire to engage with spirituality is often varied for very good reasons. Of course that’s not something that everyone wants, it’s not something that I thought I wanted.
I appreciate that; I know everyone has a unique way that they view their practice. Why do you think queer people are so drawn to tarot?
Tarot can be a way to engage with feelings or ways of thinking about yourself that are maybe hard to access for queer people who have often been told to not trust themselves, not believe themselves. Or to not connect to something beyond themselves, beyond the personal and into the collective. So it’s a tool that can be a safer container for queer folks because it’s outside of the bounds of many traditional ways of engaging.
In the history of tarot, there’s been many different ways of approaching it; all are valid and none are bad. However, there have been really structured ways of approaching tarot and I think now, in this surge of engagement and reimagining of tarot, there’s been a deliberate tearing down of those structures—which for me is what I’m drawn to. I think tarot can help take down binary ways of thinking; engaging with it as a tool that has a strong structure, but that you can engage with that structure however you want is what really draws queer people in. Especially now, when we see a lot of really great independent tarot decks designed specifically in ways that are inviting and affirming to queer tarot readers that go beyond more rigid interpretation. So as a tool, it inherently draws people in, and what we’re seeing now in terms of what queer people are doing with tarot specifically draws people even closer.
You mentioned history; I know that there are people who study the history of the tarot, and I’m very much interested in the archiving aspect of it. Do you know if there are people who are into archiving these practices or cards? I know that the history of tarot is not very well known; do you know if people are literally preserving tarot decks in any way? Are there ways that people are trying to study this tradition? From what I know it is a very cultural Romani tradition.
Yeah that’s a big question; I am not a tarot historian so I want to leave it to the people who are better suited to navigate those waters. But I know that there’s a complex history of tarot in terms of different origin points that people point to. It’s a contested history, and when engaging with tarot, it’s important to be aware of that and approach it in a way that’s humbly acknowledging what you don’t know. It’s also important to respect the various cultural practices that tarot has been part of, as well as the ways in which tarot has historically been appropriated and removed from their place of origin.
It’s also interesting because a lot of “earlier” decks—again it's a contested history—are held in very monied and famous institutions. The Morgan Library has a tarot deck in their collection that they’ve created programming around. So there’s a known interest about these materials that are within collections. But knowing people who work in the tarot space, every tarot reader is an archive of their own information that they’ve gathered about tarot, and people who have created their own decks have their own personal archive of the art that went into that, the research that went into that. That kind of dispersal is a valid custodial archival model. There are many people working in the space now who have a wealth of material in their own archive.
I remember seeing your program on queer tarot when you were working at the History Project. I was thinking about how this might look in the future, in terms of what that preservation might look like.
It’s interesting because I can only assume there are queer archives out there that do have tarot-related materials. Especially with the popularization, for better or for worse, of tarot in the 1970s in America. A lot of queer archives have a lot of rich material from that.
When you’re doing a reading for someone else, do you have a formula? Or, how do you go about reading for someone else, for people who might be reading the article who have no idea how to read for other people.
Early in my tarot practice, I read just for and with—I say with because I do think tarot is something that you’re coming to together—friends that I was close to in my home, in a comfortable place. And that kind of evolved my ethos of how to approach tarot as a cozy offering for someone, to someone, with someone. So for me, it’s not like you are bringing something and I have an answer. I don’t think that I necessarily have any answers; I’m not someone who is specifically clairvoyant, though I do have my moments! It’s more of an offering of what I think the tarot might want you to know. That could just be an affirmation and reflection of how you’re feeling. I think sometimes that’s all that’s needed, like a witnessing and a mirroring, and sometimes tarot can do that really well.
In other circumstances, tarot might bring something that offers a challenging perspective. And bringing that to someone in a loving, fun, and entertaining way is my goal. I’m not gonna sit here and tell someone whose story I don’t, and can’t know, what they should do based on a card. So I approach tarot in a low-stakes and, dare I say, chill way, about whatever’s being offered in that moment, however I’m interpreting it and however it’s coming to the person.
The 2nd half of Sam Valentine’s interview
Find Sam Valentine’s tarot work at sam-valentine.com or on instagram @valentine.tarot
