The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 485, titled:
Venus Retrograde in Aries and Queer History
With Chris Brennan and Elly Higgins
Episode originally released on April 6, 2025
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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
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Transcribed by Teresa “Peri” Lardo
Transcription released April 25th, 2025
Copyright © 2025 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey. My name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. Joining me today is astrologer Elly Higgins, and we’re gonna be talking about Venus retrograde in Aries and queer history. Hey Elly; thanks for joining me.
ELLY HIGGINS: Hi, Chris. Thank you so much for having me.
CB: Yeah. I’m really actually excited to do this topic with you because I did the whole big Venus retrograde in Aries in history episode with Nick Dagan Best in January just as Venus was moving into its shadow phase. And I had noticed as we went through like, a century of this Venus retrograde that repeats every eight years that there were some really interesting and important turning points in queer history at different points. And then you wrote me afterwards and pointed out there’s actually a lot more that you had found. So over the past month, you’ve been compiling a bunch of research, and that’s part of what we’re gonna go through today is you’ve found a much more extensive set of events tied in with this Venus retrograde, which I think after we go through today will help us to see the greater context of some of the things that have been happening recently in this current one. But since this is your first time on the podcast, I wanted to introduce you to my audience, so tell me a little bit about yourself and your background in this area.
EH: Of course, yeah. Thank you again so much for having me. And of course, I can’t fill Nick’s shoes, but hopefully will bring some interesting insights.
CB: Right.
EH: But yeah. My name is Elly, and I am a consulting astrologer and independent researcher/historian of queer cultural history. As an astrologer, I do one-on-one consultations and workshops, but also I host a queer astrology podcast called Star Gays: The Queer Astrology Archives Podcast where I talk a lot about the astrology of important queer artists, activists, and thinkers. So I often say that my astrology is rooted in Hellenistic techniques and teachings, but it’s really guided by queer liberation struggles, because one of the primary ways that I access astrology is through queer historical and archival research. You know, rummaging through the archives of queer art, thought, and activism has been a lifelong journey of mine; it’s always been a way that I’ve located myself and rooted into who I am and where I come from.
You know, in undergrad, these were things that I studied, and then during and after that time I spent a lot of time volunteering at queer archives. So you know, I was reading queer theorists like Jose Esteban Munoz who wrote things like, “The time of the past helps mount a critique of the space of the present. This is not a revisionist history or a metahistory, but a critical deployment of the past for the purpose of engaging the present and imagining the future,” which he was using to deploy the knowledge gleaned from queer ephemeral archives for the purposes of reanimating and reviving a utopian impulse for the future. So when I began to learn astrology, it only made sense to layer astrology onto that kind of queer art, thought, and activism, that has always guided me and to use astrology to understand the cycles of time that are playing out in those stories better. And so my approach to astrology is very much informed by Munoz’s way of thinking about time and about the archives.
This specific research that we’re gonna get into today really grew out of research that I started doing for Star Gays where I was really trying to understand the chart for the Stonewall uprisings better, and we’ll get into all of those details a little bit later in this episode. But I found some really fascinating connections between the chart for Stonewall and the Venus retrograde that took place in the spring of 1969, and that really just sent me on an astrological rabbit hole trying to find more connections in history. And then certainly, you know, living through this current Venus retrograde, it feels really impossible to ignore all of these themes that are coming up, so.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. When Nick and I recorded the original episode on January 10th, which was around the day that Venus was at its maximum elongation but it was before the inauguration of Trump, and so much has happened since then, and yeah, so this is partially a follow up and a continuation of this whole series of episodes I’ve been doing on this Venus retrograde over the past few months. And you know, one of my challenges with the big historical episodes that I’ve been doing is I spent most of my adult life from like, my late teens through my early 30s specializing in and writing my book on Hellenistic astrology and specializing in ancient history. And when we do these big historical episodes where we look at repetitions and correlations with planetary alignments, I do my best to study the different historical areas but they’re often areas that I don’t necessarily specialize in myself, at least at expertly as I do with like, ancient astrology. So one of the things I wanted to do here and one of the things I wanna be able to do more often is consult with people that have more of a background and know more of the nuances and details and can really fill in a lot of the gaps that I have in my knowledge when it comes to different histories and things like that. So that one of the things that I’m excited to revisit this topic today and go through some of these Venus retrogrades over the past history in the Aries cycle every eight years, just because I think you were able to flesh out a lot of really interesting details that help much better contextualize our current times.
Yeah. So all right, where should we get started? Should we jump right into it? We had talked a little bit about whether we would go in like, reverse chronology from the present to the past like Nick and I did, or if we would start back in the past and then work our way forward to the present, and I think we decided – you felt like it would be better to go and start with the earliest retrogrades, right?
EH: Yeah. I mean, you know, you can trace this history much farther back than we’re going to today, but I think kind of starting at the beginning of the 20th century and working our way forward we’re gonna see there’s kind of like, a cast of characters that will recur at each retrograde. And so I think starting moving chronologically I think will be helpful in this time.
CB: Okay. Well, and here’s the graphic from the original episode, just to remind people. Here’s a graphic that shows the Venus retrograde in Aries years where it started in 1905 – that was the first Venus retrograde where it went retrograde in Taurus, but it retrograded back and stationed direct in Aries towards the end of the 40-day cycle. Then the next Venus retrograde in Aries was eight years later in 1913. Then eight years after that, there was another one in Aries in 1921. Then 1929, 1937, 1945, 1953, 1961. ‘69, ‘77, ‘85, ‘93, 2001, 2009, 2017, and then the most recent current one which is 2025.
So where do we start? Are we gonna – did we have anything? One of the things we ran into is there was an issue the further back you go, the less well-documented queer history actually is, which is one of the challenges to researching this topic, right?
EH: Yes, definitely. I mean, we will definitely talk about all of that, but like, I mean, I know this is something that you run into even just in the regular history episodes is like, you have to, you know, it takes a lot to find specific dates and specific people. And when people or organizations are marginalized, those histories tend to be less well recorded, and also less well preserved, and so finding these histories becomes even more challenging. So yeah, going back, you know, pre the like, 1953 retrograde, it becomes actually more and more challenging to find things even though there definitely are these themes kind of coming up every eight years. And then also interestingly, actually like, the 2001 to present day retrograde – with the exception of what’s happening right now – it’s also challenging to find some of those things as like, websites from like, 2001 are not – those like, links don’t work anymore. I ran into that a whole bunch, of like, thinking that I was finding something, and then like, you know, because it was post-internet but a long time ago internet in the grand scheme of internet time, those websites don’t work anymore. And so there’s this interesting like, from 1953 to 1993 is actually when it is easiest to do this research and find things. But also —
CB: Right.
EH: — part…
CB: And that also brings up a topic that you brought up at one point in the notes, which is one thing that’s happening today during the current Venus retrograde is erasure. That there’s like, an actual attempt to erase the existence of queer people or certain types of – in this retrograde, especially trans people – but that that’s an issue in general with the history where there may not be as much documentation because of active attempts to repress or erase things.
EH: Definitely. Yeah. Yeah, definitely in this current Venus retrograde we’re seeing that a lot of active attempts to erase trans people, whether that’s, you know, from the Stonewall monument website or like, book bans. But you know, this is a thing that has happened over and over again in history. But yeah, so you know, especially at a moment when trans people specifically and really all queer people are being targeted and our stories and our histories are being erased, it becomes all the more important to document and preserve our stories and to really show the like, cyclical nature of some of these themes. You know, like, this is not the first time that we are dealing with a lot of this, and we can trace that back through the Venus retrograde —
CB: Right.
EH: — Yeah.
CB: And maybe we should define like, how are we using the term “queer” and what is that including in the context of our discussion today?
EH: Totally. Yeah. So the way that I think about queerness is like, all of the like, people and like, relational styles that are non-normative that have been marginalized. So we’re talking about, you know, homosexual relationships, and also people whose relationships to gender are more complicated. So, you know, trans people, nonbinary people. I think one of the things that we’re going to see as we go through this history is the definition of the like, queer community kind of comes up at some of these early Venus retrograde moments and gets kind of like, redefined and redefined and redefined, to such a point where right now we are seeing this interesting division between, you know, these like, right-wing conservative – the like, LGB without the T movement, and then the like, trans liberation movement as like, becoming a separate entity. But I think what we’ll see is that if we go back in history, sexuality and gender are both much more complicated than we give them credit for, and much more interesting when we allow them to be complicated. And so we’re going to be talking about all forms of queerness in that way.
And I think just with that, the like, language that we have to talk about queerness has changed throughout time, so you know, when we go back to the like, early 1900s, the language that’s being used is “inversions” or “inverts.” And then we’re talking about homosexuality. And then we’re talking about queerness and transness. But I think it’s just really important to be clear that there are trans people present at each of these eight year intervals, and the language that I will be using throughout this episode is reflective of the language that people were using at that point in time. But I think we need to be really clear about the fact that even though the language has changed and developed over the last 125 years, queer people and trans people are not new but have always existed and have existed in many forms and communities and ways for all of time. And I think also just with that, like, I think it’s important to say like, these are not just like, historical facts that we’re talking about in this episode. But these have like, implications for real people, especially the 2025 stuff that we’ll talk about towards the end. But you know, even going back in history, like, we are going to be discussing homophobic and transphobic violence, and we’ll be talking about real people who experience those things. And yeah, so I just wanna like, be clear about that.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. I think that’s really important, because as we were preparing for this over the past few days, you know, I’d mentioned that one of my interests was especially since so much of the current moment, a lot of the vitriol is being directed towards trans people under the current retrograde that part of my interest in revisiting this and going more deeper into this cycle with you and the history was some of the ways in which trans people have come up in these eight year repetitions under this retrograde, and whether that would be then a large part or the main focus for us today, but one of the points that you made is that one of the issues that’s happening right now is those attempts to almost like, separate the trans movement from the broader LGB whatever movement, you know. But in fact, those histories have been intertwined and are often interlocked throughout history so that even though there’s attempts to split those things up today and to like, you know, try to create different categories of like, this is okay now and this is not, or what have you, that we shouldn’t necessarily give into those attempts to make those false distinctions because of the broader history of how things were interlocked.
EH: Definitely. Definitely. Yeah. Thank you for articulating that so clearly.
CB: Yeah. And then also to your point about Venus retrograde – or about the existence of, you know, trans history going back more than recent times, which is another like, false sort of narrative that somehow this is like, a new thing that’s come out of nowhere or something like that, one of the things I was particularly struck by when I was doing a lot of Venus retrograde research under the last Venus retrograde when Demetra and I did a deep dive into the myth of Inanna in ancient Mesopotamian history about 2000 BC – so like, 4,000 years ago – is I found this fairly explicit reference in this hymn to Inanna, which is the goddess associated with the planet Venus and which is specifically the myth is associated with and is thought to describe part of Venus’s retrograde cycle as a sort of parable, which came up in 2023 because the Barbie movie like, weirdly kind of echoed this narrative in this really interesting way. But I found when we were researching that in 2023 this actual reference within the context of Inanna and Venus retrogrades and things like that a reference to trans people within the context of this sort of like, religious concept in the ancient world. So I tried to remember that, but I think I found the wrong quote when I tried to read it again in one of the recent episodes; maybe it was the one with Nick. So I’d like to read it here again, if that’s okay, just to set up precedent that what we’re gonna be talking about with Venus retrogrades and in some instances issues related to queer history or even trans issues in particular actually goes back over 4,000 years.
EH: Definitely.
CB: All right. So here is the hymn to Inanna, and it was written by a woman; it was actually the first person in history who signed their name to a literary work, and it was the – which is striking in and of itself – from about roughly like, 2300 BCE. And it was from a priestess known as Enheduanna, who was the head of like, a cult associated with the Moon in ancient Mesopotamia. So she wrote this hymn to Inanna, because she experienced this like, Venus retrograde type experience where she was in charge of this place and especially was the head priestess of this Moon group, basically. But then at one point, she’s like, overthrown by a man who kicks her out and treats her badly. But then eventually through going through this journey she’s able to like, reclaim her power and again become the head of this. And as a result of that, she dedicates herself to the goddess Venus, essentially.
So she writes this hymn to Venus. And part of she says, it starts off – she says, “The great-hearted mistress, the impetuous lady, proud among the Anuna gods and preeminent in all the lands. Exalted among the great princes, the magnificent lady -” Venus, and Inanna, “who gathers up the divine powers of heaven and earth and rivals the other great gods. She is the mightiest among the great gods, and she makes their verdicts final.”
So it goes on, and it just says all these great, laudatory things about Venus; it says, “She makes the great divine powers. She holds the shepherd’s crook and she is their magnificent, preeminent one.” So then at one point, she starts talking about the things that are attributed, that Inanna and Venus do, and she says, “Lady preeminent through the power of An and Enlil, without you, no destiny at all is determined. No clever council is granted in favor. To run, to escape, to quiet, and to pacify are yours, Inanna. To rove around, to rush up, to fall down, and to something, a companion are yours, Inanna.” There’s like, a blank there, and I’m not sure if it’s implied to like, bed a companion are associated with Inanna. “To open up roads and paths, a place of peace for the journey, a companion for the weak are yours, Inanna. To keep paths and ways in good order, to shatter earth and to make it firm are yours, Inanna. To destroy, the build up, to tear out, and to settle are yours, Inanna. To turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man are yours, Inanna. Desirability and arousal, goods and property are yours, Inanna. Gain, profit, great wealth and greater wealth are yours, Inanna.”
And it keeps going on with other things that often end up turning into things that we still even today associate with Venus. But there’s just like, this one line that kind of, you know, jumps out to you if you’re reading as a modern person where it says very explicitly to turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man, and attributing that to the goddess Venus, which is closely associated with the Venus retrograde cycle where Venus starts as a – what is it – as an evening star and then retrogrades and descends under the beams and into obscurity and then emerges on the other side as a morning star. And there’s just something very important about that that goes all the way back to 4000 BCE. And I think that provides some really important context for some of the history of the past century that we’re about to talk about today.
EH: Yeah. That’s a really just like, fascinating find. And certainly, like, for anyone who has been studying astrology even not knowing that myth, the like, association with Venus and sexuality is one that gets made, you know, somewhat regularly. But then to see going back, you know, as far as like, 4,000 years ago, that’s really powerful.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, and it shows that in the ancient world, there were already discussions and concepts of things like gender fluidity or gender ambiguity. Elsewhere, there’s like, discussions about the priests and priestesses associated with the Inanna cult, or other people in that city sometimes like, dressing the way that the opposite gender is usually expected to dress. So like, in this procession, like, men dressing like women and women dressing like men. And so there’s this broader theme that sometimes comes up about gender fluidity and gender ambiguity that I think is really core with Venus retrogrades going all the way back to 4000 BCE, but that we’ll see come up again very strongly over the past century under this Venus retrograde in Aries in particular. But the point is just that it’s not a new phenomenon, and just because it’s something that’s been suppressed or erased by other cultural or historical periods where that was suppressed doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s something brand new.
EH: Definitely. Definitely.
CB: Yeah. All right. So shall we jump into the chronology? I don’t think we had much for 1905, but I had one new one I found in 1913, and I think you had one for then as well, right?
EH: Yeah. I mean, the one thing that I found one small thing for 1905 that is I think slightly off-topic, but I think is gonna come up so much throughout the rest of them that I think it might be helpful to start there.
CB: All right. What was your 1905 event that you wanted to mention?
EH: Yeah. So the one thing that I found from 1905 was a quote actually from Michael Bronski’s Queer History of the United States, and he’s talking about Theodore Roosevelt, the president, and so he says,
“For Roosevelt, manhood and the strong, athletic, white male body were inseparable from America and patriotism.” He goes on. “The conflation of robust maleness, heterosexuality, and whiteness set a standard for citizenship that was the antithesis of the invert.” And, of course, “invert” there is one of these early words for homosexuality, queerness, gender variants. And he goes on; he’s talking about Roosevelt and about eugenics and says,
“Eugenics produced a scientific model of ‘fitness’ that would be used for the next century to describe and limit the lives of LGBT people in numerous substantial ways. Their obvious ‘unfitness’ denied them full citizenship and rendered them medically inferior, legally unequal, morally suspect, and socially outcast with no right to reproduce.”
So Roosevelt embraced that eugenic thought, and for Roosevelt, masculinity and nationhood were completely tied in with worries about racial degeneracy. And in a speech that he gave to the National Congress of Mothers on May 13th, 1905, which is during this Venus retrograde, Roosevelt bemoaned the idea of family planning and claimed that “if the average family in which there are children contained but two children, the nation as a whole would decrease in population so rapidly that in two or three generations, it would very deservedly be on the point of extinction.”
So he’s talking about like, eugenics in the context of racism. But what Bronski points out in other moments in this text is that homosexuality is kind of like, implied in this. And just the idea of queerness and otherness as a danger to the idea of a nation and a conflation of heterosexuality and whiteness with citizenship – we’re going to see these themes just come up over and over and over again.
CB: Yeah. As well as, I mean, talking about essentially like, population decline and saying we can’t let there be gay people because then if not enough people are reproducing, then society will fall apart. And that’s actually kind of funny – not funny, you know, “funny,” because of some of the current discussions about that by some of the people in charge today. Like, that’s one of Musk’s things that he keeps repeating over and over again is how —
EH: Right.
CB: — population is declining and everyone needs to start having babies, otherwise society’s gonna implode. But it’s interesting seeing the similar language here but used in the context of why we have to, you know, essentially suppress people of their rights or of their own preferences or inclinations.
EH: Absolutely. Yeah.
CB: So that’s amazing. So the speech is May 13th, 1905, so yeah, that’s in that range. Because essentially, this Venus retrograde in Aries is always basically the first half of the year every eight years in those increments starting 1905 and then forward in eight year increments. So that for sure fell during that time frame, and here’s the chart for that. I’m gonna actually show the chart for those watching the video viewers where we see Venus is retrograde; it’s at 28 degrees of Aries. It’s four days away from stationing direct in Aries, so it’s practically stationary, and it’s conjunct Mercury at 28 Aries on that very day.
So that’s a really good find; that was a good – I’m glad you found that one, since that’s right at the start of this entire, you know, series. Because prior to this time when Venus went retrograde, it was entirely in Taurus, and that was the first time – 1905 – that it started in Taurus but then retrograded back and stationed direct at the very end of Aries.
EH: Yeah. So we get to, we start to see some of these themes coming up, but they’re not quite as explicit as they will become in the later retrogrades when Venus is primarily in Aries. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. Shall we jump forward eight years to the next Venus retrograde in Aries of 1913?
EH: Yes. Let’s do it.
CB: All right. What do you got for that one? What did you find?
EH: So this one is just a quick little one that will become much more relevant later on. But this is that in March of 1913, the Massachusetts General Laws chapter 207, section 11 was passed. So this is more commonly known as the 1913 Law, and this is a Massachusetts law that was enacted in 1913 and repealed in 2008 that invalidated the marriage of non-residents if the marriage was invalid in the state where they lived. So it comes from this period of time where there’s a lot of…
CB: Racism?
EH: Yeah, racism.
CB: Yeah.
EH: And frustration, anger, around interracial marriage. But it was actually largely unenforced until between 2004, 2008, when it was used to deny marriage licenses to out-of-state same-sex couples. So you know, same-sex marriage becomes legal in Masachusetts in 2004, but during this time when it’s only a couple of states that have same-sex mariage being legal, they basically start using this law again to deny people who might travel from out of state to get married if the marriage is not legal in their state. So yeah, the governor, Mitt Romney at that time, said that Massachusetts should not become the Las Vegas of same-sex marriage. So there’s this law that’s from almost a hundred years ago – or more than a hundred years ago now, but certainly almost a hundred years ago then – that was originally designed to be racist and then was brought back around to be homophobic.
CB: Wow. That’s incredible. So it was like, a law, yeah, that later gets invoked against same-sex marriage even though it was originally for something else. But then we see echoes of it, what, nearly a century later and still being relevant in terms of that. Interesting. Okay. That’s a good one. Did you have anything else about that?
EH: We’ll circle back around to that one when we get to 2001.
CB: Okay. I was doing some searches, and I found this interesting one for this 1913 Venus retrograde that happened in the spring where the head of the Austrian intelligence agency at the time, whose name was Alfred Redl, was exposed as a Russian double agent but also a homosexual. And in 1913, he committed suicide after being outed, basically, for this. And he died on May 25th, 1913, when Venus had just stationed direct in Aries just nine days earlier conjunct Mars. So this event had a major impact on the perception of homosexuality, because it fueled the idea that they were like, security risks in the intelligence agencies, or when it came to blackmail or other things like that, which will be a recurring theme that we’ll see come up many other times during subsequent retrogrades because that stereotype then persisted for many years. And it showed, you know, this shows kind of like, the social climate that people faced then in 1913 as well as the dangers that queer people faced.
EH: Definitely. And even just the framing of like, queer people as a security risk, which like, echoes what Roosevelt was saying eight years earlier.
CB: Right, that this is something that’s like, dangerous or a moral failing that’s dangerous to society in some ways and that oftentimes there’s these different arguments about why people need to be deprived on their rights in order to protect society or protect different groups in society supposedly, even though ultimately many of those arguments don’t make sense or like, aren’t true.
EH: Absolutely. Yeah.
CB: All right. And here’s the chart for this. He passed away on May 25, 1913, and we see Venus here at 27 Aries having just stationed direct. So the whole retrograde, basically, led up to that and was the whole controversy, and we see Mars there at 13 and the nodes were traveling through the early part of Aries. So that means there had been a eclipse there in Aries and Libra just a couple months earlier, a month or two earlier.
And I meant to show a chart – this was our electional chart for today. We chose the best election of the month to record this episode, and I think we started, what, just after three? So it’s probably something like this with a Moon-Jupiter conjunction today, Leo rising, and the Sun and the Moon applying to that sextile with Jupiter.
All right. So why don’t we jump forward? So now we jump eight years later to the next Venus retrograde in Aries, and this brings us to 1921. I found – I was doing some searches and I found a few things in this part. You were not finding as much, necessarily, during ‘21, right?
EH: Yeah. You should share what you found.
CB: Okay. So what I found is some sources were saying that there was a club called the Dorian Gray nightclub that was opened in Berlin in 1921, and that there was this general – post World War One – this general growth in social spaces catering to gay individuals in the 1920s which provided areas where queer people could meet.
So there’s some like, conflicting sources on the dates, but some of the sources were saying 1921. And relevant to this also in Berlin later that year, there was a person named Magnus Hirschfeld who organized the First International Congress for Sexual Reform on the basis of sexual science also in Berlin in September of 1921. So this is outside of the retrograde period, but it’s happening later in the same city in the same year as the nightclub I was mentioning earlier. And according to Wikipedia, this later in 1928 spurred the creation of an organization called the World League for Sexual Reform in 1928. And the organization aimed to advocate for sexual reform which included homosexual rights.
So I wanted to point this out, because since it’s happening the same year as 1921 in the same city as the Dorian Gray nightclub, there may have been some overlap there between like, people that attended this first conference later this year and people that frequented places like the nightclub, and it’s kind of suggestive that the environment in Berlin at this time is fostering some things. And I think that’s gonna become relevant, because Berlin will come up subsequently in the next two or three retrogrades as well. But here at least, we’re seeing a period of potential opening up and progress being made in terms of things in this part of the world at this time.
On the other hand, in England in 1921, there were some attempts to criminalize lesbians, basically. And ultimately, the attempt to do this by adding some things to existing laws ended up failing, but it highlighted some of the legal challenges faced by queer people at the time. So I thought that was also relevant, because that was something that would have come up during the Venus retrograde, and then it was again, like, settled later in that year.
EH: Definitely. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the things that you’re pointing to, especially with the Magnus Hirschfeld example, that we’ll kind of see come up over and over again – which makes sense, because, you know, the Venus retrograde is a moment where Venus and the Sun come together, and so we like, lose sight of Venus for a little bit, but it’s also kind of like, a New Moon for Venus. And so with that, like, things are born during that time that we might not necessarily see in that exact moment, but then if you look, you know, six months or eight months later, that thing has now, you know, Venus is visible again, and the thing that we didn’t quite know was being formed during the retrograde has kind of taken shape and taken form.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. I think that’s a huge thing with conjunctions and especially with cazimis is that it lays the seeds and the foundation for something that will grow and develop, but like a seed that you plant in the ground, it’s not usually visible at that time. There’s something subtle or easily overlooked that people don’t fully realize how significant it is at the time, and it’s only in retrospect, you know, sometimes many years later that you can sometimes look back and see that that was an important starting point or turning point. Yeah. But that’s the recurring theme that we’ll see with Venus going under the beams during the retrograde cycle is that sometimes there can be a hidden or obscure component to things.
EH: Definitely.
CB: All right. Anything before we jump forward else that you wanted to mention?
EH: I guess just quickly I’ll mention that on April 30th, 1921, Proust publishes the first part of Sodom and Gomorrah, which is part of Remembrance of Things Past, or In Search of Lost Time. And this like, you know, his whole huge magnum opus. But this particular part of, the themes of homosexuality kind of come to the forefront, where previously they’d been a little bit more hidden. But now they kind of come out and it’s a little bit more explicit, and this is really like, his extended essay on homosexuality.
CB: Wow. Okay. Yeah, I just looked up the date for that, and so that’s right in the middle of the retrograde. But it’s just like, a couple weeks before Venus stations direct in Aries.
EH: Yeah.
CB: Nice. Okay. All right. So that was 1921. Now we jump ahead eight years to the next time Venus went retrograde in Aries, which was in 1929 in the first half of the year, but the first few months of the year especially.
All right. So what did you find for 1929?
EH: Yeah. So I found a couple of things. One of the biggest things is about this book called The Well of Loneliness, which often gets described as like, the first ever lesbian novel. But also many scholars have suggested that it’s possible to read this story through a trans lens, and so it deals with issues of gender and sexuality, social ostracization, and also queer youth, and really makes clear the inextricable nature of gender and sexuality. So this book, which was published in 1928 by British author Radclyffe Hall, was initially seen as obscene and ruled to be obscene. But then on April 19th, 1929, which I believe is the day of the Venus cazimi for that retrograde, a New York City court rules that it is, in fact, not obscene, and this ruling just allows the book to become so much more popular and allows so many people to read this book and to be introduced to the idea of this different type of sexuality. This is still the point where it’s being referred to as “sexual inversion,” but I think one of the most crucial lines in the book is Hall writes, “Give us also the right to our existence.” And we’re gonna see that kind of theme come up over and over again, like, having the right to exist, the right to come out, to be visible and seen, and also just live and not be ostracized or persecuted.
CB: Wow. That’s incredible.
EH: Yeah.
CB: That’s a great find. I can’t believe it was right on the cazimi. I just pulled up the chart, and I can’t believe you found that. So yeah, here’s – it was later in the day it goes exact on the 19th and early into the 20th, but we see Venus actually starts the day in Taurus but then it retrogrades back into Aries and then conjoins the Sun at like, 29 Aries on the 19th and 20th. So that’s right on the cazimi in the middle of the retrograde cycle.
EH: Yeah. Yeah, that one just felt really powerful.
CB: Nice. Good work.
EH: Yeah.
CB: Okay. And —
EH: And then —
CB: — what else do you got?
EH: Yeah, so along with that, there’s actually another novel that is relevant to this time period. So we don’t have the exact date, but in April of 1929, Passing by Nella Larsen was published, and this is a novel where the central plot of this is about like, the main character passing or not passing as white. So she’s black, but she’s attempting to pass as white. So certainly the like, we’re gonna see again and again how kind of like, racism and sexuality get tied together during this retrograde. But also there’s a like, homoerotic subtext to the novel between the main characters, Irene and Clare, and that kind of theme runs throughout the novel even though it is not explicitly discussed. And some scholars have written about that and like, written essentially that like, using this – or reading this homoerotic subtext, you might understand the novel’s central metaphor of passing under a different identity which could occur at a variety of levels, including sexuality.
And then, of course, also just like, the like, word “passing” has a particular meaning in a trans context, so the idea of like, passing as a specific gender, which this novel isn’t specifically referring to, but just that interesting connection of that word through time, yeah.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. And the significance that would take. But maybe also just the broader meaning sometimes of, I don’t know how to phrase it, but like of a minority group and passing for whatever the dominant thing is or something like that or instances like that as a recurring theme potentially with Venus retrograde symbolically.
EH: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. That’s good. The only one I found in this area that was important was that again back in Germany during the Weimar Republic, particularly in Berlin again, there was a relative degree of tolerance towards queer people at this time which allowed for the existence and some flourishing of queer subcultures. But then this period was also marked by increasing political instability as, you know, the Nazis started their rise essentially, which would later have hugely devastating consequences especially during World War Two and once the Nazis fully came into governmental power just a few years later in the early 1930s.
So there was this existing law, basically, that criminalized homosexual acts in Germany called Paragraph 175, and around this time, there was a movement in the German legislature to repeal it and to actually get rid of this law, which didn’t end up happening but it shows you part of the context in this time period of that’s sort of built on the previous Venus retrograde in Aries and that things were sort of opening up and becoming better for a period of time, that there was some forward progress and momentum that was being made, at least during this retrograde in 1921.
EH: Definitely.
CB: And sorry, yeah, ‘29. I got mixed up there for a moment. All right. But yeah, unfortunately, that was 1929, and as we know from history, things would change by the time you jump forward eight years to the next Venus retrograde in Aries where you get to 1937. Did you have anything? I found several things during this one. Are there any that you wanted to mention?
EH: Yeah. Just in the US – and this also comes from Michael Bronski’s Queer History – bars and clubs and all of these different night spots that were catering to homosexual clientele were frequently targets of police raids. And these police raids were instigated by public outrage or politicians promising to make public spaces “safe” for women, children, and families. But of course, what was actually dangerous for homosexuals was these like, legal and moral crusades that emerged in the late 1930s, which Bronski says “climaxed in the summer of 1937 when widespread panic broke out over alleged sexual psychopaths who would harm and murder children. The frightening image of the sexual psychopath was clearly linked to the emerging figure of the male homosexual, and these campaigns were connected to the local police assaults on homosexual venues, particularly in Los Angeles.” And of course, these attacks are always in coded language. You know, they never mention homosexuality, but when they’re talking about sexual psychopaths, it’s like, commonly understood that they are talking about homosexual men. So I know you found a bunch of stuff in Germany, but also in the US around this time we’re seeing one of these rises of police raids and police violence on queers being in public spaces.
CB: Yeah. That’s incredible that you found that in, as it says, the summer of 1937, so that’s during and just after that Venus retrograde. And also the echoes that we can see here of the false like, claims about like, protecting children, as if that’s like, the focus or that it’s some sort of like, pandemic or something that’s taking place and the false sense of alarm in order to, again, get people to take away or suppress the rights of other people.
EH: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So 1937, the main thing I found was just the Nazis came to power in the early 1930s. Hitler, like, very quickly takes over and essentially dismantles the government, or at least the opposition party, so that he’s in control and will not relinquish it. And in 1937, there was a real intensification of the persecution of homosexual men during this time where that law in Germany that during the previous retrograde they were talking about repealing – Paragraph 175 – suddenly, they’re invoking it and they’re using it to make a surge in arrests of homosexual men and essentially to persecute them during this time. So it greatly increases. But then also one of the striking things that I found is that the use of concentration camps to imprison homosexual men was increasing at this time, and one of the things that I found is that the use of the now very famous pink triangle to mark prisoners in concentration camps as homosexuals, while this is often attributed to 1938, it was actually – their imprisonment was actually happening in 1937. It was happening a little bit earlier. So for example, in January of 1937, the SS arrested 230 men under the Nazi-revised criminal codes Paragraph 175 which banned homosexual relationships. And then in February of 1937, Heinrich Himmler spoke of homosexuality as “depravity” and as “a plague.” And he said that the persecution and even murder of homosexuals was desirable because gay people hindered efforts to breed a dominantly racially strong nation. And he said, “All things which take place in the sexual sphere are not private affair of the individuals, but signify the life and death of the nation. A people of good race which has too few children has a one-way ticket to the grave.”
So I thought that was incredible because on the one hand we see again an echo of this sort of like, eugenics or this notion of that we have to do this – we have to suppress this – due to population control or due to other things like that, but we also see – which we saw echoes of during one of the previous Venus retrogrades – but also we see the origins of the starting to throw gay men and homosexuals in concentration camps and potentially the creation of the symbol which later queer people, queer activists would adopt as one of the symbols for gay people and gay rights, the pink triangle, originating potentially with the circumstances that were constellating under this Venus retrograde in early 1937.
EH: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a really incredible find. And even just like, the language that Himmler’s using is like, so directly reminiscent of the quote that I shared from Theodore Roosevelt. Like, it’s, you know —
CB: Right.
EH: — it’s all about the like, defining the nation in a particular way and like, creating queer people or people of color as like, outside of the nation, which then they use to enact real violence.
CB: Yeah. And treating it almost as a disease or something that they want to exterminate, which then they actively did when you start thinking like that and you start putting things in that context. Like, that’s what they literally did is they started attempting to exterminate supposedly like, “undesirable” parts of society from that point forwards, which, you know, starts with gays and with homosexual and other people, with queers, but also gets expanded to like, other groups like Jewish people or people that are disabled or what have you. Yeah.
EH: Yeah.
CB: So that’s one of the problems with the general when society starts targeting minority groups and applying obvious cruelty to those groups under false premises, which is I feel like one of the echoes that we’re starting to see today, whether it be due to targeting people for their sexuality or gender identity or even due to their nationality or status in the country as like, as immigrants. Like, there are similar themes coming up again in terms of what happens when the dominant elements in society start trying to stamp out or visit cruelty on different groups that they think is justified just because they have decided that that minority group is bad for some reason.
EH: Absolutely. Yeah. I think we’ll see kind of again and again the idea of like, creating a scapegoat out of a particular minority group and how that then pulls in everyone who doesn’t fit a particular idea of, you know, in Germany at this time what it means to be German, or in the United States now or throughout history what it means to be an American.
CB: Absolutely. Yeah. And that it starts there and then it expands, and it expands to include other people, including like, eventually even like, political prisoners. Like, they started throwing in like, you know, Communists into concentration camps or people that were in opposition parties so that eventually it’s just everyone that opposes us, you know —
EH: Absolutely.
CB: — which is one of the reasons why you have that like, classic quote from that period that seems like it’s been – it used to be cliche, but it’s weird how it’s become forgotten. Like, I can’t remember the exact quote now, but it’s like, first they came for whoever, but I didn’t object because I wasn’t one of them, and then they came for this other group and I didn’t object because I wasn’t part of that group either. But then eventually they came for me.
EH: Yeah. Yeah. I think one of the things we’ll see throughout these Venus retrogrades is just the importance of like, intra-community solidarity in order that that doesn’t happen, you know.
CB: Right.
EH: That we stand up for everyone, because that is how we protect everyone.
CB: Yeah. That makes sense that the violation of any group’s rights, no matter how small that minority group may be in society, is a violation of everyone’s rights.
EH: Absolutely.
CB: All right. So after 1937, we jump forward eight years to the next Venus retrograde, which is 1945. And this is huge, because the first half of 1945 and this entire Venus retrograde, like, perfectly coincides with the end of World War Two in Europe. And Nick and I talked about this extensively because I was really stunned by how this Venus retrograde in particular coincided with the liberation of all of the concentration camps starting earlier in the year and then going through until some of the last camps were liberated around the time of Venus slowing down and stationing direct. So it was really striking, but so on the one hand, you have thousands or maybe millions of people being freed from these camps, but on the other hand, because in some areas because homosexuality was still outlawed, many queer people were then sent back to prison as a result of that. And some of them were forced to serve out the rest of their sentences due to the laws that were still in place.
EH: Yeah. That was one that was new to me when I was listening to your episode with Nick. It was fascinating and scary to learn.
CB: Yeah. It’s just important in terms of like, I don’t know, society being really fucked up. And you think about, yeah, things… You think about the, I don’t know, just how happy you would be to liberated from like, the worse experience of your life, but then because of your sexual orientation and nothing else, like, thrown back into imprisonment as a result of that.
So this was also the post-war period, and you found that there was a lot of important stuff. This sort of takes us rapidly into the post-war period, and you found that there was important stuff going on in the US, right?
EH: Yeah, definitely. So I mean, this is a little bit more like, larger time frame; I don’t know exactly how tied in this is with the specific, you know, couple of months that Venus retrograde happens in 1945. But it also is so clearly tied in. And so this comes from John D’Emilio and his book Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities. And he basically makes the argument in this book that World War Two and the immediate post-war period is a huge turning point in the creation of like, homosexuality or gayness as an indentity category. You know, he would say like, before this point, there are certainly people who do things that are gay, but the idea of like, being gay as opposed to like, doing something that you might consider gay, like having gay sex, that is really comes out of this period. And so this is from a review of D’Emilio’s book where it says, “The severe dislocations caused by war gave many men and women their first opportunity for anonymity. In addition, membership in the armed forces gave large numbers of people prolonged contact with their own sex and opportunities to explore their sexual nature away from their hometowns. And finally the army’s need for combat and support personnel was such that it put aside traditional homophobia and ignored much of what went on among the troops.” So many gay people discovered for the first time large numbers of other gay people. And this like, essentially this time period creates the idea of having a gay identity and community that is possible through that identity formation.
CB: Right. That makes sense. That reminds me of Nick and I had talked about many instances during this retrograde of like, Black soldiers who, you know, had been in leadership roles or had been treated as equals in the army fighting in World War Two coming back home at this time and then in some instances traveling back to different areas, especially in the South, and then experiencing intense racism, but having had the experience of greater freedom and equality during the war, not being as willing potentially to like, put up with it or having more of an identity and seeing sort of the future of what things could be like, and therefore it creating an important turning point in terms of the fight against racism or towards equality with just Black people in the US at this time with this retrograde. So it’s interesting that there may have been something similar here as a cultural or social turning point under this Venus retrograde with homosexuality as well.
EH: Yeah. Definitely.
CB: Yeah. All right. Did you have anything else for 1945?
EH: Yeah. The other thing was just that we see another kind of gay book come out of the woodwork in 1945. This one was actually written by a straight novelist and was using homosexuality to critique what he saw as destructive American masculinity. And this was Richard Brooks’s 1945 The Brick Foxhole. And in this novel, it details the murder of an openly gay man by a soldier. And Brooks in writing this, it’s clear that the soldier both hated homosexuals as well as Jews and Black people and that this was like, directly linked with his ideas about white American masculinity. And so the soldier kind of stands in for this idea of white American masculinity and the like, hatred that is created there, and these minority groups experiencing the like, brunt of the violence of that hatred.
CB: Okay. Yeah. That’s really important. So that’s 1945. Yeah. That’s really striking.
EH: Yeah.
CB: All right. So I think that’s it for 1945. So now we jump forward eight years to 1953, and this is when we start getting a lot more stuff in the histories. And this retrograde’s interesting because I’ve now covered this time period twice now in the past few months. Because on the one hand, because it’s a double repetition of right now where on the one hand, we had the Venus retrograde that happened in the first half of 1953, but there was also a simultaneous Saturn-Neptune conjunction that was happening at the same time. So we get important turning point, but also stronger echoes of today coming from this period. So you found quite a bit here, didn’t you?
EH: Yeah. I have a couple of short things, and then I have kind of some of the more longer story lines that we’re gonna get into. And yeah, so maybe I’ll run through some of these quick little ones first and then talk about some of the bigger ones, if that works for you?
CB: Yeah. Can I mention the first one? Just because this is one —
EH: Yes, definitely.
CB: — I had found and I mentioned in the original episode in Saturn retrograde in Aries in January, which is just I was so amazed by this because I didn’t know this history, but that there was a transwoman named Christine Jorgensen who transitioned and then came back to America during this retrograde and then was like, it was like, a big media sensation and she became like, a celebrity and was openly trans like, at this time. And I was so struck by that; it was such an incredible instance under this Venus retrograde of trans people having greater visibility all of a sudden. But in this instance, like, it was actually relatively – it was covered like, relatively positively. Like, that was the other thing that struck me is a lot of the coverage of her as like, a celebrity during this time.
EH: Yeah, she really becomes kind of like, a starlet and the like, public opinion is – at least as far as, you know, what’s kind of being reported in the news – is pretty like, “Wow, that’s amazing!” as opposed to, you know, what we might expect from what we’re seeing today. Yeah.
CB: Right. And she had gone to, like, one of the first clinics in the world which was in Europe at the time which did like, sexual reassignment surgery, I believe.
EH: Yeah. Yes. I think also just one kind of side note that’s interesting about her is at some point, she makes some comment about like, saying like, I’m transgender as opposed to transsexual, saying like, this has to do with my gender and not my sexuality. Which, you know, those two terms are used I would say interchangeably in some periods of time, and then less interchangeably in other periods of time. And it for a time you would, like, “transsexual” was like, the preferred term, and then “transgender” became the preferred term, and now at least in trans communities there is much more I would say fluidity between those two. But I think this is one of those instances where we start to see this kind of like, separation out of the idea of gender from sexuality. So I just wanted to mention that.
CB: Yeah. That’s great; I’m glad you mentioned that. Because yeah, that was something she said that I mentioned in that episode that she preferred to be referred to as transgender. And one of the reasons I have better perspective on this one now than when I did in January is I think both the – why I mentioned both the Venus retrograde and the Saturn-Neptune is I think both are relevant. Because one of the things I was seeing over and over again in the Saturn-Neptune was sometimes when there was blurring of boundaries or borders between things, and sometimes oftentimes that was very literal. Like, we were talking about like, borders between countries and things like that. But then where sometimes there would be an ambiguity surrounding those. And I think that’s part of the reason like, this is relevant and has greater echo here just because sometimes one of the themes we saw that I mentioned in the wrap up at the very end of the Saturn-Neptune episode, which is just that sometimes the boundaries that people, that humans assign to things can sometimes be either arbitrarily assigned or can be more fluid than people acknowledge or realize. And I think we have that sometimes with Saturn-Neptune and we also with Venus itself, just the connections with gender and sexuality and during the retrograde specifically, like, Venus changing sides and starting as an evening star, going through its underworld journey or transformation, and then emerging as an almost completely different star that’s a morning star so that there’s also this notion of like, of transition or of crossing boundaries or other things like that that come up.
EH: Yeah. Actually shortly before we started recording, a friend of mine sent me just a screenshot of this Wikipedia page that was about I believe it was ancient Egyptian views on Venus. And one of the like, talking about like, did they know about like, Venus as an evening and morning star? And it like, said, like, one of the words that – or one of the phrases – that got used about Venus was as like, “the crosser,” and certainly I think we can like, be more complex and nuanced in our understanding of like, what it means to be trans. But like, the idea of like, crossing and like, being a crosser, and that that phrase goes back as far as ancient like, Egyptian understandings of Venus was just like, another powerful image along with the hymn to Inanna.
CB: Absolutely. That’s great. I didn’t know that; I’m glad you mentioned that.
EH: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. As well as even in like, Hellenistic astrology, the associations of like, Venus being more masculine as a morning star or Venus being more feminine as an evening star so that even in that that you have the notion that the planet can adopt more, you know, like, “masculine” or “feminine” roles depending on its position that it holds both within itself in some ways.
All right. What else was going on in 1953?
EH: Yeah. So couple of quick things. One is this person, Robert Rayford, is born right before, a couple weeks before the Venus retrograde with Venus at one degree of Aries. He is born on February 3rd, 1953. And we’re gonna come back to him, actually, in a couple of Venus retrogrades because he’s gonna play an important role. Just wanted to mention that here.
Another thing is that ONE Inc., which is the first widely distributed journal for homosexuals and it’s like, an offshoot of the Mattachine Society, which we’re gonna talk about in a second, so they started publishing in January of 1953 and got their charter from the state of California granted in May of 1953. And so this is like, just like the first instance of like, a widely distributed magazine that is like, specifically by and for homosexuals. And it’s really coming into its – it’s being born through this Venus retrograde. And then also —
CB: Nice.
EH: — on March 19th, 1953, and this one is actually connected to the Oscars, the Diana Foundation was founded in Houston, Texas. And it was founded basically at a like, Oscar-watching party where like, the TV that this guy had got wasn’t working, and so they ended up just like, doing their own award show. And that grew into the Diana Foundation, which is a nonprofit organization and is actually the oldest continuously active gay organization in the United States. And they host annual fundraisers and their annual Diana Awards.
CB: That’s incredible; I love that. So that was specifically from the Oscars, and you know, like, Nick and I had said the Venus retrograde of this – in Aries – every eight years always has a really important Oscars where there’s usually something that like, goes awry, but there’s also a lot of firsts and a lot of important turning points. So that’s really funny; I didn’t know that that organization was founded as a direct result of that incident. So they were having trouble watching it? Like, the TV signal wasn’t working?
EH: Yeah. You know. I don’t know exactly what was going on, but you know, 1950s TV, and it was just they couldn’t get the Oscars to happen. And so it ended up becoming from that the longest actively running gay organization in the US.
CB: I just pulled it up, and because I wanted to confirm that this is true, but 1953 was the first time that the Oscars were broadcast live on TV for the first time. So that’s really funny because that then was one of those firsts, just like, you know, this year in 2025 was the first time it was live streamed through Hulu, and then it crashed like, at the end when they were reading the award for Best Actress and —
EH: Right.
CB: — which, you know, also this year the very first trans actress was like, nominated for Best Actress, which was another notable first under this Venus retrograde in Aries. So that’s incredible tie back to the 1953 one that I didn’t know.
EH: Yeah.
CB: Nice. All right. What else was going on in 1953?
EH: Quite a bit! So I mean, one of the main stories that I found for 1953 is about the Mattachine Society. And the Mattachine Society is one of the earlier homophile organizations in the United States. Technically it’s not the first; there is one other one – the Society for Human Rights, I believe, and that was in Chicago in like, 1924. But it was fairly short-lived, and is also, you know, like, 25 years before this. So this is really like, the first of its kind, the Mattachine Society. And the homophile organizations really categorized a lot of the queer movement of the 1950s and 1960s pre-Stonewall. And generally when we think about the homophile movement, we generally think of them as being more cautious and more focused on assimilation and fitting in. But what’s interesting about the Mattachine Society – so it was founded by Harry Hay and a group of other gay men in Los Angeles on November 11th, 1950, so a couple years before. But that’s actually on the eve of a Venus cazimi in Scorpio. And Hay, although he’s kind of a complicated, messy figure in a lot of ways, was a Communist and a labor organizer, and the original Mattachine Society is pretty radical for its time. Their original mission and purpose statement included a call for a grassroots movement of gay people to challenge anti-gay discrimination and to also build comunity. One of the quotes I have from them is that “Mattachine holds it possible and desirable that a highly ethical homosexual culture emerge as a consequence of its work, paralleling the emerging cultures of our fellow minorities.” So they’re focused both on challenging discrimination and also building up culture. And even the name “Mattachine” refers to these troops of unmarried men from Renaissance France who would perform these dances and rituals and kind of like, dramatic performances very often using these performances as a form of peasant protest or like, protesting the oppression of the rulers of the time. And Hay really believed that 1950s gays were also a masked people, and they were unknown and anonymous but that they could be engaged in morale-biulding and helping themselves and others through struggle towards total redress and change. So we see that kind of more like, we’re hidden, we’re masked, we’re unknown, anonymous, but we could like, come together and struggle and build something different. So by 1951, the Mattachine are like, hosting discussion groups, and attendance is growing pretty rapidly, so much so that by the time we get to 1953, they sent out this questionnaire to local political candidates asking them to state their positions on gay rights issues. But this boldness brings some attention, and so because of that, the LA Times writes this article accusing them of being this strange new pressure group and they’re accusing them of doing like, dangerously subversive activities. And of course, you know, this is like, peak 1950s McCarthyism, Red Scare, and so a bunch of members of the Mattachine Society get really freaked out. And so they decide to hold this convention to like, talk about this and establish a new constitution. And that brings us to the 1953 retrograde.
So on April 11th and 12th, which is right before the Venus cazimi during this retrograde, they hold their first constitutional convention to establish a new constitution. And this meeting was like, unprecedented in terms of like, public gatherings of queer people. Unfortunately, factions are formed, and some of the more radical leaders are ousted. I think Hay had left a little bit earlier because he was already feeling just like, nervous about the Red Scare kind of coming to get them. But at this time, the rest of the leadership – all of the like, original Communist leadership – is shaken enough by the threat of a government investigation that either they resign or they are not reelected to their, you know, seats within the group. And the group gets essentially like, handed over to the more conservative members of the group. And you know, unfortunately, that new leadership didn’t share the values or the experience of the original founders, and like, drastically revised the goals of the organization. They like, backtracked on kind of everything that the Mattachine Society had initially kind of stood for. So instead of social change, they’re advocating for accommodation. And instead of mobilizing gay people, they’re seeking the support of professionals who they believed held the key to reform. So that’s like, bringing in like, psychiatrists to talk about like, the “disease” or like, what’s wrong with homosexuals. Like, that kind of professional. And importantly, they stated, “We do not advocate a homosexual culture or community, and we believe none exists.”
So although their membership was at a real high during this Venus retrograde, one of the like, newsletters that they sent out in May of 1953 estimated their total membership to be about 2,000 people, and they had like, a hundred different discussion groups happening all over California, the group from this point on takes on a much more low profile, non-confrontational approach. And eventually the society will splinter, actually, into regional groups in 1961, which is our next Venus retrograde.
So while 1953 wasn’t like, the original founding date of the Mattachine Society, this retrograde marks a really important turning point in the organization and in the birth of a more conservative, assimilationist homophile movement of the 1950s.
CB: Okay. Yeah. So one of the things in reading your notes as we were preparing for this that this brought up to me was how when Venus slows down and stations retrograde and then starts moving backwards, it does that retrograde conjunction with the Sun, which it was doing at this time at this pivotal moment when that conference happened that you mentioned – the cazimi. But that Venus retrograde involves this process of concealment, of Venus being really bright and being really bold and visible when it starts slowing down to station retrograde, because that’s when it’s almost near its greatest elongation and it’s the brightest – it becomes the brightest star in the sky. But it’s not a star; it’s a planet. And then after being so bright and so visible, Venus goes to the Sun and disappears, and there’s this process of concealment. And some of the stuff, especially in the mid-20th century in the middle of the 1900s and the second half of the 20th century kept reminding me of how much especially homosexual men especially had to like, conceal what they were doing or hide what they’re doing or hide their lifestyles in different ways, or have covers or other things like that because of where society was at. And nowhere would that have been more prominent, probably, than during this period in the early 1950s, because you also have McCarthyism reaching its peak and the Red Scare and yeah, the conservatives being more prominent after Eisenhower like, takes over in the early 1950s and ushers in a wave of Republican dominance. But one of the things we noticed during the Saturn-Neptune episode is that it often coincides with periods of like, paranoia. So that was especially true during this period when it came to like, Communism and like, the Red Scare. But that also then ends up tying into and bleeding over into the treatment of queer people during this time as well, right?
EH: Definitely. Yeah. And you know, the like, decision to like, have this more conservative Mattachine Society is because of the like, Red Scare. But also like, literally two weeks later on April 27th, President Eisenhower signs Executive Order 10450, which establishes grounds for investigation and dismissal of federal employees who posed a security risk by a new set of criteria. And they defined this criteria as “any criminal, infamous, dishonest, immoral, or notoriously disgraceful conduct, habitual use of intoxicants to excess, drug addiction, or sexual perversion.” And so although they don’t explicitly state sexuality there, it’s really – they’re talking about sexuality. And so prior to this —
CB: Right.
EH: — executive order —
CB: Even though they don’t state homosexuality, that’s what’s implied there.
EH: Exactly. Yes.
CB: Got it.
EH: Yeah. And so like, prior to this executive order, the security risk was defined by like, political affiliation with suspect organizations like Communist groups or, you know, clear acts of disloyalty. But this new executive order is much broader and like, is effectively banning queer people from working for the government. And this ushers in this period known as the Lavender Scare. And so during this period, the like, larger period from 1947 to 1961, more than 5,000 allegedly homosexual federal civil servants lost their jobs in these purges for no reason other than alleged sexual orientation, and also thousands of applicants are denied. Yeah. And this is from Documenting Discrimination the Basis of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in State Employment by Christy Mallory, Nan Hunter, and Brad Sears. And one of the things that they note was that during this period, a far greater number of people were dismissed for their sexuality than for their potential affiliation with the Community Party. So even though the Mattachine Society is like, okay, we don’t wanna be associated with Communists, so we’ll oust all the Communists and we’ll be really conservative and we’ll be safe, it actually doesn’t really protect them because immediately after this point we get the beginning of what’s known as the Lavender Scare.
CB: Okay. So this is the Lavender Scare. And so part of the thing you have at the end of that quote is that LGBT people were “treated as a national security threat, demanding the attention of Congress, the courts, state houses, and the media,” and that’s crazy because we’ll see the echoes of that later in the 1993 Venus retrograde in Aries, which is when Clinton passes Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, which allows gay people to stay in the military but only if they are not out, basically. If they get outed, then they get kicked out. And then more recently, the current Venus retrograde wherein the past couple of months Trump has outright banned trans people from the military.
You know, what’s funny about this article you mentioned – Documenting Discrimination the Basis of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in State Employment – it says it was published September 2009. That means I bet you they were writing that early in 2009 during that Venus retrograde in Aries.
EH: Totally. Yeah. There’s a whole bunch of things where the secondary text is being written in like, one of these next Venus retrograde cycles probably. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. I love that. And it’s also important sometimes, I’ve noticed in this research that while we try to stick with the exact date ranges as close as we can in terms of like, establishing our range and then sticking with events within that, it’s like, sometimes you can tell. You know that there’s like, stuff that happened close to that in the same year that’s like, relevant and tied in with it even if it like, doesn’t fall exactly within that range based on, for example, like, the publication date or what have you.
EH: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. So this is, so 1953 is like, peak Red Scare but also peak Lavender Scare probably.
EH: Yeah. And then I have one more small thing for 1953 that also is this April 11th and 12th date; I don’t know if you wanna pull up the chart for that. But yeah —
CB: I’ll let you read it, and then I’ll pull up the chart.
EH: Syre. Yeah. So this is the same time as the Mattachine Society is gathering to change their constitution. 63 men are arrested in Waco, Texas, at what is referred to in the news as a “homosexual convention.” Very likely this was a wedding celebration and ceremony. Police arrived at a private residence. They like, received a tip from somebody, but they arrived and they arrested everybody who was there. Most of the people that were arrested were arrested on vagrancy charges, which was kind of just like, they didn’t really have a reason to arrest them, and so this was like, a kind of like catch-all law that they used. But yeah, I think one of the important pieces here is that some of the people in attendance that night, including Tommy Gene Brown, who was named as like, the Waco Bride, were wearing what we would consider to be traditionally women’s clothing. You know, Tommy was like, wearing a wedding dress, and a number of other people were wearing what we would consider to be traditionally women’s clothing. And so we get this kind of like, fluidity between gender and sexuality coming up. You know, they are named as men; it’s very possible that they were men. It’s also very possible that some or all of them are trans; we don’t really know. But the names of all of these attendees gets published in one of the local newspapers, The Waco Citizen, a couple days later on April 16th. And because of that, many of the attendees are forced out of their jobs or kicked out of school. And so it just like, outs a whole bunch of people and is this whole like, news scandal.
CB: Yeah. That’s incredible. Or that’s terrible. That brings in the other part of the other side of what I was saying earlier about Venus retrogrades being about concealment through that astronomical cycle of Venus slowing down and then moving towards the Sun and visibly disappearing so that you can’t see it and there’s something concealed about it is – the other side of that is the second half of the Venus retrograde cycle is Venus emerging from the conjunction with the Sun and emerging back into view and becoming visible again, so that there’s this dual process with Venus retrograde of both concealment but also revealment. And in this instance, it’s like, we’re talking about the negative side of that when people who want to – for safety reasons – have to conceal their true identity or orientation or what have you suddenly are outed in a negative sense, that could sometimes have really devastating repercussions for a person’s life through much of the 20th century.
EH: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. But even today in more recent times, still it becomes a relevant thing sometimes in like, let’s say the past couple of decades of especially like, let’s say a decade ago or 15 years ago when it was – before gay marriage was legal, the process of like, coming out being a much more major turning point sometimes in a queer person’s life. And we get echoes and themes of that there. I mean, it still is in some instances; I was just listening to like, a comedy podcast last night where somebody called in and he was talking about dating a guy who was 45 and they had been dating for a while and had met each other’s parents. But he wouldn’t introduce him to his parents as his partner, as his boyfriend, essentially; it was two men. And this guy was like, 45, but his parents were like, were Mormons, so you know, there’s still a lot of people where that’s still obviously like, a really important and relevant dynamic of in terms of part of their orientation.
EH: Absolutely. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. Here’s the chart; I meant to show that. Because this applies both to this event but also more broadly to most of the events we were talking about were pretty close to this cazimi. And we see… Oh wow, it was actually a New Moon. So a few days later, there was like, a New Moon as like, 22, 23 Aries and Venus was like, conjoining the Sun around that time. And both of them were opposite to the Saturn-Neptune conjunction where Saturn was at 24 Libra and Neptune was at 22 Libra. So you get, you know, that’s probably one of the reasons why this one is so important and we’re seeing so many important events around it because you had the midpoint of the Venus retrograde cycle opposing the Saturn-Neptune conjunction at the same time.
EH: Yeah.
CB: I love that. That’s been a great thing for me over the past few months as I’ve been learning as I research this stuff now is starting to see the overlap between different alignments and how they’re relevant at different points and coming to further realizations about that.
EH: Yeah. It really just layers.
CB: Yeah. All right. Is there anything else about 1953 before we move forward?
EH: I think that’s it. I wonder if we should take a break before 1961.
CB: Sure! Why don’t we take a little break.
All right, we’re back from break, and we’re gonna continue at this point with 1961, which is the next period, the next eight-year repetition of Venus retrograde in Aries. So 1961. What did you find during this period?
EH: Yeah, so there’s two main pieces for 1961. And the first is actually occurs on the day that Venus stations retrograde – March 20th, 1961. And this is that the US Supreme Court declines to hear Frank Kameny’s petition to review the legality of his firing by the United States Army Map Service. So Kameny was actually an astronomer for the US Army’s Map Service, and he was fired from this job in 1957 because of his homosexuality, and this led him to essentially trying to fight that in the court and try to get his job back. This moment on the day that Venus stationed retrograde is the end of that fight. That, you know, there’s no more like, legal avenues for him to take to get his job back. And this is like, the first known civil rights claim based on sexual orientation pursued in a United States court. And of course the, you know, Supreme Court declines to hear it, but it’s like, a crucial turning point and also that November, Kameny would go onto found the Mattachine Society of Washington, DC. And so it’s this kind of like, this turning point for him where he’s like, okay, I can’t go through this avenue; I have to go through another avenue. And he decides to go through the avenue of the Mattachine Society, which at this point has known splintered into these regional groups.
CB: Okay. That’s really important. So this is the first known civil rights claim based on sexual orientation pursued in a US court, and it’s literally the day that Venus is stationing retrograde in Aries. That’s incredible. So here’s the chart for that. We can see Venus stationing at 29 degrees of Aries. So ‘61 is the first series where it’s entirely in Aries. Prior to this time, it started in Taurus and went back into Aries, but this is the first one where Venus stations at 29 Aries and then will go back and station in early Aries. And this one’s also a double repetition with now, because ‘61 was also a Mars retrograde in Cancer year. So we see Mars in Cancer at this time, and it’s just coming off of a retrograde station, retrograde in Cancer and Gemini.
All right.
EH: Yeah. And then the other thing that occurs is that we also get Jose Sarria, who is the first openly gay person to run for public office in the United States. And he runs for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. And you know, the election for that obviously is happening in November, but the campaigning would have been in the spring. And I did some research because I was really trying to find out like, okay, when did he actually have to like, announce his candidacy? Because one of the big pieces of this is that he doesn’t win, but he almost won by default because on the last day for candidates to file for like, candidacy, the city officials realized that there were fewer candidates running than there were open seats. And so he would have won by default. But because of homophobia, when this is like, realized, a whole bunch of people then put their names in the race and he ends up losing although he does pretty well. By the end of that day, a total of 34 candidates had filed, and he comes in 9th. But yeah. So like, so he loses, but his running really like, puts the gay vote on the map for the first time, and he would have had to announce his candidacy like, in the like, May, June timeframe so it would have been like, campaigning and announcing candidacy in that spring and into the summer.
CB: Got it. And Venus was stationing retrograde in Aries around May, early May, basically.
EH: Or stationing direct, yeah.
CB: Direct. Sorry. So that’s really notable. So that’s another major first under this Venus retrograde, which is the first openly gay person to run for public office in the US. And then he would have gotten into office, but then they stacked it against him basically just to make sure he couldn’t.
EH: Exactly.
CB: All right. Both of those seem really important, because here we’re seeing the legal component here. Like, the first known civil rights case pursued based on sexual orientation and then person attempting to hold public office but being blocked as a result of homophobia with the Venus retrograde in Aries and the Mars retrograde in Cancer repetition. And then so much of what’s happening today in 2025 is a huge flurry of legal and court cases in order to attempt to block some of the negative stuff that the Trump administration is putting into place.
EH: Definitely. Yeah. And we’ll see between this Venus retrograde and today’s Venus retrograde many repetitions of court cases and also people running for office who are openly queer in some way.
CB: Nice. All right. I believe that brings us to our next period, which is eight years later, which is 1969, right?
EH: Yeah. So this period, you know, if you know anything about queer history, you know about the Stonewall Riots that occurred in June of 1969. And I know that when you did your episode with Nick, you had this moment where you were like, “Wait, is it – like, does it fall – like, is it within the bounds?” And it’s like, kind of just outside of the like, bounds of the greatest elongation. But when I was doing my own personal research around Stonewall, I was like, looking at this chart and I was like, trying to understand like, what’s going on with this chart, because it’s like, I would say pretty not remarkable. You know, you have like, Uranus has just changed signs. But like, aside from that, it’s like, you know, you’re not looking at —
CB: What’s the date again?
EH: June 28th, 1969. At around 1:15 AM in New York.
CB: Hold on just a second. Keep talking while I’m – so for those, let’s not assume or take it for granted even though Nick and I just did mention a little bit, but just very briefly, what was the significance of – Stonewall was a pivotal moment for the gay rights movement, for queer rights, but why briefly, in like, a sentence or two?
EH: Yeah. So basically we think about Stonewall as kind of like, the birth of the modern queer liberation movement. Police raided the Stonewall Inn, which was a place that many gay people would hang out, and you know, the raids were regularly occurring, but for some reason on this night, people decided to fight back and, you know, there was possibly brick-throwing. There was certainly a parking meter used as a battering ram. People were climbing on cars. They were like, setting trash cans on fire. And you know, it was like, this real like, uprising of like, queer and trans youth fighting back against this discrimination from the police for the first time that led to many nights of uprising and protest. And then from that birthed the Gay Liberation Front and the STAR, which is Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, and just a number of gay liberation groups. And then of course from that, you know, the anniversary every year of the Stonewall Riots is what we today consider like, Pride weekend; Pride parades happen all over the world. And so it’s this like, pivotal turning point. So you would expect with that that the chart is gonna be like, kind of impressive.
CB: Right. So and one thing about that is even though today it’s often framed as the beginning of the gay rights movement, that some of the initial leaders were trans people – that trans people were involved in the Stonewall Riots as well, right?
EH: Absolutely. Yeah. Definitely. Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera are the two names that are mentioned most often as trans people who were present in the Stonewall Riots. And there’s also Storme DeLarverie who was maybe a butch lesbian, maybe trans. You know, some of these people who might have had different language for their gender at that time but who were occupying roles that we might today understand as like, transgressing gender boundaries if nothing else. So yeah, definitely trans people and also people of color – you know, Marsha was Black, Storme was Black, and Sylvia was Puerto Rican, I believe. You know, these were the – and all three of them were quite young. So these are the people who are kind of like, at the forefront of this movement.
CB: Got it. Okay. So here’s the chart. So the Stonewall Riot begins June 28th, 1969, around 1:15 AM in New York. And for the people listening to the audio version, we’re looking at a chart with 18 Aries rising and we see that Uranus has just moved into like, Libra at like, zero degrees of Libra. Maybe I’ll let you describe. So your impression – because you said you started, like, part of your initial interest in getting into studying queer history through the lens of astrology was partially through this event and this chart, right?
EH: Yeah. Or so, this was one of the charts that I did an episode about for my podcast, and as I was kind of looking at this chart, I was like, you know, really hoping to see in the chart like, okay, there’s something that’s gonna be like, so obvious, so powerful, you know? Like, a Jupiter-Saturn conjunction or Mars-Pluto, or you know, like, something!
CB: Right.
EH: And we kind of just —
CB: You wanted it to like, really stand out and like, hit you over the head with it?
EH: Exactly. You know? Like, if this is gonna be the like, birth of the movement, like, I wanna see that in the chart. And you know, there’s definitely stuff like that Uranus entrance into Libra. It’s an Aries rising chart, so the Ascendant ruler is Mars, which is retrograde in Sagittarius. And you know, Mars is copresent with the Moon in Sag opposite Mercury in Gemini. We have Saturn and Venus are copresent in Taurus, but there’s like, not terribly close together. So like, all in all, I just was like, okay, there’s something more here, and I wanna figure out what it is. And that kind of – and also I think just like, the story that we tell about Stonewall is like, all of a sudden out of nowhere people decided they had had enough, and they started fighting back. And I think, you know, what we know about movements is that usually there are these like, precipitating events that occur and —
CB: Right.
EH: — pretty rarely is it just like, oh, all of a sudden, people just decided.
CB: Yeah. And that was one of the – well, two things. One, that was the debate Nick and I had in the Venus in Aries episode in January was he was saying that there may have been, that there was some like, Venus retrograde connection with an actress who had just died, and that that might have been part of the contributing reason or that there was some legends that that may have been part of the reason that people were feeling more raw that night than, you know, maybe other nights. So I wanna ask you about that. And then the other thing just briefly about the chart – you know, I had always, the thing that had always been the most striking, because I also had similar feelings about the chart, but the thing that I did always find really striking is just that Uranus had like, just ingressed into Libra, what is it, like, three or four days earlier. So —
EH: Right.
CB: — that was striking to me. Like, Uranus going into the sign of Venus as this huge outer planet shift which it only would do every like, 80 years. And to have it have such a huge outer planet shift change signs just days before this, that’s kind of reminiscent of some other like, I don’t know, major ingresses like everyone right now for example is talking about how the Civil War broke out like, the day Neptune moved into Aries and they started firing on Fort Sumter. There’s something there that does seem a little bit compelling, but you’re right that otherwise the chart’s not standing out as much as one might think or hope.
EH: Yes. Absolutely no disrespect to Uranus in Libra.
CB: Right!
EH: But yeah, I think I was just like, there’s gotta be more here. But to your point about it was Judy Garland who had died, I think it was like, a week before Stonewall, and then I believe it was like, her funeral was held maybe the day before or maybe it was earlier that day; I’m not totally sure. But in my understanding, and you know, listeners can correct me if this is not true, but I believe that there was only like, one or two newspapers that kind of said, you know, the like, homos are so upset because their queen, Judy Garland, has died in kind of this like, homophobic way almost.
CB: Right. That was what I was nervous about is Nick was putting a lot of weight on it, but I was nervous because I knew there was a much broader history of like, you know, getting hassled and beaten and arrested behind everything. So that while that could have contributed, I was nervous about putting too much emphasis on that.
EH: Yeah. I mean, you know, I don’t know for sure. It seems possible that that had some contributing factor, but certainly – I mean, we’ll talk about what I found as like, other contributing factors. I think those are perhaps more compelling arguments for —
CB: Okay.
EH: Yeah.
CB: Okay. Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s talk about it. So what was going on that year, and what was the context of what led up to – so the Venus retrograde would have led up to Stonewall. So in some ways, Stonewalls becomes the culmination or the result of a bunch of things that were happening for months leading up to it in the retrograde, right?
EH: Yeah. So yes, we get this Venus retrograde that happens in the spring of 1969. And there’s some kind of like, incredible organizing that’s happening at this time. I’m gonna start with just reading this quote from Emily Hobson’s Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left, because it summarizes it pretty well, and then we’ll talk a little bit about some of the dates. But so she writes,
“Gay liberation emerged definitively in the spring and summer of 1969, as marked by a set of key events in San Francisco and New York. In San Francisco in March of 1969, Leo Laurence, a young white man who served as editor of the homophile SIR publication Vector and worked with Reverend Williams’ Glide Church, held an interview with the countercultural newspaper The Berkeley Barb. In an article entitled ‘Homo Revolt: Don’t Hide It,’ Lawrence challenged SIR to join the broader left movement, especially by abandoning gay inclusion in the military in favor of opposition to the Vietnam War. He urged gay and lesbian radicals to see links between sexual liberation and support for the Black Panthers, and he lambasted SIR in the Tavern Guild for ‘middle class bigotry and racism’ in part because of the guild’s refusal to work with Citizens Alert against police abuse. The Barb illustrated its article with a front cover photo of Lawrence embracing a shirtless Gale Whittington, Lawrence’s boyfriend and a clerical worker for the San Francisco Steamship Lines Company. A copy of the Barb made its way to the Steamship Lines office in the financial district, and Whittington was promptly fired. Meanwhile, SIR pushed Lawrence out of Vector and declared itself a resolutely one-issue organization, addressing only those issues that pertain to the homosexual as a homosexual. Laurence and his comrades responded by creating a new and more multi-issue group, the Committee for Homosexual Freedom, which began lunchtime pickets of anti-gay discrimination at Steamship Lines, Tower Records, Safeway, Macy’s, and the federal building. These protests lasted throughout April and much of May, and received wide though generally mocking coverage in local media. The Committee for Homosexual Freedom issued calls for multi-sector alliance with one broadside urging supporters to attend an upcoming Free Huey Newton of the Black Panthers rally and stating that the Committee for Homosexual Freedom is in the vanguard of homosexuals who know they must form coalitions with the movement.” Meaning the like, Black Power movement. “Laurence termed gay freedom the same as black is beautiful, while the Committee for Homosexual Freedom’s flyers held that our condition is a part of the oppression which Blacks, Chicanos, and yes, the Vietnamese have known. Meanwhile, another local gay radical, Carl Wittman, began to write and circulate an essay, ‘Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto,’ that further called for alliance and comparison between sexuality and race.” And he was writing that manifesto in the spring of 1969 and finalized it by May. So that’s just a short summary of what was going on in this time period, but I think what’s really kind of powerful is if we look at some of the dates of these things.
So the original article that was published in the Barb and also the article in Vector, they’re both published on the same day, which is March 28th, 1969 – so shortly after Venus has stationed retrograde. And then —
CB: So Venus stationed retrograde on like, the 19th of March that year, it looks like. Here, I’ll show the chart really quickly. So here’s Venus stationing retrograde, and that one’s interesting because is stationed retrograde at 26 Aries conjunct Saturn at 24 Aries, and there was actually an eclipse that had just taken place in late Pisces – like, a solar eclipse – right before the station. And this is opposite to Jupiter and Uranus, which are in early Libra. Okay. Go ahead; continue.
EH: Yeah. So those articles come out. Whittington is fired. Laurence is pushed out of the SIR, and they form the Committee for Homosexual Freedom. They begin their picket on April 9th, 1969, which is the day after that Venus cazimi.
CB: Wow. Okay. So the cazimi just keeps coming up over and over again as like, a crucial turning point.
EH: Yeah. And so they’re like, meeting every day. I think like, Monday to Friday, outside of the Steamship Company, and they’ve got signs that say things like, “Let Gays Live,” “Free the Queers,” “Freedom for Homos Now.” And this is being reported in The Berkeley Barb, which is like, the countercultural newspaper. On the 11th of April, they published an article that says, “The homosexual revolution of 1969 started this week in San Francisco as militant homosexuals made war on both gay and straight establishments.” By May, these protests spread to Tower Records because an employee there was fired for supposedly returning the wink of a male customer, and so they go and protest there, and actually in that protest they’re able to get that person’s job back. Whittington does not get his job back. But yeah, we just see this like, string of protests that arises.
CB: Yeah. So basically people were like, fired up early that year especially during the Venus, and there was stuff bubbling and coming out and people were getting militant about not putting up with stuff anymore. And this is happening over on the west coast, so this is in like, California and like, San Francisco. But it just shows you some of the energy at the time on the other side of the country from where Stonewall happened in New York.
EH: Yeah. And also simultaneous to this, there is like, a string of police violence. So on March 9th, the Los Angeles Police killed this person named Howard Efland during an anti-gay vice raid of a hotel that was like, often a site for cruising between men. And there were like, multiple eyewitnesses that tried to get justice for this person, but the jury ruled that it was excusable because the victim had resisted arrest.
CB: Wow.
EH: Yeah.
CB: That was March 9th?
EH: Yeah. So a little bit before the retrograde.
CB: Yeah. It looks like that was the Venus – there was a Venus-Saturn conjunction that was happening then. Like, Saturn at like, 23 Aries and Venus at like, 25. Just noting that.
EH: Yeah. And then on April 3rd, the New York Police discovered the body of a man who was very likely murdered in the Hudson River very close to the Christopher Street docks which was also a popular gay cruising site and like, very close to where Stonewall is.
CB: Okay.
EH: April 17th, 1969, undercover police in Berkeley kill this man named Frank Bartley after essentially entrapping him at a cruising site. And once again, authorities declined to pursue charges against the cops who killed him. And at this point, you know, this is happening like, in the same area as where the Committee for Homosexual Freedom is doing their daily pickets, and so they basically create a faction that is doing protests against police violence. And they hold a political funeral for Bartley on April 25th, 1969.
And then in June of 1969 in Oakland, police officers attack and kill this man named Philip Caplan, who they accused of loitering and essentially cruising near Lake Merritt, but actually he very likely was not cruising and just like, had a like, prostate issue and so he needed to go to the bathroom regularly. And so like, the local authorities once again declined to pursue charges, but in this instance, it like, made it very clear that, like, you know, Caplan was very likely a straight man. And so this is just an example of like, anyone can become a victim to anti-queer violence if you are like, perceived in a certain way.
CB: Right.
EH: Yeah. So with both of these, you know, with Leo Laurence and the Committee for Homosexual Freedom and then with all of this police violence, we don’t like, technically know if specifically the people who were at Stonewall knew about these incidents. But what we do know is that anyone who was like, politically organized and queer in New York, many of whom did participate at Stonewall, they definitely were concerned about police violence because of the raids and definitely would have known about the man who was found in the Hudson River. And also, you know, these are being reported in The Berkeley Barb, but also the Mattachine Society of New York’s newsletter reports on these various killings in their April 1969 newsletter. So like, basically anybody who was like, politically involved and queer in New York has like, some sense of what is happening. And then also, Leo Laurence reports on Stonewall in the July 4th issue of The Berkeley Barb, and in that story, he reports talking to someone named Jay Marks who was an eyewitness at Stonewall, and he quotes Marks as saying, “The gay community in New York City has been inspired by your homosexual liberation stories in the Barb.” And Gale Whittington, who’s the other – was Laurence’s boyfriend – in his memoir, he writes that several people who were at Stonewall contacted the various San Francisco groups to say that they took inspiration from the like, militant Committee for Homosexual Freedom activities and said like, they said that if we could do it here, then they could do it there. And one of the like, very direct outcomes of the Stonewall uprising in June is that a group of activists in New York come together like, in the next couple nights, and they form the Gay Liberation Front. And basically, the Committee for Homosexual Freedom in San Francisco is like, “Hmm, that’s kind of a like, better, like, more militant name; we’re gonna take that name.” And so they start to use those interchangeably for a couple months and then eventually the Committee for Homosexual Freedom becomes like, San Francisco’s chapter of the Gay Liberation Front.
CB: Okay. Got it. So that’s really interesting. So that quote, though, from July – that quote, “The gay community in New York City has been inspired by your homosexual liberation stories in the Barb” – that shows that the people in New York around Stonewall were aware of what was happening in San Francisco in the months leading up to it and how they had already been fighting against oppression and especially the police crackdowns and other things like that, and that that may have had some inspiration or crossover with eventually the uprising in Stonewall.
EH: Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. And I think that kind of story makes more sense to me, that they would be seeing other like, groups rising up and standing up for their rights and also be seeing all of this like, violence and also experiencing these like, regular raids. And that combination would lead to this moment of like, enough is enough.
But also we can see this in the astrology. And this is like, my like, pulling the rabbit out of the hat moment.
CB: All right!
EH: So if we look at the chart for the Venus cazimi, which we know occurred like, the night before the first Committee for Homosexual Freedom picket…
CB: Can I first just to show the start of the retrograde, because I think that’s also important and leads into the point you’re about to make about the cazimi. So here’s the retrograde station. So this is Venus slowing down and stationing retrograde in March, March 19th. And Venus is like, very closely conjunct Saturn. Like, Saturn’s at 24 and Venus is at 26, and I think as I’m hearing this, like, so much of the context you’re giving then is that we had a very long Venus cazimi that’s copresent with Saturn, and Venus is like, copresent with Saturn this entire year for like, several months early in the year. And that’s all this like, oppression, that’s all this like, police beatings, these like, deaths that are happening. But it’s like, contrasting with this other energy over here of the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction. So I just wanted to set that up, because now what you are pointing out is – what was the date of the cazimi? So this is Venus’s station, so it slows down, turns retrograde, and then we advance about, what, 20 days into the cycle.
EH: Yeah. I believe it’s on April 8th, the cazimi.
CB: April 8th. Okay. Almost there. There we go! So Venus conjoins the Sun at 18 degrees of Aries. Mercury’s there at the same time at 17. Actually go on, because that’s what you’re gonna say.
EH: Yeah, yeah. So the exact moment of the cazimi is at 18 degrees and 36 minutes of Aries, and if we then look at the chart for Stonewall, the Ascendant degree of Stonewall is 18 degrees and 39 minutes of Aries. And —
CB: Let me.
EH: Yeah.
CB: Okay, so here’s the 18 minutes, and then here’s the chart for Stonewall, which I’ll switch to here, and there it is at, you know, 1:15 in the morning. The Ascendant’s at 18 degrees of Aries.
EH: Yeah.
CB: Wow. Nice. That’s incredible.
EH: Yeah.
CB: So and again, what was the event again that happened at the cazimi?
EH: So the cazimi was the like, birth of the Committee for Homosexual Freedom and their first like, picket. So their first kind of public appearance where the people who would eventually participate in Stonewall might have started to take notice of this other group that is like, standing up and fighting back.
CB: Got it. Okay.
EH: Yeah. And then, you know, if we think about that cazimi at like, a kind of New Moon for Venus, and then the like, Ascendant of the Stonewall chart is the, you know, the motivation, the thing that is like, bringing this thing to life, is calling back to that Venus cazimi. And also I’ll just, for the history nerds quickly, I’ll just say that the time for the Stonewall Riots has been, you know, kind of widely debated. The time that I’m using comes from David Carter’s book Stonewall, and initially if you read just the regular text, it says 1:20 AM, and so that was the time that I was initially using. But I was like, what happens if you like, mess around with time a little bit? But then I found that there’s like, a footnote in that book where he says, “According to the 6th precinct log for June 28th, 1969, obtained by Michael Shirker under the Freedom of Information Act, the raid began at 1:20 AM. This agrees with the account given in the underground newspaper, Rat, which gives the time of the raid as about 1:15 AM. By all evidence, the Rat account of the riots is possibly the most precise reporting of the events of Friday night.” So that 1:15 AM time comes from there.
CB: Got it. Okay. And then you had one other point about the chart with Mars’s location?
EH: Yeah. So Mars is at 14 degrees of Sagittarius in the cazimi chart, and then it will, you know, go retrograde, and so then we have this retrograde Mars at like, two Sagittarius on the night of Stonewall. But also on that night, the Moon is at 13 degrees of Sagittarius and opposing Mercury at 14 degrees of Gemini. So kind of referring back to that Mars at 14 Sagittarius in the cazimi chart. Yeah.
CB: Got it. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I think this helps to contextualize things a lot better, because that’s one of the things with Venus retrogrades. While sometimes the history episodes, we try to identify like, singular important events happen during them, oftentimes it’s like, a process of something that’s unfolding over several months. And I think this especially makes that very clear that Stonewall wasn’t a singular event that happened spontaneously out of nowhere; it was something that happened as a result of like, at the very least months of things building up and bubbling both overtly and also not overtly, especially during the Venus retrograde that preceded Stonewall. And I think that’s described just really well with… I’m surprised at how much the copresence – because Venus ends up being copresent for like, the first like, six months of the year or something if you pay attention to the sign-based transits. Venus goes into Aries here in like, February 2nd. Goes into Aries, zero degrees of Aries February 2nd. Saturn’s at 20 degrees of Aries. So Venus is heading towards Saturn, then, for the next month of February. It eventually conjoins on March 2nd. But then Venus is like, super slow at this point; it’s slowing down, and it just like, hovers there at 26 Aries for the next few weeks while Saturn stays there at 24 degrees of Aries. So you just have this extended degree-based conjunction of Venus and Saturn which must have felt just like, so oppressive and like, restrictive and, you know, the violence in some instances from the police. And then Venus goes retrograde; they form a conjunction while Venus is retrograde in March. Venus has the cazimi like, halfway through in April. Venus slows down and starts to station direct, and interestingly around the direct station in early May, Saturn changes signs and goes into Taurus. But what’s funny about that is as a result of that, so Venus goes direct, that’s gonna extend the sign-based conjunction so that once Venus changes signs, she then doesn’t get free of Saturn. She immediately like, goes to a different house and suddenly Saturn’s there again! Like, he’s stalking you or something. And they meet up in a degree-based conjunction June 11th, and then by the end of June, they’re wide. So it’s like, it doesn’t seem as close or as intense as you would think, and it’s one of the unremarkable things in the actual Stonewall chart by the time you get to the 28th. But if you realize that that’s Venus at the end of a very long series of conjunctions by degree and by sign with Saturn, you realize how pronounced that energy has been for the past several months, and therefore why the shift of Uranus moving into Libra for the final time would have mattered as well as the fact that there’s a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction, which is the other energy that’s going on in addition to like, the Mars retrograde.
Anyway. I was just – long way to say that all of your research has made me understand better the context and how things built up to what eventually happened at Stonewall.
EH: Yeah. And just to add quickly to that, just like, you know, that’s like, Venus moving from being both retrograde and in the sign of its detriment in Aries to then Venus being in its domicile in Taurus and that move to… Once it’s in its domicile in Taurus is when you get this like, much bigger, more well known moment that is Stonewall. And also —
CB: Right.
EH: — I’m just thinking about —
CB: That’s a good point.
EH: — I think it’s Firmicus who says like, Venus and Saturn in like, connection in any way makes natives gay or something like that? And just thinking about like, you know, this time in 1969 is like, such a crucial moment for gay history, for queer history, and is really marked by this many, many months of Venus and Saturn hanging out together.
CB: Yeah, absolutely. And how it’s like, Venus is trying to escape that and escape Saturn, and by degree it’s like, Venus is headed towards – by then at 21 Taurus, it’s headed towards a trine with first Pluto at 22 Virgo, but then especially Jupiter at 27, 28 Virgo, which it eventually completes like, a week later on July 5th. And then eventually it moves into Gemini and trines Uranus on July 7th.
So that’s interesting, and it just, it’s reminiscent of another recent one I did, which is like, looking in the Saturn-Neptune episode, the Boston Tea Party and how sometimes you think about the Boston Tea Party as like, this singular event, but really it was like, culmination of like, a lot of tensions and other things that had been building up to that point. But then it becomes kind of like, a watershed moment where things peak and then it creates this new era that you move into. In a similar way here, it’s a watershed moment that moves you into a new era.
EH: Yeah. Definitely.
CB: Nice. All right. Well I think that not demystifies, but it I think becomes one of the most compelling treatments, I think, to understand better what was going on in terms of Stonewall and the astrology surrounding it. What else was going on in 1969, because that was not the only thing. Or is there other things we should cover or mention before we move on?
EH: Yeah. I’m gonna skip a couple of the smaller ones just for the sake of time. But the one other crucial one that I wanted to mention is that on May 15th, 1969, so shortly after Venus has stationed direct, Robert Rayford dies of what is very likely the first confirmed case of HIV and AIDS in North America. And if you remember, he was born just before the 1953 retrograde. And just quickly a little bit about his story – so he was, you know, a teenager. He was like, 14, 15 years old. He was Black. He was potentially disabled and very likely the victim of sexual abuse. And he dies after almost a year of being in and out of the hospital of pneumonia. But he also had Kaposi’s sarcoma, which is a rare cancer that would later in the 1980s become this like, defining disease for people with AIDS. But at that point in time, you know, this is 1969, so this is like, significantly before the like, AIDS pandemic of the ‘80s. And so doctors didn’t know what was wrong with him. But they like, did some initial testing, actually, in 1984 on some of the like, tissue samples that they had saved, and that test comes back negative. But then there’s some retesting that’s done in 1987, which confirmed that Rayford had HIV, and so this is like, the first North American death from HIV and AIDS, although possibly this is like, an earlier strain of the disease than the one that causes the 1980s pandemic. But there’s just this like, tie in with Venus retrograde that we’re gonna see repeated once we get to the ‘80s.
CB: Wow. That’s stunning. So he was born February 3rd, 1953, with Venus at one degree of Aries just before it goes retrograde and will go back into Aries and then he passes away in 1969 during the Venus retrograde in Aries.
EH: Yeah.
CB: Okay. Yeah. That’s really, really important and really also then foreshadowing to some extent.
EH: Definitely.
CB: Okay. What else was going on? Is there anything else we should mention about 1969?
EH: I guess the only other – well, I’ll quickly do two. Which is that on May 18th, the Fight Repression of Exotic Expression, or FREE, which would later be called the Queer Student Cultural Center, was formed at the University of Minnesota. And this is one of like, the first gay and lesbian organizations at a college and was kind of like, the beginning of the like, student queer association movement. And then —
CB: It was one of the first at a college in the United States?
EH: I believe there was one other one, maybe like, a year or so earlier at Columbia. But this one is one of the first.
CB: Okay. That’s crazy, given the current Venus retrograde and that’s one of the things that’s happening is the Trump administration is like, threatening universities and they have to remove federal funding if they promote things that they don’t want people to talk about, including LGBTQ issues.
EH: Definitely. Yeah. Yeah, and then the other one is just that also in May of 1969, we get the like, first written use of the term “homophobia,” which at that point they’re using to refer to a straight man’s fear that they might be gay. And this is in like, a straight porno magazine called Screw. But these two gay guys write this article about homophobia, and so this was like, the first instance of this term in print media. And actually one of the two people who wrote that was like, the other person who founded the Mattachine Society of Washington, DC, with Frank Kameny in 1961.
CB: Okay. So the two authors were gay men, so was this a pro… This isn’t supposed to be derogatory, but was positive?
EH: Yeah. Yeah. This was just like, an article like, explaining homophobia and like, trying to like, to help people understand that concept and like, essentially like, push back against it.
CB: Got it. Okay. Yeah. There’s so many firsts. Like, this Venus retrograde in Aries, there’s so many firsts, and this is – that’s another really striking one. It’s also notable because it’s a phobia. You know, it frames it as like, a mental or like, a fear. A purely like, fear-based thing of something like fear of heights or other somewhat like, irrational things.
EH: Definitely.
CB: All right. So let’s jump into 1977 and the Venus retrograde that happened in the first half of that year.
EH: Yeah. So this is also another big one. And one of our key characters here is the person named Anita Bryant, who listeners of The Astrology Podcast might remember that Nick Dagan Best actually referenced Anita Bryant because she did a kind of similar thing in 1961 during that Venus retrograde with Jim Morrison. But basically, Anita Bryant is this very religious pop singer, beauty pageant winner, and also critically brand ambassador of the Florida Citrus Commission. And in January of 1977, the Miami-Dade County Board of Commissions passes an anti-discrimination bill that includes like, gay people in the bill. And basically immediately, a religious group comes together and forms this new foundation, Save Our Children, and they elect Anita Bryant as their president and spokesperson. So on February 1st, Save Our Children initiates the process to repeal this anti-discrimination bill, and this is like, so crucial because Save Our Children was like, the first organized opposition to any of the like, gay liberation movement. And I have this quote that says, “It brought together nationalism and religion to respond to homosexuality as immoral and against God’s wishes. It portrayed gay and lesbian non-discrimination legislation as an infringement on the rights of Christians, and the campaign also tied opposition to non-discrimination legislation to preventing the homosexuals from recruiting children – hence the name Save Our Children.”
So Bryant is appearing in commercials and taking out, like, full-page newspaper ads and becoming like, a frequent guest on talk shows and religious programs and basically just like, constantly like, promoting Save Our Children’s mission, which is to repeal this anti-discrimination bill. And you know, she says like, as a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children, therefore they must recruit our children. Which we will see echoes of in the past and into the future. But in response to this, there’s this huge boycott of orange juice by the gay community because Bryant was a spokesperson of the Florida Citrus Commission. So gay bars stop serving screwdrivers, which is an alcoholic drink that is like, orange juice and vodka, and instead they start serving this drink called Anita Bryants, which basically replaces that with apple juice.
CB: That’s really funny.
EH: I know! Yeah. And you know, there’s just like, huge boycotts, and whenever she like, goes somewhere to give a speech, there’s like, huge protests. And people just like, she becomes like, almost like a supervillain in the gay community, and like, rightfully so. But like, throughout that whole year, there’s like, people in “Fuck Anita Bryant” t-shirts and a classic one is like, “Anita Bryant Sucks Oranges.” Like, it just is like, really like, people are really galvanized by this, including —
CB: Well, because what a horrible person for her to be the start of some of this that we still see echoes of today of this like, “Oh, won’t somebody think of the children?” Or these false accusations that homosexuals are preying on children or other things like that in attempt to blur that or create these false narratives as well as blending that in with the appeal to religion and the attempts to spin her attempts at repression and say that she’s being repressed as a Christian for having this forced on her, which is an absurd attempt to reframe and create a sort of propaganda surrounding attempts to oppress another minority group of people by the dominant religious and other groups of people. I can understand why there would be like, a very strong reaction then as a result.
EH: Yeah. I mean, like, one of my favorite posters that I found when I was doing this research was this person who had a poster that said, “My straight teachers couldn’t convert me.” So you know, kind of like, pushing back on this idea of like, gay teachers or, you know, in whatever role like, converting children or recruiting children.
One of the like, key players in this whole boycott is Harvey Milk, and he actually publishes an article on March 15th, which is the day that Venus stationed retrograde, calling for people to join the orange juice boycott in the Bay Area Reporter.
CB: Wow. So that’s literally the day Venus stations retrograde in Aries. Looks like it was at 24 Aries conjunct the South Node at 24 Aries. Okay.
EH: Yeah. And Harvey Milk is gonna become a also crucial player in this, because he is actually running for public office as an openly gay man during this time. So but with Anita Bryant and this like, attempt to repeal the anti-discrimination law, even though there’s this huge boycott and all these protests wherever she goes, there’s a referendum vote that is taken in Miami on June 7th, 1977, which does repeal the law. And so this is kind of like, this moment for both the queer movement and also for the like, religious right movement where the queer movement is like, you know, so like, upset that they’ve lost, and the religious right movement is like, whoa, we just like, won this. And so that’s like, really a beginning point for what we still see today of like, religious right, like, homophobia and transphobia. And in Miami, they don’t get another anti-discrimination bill until like, the late ‘90s. So her homophobia has like, lasting impacts.
CB: Right. So this sets up a signature of the gay rights and queer rights movement being set back and through legislative efforts, essentially, under this Venus retrograde. And it’s playing out during the course of this Venus retrograde and then eventually culminates with that anti-discrimination bill being repealed, which then makes it okay to like, discriminate against queer people.
EH: Exactly. Yeah.
CB: Got it. Okay. And you said it was June 7th was? So it looks like Venus like, just departed from Aries and it met up with Mars and conjoined Mars on June 7th. So it’s like, you’re coming off of the retrograde in Aries when Venus and Mars were copresent, and then they change signs and yeah, meet. So all right. Keep going.
EH: Yeah. So the other kind of character that I mentioned in this story is Harvey Milk, who’s one of the, you know, main faces of this boycott and publishes this article on the day that Venus stations retrograde about the boycott. But Harvey Milk is living in San Francisco, and he is running for office – the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, which was the same office that Jose Sarria tried to run for in 1961. He is elected this time, though, on November 8th, 1977. So although the election, again, doesn’t take place during the Venus retrograde, he is actively campaigning during the retrograde. I did a search in the Bay Area Reporter, which is like, all online, and he had his own column called “The Milk Forum” where he’s like, calling for Anita Bryant to lose her job, for direct action like the boycotting of Florida oranges. At one point, he actually calls for them to throw orange juice into the harbor, a la the Boston Tea Party.
CB: Nice.
EH: And he’s like, you know, campaigning and speaking publicly and also calling for a boycott of Coors beer because of their bigotry. So he’s using the Venus retrograde, whether he knows it or not, to kind of like, galvanize his supporters and say like, “I’m gonna be someone who’s gonna have a backbone and call for these kinds of actions.”
CB: Right. He’s gonna fight for you and for the cause, and he’s emerging as this leader, this essentially like, civil rights leader in the gay community during this Venus retrograde.
EH: Yeah.
CB: Nice.
EH: The next election in November, he is elected and becomes the first openly gay person elected to a public office.
CB: Incredible. Nice. All right. So that’s a good thing, a good example, maybe, sometimes of a good thing of the galvanization when terrible stuff’s happening and laws are being passed, because the precedent that’s set up is what’s happening right now basically. But then sometimes galvanizing – we’ve seen a couple of instances like this and in 1969 before Stonewall of really terrible stuff happening, really big setbacks happening, oppression being widespread, but then sometimes it galvanizing people into action and sometimes leaders rising up that help to lead people through that as a result.
EH: Yeah.
CB: Okay. There was another major first under this retrograde in ‘77, right?
EH: Yeah. So on March 26th, 1977, this is the first time that openly gay and lesbian people are invited to the White House and are like, given office with, you know, the president’s people.
CB: So this is Carter, because at the beginning of ‘77, Carter gets into office and he’s inaugurated in January as Venus is slowing down to go retrograde. And then this happens?
EH: Exactly. Yes.
CB: Okay.
EH: And Frank Kameny, who’s come up a couple times, is one of the people there.
CB: Who was he again?
EH: He was the one who tried to fight for getting his job back and like, fought all the way to the Supreme Court in 1961 but was denied his job.
CB: Was that the one that was one of the first court cases?
EH: Exactly, yes.
CB: Wow. Okay. So then he comes back up again; he’s one of the people that’s present in this visit to the White House. So what was the context? They were going to the White House for the first official discussion of lesbian and gay rights?
EH: Exactly. Yes. This is like, the first time that they had been, that any openly gay or lesbian person has been invited to the White House, and it’s like, a group of like, I think two dozens people or something like that who are all invited to kind of come and share their grievances and their focus is on things like asking for the right to serve in the military, more homosexuals in the state department, in the FBI and the CIA, and also tax exempt status for their organizations. So this is like, a fairly kind of conservative group that’s going to the White House, and you know, like, fairly conservative demands, basically. Like, we wanna fight in the military and we want to work for the state. But this is kind of like, the outgrowth from the Mattachines through to now.
CB: Yeah, that’s incredible. I mean, that’s huge progress; that’s a huge milestone and like, turning point to be able to go out and advocate for those things like, at the White House with the president directly. And I looked at the chart, so this is March 26th, 1977, and we see Venus has just stationed retrograde 10 days earlier, so it’s just stationed retrograde, and it’s at 22 degrees of Aries conjunct Mercury at 16 Aries. And actually it looks like it’s – is it coming off of an eclipse? No, it’s going into – it’s about to go into eclipse season with a eclipse that must have been in Libra a couple weeks later. So this Venus retrograde actually took place with a eclipse in Libra and possibly Aries.
Okay, so that’s huge. And then of course that has echoes, because you said to be able to serve in the military, and this becomes relevant later in 1993 because Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is passed.
EH: Exactly. Exactly.
CB: Yeah. That’s crazy. Some of these retrogrades really sometimes it sets a foundation for something that then you build on it, and eventually the fruition of that thing, you know, comes up in the future, although like with retrogrades sometimes progress is not always a straight line. But sometimes society turns retrograde and goes back on itself and backtracks, and we’re seeing continued echoes of that today where, you know, Trump has just banned trans people from the military.
EH: Yes. Yeah. For the second time. The first time being right after the 2017 retrograde. So —
CB: Got it.
EH: — it comes up again and again.
CB: Right.
EH: But —
CB: So and there was the White House Press Secretary had to defend this meeting, right?
EH: Yeah. So like, a lot of people were like, essentially like, why are you giving any time to this? And the press secretary basically says like, they’re an organized group; they feel they have grievances; they’re not being treated fairly. And so like, as the government, we’re responsible to address those grievances and essentially says like, it doesn’t matter what I feel about gay rights or any other group; it’s not about that. It’s about, you know, addressing the grievances.
So it’s like, it’s not quite… It’s still fairly homophobic, but it is this like, step towards being heard.
CB: Yeah. I mean, progress is incremental. I mean, that’s one of the things that’s always such a tension with different groups is wanting sometimes having like, an all-or-nothing attitude or progress feeling really slow, but sometimes you gotta take the little victories when you can get it. And obviously symbolically this is an important turning point. But one of the things you said is that they, in the New York Times article, says that they were trying to advocate for tax status for their organizations. So that meant at this time in history, like, gay and lesbian groups could not even get – even though they were nonprofit groups, they couldn’t get tax-free, normal like, nonprofit status because of what they were focused on.
EH: Exactly. Yeah.
CB: Do you have any – I wonder when that changed. Do you happen to know?
EH: I don’t, actually.
CB: Okay. Well, we’ll revisit that. Was there anything else in 1977?
EH: Yeah, there was one other thing that I wanted to mention, and I feel like this is actually like, a good kind of contrast for like, the gay meeting at the White House. So like, the people who were welcomed to the White House, it was a very particular like, set of people, all fairly conservative. Kind of like, you know, suit and tie, assimilationist – you know, we just want to be like everyone else, fight in the military, have these jobs, have tax-free status for our organizations. The other side of this is that – or one example of the other side of this – is the Combahee River Collective, which was a Black, feminist, lesbian socialist organization based out of Boston, Massachusetts. And in April of 1977, during this Venus retrograde, they wrote the Combahee River Collective statement, which is one of the foundational texts in contemporary Black feminism, and this text like, really introduces the idea of identity politics and introduces the concept of interlocking systems of oppression, including but not limited to gender, race, and sexuality. So this is kind of like, one of the fundamental texts of intersectionality. So —
CB: Got it.
EH: — the, sorry, go ahead.
CB: So this is like, part of the foundation of the concept of intersectionality that I did an episode with Diana Rose Harper talking about this years ago and just that it’s rarely, people are rarely just oppressed based on a singular thing, but oftentimes there can be overlapping categories of oppression in which a person is hit on like, multiple fronts.
EH: Yeah. I believe that like, the term “intersectionality” was technically coined by Kimberle Crenshaw, but this like, idea of interlocking systems of oppression and being oppressed from like, multiple sides like, this statement is really like, foundational to that understanding. And you know, this is a group of like, Black lesbians, and so they felt like they couldn’t separate out their Blackness from being women from being lesbians, and that as they had tried to organize in the Black Power movement or the like, women’s movement, those movements were serving them because the oppression that they experienced occurred at these intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class. And so they formed this collective to like, address their specific concerns and really brought to light the idea that like, each of these different identity categories like, comes together to create a particular type of oppression and that we need to understand how these are all interwoven in order to be able to fight them better.
CB: That makes sense. That’s really important. And quick correction – I did talk about intersectionality with Diana Rose Harper back in 2020, but the main episode actually I did on intersectionality was with Bear Ryver in 2020 around the same time. There was like, a lot of discussions about that going on at the time. But so this is really notable then if this Venus retrograde – because April, I just looked, and in April that’s when the cazimi happened at like, 16 degrees of Aries. And you said this was written around that time, so that goes to your point, again, of another like, seed moment at the conjunction between the Sun and Venus.
EH: Yeah.
CB: Nice. Okay. Anything else you wanna mention about that, or is that good?
EH: I think that’s good. And I’ll just quickly add in that we also have on March 17th, the Arkansas State Legislature reinstates their sodomy law two years after repealing it. And so this is kind of the first of a series of setbacks for queer civil rights. And so we see that Venus retrograde principle of like, reversals, and —
CB: Right.
EH: — then —
CB: What was the date on that again?
EH: That was March 17th, 1977.
CB: So they repeal it and then they put it back again. Yeah. So like, reversals, and the taking away of rights essentially. There was a keyword we had for that I put somewhere in the introduction keywords, but that just seemed relevant because we kept seeing it here, but also… I mean, I guess it was erasure, but this isn’t necessarily erasure, but it’s like, setbacks, basically, that foreshadow later progress and triumphs. But it’s like, oh yeah, like, reactionary I think is one of the words that’s been coming up a lot during this, which is during 2025, which is not just removing progress that has been made but like, actively trying to reverse it and get rid of social progress that has been made, especially by minority or other like, social groups.
EH: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Okay.
EH: And then also just a couple quick ones. The New York Supreme Court – this is a little bit later in the year, but they probably were like, hearing the arguments of the trial during the Venus retrograde – but the New York Supreme Court rules that transwoman Renee Richards is allowed to play tennis. And then also 1977, Sandy Stone, who is a trans woman, was hired to work for Olivia Records, which was a like, women-owned lesbian record company, and people found out that she was trans and there was this big boycott. And she was essentially like, ousted from Olivia Records. And then also 1977, the state department —
CB: Was she – was the protest from like, conservatives, or was it from the left?
EH: Well, it was from other lesbians —
CB: Right. Yeah.
EH: — who were upset that there was like, a transwoman in this like, woman-owned space. So it was from a transphobic perspective, but from other gay people.
CB: Got it. Okay. Yeah. So both of these we see echoes off. I guess we can reflect on that in a minute. Were there any other ones you wanted to mention?
EH: Oh, just that in 1977 is when the state department begins to include sex markers on passports due to “the rise of unisex fashion and hairstyles,” which just seems relevant to today’s retrograde.
CB: Absolutely. So they start including that specifically because the fashions are becoming less like, obviously gender specific.
EH: Yeah. Up until that point, there were like, not any markers for gender on passports, but then in 1977 is when that starts.
CB: So there’s like, an attempt to differentiate it and to like, put people into one category or another. But that’s incredible – so the Supreme Court case probably would have been, you noted, like, being argued about a trans woman being allowed to play in a tennis tournament. So right there we’ve got repetition of that this year with Trump attempting to issue executive orders banning trans people from sports, effectively, like, entirely or forcing them to conform with whatever their assignment was at birth. And then we’ve got with the other one the some tensions on the left in terms of acceptance of transwomen in women-centered spaces and like, discussions surrounding that.
EH: Yeah.
CB: Okay. Wow. Yeah. That’s incredible. Echoes. Echoes of things.
EH: Yeah. Definitely.
CB: Yeah. And then this is – so like I said, just to something I thought of, but just thinking of how that began. Because this Venus retrograde, because it repeats every eight years, you’ll get it at the beginning of certain presidential terms, and it’s just crazy thinking about that being the beginning of Carter’s term and him meeting that group who were advocating for gay rights at the White House. But then, you know, he just gets that four years, and then all of a sudden you get Reagan for eight years who was so terrible in terms of gay rights as well as his treatment of AIDS because it was treated as if it was like, just a gay disease, and how much sometimes there’s like, these opportunities for like, progress or forward movement, but then sometimes like, things just go and just backtrack terribly for like, a decade. Sort of in the same way that happened with like, Germany, where it seems like they’re making a lot of progress in Berlin in the 1920s, and there’s like, spaces for gay people and other things like that, and then all of a sudden, the Nazis get swept into power and just like, wreak havoc for a decade and a half until they’re eventually defeated.
All right. So I think that’s good for 1977. Do you wanna move onto 1985?
EH: Yeah, let’s do it.
CB: All right, let’s transition to talking about 1985 and the next Venus retrograde in Aries that occurred after our previous period. So what was going on in the first half of 1985?
EH: Yeah, so it was actually a lot of themes that have to do with HIV and AIDS. And typically, you know, when we’re talking about HIV and AIDS and astrology, we’re looking at other cycles like the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction of 1980 and 1981. I know that you did an episode with Gary Lorentzen about it was Saturn-Pluto, I believe? Right?
CB: Yeah. We talked about the Saturn-Pluto conjunction that was occurring in the early 1980s and how that coincided with the sort of explosion and the sudden awareness and identification of the AIDS pandemic during that time in like, the first half of the ‘80s. And we did that episode like, I don’t know, like, a couple of years ago partially in the context of the most recent Saturn-Pluto conjunction that went exact in 2020 and how that coincided with the covid pandemic. So it was, we were sort of looking at it from that standpoint.
EH: Yeah. Yeah, so typically we’d be using these kind of, like, bigger frame astrology cycles. But also, you know, as we’ve already started to see, the Venus retrograde seems to play a role here too, like, with Robert Rayford. But —
CB: Absolutely.
EH: There’s a number of things that happened related to HIV. The first is on March 2nd, 1985, ELISA, which is the first ever HIV test, is approved by the FDA. And then a second test of the same type is approved on March 9th just about a week later. And originally, these tests were used for to test blood from the like, blood donation supply rather than people, because the tests had a very high rate of false positive results. So for people taking these early tests, they often had to retake them to confirm a positive result, which also feels like a kind of classic like, retrograde. Like, having to do something more than once. But of course, you know, with an HIV test, that’s a very like, kind of high stakes, especially at that point —
CB: Right.
EH: — testing.
CB: Can you imagine? Like, one, you might not even be able to get testing prior to that point, and then getting testing but having the test maybe, you know, not being super reliable at that time.
EH: Yeah. So we’ve got these early like, really like, the first HIV tests. And then on March 15th in 1985, just two days after Venus has stationed, the American Medical Association concludes that HIV is not spread through casual contact. So that’s like, a huge deal in terms of like, public understanding of how HIV is spread.
CB: That it’s not just from like, being in the vicinity of somebody or touching somebody with your hand or something?
EH: Exactly.
CB: So it’s like, they’ve figured out that it’s happening through specifically through sexual contact.
EH: Or intravenous drug use or from parent to child during birth.
CB: Got it.
EH: Yeah. But this is like, yeah. Prior to this point, there’s like, I mean, so much fear and also stigma around HIV. And so a lot of like, concern about touching, being in the same room, and then during this Venus retrograde, we get a little bit more information about actually how it is spread.
CB: Right. Which is both a good thing but an also a not great thing for Venusian things in terms of —
EH: Right.
CB: — narrowing it down and realizing that it spread – that one of the vectors is through sexual contact. So this is March 15th, 1985. Look at the chart. Venus has like, literally just stationed retrograde one point nine days earlier at 22 degrees of Aries. So that means that identification of, yeah, of AIDS not spreading through casual contact, which is like, a deconfirmation on the one hand but then a confirmation of the ways in which it does spread happening like, exactly on that station. That’s incredible. I guess I’m just thinking of like, I grew up in the ‘90s, and took, you know, they would do the whatever the classes are that you go through eventually in puberty about school and like, safe sex and stuff like that. Like, safe sex was huge during the 1990s and just thinking about the context of the next couple of decades at least in terms of when the AIDS pandemic was at its highest let’s say in the US, and the context that that would set for generation or two of people in terms of just what dating or sex or other things were like or, you know, especially in the gay community. And then this being such a crucial turning point with that starting on the Venus retrograde – that’s just incredible.
EH: Absolutely. Yeah. And I mean, also just like, you know, prior to this point – at this point, even, like, Reagan as the president has yet to say the word “HIV” or “AIDS” publicly. And so getting like, public recognition, getting government support and support from these like, medical organizations has been a huge fight up until this point. And so this is like, that’s part of why this is such a big moment.
CB: Right. He refuses to. And it’s like, his slow-walking of dealing with the pandemic is part of what ends up making it worse than it necessarily even needed to be, if instead you had somebody like Carter in the White House or what have you.
EH: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of the organizing and pushback by HIV and AIDS activists is actually about government inaction and yeah, you know, one of the most famous quotes, which is from a little bit later, but I think just really exemplifies the point is like, this idea of like, if I die of AIDS, forget burial. Just like, bring my body to the steps of the FDA. Like, you know, I died not because of this disease but because of the government inaction because of the refusal to take this seriously because it affects primarily at that point particular minorities.
CB: Right. Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s really important. I think it’s important also because of like, I see sometimes nowadays the right idealizing Reagan and like, what a great president Reagan supposedly was. But like, no. Like, there were many areas, and this is just one of the most egregious areas in which people died – more people died in the country as a result of his presidency that didn’t necessarily need to die for various reasons.
EH: Absolutely. Yeah.
CB: All right. So what else was going on?
EH: Yeah. So a little bit later, April 15th to the 17th, the United States Department of Health and Human Services and the World Health Organization holds their first International AIDS Conference in Georgia. So this is kind of our second piece of like, okay, the government and the WOrld Health Organization is taking this a little bit more seriously and trying to like, figure out what to do.
CB: Right. Which, you know, speaking of World Health Organization, like, today —
EH: Right.
CB: The US basically like, pulling out of it functionally. Yeah.
EH: Yeah. And then simultaneous to these kind of like, government-based changes, we also have a couple kind of critical instances of activists using art to bring attention to HIV and AIDS. So one of these is that on April 21st, 1985, Larry Kramer, who is the founder of ACT UP, which is one of these huge really important AIDS organizing groups, his play, Normal Heart, opens off Broadway. And it focuses on the AIDS epidemic and activist fight for government and science attention and resources. And during the original production, the set was really simple, but what they would do is they would like, paint facts and newspaper headlines and figures that were associated with the HIV and AIDS epidemic on like, the walls and on the chairs. So like, for example, one of the like, written passages on the set was like, “During the first 19 months of the epidemic, the New York Times wrote about it a total of seven times.” And then another passage read, “During the three months of the Tylenol scare in 1982, the New York Times wrote about it a total of 54 times.” And the text on the set would be like, repainted and updated and revised constantly, and they would update the latest number of AIDS cases and like, so before each performance they would cross out whatever the previous number had been and update it with a new figure, which also feels really, like, Venus retrograde. Like, constantly revising and updating. And —
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. And I looked at the chart, and so this – the first time this play opened was you said April 21st, 1985, and that’s like, Venus is stationing direct at that point. It’s three days away from stationing direct at six degrees of Aries, and it’s conjunct Mercury. So here’s the chart. Venus at six Aries; Mercury at seven Aries. Venus just three days from direct, so it’s practically stationary at this point. Okay.
EH: Yeah. And so that’s, and also interestingly just as kind of a side note, this play itself gets its own like, Venus retrograde repetition when in April of 1993, Barbra Streisand organizes and does a benefit reading of this play for Broadway Cares. So the play itself gets kind of tied in with Venus retrograde. But also there’s a like, there’s this other play that’s also about HIV and AIDS that opens just like, a few weeks before on March 10th, 1985, and that’s As Is by William Hoffman. And it starts off Broadway, but it actually moves to Broadway on May 1st, 1985. And what’s interesting is that As Is is a much more like, romantic not like, overtly political or critical of the government or like, the medical institutions, and so there’s this interesting like, distinction that gets drawn between the two, because both are like, the two first kind of plays about HIV and AIDS coming out within weeks of each other. And one is like, very like, explicitly political, and the other is about this like, relationship between these two people, and that’s the one that kind of makes it to Broadway.
CB: So the more, the one that’s like, less aggressively in your face about it is the one that’s able to go more mainstream, whereas the other one that’s more, you know, putting the facts and the figures like, right in front of you is not. And that’s interesting, because we talked about this in the AIDS pandemic episode with Gary Lorentzen, and Gary’s a gay man that was like, alive at that time, so that’s one of the reasons that I wanted to do that episode because it was partially collecting like, a live account of like, an astrologer who was around and paying attention to everything at that time. But one of the things we talked about is how the creator of the first play, Larry Kramer, ended up going on to found ACT UP in, what, like, two years later, and I think that ended up being one of the more aggressive type organizations in terms of how they approached dealing with the AIDS pandemic. Right? Like, I’m getting that right?
EH: Yeah. Definitely. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
CB: Yeah. And that came to characterize sort of two different approaches in the gay community in dealing with AIDS but also dealing with just being gay and queerness in general and the extent to which people should be out about that versus not. So we’re seeing like, a little mini microcosm of that here with these two plays launching under this Venus retrograde in 1985 where it’s almost like we’re seeing like, the two sides of the Venus retrograde. You have like, the morning star Venus, which is like, much more like, you know, aggressive and direct and forthright and sort of like, in your face, and we have like, the evening star Venus which is a little bit more passive, a little bit more, you know, using honey instead of vinegar type approach. Sort of different ways of approaching things.
EH: Yeah. No, definitely. It was kind of like, amazing finding these two like, so obviously parable plays coming out just at the exact same moment focused on the exact same thing. They were both these firsts, but doing it in these very different ways and seeing how the public reacts to that.
CB: Right. Because that became the central tension and conflict in the queer community from that point forward was over things like that and how to approach the public, which we’ve already seen before. Like, we’ve already seen echoes of this tension before, but with ACT UP, like, what became the central tension in terms of what they were trying to do versus what the other approaches were?
EH: I mean, so they were like, I would say ACT UP was like, in your face, political, angry. You know, they went into like, Wall Street and stopped the New York Stock Exchange for the first time ever a couple years later. Like, they’re like, disruptive. And some of the other approaches are, you know, much more like, we need to go and have meetings; we need to like, sit down with people, you know, taking the Venus as like, the diplomat approach versus Venus as like, the warrior morning star kind of approach. Yeah.
CB: Right. One of the things I think Gary and I talked about is that ACT UP was actively like, outing people at a certain point because they believed that it was important for the gay rights movement, for people that were queer to be like, out about it and to have that more known or other things like that. That was also one of the central tensions.
EH: Yeah. Definitely. They took a much more aggressive route than some of the other people would have liked. But yeah. I think also just the idea of like, coming out kind of comes through this Venus retrograde. I think I didn’t mention it, but I believe it was in 1969 with Carl Wittman’s like, manifesto about refugees in America, he talks about like, coming out, whereas prior to that point, there was a kind of like, the framing was more like, coming into. And so that shift of like, joining society versus like, coming out and being perhaps outside of mainstream society also feels very like, Venus as like a rebellious, retrograde kind of energy. And ACT UP definitely grew out of – not directly necessarily, but certainly in that same vein.
CB: Yeah, absolutely. I like that – coming into. We could think about the retrograde conjunction and Venus going into the Sun and this internalization process sometimes of looking inwards versus coming out and Venus moving away from the cazimi conjunction and like, emerging from the Sun’s beams into view again.
All right. And you said there was one last thing about that second play that was actually a repetition, right?
EH: Yeah. So that play was written by William Hoffman, and he actually died in April of 2017, which was another Venus retrograde.
CB: Wow. So his play premiered and, you know, the play As Is premiered in March ‘85 and went to Broadway in May of ‘85 under the Venus retrograde in Aries and then he passed away, what, one, two, three, four Venus cycles later?
EH: Yeah.
CB: Wow. Yeah. I saw a lot of that with other ones, of people doing some of their most important work under one and then sometimes passing away under a subsequent repetition. So that’s really striking.
EH: Yeah. And then just one other art thing that happens is so Arthur J. Bressan’s film Buddies, which is the first narrative film about HIV, comes out in September of 1985. Obviously this is not during the retrograde, but I did a bunch of research trying to figure out when they were filming it, and I know that it was filmed – it was like, written and filmed over the course of nine days. And he like, wanted to get it out as quickly as possible. And so I think there’s a very good chance that it was being filmed around the time of the Venus retrograde, and so just another instance of one of these like, first art things having to do with HIV and this Venus retrograde.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. That’s really good. And how sometimes things happen later in the same year but the core of their creation was during the retrograde itself. Yeah.
EH: And then in terms of legal cases, we get an important repetition on March 26th, 1985, because this is when the United States Supreme Court offers their decision about a case that involves homosexuality. And so this means that this is like, the first time that they have actually like, heard a case that had anything to do with gay rights or queer rights, and we can compare that back to the Frank Kameny trial in 1961 where they refused to hear his case. Now this time, they have chosen to hear the case and offer a decision. And this was the Board of Education of Oklahoma City versus the National Gay Task Force. So Oklahoma Public Schools had been firing teachers for “promoting homosexual activity,” and there was a bunch of back-and-forth with the courts moving up to the Supreme Court about whether or not this was legal. And essentially, the court was divided, but ruled that it was not legal for teachers to be fired because this infringed on their First Amendment rights. So yeah, we get this – it’s sort of a win? It’s a little bit like, complicated. Like, they don’t, there’s a couple of like, caveats to it. But this is like, the first time that the Supreme Court hears a case that has to do with gay rights and also sets a precedent for like, freedom of speech associated with like, talking about queerness.
CB: Yeah. That’s incredible. That’s a huge first. First oral arguments before the Supreme Court on any gay rights issue happening on this one, and the chart is really amazing, because March 26th, 1985 – that’s like, Venus has just stationed 12 days earlier. It’s retrograde at 18 degrees of Aries, and it’s exactly conjoining Mercury, which has just stationed one point eight days earlier. And it’s conjoining Venus at 18 degrees of Aries. So first oral arguments in the Supreme Court for a case related to gay rights, and it’s Venus retrograde in Aries conjunct Mercury. Incredible. That’s perfect.
EH: Yeah.
CB: And then so that means, again, when it comes to repetition, so that’s 1985, and Mercury has a 20-year repetition cycle, so this was a Mercury retrograde in Aries and Venus retrograde in Aries, so that repeats every – with Mercury, every 20 years. So that jumps to 2005 and then again in 2025, so right now we’re in the 20-year Mercury repetition of this case from exactly 40 years ago. And that’s a lot of what’s happening right now is a lot of like, legal cases being filed to stop some of Trump’s executive orders, and a lot of this is gonna play out in the courts in terms of how much some of that can stand or not stand.
EH: Yeah.
CB: All right. Anything else about 1985?
EH: I think the rest we can save for the document you release for patrons.
CB: Okay. There’s no other major… Yeah, okay. So you are good to release this document with your research notes to patrons? I usually do that, but just wanted to – I forgot to confirm.
EH: Yeah. Yeah, that’s totally fine.
CB: Cool. All right. So people can find the notes with a lot of bonus content there. Wasn’t there – maybe it’s the next one. But there wasn’t something in the ‘85 about that referred back to – yeah. No, this one’s actually really important. You have one note about May 12th, 1985 —
EH: Oh yes.
CB: Go ahead.
EH: Yeah. So on May 12th, 1985, we get the first memorial to LGBT victims of the Nazis. And yeah, it’s a pink, granite stone, so we get the pink from the pink triangle, and dedicated to homosexual victims of National Socialism. And so this is, you know, 40 years after the end of World War Two, and this is like, the first time that we get a public moment really just dedicated to the homosexual victims of the Holocaust, which as you mentioned, you know, as early at 1937 people were being imprisoned on the basis of homosexuality. So you know, this is like, a long time coming in terms of like, recognizing the harm that has been done.
CB: Yeah. That’s incredible. Because like I said, like, they were imprisoning – there was a large number of queer people that were imprisoned in the first half of 1937 in Germany. And that may have been the start, at some point that year, of the pinot triangle to be like, the designation in the first place for them in these concentration camps. So it’s incredible that you have the first memorial to that here under a subsequent Venus retrograde in Aries. And it’s also striking because going back to what I was just talking about with the 20 year Mercury repetition, like I said, it repeats every 20 years, so that means that this was two 20-year Mercury cycles after the liberation of those concentration camps that had so many queer prisoners in 1945 when Mercury went retrograde in Aries and Venus went retrograde in Aries in 1945 when those camps were liberated. And here 40 years later, we had a repetition of that where Mercury was retrograde in Aries and Venus was retrograde in Aries. So here’s the actual chart, because that just goes to my whole – my point that I was making previously about the 40 year repetition of the Supreme Court cases. So here is, let’s say, like, May 1945. Mercury has just recently, like two weeks earlier, stationed direct in Aries; it had been retrograde in Aries, and Venus is also coming off of its station in Aries. And then when you jump forward to May 1985, you get Venus coming off of its retrograde in Aries and you get Mercury coming off of a retrograde in Aries.
EH: Yeah.
CB: So there you go again with just some of those repeating cycles and how they connect events sometimes very far away in time. In this instance, in like, 40 year increments when you get a doubling up of two repetitions.
EH: Yeah.
CB: All right. So is that good for 1985?
EH: I think so. Yeah.
CB: You had other good ones here! I don’t know.
EH: Okay, we can – I’m happy to share as much.
CB: Okay.
EH: Yeah. So one other important one is that on February 24th, 1985, Gwen Araujo… Hello?
CB: I can hear you.
EH: Okay. Cool. So another important one is that on February 24th, 1985, Gwen Araujo is born, and she is a transwoman. She comes out pretty young – maybe like, 14 – and you know, she was born just before this Venus retrograde. And unfortunately, she will be murdered in October 2002. And her death and the trial following that is the first time that we get the use of a like, trans panic defense, which essentially is when someone argues that like, they didn’t know that someone was trans, and then upon finding out, they have some sort of panic that leads to extreme violence. And you know, that defense doesn’t like, work in court, and the people who murdered her are sentenced to prison, but it’s like, this really horrible violent occurrence that leads to the Trans Day of Remembrance and also is like, one of these early like, instances of public acknowledgement of trans violence. And so she was born right before this Venus retrograde, and when she dies, it is actually just five days before Venus will station retrograde in Scorpio, which is Mars’s other sign. So while her death is not connected to this specific cycle, it is still connected to Venus and the Venus retrograde in Mars-ruled signs.
CB: Yeah, absolutely. That’s actually the first Venus retrograde that I remember was that one in October and November of 2002 because it was the first time I, early in my astrological studies, that I was like, aware that Venus’s retrograde was happening then, and I was seeing it line up with some events in my life at the time. So it was just five days before it stationed retrograde in Scorpio, and here we can see Venus at 14, and it’s getting ready to station at 15 just five, six days later. Yeah. So that’s really important in terms of her being born, you know, as Venus was slowing down to retrograde and then being murdered as Venus was slowing down to go retrograde, and then the precedent that would eventually set at least in… Not that the trans panic defense was first used, but that it became not successful and that now it’s not a valid, you know, attempt to defend violence on trans people.
EH: Yeah. And I believe that this is like, after her death is one of the first instances of like, hate crime legislation specific to gender identity. I don’t know for certain if that’s true, but I believe that a law is passed after her death that essentially like, inscribes within hate crime law that gender identity as a protected category.
CB: Okay.
EH: Which then makes —
CB: Nice.
EH: — the trans panic defense not useful or usable.
CB: Good. Okay. All right. These others seem relevant, if you wanna mention them briefly in passing. Or if you wanna move on, we can. I just know we’ve sort of committed at this point, so I’m in it —
EH: Yeah.
CB: — for the long haul —
EH: All right.
CB: — but I also wanna respect your time and energy as well.
EH: Yeah. No, let’s do it.
CB: Okay.
EH: So couple other ones… March 16th, 1985, the GLBT Historical Society is founded, and you know, this is one of the crucial really important societies that like, houses a whole bunch of archives and records and grows out of a like, essentially like, meeting of a group of people called the Lesbian and Gay History Project. And they decide to like, start this historical foundation and invite a whole bunch of people to meet at the San Francisco Public Library on March 16th, 1985. They end up with a group of 63 people and decide that everybody there is a member of the foundation. And from that point, you know, this grows to be just like, a massive research in terms of like, archives for queer history and is definitely one of the places that I was doing a lot of my research is through their like, digital archives. Yeah.
CB: Nice. That’s incredible. And it looks like Venus was just – it had just stationed retrograde two point nine days earlier, and that’s just incredible in the context of when you think about the context of the earlier Venus retrogrades in like, 1969 and what was happening in the Bay Area, and then to have this formed in ‘85 in the Bay Area is incredible.
EH: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So that’s good. And then in March, the LA Times came out in favor of gay rights as well?
EH: Yeah. Yeah, so they, you may recall that in 1953, they were writing articles about how the Mattachine Society was subversive and dangerous. And then we compare that to 1985 when they kind of write this article coming out in favor of gay rights and urging the Supreme Court in that Oklahoma versus the National Gay Task Force to take a stand on more gay-related issues. So we see that reversal from 1953 to 1985 of this one specific newspaper.
CB: Nice. I like that. Something just to go back to the last one to mention really quickly – I’ve noticed that the Venus retrograde sometimes, because it goes retrograde, there can be a backwards-looking component to retrograde planets, and it can turn people’s attention towards the past. And you know, sometimes it classically, you know, we associate it with like, a former relationship coming back or like, an ex coming back into your life, but that’s part of a broader phenomenon where just sometimes things from the past and your attention can be directed towards the past. And one of the ways that I see that happening sometimes is like this with the people that set up the historical society, because then part of what’s happening is they’re revisiting the past, and that’s at a point where enough of the past has been around and they’ve reached a new milestone where they can begin looking back and reconstructing their own history. I saw something else with similar groups with like, a Holocaust group in one of the retrogrades, and I’m forgetting the details right now, but it just reminded me that that’s a major element to Venus retrogrades that we’re seeing here, both in that one as well as one of the other ones I’m forgetting.
EH: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
EH: Yeah.
CB: Oh, and – well, yeah, that was the other one, the granite stone —
EH: Memorial. Yeah.
CB: The memorial, which is like, harkening back to what happened in the Holocaust and the liberation of the camps, but that’s again part of the reason we’re seeing that is we have to remember that sometimes there’s this backwards-looking component of remembrance to Venus retrogrades. But also it gets doubled up when it’s also on top of a Mercury retrograde, so you get two of the same thing.
EH: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. I think that’s good for 1985, yeah?
EH: Yeah, that sounds great.
CB: Okay. Oh sorry – I interrupted. There was one last one you were gonna do?
EH: Yeah. Sure. So the last one is actually – it’s also kind of a repetition or a looking back to a previous Venus retrograde, and that is so shortly after Harvey Milk was elected to office, he was murdered. And so he becomes this martyr and this like, figure in gay history. And in his honor, in his memory, there is a school called Harvey Milk High School that is founded in New York City, and it’s a school – it’s a, you know, very small high school. It’s like, for 20 kids only. And it’s a city-funded school that provides a kind of like, refuge for students who might have dropped out or like, you know, had a really bad time in school because of homophobic or transphobic bullying and harassment. And so on April 1st, 1985, is when they hold their first ever classes. So we get the repetition of Harvey Milk from the 1977 to 1985.
CB: Beautiful. I love that. And that was a retrograde Mercury and Venus conjoining each other at 15 Aries, heading into the cazimi with the Sun at 11 Aries at that time. Beautiful. All right. I think that’s good for 1985. Why don’t we take a little break?
EH: Cool.
CB: All right, we’re back from break, and now we’re gonna transition to talking about 1993 and the Venus retrograde in Aries that happened in the first half of that year. So what was going on in 1993?
EH: Yeah. So we’ve got a lot going on in 1993. The first major piece is we have another boycott – this time not of a fruit, but of a state. So in November of 1992, Colorado passed Amendment Two, which prevented municipalities from enacting anti-discrimination laws on the basis of sexual orientation. So again we have this kind of like, prevention of anti-discrimination laws coming up. And basically in response to this, there is this like, huge call to boycott the state of Colorado, which was actually widely debated during this Venus retrograde. So the call was to boycott all like, tourism to Colorado and also all products made in Colorado. And this is like a, you know, big deal – like, big enough that like, the California Democrats when they meet in early April during this Venus retrograde, they sign a resolution in support of the boycott.
CB: My god.
EH: Yeah!
CB: Obviously, like, the majority of the people boycotting this are gonna be Republicans and, I don’t know, religious fundamentalists and stuff like that?
EH: Or the reverse. So the amendment that’s passed, like, bans enacting anti-discrimination laws, so it says like, you can’t have anti-discrimination laws. So like, essentially you, like, does that make sense?
CB: No. So they – oh wait, so the law that was passed in 1992 prevented places from passing anti-discrimination laws. So it was actually basically like —
EH: Yes.
CB: — enacting discrimination laws, basically, is what was happening.
EH: Yes. Yes.
CB: Okay. So the protest then is the Democrats – the people in California are like, we’re gonna protest Colorado because they’ve just put this oppressive like, laws into place which don’t make any sense.
EH: Exactly. Yeah.
CB: Got it. That’s unfortunate, as that being my home state. I’m embarrassed. But I don’t remember; I was not paying attention to the news in 1993 as much as I do today.
EH: Yeah. So we get this amendment that says, like, essentially you can have discrimination laws, and then a boycott of the state of Colorado that is basically like, we’re not gonna go to Colorado because like, discrimination is allowed there. And then the California Democrats are signing on in support of this boycott, saying, yeah, we’re not gonna go to Colorado because discrimination is allowed there. And you know, Amendment Two is found to be unconstitutional by the State Supreme Court by 1994, and at that point, the boycott is called off. But this Venus retrograde is like, really this point in time where there’s the call for the boycott and also people are really like, debating like, should we boycott? You know, there’s if you look up the like, gay newspapers from that time, there’s all these like, letters to the editor that are like, well, like, what about the like, you know, gay business owners in Colorado? And like, we shouldn’t boycott them, and you know. And then other people being like, no, we need to boycott the whole state to really prove our point.
CB: Right. Well, it’s funny and it’s interesting and it shows how much times have changed if that passed in November of 1992, but Colorado’s otherwise been like, a relatively liberal state over the past 30 years. You know, being the first to legalize marijuana – like, not the first, one of the first state to decriminalize or legalize functionally marijuana in the early 2010s, or like, our current governor. Our current, yeah, governor of Colorado, Jared Polis, is like, one of the first openly gay men to be elected governor of a US state. So it’s interesting how much, I guess, how much times have changed. I don’t know how that passed in 1992 or what the situation was back then, but that’s striking.
EH: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. And then moving on we had other stuff going on in March, right?
EH: Yeah. So one of the big things that happens in —
CB: Actually, sorry to interrupt, but just to take that back, I wanted to like, re-emphasize that point. If Colorado’s like, banning stuff – doing stuff like that – in 1992, but we have like, the first openly gay – the second openly gay governor now, I just wanna give that to people as like, an image in terms of 30-year increments of how much stuff, how much bullshit people are having to put up with today and how different things may be in 10 or 20 or 30 years’ time with regard to some of the battles that are being fought today. Just to give some people some hope in terms of this like, current retrograde.
EH: Definitely. Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
EH: Yeah. And I’m hoping we can talk more about this at the end, but I’m hoping that several of these stories we can kind of take with us to, you know, bolster us for this particularly challenging moment, so. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. All right. Continue.
EH: Yeah. So another thing that’s happening – this is actually just as Venus is stationing direct – is we get the first ever Dyke March, and the third March on Washington. And this occurs the weekend of April 24th and 25th of 1993. So the first ever Dyke March is held on April 24th, 1993, at around five PM in Washington, DC. And this march is led by the Lesbian Avengers, and the Lesbian Avengers are a direct action group, and they’re focused on lesbian visibility and survival. If you go to their website, it says, “Too impatient for lobbying or letter-writing, these fire-eating secretaries, students, cab drivers, journalists, artists, and teachers joined together to create a fabulous street action that inserted lesbians into public life, forced political change, and redefined dykes as the coolest most ferocious girls on the block.”
So this evening of April 24th, they come down from New York – they were based in New York – and they like, have done a whole bunch of like, flyering and advertising to get a whole bunch of people to come to Washington, DC, for this first ever Dyke March which will become, you know, really symbolic, or a really important piece of Pride. Every year after this first Dyke March, there is then one that happens in June right before the like, usual Pride parade, and then every year since then we’ve had a Dyke March in New York City and in many, many cities across the world. But at this first one, there is something like 20,000 lesbians who join this march, and this is at least according to one of the Lesbian Avengers the biggest gathering of lesbians in the history of the world. Which is huge on its own, but also one of the things that the Lesbian Avengers become known for is this symbol of eating fire. So the first time that they ate fire was on October 30th, 1992, and they did this to honor the lives of Hattie Mae Cohens and Brian Mock, who were both gay. Hattie Mae Cohens was also Black, and Brian Mock was disabled, and the two of them lived together in Salem, Oregon, I believe, and faced a lot of discrimination from the community. And they were killed in a firebombing of their home. And that happened in that fall of 1992, and so the Lesbian Avengers, in order to honor their lives, in order to share their story, in order to make sure that people didn’t forget, they learned how to eat fire and basically at this demonstration in October of 1992, they ate fire for the first time. And then in April of 1993, at this first Dyke March, the evening before the third March on Washington, while they are – or after they have marched to the front of the White House, they’re standing in front of the White House, and they eat fire while chanting, “The fire will not consume us. We take it and make it our own. And we take the fire within us, we take it and make it our own.” Which just feels like such a like, on-the-nose like, Venus retrograde in Aries symbol of like, eating fire, taking all of the harms that have been done to us as a community and like, rather than being consumed by them, we like, take them in and kind of like, transform them and make them our own and carry them forward. I don’t know; that just like, felt like such a powerful symbol of Venus retrograde in Aries.
CB: Absolutely. And I’m looking at the astrology, and the astrology is crazy. Like, this is right on the Venus station. Like, Venus has just stationed direct two days earlier at three degrees of Aries, and at five PM in Washington, DC, Venus was just setting over the western horizon while Jupiter in Libra was rising over the eastern horizon. And since this is ‘93, this is also a repetition of the Mars retrograde in Cancer. So this is one of those years where you get the same retrograde we have now, which is like, Venus retrograde in Aries and Mars retrograde in Cancer. But I love that this is like, the first, you know, like you said, in Washington, DC, the first Dyke March. And it’s literally right on the Venus direct station in Aries.
EH: Yeah. And I think like, with that repetition of the Mars retrograde and Venus retrograde, like, I believe the Mars retrograde came first and was kind of happening in the fall of 1992, if I’m not mistaken.
CB: Yeah, that’s the connection. I pulled up the animated chart and it was like, Mars – so see, Mars is at like, 28 Cancer here after stationing direct, and then here’s the first fire-breathing incident was on October 30th, you said, so Mars is at like, 22 Cancer. So it’s like, it’s tracking the Mars retrograde.
EH: Yeah. So yeah, we get this kind of like, this instance of violence and then also the transformation of that into this symbol of, you know, we won’t let this consume us; we won’t be taken down. We’re gonna like, come together as a community and come back stronger. And that kind of like, passing off of the Mars retrograde to the Venus retrograde feels like, very appropriate to that.
CB: Right.
EH: The way that that story happened.
CB: When was the death of that they were inspired by? Do you know?
EH: I don’t have the date off the top of my head, but it was like, a couple weeks before —
CB: Okay. Yeah. So it was, so Mars was probably in Cancer already like, building up to that retrograde.
EH: Definitely. Yeah. It was, you know, either like, beginning of October or end of September; it was very close.
CB: Got it. Okay. Yeah. All right. So that’s huge. And that’s right on the retrograde, so that’s incredibly striking, especially as a first. Yeah, especially as a first.
EH: Yeah. Simultaneous to this, while we have this like, huge gathering of 20,000 lesbians, and like, you know, there’s also like, other people who are not necessarily lesbians who are like, on the sidelines kind of like, cheering them on. Like, there’s this great documentary called Lesbian Avengers Eat Fire Too that has all of this footage from the October action and then from this first Dyke March, and it’s just like, really fun and celebratory but also very like, political and like, fiery. At the same time, there is also this mass wedding ceremony that’s being conducted by Reverend Troy Perry in front of the IRS building. And at this ceremony, something like 1,500 lesbian and gay couples are married.
CB: Wow. And this is the same day as the march; this is also April 24th, like, right as Venus is stationing direct.
EH: Yeah. So basically —
CB: Wow.
EH: — what happened was the next day, there was going to be the third March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation. And so people from like, all over the country have like, come to DC for this huge march. And so the evening before, there’s all of these like, other smaller actions, including this first Dyke March and then this like, mass wedding ceremony. And in a now classic Venus retrograde repetition, the reverend who like, officiated the wedding was one of the people along with Kameny who was at the White House in 1977 when you had the like, first gay and lesbians meeting at the White House.
CB: Wow. That’s amazing. And then this is happening in Washington, DC, so it’s like, this happens in the same city.
EH: Exactly. Yeah. So it’s basically the same chart.
CB: Yeah. That’s incredible. That’s a great repetition. Nice.
EH: Yeah. And then the next day we get the third March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation, which is just like, huge. Something like one million people attend the march. It’s like, you know, certainly one of the biggest marches on Washington, and is like, just really a huge gathering of people. One interesting piece is that trans people were not named in the official title, and there were a number of trans activists who were like, very upset about that. And so again we kind of see this like, splitting out of trans people from the rest of the queer community. But yeah, it just like, certainly there were trans people who were there on that day. One other funny thing with that is that the National Park Service estimated like, 300,000 people were there, and it was like, so laughably obvious that that was wrong and that there were way more people there that they actually stopped giving estimates of how many people were attending events, because they were like, embarrassed that they had gotten it so wrong or underestimated it by so much, which we’ll see as a repetition in 2025 when it’s the National Parks Service that removes trans from the Stonewall Monument website.
CB: Got it. Right. Yeah. This is incredible. I mean, because this is also – in the episode with Nick, I had noticed that like, politically, a lot of articles in like, January and February of ‘92 were talking about it being – or ‘93 – the year of women, and they were calling it that because so many women had been elected to office and were coming into office as a result of the late 1992 elections. And then they were coming into office at the beginning of ‘93, and then the Oscars which like, played off of that like, also tried to do a sort of like, women-themed ceremony, although there was some criticism of that. But I didn’t realize that like, right on the retrograde, you have this – the march, especially, but both of these, but also the first Dyke March in particular and the weddings gives another side to that that I didn’t, we didn’t see or I didn’t catch in the first episode.
EH: Yeah.
CB: Nice. All right. What else was going on in 1993?
EH: Yeah. So one of the big issues, actually, that was coming up at this third March on Washington is the issue of gay people in the military. One of the like, precipitating factors to this being such an issue is that in 1992, this person named Allen Schindler was murdered. He was a sailor in the US Navy, and was murdered by a like, fellow Navy person, and then the Navy attempted to cover up this murder, which of course stirred upset and outrage. And you know, this is like, one of these big cases that ultimately will lead to President Clinton passing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. So you know, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell doesn’t come into effect until July of 1993, but in the end of January, Bill Clinton is giving this like, he gives this press conference about gays in the military. And then it’s —
CB: Right.
EH: — kind of theme that runs through the 1993 Venus retrograde.
CB: Because he’s just inaugurated on like, January 20th of ‘93.
EH: Yeah. So it’d be like, a week later, yeah.
CB: Bill Clinton coming into office and then immediately this topic is like, one of the first things that’s coming up basically. Because —
EH: Exactly.
CB: — I didn’t know a lot about it because I was too young at the time, but I was reading up about it recently, and it was saying that he had run on – in his actual campaign in 1992 – like, gays being able to serve openly in the military. But then what I was reading – you’ll have to tell me if this is true – that he had to make concessions, and like, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was eventually basically like, a concession with Congress and other things that he had to make that made the more liberal policy that he had while he was running like, much less liberal. And you know, it’s often looked back on negatively at this point, but that it was a compromise, I guess, that was made at the time.
EH: Yeah. And I think you said perhaps earlier in the episode, but just to reiterate, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is like, this policy that prior to this point, gay people were not allowed to serve in the military. And so Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell says, okay, like, fine, you can serve in the military as long as you don’t say anything about your sexuality.
CB: As long as you’re not open about it, basically.
EH: Exactly.
CB: So it’s like, on the one hand, it’s technically actually progress because now it’s repealing a blanket ban on gays serving in the military. But on the other hand, it’s still not great because it’s saying you can only if you’re like, closeted, essentially.
EH: Yeah. And if you remember like, I mean, the issue about gay people being in the military has been one that has come up at various retrogrades. Like, in 1977 when this group of gay people is invited to the White House, one of their big like, points that they want to articulate is about gay inclusion in the military. And so through this 1993 Venus retrograde, you have like, some of the like, more conservative gay rights groups are pushing for gay inclusion in the military. At that same like, California Democrats meeting where they signed onto the boycott, they also signed onto like, arguing for gay inclusion in the military. But we also at the same time have some of the like, more radical queers arguing for a different approach to this. And what I have is from an article by Barbara Smith who was one of the people who wrote the Combahee River Collective statement which came out in April of 1977. And so she is this like, Black feminist lesbian, and this article is from July 1993, but reflecting on the March on Washington and the last like, six months. And it’s an article titled “Where’s the Revolution.” And so what she says is,
“The issue of access to the military embodies the current gay movement’s inability to frame an issue in such a way that it brings various groups together instead of alienating them, as has happened with segments of the black community. It also reveals a gay political agenda that is not merely moderate but conservative. As long as a military exists, it should be open to everyone regardless of sexual orientation, especially since it represents job and training opportunities for poor and working-class youth who are disproportionately people of color. But given the US military’s role as the world police order, which implements imperialist foreign policies and murders those who stand in its way (for example, the estimated quarter of a million people, mostly civilians, who died in Iraq as a result of the Gulf War), a progressive lesbian and gay movement would at least consider the political implications of frantically organizing to get into the mercenary wing of the military industrial complex. A radical lesbian and gay movement would of course be working to dismantle the military completely.”
And so I think just like, contrasting like, okay, what are our two options are? Either we —
CB: Right.
EH: — join the military, or we’re like, wait a minute. Do we actually wanna be part of this institution that is like, enacting violence all over the world? Or is part of being queer saying like, what if we did this completely differently? What if we didn’t have a military? What if we dismantled it completely, as Smith argues.
CB: Right. Yeah. Just the tensions in the left, basically, which is the side that’s promoting gay rights. And on the one hand, the push to wanna have the same rights as straight people, which would include simple things like being able to join the military as a simple vocation. But then on the other hand, obviously, the irony of, you know, super progressive leftists pushing for trying to get people in the military so they can, on the one hand in some instances like, kill people or like, take over countries. Yeah. That shows a lot of the – that’s interesting just in terms of the complex web of like, different motivations and things going on that is so tricky when it comes to the left but also the gay rights movement in terms of yeah, competing desires and motivations and goals and like, ideologies and all these different things swirling together that make it sometimes really complicated to find a compromise, which is really another good Venus retrograde keyword that we’re often running into here is like sometimes different people’s motivations and ideologies and stuff running into each other and having to find some compromise in order to push forward progress as well as the sometimes frustration with making little incremental bits of progress each time in society. And it just taking a lot of energy sometimes just to make one small step forward during one retrograde, and then, you know, eight years later or whatever taking another like, small step which adds up over the long course of time, but in the short span can probably feel very frustrating.
EH: Yeah. And I think one thing that we’ll kind of see repeated throughout is like, yeah, this tension between the like, group of organizers that is like, we’ll take the incremental change, and then the group of organizers that’s like, we need to like, do away with incremental change and like, do away with the system entirely and do this a different way. You know, whether that is through the military or through like, marriage or like, any of these like, systems where we’re fighting with the state to have rights. It’s like, okay, do we keep fighting to have rights, or do we do what like, Barbara Smith is offering here, and say like, we need to really think about like, do we need a military at all? What is the military actually doing? Is that a system that we actually wanna be a part of? Or is the way to like, gather people – you know, like, what she’s talking about is bringing different movements together – like, is the way to gather people to have this actually anti-military, anti-war movement?
CB: Right. Yeah. I mean, part of the problem and the way it ultimately ends up going, though, is sometimes it’s hard to dismantle – or even if you’re not fully dismantling, it’s hard to change something from the outside, and sometimes you have to be on the inside in order to make certain types of changes, at least. But it’s interesting to see continued echoes and other things of this later on since then one of the issues becomes often like, internal divisions about especially in like, the 2017 and then the 2025, the presidential elections around those times. A lot of what ends up happening is the left turns on itself and fighting with itself, which then is encouraged and amplified by conservatives because it serves their agenda. But the splitting apart of and the breaking up of alliances on the left is part of what ushers these periods of conservatives coming into power when the left fails to unify together.
EH: Yeah. Definitely.
CB: Yeah. So all right. So that’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Of course, the big repetition we’re seeing of that now is it’s shifted to gays being okay in the military but now the focus of this retrograde is like, trying to exclude trans people from the military, which just as this looks absurd now in retrospect looking at what was happening in 1993, in like, 30 years will look just as absurd —
EH: Totally.
CB: — seeing what’s happening now. Which is like, anybody with a brain can see, just stepping back and looking at things, but it’s like, in the moment, like, these battles are like, actually having to be fought.
EH: Yeah.
CB: All right. So those were – oh, there was one other big 1993 thing, right?
EH: Yeah. You wanna do that one?
CB: Right, because this was one that I found. Sorry, I forgot. So Minnesota actually added gender identity to its Human Rights Act in this 1993 period. So it became the first US state to explicitly include gender identity in its statewide non-discrimination laws, which then offered protections in areas like employment, housing, and public accommodations. So this is actually a landmark legislative achievement, and yeah, really important and really again gives you some perspective compared to now. But that issues of like, gender identity and identification were coming up already in terms of legislation in 1993, which is really foreshadowing a lot of the battles that are happening right now under the current retrograde.
EH: Absolutely. Yeah. Glad you found that one.
CB: All right. Are there a few others from ‘93 that you wanna mention briefly?
EH: Yeah. So there’s a couple of like, political ones. One is that on May 24th, Roberta Actenberg is appointed Assistant Secretary for the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity by President Clinton, and so she becomes the first out LGBTQ person to be appointed and confirmed to a position within a cabinet. And her initial hearing was on April 29th, so a little bit closer to that Venus retrograde.
We also get the organization Lesbian and Gay Immigration Rights Task Force founded, and their purpose is to work towards equal rights for LGBTQ and HIV-positive immigrants in terms of equal immigration and asylum. And this is like, a division of Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund and The Center, and advocating for reforms of discriminatory immigration laws in the US. That one was a little earlier on March 3rd, 1993.
In terms of like, art in this period, we get a couple important ones. One is May 2nd, 1993, Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America opens on Broadway. And so that’s another just like, important piece of art about HIV and AIDS. And then also on March 1st, 1993, Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues is published. And Stone Butch Blues is Feinberg’s first novel, and it is widely considered to be a groundbreaking work about the complexities of gender. And you know, like, one of the things that Feinberg said about this book was, “Like my own life, the novel defies easy classification. If you found Stone Butch Blues in a bookstore or library, what category was it in? Lesbian fiction? Gender studies? Like the germinal novel The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe/John Hall, this book is a lesbian novel and a transgender novel—making ‘trans’ genre a verb, as well as an adjective.”
And so I just love that one, both because Stone Butch Blues is a crucial work in terms of thinking about class and gender together, and also just like, a beautiful novel. But also, Feinberg is actively referencing back to The Well of Loneliness, which was our 1929 Venus retrograde novel, and so we see that thread almost, you know, like, 75 years later still coming through.
CB: That’s incredible. Yeah, and that’s just – so that’s March 1st, so that’s next station like a week later, so it’s a week before Venus stations retrograde in Aries. And yeah, that last line – “making ‘trans’ genre a verb as well as an adjective.” So that’s interesting already that that’s coming up under this Venus retrograde.
EH: Yeah.
CB: All right. Anything else?
EH: One last piece is just that in May of 1993, the American Psychological Association has this planning meeting where they’re proposing that maybe they will remove “well-adjusted transsexuals” from like, people who would be considered to have a mental disorder. And this meeting that they’re having is protested by this group called Transgender Nation trying to get them to actually do this and remove transsexuality from their list of mental disorders, which they will eventually do, I think later in 1993.
CB: Oh, in that same year? Wow, okay.
EH: I believe so, yeah.
CB: Okay. So yeah, that’s huge.
EH: Yeah.
CB: Because that’s the – is that the organization that publishes like, the DSM or —
EH: Exactly.
CB: — whatever it’s called?
EH: Yes. Yeah.
CB: Okay. So that’s like, the manual of like, official classifications of, which includes different mental illnesses. And so for a long time, it was treated as if it’s a mental illness. So this is the turning point or the inflection point where it starts moving away from that.
EH: Exactly. Yeah.
CB: That’s huge. Okay. And then did you already mention this one about Bill Clinton?
EH: Yes, I did, actually. About Roberta Actenberg, yeah.
CB: Yeah. Just the first out LGBT person appointed and confirmed to a major cabinet office. That’s huge. Cool. All right. I think that’s good for ‘93, yeah?
EH: I think so.
CB: So that was a big one. ‘93 was a really big turning point in a number of ways.
All right, so we jump forward eight years later to 2001 and the Venus retrograde that occurred in the more broadly like, the first half of that year, but especially March 8th through April 20th of 2001.
EH: Yeah. So this is actually the point where doing this research becomes hard again, because a lot of the organizing that was happening is starting to happen on the internet, but those things were not being preserved in the same way. Because all of these like, websites have just like, dead links that you can’t access anymore.
CB: Right.
EH: But it’s not pre-internet, so it’s not like, paper things that didn’t get preserved and put online. So I’m sure that there is actually a lot more than what we have here, but it actually becomes a little bit more challenging at this point. So some crucial things though did happen, and a lot of this has to do with gay marriage.
On March 16th, 2001, the Vermont House bans gay marriage by amending one of their laws to define marriage as between one man and one woman. But on April 1st, 2001, we get the first ever legal same-sex weddings in the world, and those take place in Amsterdam, so that’s like, actually like, first in the world right in the middle of this retrograde cycle.
CB: Wow.
EH: Yeah.
CB: Right after the cazimi, it looks like.
EH: Yeah.
CB: So here’s the chart for those watching the video version. And we see the Sun at 11 Aries and Venus retrograde at like, eight Aries. So it’s just coming off of the Venus retrograde cazimi when we get the first legal same-sex marriages, weddings, in the world taking place. That’s incredible. And what a great, you know, harkening back to eight years earlier, the event that took place during the march where you had those 1,500 people that were married, but it wouldn’t have been recognized as legal from a state standpoint.
EH: Exactly. Yes. Yeah. And then you know, that’s happening in Amsterdam, but in the US, on April 11th, GLAD files the Goodridge versus Department of Public Health case in Massachusetts, which it takes a few years, but this leads to Massachusetts becoming the first US state to legalize same-sex marriage in 2004. And if you remember all the way back to 1913 where we started, this case that will ultimately lead to same-sex marriage being legalized is then also tied in with the 1913 Massachusetts law that said essentially like, you need to live in Massachusetts in order to get married in Massachusetts, because they didn’t want people coming from out of state to get married. So we have this now like, almost hundred years apart connection between Venus retrogrades.
CB: What year was that again? The original?
EH: It was 1913.
CB: Wow. That’s crazy.
EH: Yeah.
CB: Got it. So and here… That’s amazing. So this was the start eventually that would lead to Massachusetts becoming the first state. That’s amazing. And it happened during this Venus retrograde, they filed the case.
EH: Exactly.
CB: Okay. So that’s April 11th. Looks like Venus is at like, two degrees of Aries, and it’s eight days from stationing, so it’s slowing down and stationing like, right as that case is happening. So you know, that’s important, because sometimes like, you’ll see something important is happening in the sky – like, with a station – but you won’t know yet what happened around you. But sometimes there can be things happening that you don’t realize at the time simultaneously that will have much bigger import than you realize at the time.
EH: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, this one takes, you know, like, three more years to actually go through, but —
CB: Yeah.
EH: — we see that beginning point.
CB: Yeah. But then there’s like, a domino effect eventually that grows out of this that eventually culminates in the summer of 2015 when Venus goes retrograde in Leo conjunct Jupiter when the Supreme Court makes the ruling that effectively makes same-sex marriage legalized throughout the entire country.
EH: Yeah.
CB: So it’s like, the start and the end is like, two different Venus retrogrades. Nice. All right. What else was going on during this time?
EH: The other thing that’s happening is we get the Asexual Visibility and Education Network is founded on March 21st, 2001. And this becomes the like, world’s largest online asexual community and a large archive of resources on asexuality. So up until this point, we haven’t really seen asexuality come through this Venus retrograde, but there is this moment here where we see this like, new organization and in my understanding it’s like, one of the first kind of big organizations that’s like, focused around asexuality.
CB: Okay. That’s important.
EH: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, this Venus retrograde has lots of firsts, and like with that example we just had where the legalization in the US wasn’t ‘til 2015 under a different Venus retrograde cycle, it may not always like, complete the thread that it starts. But it seems like especially the ones in Aries are sometimes like, pushing things to get the ball rolling.
EH: Yeah. That makes sense.
CB: Yeah, it does. It’s very literal. Like, it’s like you sometimes come around like, full circle with astrology sometimes of like, you start with the most basic stuff. Like, Aries is like, impetuous or like, quick to do things. And then like, you get more advanced with your astrology and it gets more complex, and you’re like, no, it has this deep, complicated, psychological thing, then you get into like, Jungian depth analysis of the sign, and it’s multiple competing things. And then eventually you come back around with astrology to the most simple thing eventually.
EH: Yeah. Ultimately, Aries does get the ball rolling!
CB: Yeah, it just like, starts things and that’s the basic function sometimes on the mental level.
EH: Totally.
CB: All right. Is that it for 2001, or is there anything we missed?
EH: I think that’s pretty much it. I had included also just like, an article that I won’t like, quote from, but just about the queer/gay assimilationist split from the beginning of May of 2001 just to like, kind of show that this split that has been occurring is kind of still ongoing through this retrograde as well.
CB: Okay. Got it. Oh, so this is an early like, example of that.
EH: Exactly, yeah.
CB: So attempting to start to split off like, just homosexuality from the broader queer community?
EH: Different from that actually. Attempting to – or trying to describe like, similar to the like, 1993 like, gays in the military. Like, attempting to split out a different political vision from like, on one side you have the assimilationist narrative which would be “we wanna be part of the military, we wanna have the right to marry,” that kind of thing. And then the other side of that would be “we want to question these institutions and have liberation that is not based in begging for our rights from our oppressors” kind of thing. Does that —
CB: Got it.
EH: — make sense?
CB: Yeah, for sure. Like, the do we join and wanna become part of the establishment, or do we want to create something completely new sort of from scratch that’s more authentic to who we are in its totality rather than, I don’t know, adapting to the consensus reality?
EH: Exactly. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. That makes sense. And then just to back up one second, because this is the first time that asexuality came up, and this is then the foundation for that, that’s become added to and is starting to become more recognized as part of the broader queer or LGBT movement because it recognizes like, another non-normative form of sexuality that’s outside of the mainstream, right? Like, or how would you articulate the significance of that or recognizing like, asexuality as a category of its own?
EH: Yeah. I mean, I think you articulated that well.
CB: Okay.
EH: The way that it gets kind of added into queer identity or like, the LGBTQIA+ acronym is in this, yeah, non-normative sexuality, and —
CB: That is the A at the end of —
EH: Yes, yeah.
CB: Okay. Got it.
EH: Yeah. And this like, awareness of like, that compulsory sexuality where we’re given these like, narratives around how relationships should be, how sex should be, how gender should be, and that like, queerness in its many forms would be saying, like, “Well, what if it’s not how it should be?” And asexuality would be one of those ways of doing something different in terms of like, having a non-normative relationship to sex and sexuality.
CB: Right. I love that. I’m glad I asked that, because that really helps to clarify and is good understanding of also why the sort of like, acronym has gotten larger as the tent has gotten larger. Because it seems like this continual process of like, establishing what the majority or the norm is, but then establishing almost like an opposition. Like, well if this is the norm, what is outside of the norm, and it’s this. And then it creates a sort of binary when you split like, a cell into two separate things. And initially, that’s like, let’s say like, being straight versus – if straight is the norm, then outside of the norm is being gay or homosexuality. So then you get two options. But then it’s like, what if then once that’s established, you have a third option, and then it splits again into another thing through this continual recursion of contrasting what the norm is with what falls outside of that and wanting to continually ensure that all non-normative practices are not being ostracized but are being recognized for, you know, genuine categories that a significant number of people fall in.
EH: Exactly. Yeah.
CB: Cool. All right. So that’s really actually more important than in 2001 is setting a new foundation. Shall we jump forward?
EH: Yeah, let’s do it.
CB: All right. So the next one is the Venus retrograde in Aries in early 2009 and the first half of 2009, especially March 6th through April 17th. And this was the first one when we did the full episode that was unique because it starts the retrograde in Aries, but it retrogrades back and then stations direct in Pisces. So this is at the very beginning of this one is Obama’s just inaugurated after eight years of George W. Bush, who came into office at the beginning of 2001.
EH: Yeah. And kind of again, we see gay marriage coming up as one of our major themes for this Venus retrograde. So on April 7th, we get the Vermont General Assembly overriding the governor. He had vetoed the same-sex marriage legislation, but the General Assembly overrides him and Vermont becomes the first state to institute same-sex marriage by statute. The previous three states, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Iowa, had all done it by court ruling. So even though the first instance of gay marriage being legal in the US doiesn’t happen in either like, the 2001 or 2009 retrograde, we get the case that will lead to it in 2001, and then we get the first time that it happens by statute as opposed to be court happening in 2009.
CB: Incredible. That’s amazing. So this is when the dam really like, starts to break at this point in terms of that. And this is Venus is retrograde in Aries, and it’s 10 days before it stations direct at this time.
EH: Exactly. Yeah. And then a little bit later in May, the Maine governor is going to sign a marriage equality law, which is the first governor in the US to sign this kind of legislation. What’s interesting with the Maine one is that there is this like, pushback, and it ends up being a like, ballot measure on the next election. And Maine actually like, repeals the marriage equality law in that next election, and that story or that like, upset is what causes this group called Against Equality to form. And they are an anti-capitalist collective of radical queer and trans writers, thinkers, and artists who critique mainstream LGBT politics. And like, kind of again we see both these movements around like, gay marriage and then also like, radical queer politic that is occuring cocurrently kind of like, in response to frustrations around seeing something like, okay, Maine gets the marriage equality law passed, but then within six months they repeal it. And also in California in May, the California Supreme Court upholds Prop Eight, which is the legislation that like, essentially bans gay marriage but does legally recognize the marriages that had taken place before its enactment. So —
CB: 18,000 same-sex marriages that took place before its enactment.
EH: Yes.
CB: That’s huge. So that’s – well, on the one hand, so that’s like, a bad thing that the Supreme Court upholds it, which then essentially re-bans same-sex marriage but that it still recognizes the 18,000 same-sex marriages that took place before this point.
EH: Yeah. So we get this kind of like, Venus retrograde reversals or you think it’s going one way, and then it goes another way with —
CB: Right.
EH: — gay marriage during this time. And then as you said it’s not ‘til 2015 with that Venus retrograde in Leo that you get the like, full US legalization of same-sex marriage.
CB: Right. Sometimes there’s like, losing ground on certain things.
EH: Exactly.
CB: Or the gains that had been made previously are sometimes subtracted. All right.
EH: Yeah. And then a couple other stories that are happening around the same time. 2009 is the first time that we get the American Professional Association of Endocrinologists, they establish best practices for trans children, which includes puberty blockers for preteens and hormone therapy beginning at age 16 plus. So that’s like, the first time that we’re getting, you know, the like, advice or insight from the like, medical professionals about trans children accessing hormone therapy. Which feels like kind of a repetition of the like, 1985 Venus retrograde with like, the American Medical Association being like, okay, you can’t get HIV through casual contact. Like, we’re getting some like, guidance for the first time in both of these.
CB: Right. And it’s like, part of that’s also probably at this point they’re starting to build up enough data and studies about the positive impact that gender-affirming care has on trans people in general, especially adults, in terms of especially like, lowering of at the most extreme instances like, the suicide rate.
EH: Yeah.
CB: So that’s like, part of what’s now going into wanting to be able to outline different guidelines for things in order to attempt to help people and have people not stuck in a situation where they’re commiting suicide.
EH: Absolutely. Yeah.
CB: Got it. Okay.
EH: Yeah. And then same time period on March 31st, 2009, we get the first ever Trans Day of Visibility event, which was created by trans activist Rachel Crandall Crocker. And this was a reaction to basically that the only other day that trans people had was the Trans Day of Remembrance, which was a day of mourning for trans people who had been murdered. And this was an attempt to say like, we need to like, acknowledge and celebrate living members of the trans community and not just like, wait until we’re dead. And I have to thank astrologer Michael J. Morris for pointing that out, because I would have missed that. But they actually posted. March 31st was just a couple days ago, and so they posted about Rachel and the Trans Day of Visibility and that astrology. So I would have missed that where it not for Michael’s research.
CB: Awesome.
EH: Yeah.
CB: I did the earlier episode, episode 279, with Michael on transgender experiences in astrology. So people can check that out. The chart for this, I was just looking up, was like, right after the cazimi. Here it is. So it’s a Mercury cazimi. Mercury’s direct, conjoining the Sun that day at 11 degrees of Aries, and Venus is just getting to – it’s heading towards, like, making an emergence out from under the beams of the Sun before too long. But it’s at four degrees of Aries, headed away from that cazimi.
All right. What’s next?
EH: So a couple other things. On March 29th, the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore, which was the first ever LGBTQ bookstore in the country, closes. It had been open since 1967, and so that was like, you know, we talk about things sometimes coming to an end during Venus retrogrades, and so that was one of the things that came to an end there.
ALso on April 6th, 2009, an 11-year-old named Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover killed himself following harassment after like, because he was perceived as being gay. And so, you know, we talked about like, things kind of getting better but also we still see especially for young queer and trans people, or even young people who are like, perceived as being non-normative in some way, that they are still facing harassment. And —
CB: Yeah. It’s still coming out of a period in which like, homophobia was like, very common in the ‘90s and going into the 2000s. And even though things changed relatively quickly in that timeframe between like, the late 2000s to the mid-2000s when gay marriage is legalized, things were still very different like, in the let’s say 2000 through 2010 time frame.
EH: Definitely. Yeah. And along with that, you know, just like a week later on April 14th, 2009, the trial begins for the murder of Angie Zapata, who was an 18-year-old transgender woman, also from Colorado. And her murderer was also convicted of a hate crime. And this was this like, another attempt at trying to use the trans panic defense that did not work, but yeah, we just kind of see like, these instances of homophobic and transphobic violence coming up through these Venus retrogrades.
CB: Got it. Yeah, this one looks like Venus had just retrograded back into Pisces, and it was stationing direct just three days after this. But it was conjunct Mars and Uranus at that time towards the end of that station.
All right. And is there one more?
EH: Yeah. The last one is just that on April 15th, 2009, GOProud, which is an organization representing conservative LGBT people, was founded, and they had been Log Cabin Republicans, which like, Log Cabin Republicans were like, a previous organization for conservative gay people, and that was actually founded in 1977, possibly during the Venus retrograde. I’m not totally sure.
CB: Wow.
EH: But we get that repetition of these like, organizations that are both explicitly for queer people and also explicitly conservative. It’s interesting.
CB: Yeah, that’s an incredible repetition.
EH: And then on May 22nd, the governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, signs into law Harvey Milk Day. So again, that repetition of Harvey Milk from 1977 and then it was 1985 was when the school was opened.
CB: Wow. Okay. Yeah. So at that point, retrogrades later, he’s being, you know, recognized by the governor, by his entire state. And he’s become this legendary figure at this point who’s being hailed for, you know, what he did and what he represented many Venus retrogrades after he was getting his start like, first running for office.
EH: Yeah.
CB: That’s incredible. Wow. Okay. That’s a really good one. And then with the Log Cabin Republicans one, that was April 15th, 2009, so Venus was like, two days from stationing direct at that point. Not with that one, but with the GOProud. And then of course now we can see the impact of that foundation, like, two retrogrades later, because now being gay has become normalized so much that you can have like, large contingents of like, people that do identify as conservative at this point and who voted for Trump that that’s like, a normal thing at this point. But then can still be like, against, you know, despite Trump and his like, anti-trans rhetoric. Or that you can have, you know, gay Republicans or conservatives who are anti-trans and have separated that in their own mind. It’s wild seeing the early foundations of that, first with the 1977 one and the Log Cabin Republicans, and then in 2009 with this one and the GOProud organization.
EH: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. So I think that’s good for 2009, yeah?
EH: Yeah.
CB: Okay. Do you wanna jump into 2017?
EH: Let’s do it.
CB: So 2017, first half of it. March 4th through April 15th was the actual retrograde, but more broadly by sign it was extended because – especially since it’s going into two signs at this point, Aries and Pisces, it really is like, almost the first half of the year.
EH: Yeah. This is the 2017 retrograde is the one where we really start to see trans rights come… I mean, it’s been, you know, we’ve seen many instances of trans people throughout time. But at this point, we get a real focus on trans rights in a way that hasn’t happened yet. And so on February 6th, 2017, this documentary film called Gender Revolution: A Journey with Katie Couric comes out, and you know, Katie Couric is like, a big name in daytime news, just to show how like, that’s like, I would say household name for many people certainly.
CB: Yeah.
EH: And so she’s —
CB: A major journalist.
EH: Yeah. So she’s doing this documentary film about gender identity that comes out in the month before Venus stations retrograde. On February 22nd, the Trump administration withdraws guidelines for trans students in public schools regarding using the bathroom and facilities. So previously, in the Obama administration, there were some guidelines that were given that basically said like, you know, trans students can use the bathroom that corresponds with their gender identity. And so Trump takes away these guidelines.
CB: Got it. So this is – they were doing battles about like, bathrooms was the big thing around this time.
EH: Yeah. In fact, on March 6th, 2017, the US Supreme Court declines to hear a case about one of these bathroom bills. So this involved a transgender high school student in Virginia who was, you know, trying to use the bathroom at school that corresponded with his gender and was given trouble by the school. And so he tried to fight it in the courts, and fought all the way to the Supreme Court, but then the Supreme Court declines to hear this case on March 6th.
CB: And that’s like, right on – Venus was, on March 6th, Venus was at 13 Aries, and it had just gone retrograde two days earlier.
EH: Yeah. And this is like, that repetition of in 1961, Frank Kameny, his case about losing his job because of his homosexuality is denied an audience at the Supreme Court on the day that Venus stations retrograde in 1961. So this is a very close repetition.
CB: Absolutely. Yeah. I forgot that that was so much of what this retrograde was about in the first half of the first Trump administration in 2017 was stuff about this that seemed relatively tame in comparison to the all-out like, culture war that is happening right now. Where it was like, they were still in the process of like, getting people whipped out about anti-trans issues, but it almost like, wasn’t there as much as it is today. I don’t know if that’s a false perception on my part, but it seems like it’s been ratcheted up hugely in the eight years since this.
EH: No, I think that’s an accurate assessment.
CB: Okay.
EH: Yeah. And I think we can, you know, see that with like, March 30th, 2017, which is like, so maybe two or three weeks after our last example. The North Carolina trans bathroom ban – or HB2 – was repealed. And that… So North Carolina had put through a trans bathroom ban, and that ban was like, the first ever bathroom ban. And then it is repealed during this Venus retrograde.
CB: Wow. Okay.
EH: Yeah. So it gets kind of simultaneous like, loss in the Supreme Court, but then this win in North Carolina, which we kind of have seen throughout the various retrograde periods.
CB: Yeah. “Repealed” is a good Venus retrograde keyword it seems like. Okay. Did you do this one on February 27th?
EH: No, not yet. Yeah, alongside bathroom bans, the other issue that is really starting to come to the forefront is trans people in sports. And so like, one of the big stories of this year, and I found this – this was like, on like, NPR’s like, top five stories of 2017 or something. I don’t know why it was, but like, just to like, show that this was like, a thing that people were paying attention to. On February 27th, 2017, this trans boy named Mack Beggs won the Texas state wrestling championship after he was forced to compete in the girls’ league because of transphobic policies. And so that became like, a big news story of like, this trans boy winning in the girls’ league, and yeah. Just like, these gender policies that we’ll see continue to play out in this current Venus retrograde where there is like, an over-legislation of trans people in sports and a lot of like, concern and like, whipping up fear and anxiety about trans people participating in sports.
CB: Right. And just especially through the like, the co-opting the media landscape and especially with conservative podcasts becoming dominant, whipping up this echo chamber over the past eight years about paranoia about this being like, one of the biggest issues and greatest instances of oppression in the country somehow of, you know, what’s going on with trans athletes or who’s using what bathrooms or things like that, so that that’s become somehow like, a major cultural touchstone today eight years later, even though it was a relatively small set of issues at the time, at this time in 2017. But because of attempts, essentially, to like, create a cultural war issue in order to score political points, it’s become magnified so that some people genuinely think that this is like, the end of the world or is like, a huge issue facing the country.
EH: Yeah. And we’ll see just that like, so much of the rhetoric, which is a repetition from the 1930s and the 1905 Venus retrograde, is about like, this like, false notion of protecting women and protecting children where that gets like, that becomes the narrative of like, we need to discriminate in order to protect these groups of people.
CB: Right. We have to oppress people! Like, we have to oppress like, this small minority segment of society, because otherwise society will end if we don’t oppress these people.
EH: Exactly. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Yeah, well, that’s crazy seeing these cases here during this Venus retrograde and the foundation that that laid where this is really like, one of the major things that now in 2025 that has been one of the main things that Trump immediately got into office and started doing was going after these as like, huge issues. And like you said, like, legislating things that the government probably doesn’t really need to be involved in.
EH: Totally. Yeah.
CB: All right. What else was going on in 2017?
EH: We got a couple other like, court and political ones. The first is on April 4th of 2017, the 7th District Court of Appeals rules that the Civil Rights Act prohibits workplace discrimination against LGBT employees. This person, Kimberly Hively, had sued Ivy Tech Community College for violating Title VII of the act by denying her employment, and this was like, a groundbreaking decision where the Court of Appeals ruled that workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation violates federal civil rights law. Yeah, and so that’s like, a big repetition and reversal of like, 1953 where they’re saying like, that they’re denying applications of federal employees who could be gay and they’re, you know, terminating employment of federal employees who they think might be gay. And now here we have in 2017 this ruling that workplace discrimination violates federal civil rights law.
CB: Got it. Okay. So that’s really important as a final endpoint to some of the continual repetitions of things that were going in the opposite direction in terms of the courts for many years up to this point. Okay.
EH: We also have Danica Roem becomes the first openly transgender person to serve in the state legislature in US history. In 2017, you know, she was a first-time candidate and challenged Republican Bob Marshall, who was a 13-term incumbent representative. And Marshall was self-described as the like, “chief homophobe” of the state and was a sponsor for Virginia bills to end same-sex marriage and also to have a like, bathroom ban. So she challenges him, and wins, and during this Venus retrograde period, I saw that she received over a thousand donations of under a hundred dollars, which was the highest number of like, small donations for any delegate candidate in the state other than this like, one other person. So she kind of is this like, person of the people coming in and taking out this like, 13-term incumbent who is like, self describing as being homophobic and is sponsoring all of these like, homophobic and transphobic bills and wins.
CB: Nice. Nice.
EH: Yeah.
CB: That’s a nice sort of repeal of something in a way.
EH: Exactly. We also get the original Trump trans military ban is July of 2017. So a little bit after this Venus retrograde period, but because we’ve seen so much of questions about gay people being in the military and then the current trans military ban, it feels relevant to share that here.
CB: Yeah. And there would have been discussion and like, build up to that that would have come during the Venus retrograde in the months that preceded the official order.
EH: Exactly.
CB: Got it. All right.
EH: And then just one last one is just that on March 31st, 2017, Gilbert Baker, who was a San Francisco artist who created the rainbow flag that we think of as like, the symbol of the community, died. So we see the loss of this person who has like, created this super important symbol. It’s also in 2017 that the black and brown stripes get added to the Pride flag. I think it’s called the like, Progress Pride flag. But it’s this kind of like, updating of the Pride flag to make note of and like, make explicit the like, connections of marginalization between queer and trans people and also Black people and other people of color.
CB: Right. And a greater awareness and integration of like, intersectionality into probably the mainstream queer discourse.
EH: Definitely. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. That makes sense. That’s incredible, though, that they passed away. I looked and it’s, what is it, it’s 14 days before Venus stations direct, but Venus was at one degree of Aries retrograde when Gilbert Baker passed away. So that’s incredibly stunning that the creator of the original rainbow flag passed away during a Venus retrograde in Aries.
EH: Yeah. I don’t know – I don’t have the date for when the flag was first came out, so I don’t know if that ties in with the Venus retrograde, but I wonder if it’s tied in with one of the Venus retrogrades.
CB: Right. Yeah. Especially if it was also revised in that year, it’s a pretty good chance some of the previous retrogrades that would have come up in different ways.
Yeah. All right. I think that’s good for 2017, yeah?
EH: Yeah.
CB: All right. So we’ve reached our final period, which brings us to the present, which is the Venus retrograde in Aries of 2025, which we are still in the midst of but we’re actually getting towards the end of and we’re getting ready to reach the direct station here later this month in like, a week or two after today. So I wanted to show a graphic, the Venus retrograde graphic I’ve been using this year. This is designed by Madeline DeCotes from Honeycomb.co that just shows the full scope of this current retrograde that we’ve been in, which Venus technically stationed retrograde on March 1st, and it’ll station direct on April 12th, which is 10 days from today. But the full retrograde cycle was extended and began on January 2nd when Venus first moved into Pisces, which is the sign that it would retrograde back to. And then it entered its pre-retrograde shadow degree on January 28th when it passed 24 Pisces, which is the degree it will retrograde back to. Then it went into Aries on February 4th, stationed retrograde on the 1st of March. The cazimi was sometime later in March; it was like, the 24th or something, right?
EH: I believe it was the 22nd. Yeah.
CB: 22nd. Okay. And then Venus will station direct on the 12th, and depart from Pisces and move into Aries on April 30th. Exit its post-retrograde shadow at 10 degrees of Aries on May 16th, and then finally it completes the entire sequence on June 5th when it departs from Aries for the final time and moves into Taurus.
So we have gotten through most of that at this point, and I’ll be releasing this episode essentially a little bit closer to the direct station. So not everything has happened. There’s gonna be some things we miss, especially since we’ve seen that the direct station has often been very important in a number of these previous retrogrades. So unfortunately, we’re a little early to the game here. But at the same time, especially relative to when I recorded the first episode in this series of Venus retrograde in history on January 10th, a lot of stuff has happened – chiefly with Trump being elected in November and then getting into office on January 20th and then beginning to issue a bunch of executive orders. But there was one event that you have here prior to that, right?
EH: Yeah. The one thing that I have for pre-Trump inauguration comes from January 9th, so still within our border of Venus has just entered Pisces. But a judge blocked President Biden’s expanded protections for trans students. I believe he tried to put through some extra protections in kind of his last moments in office, and then just before Trump takes over, those expanded protections are blocked by a judge. But yeah, then we get into there’s just kind of a onslaught of things from this Venus retrograde, and we probably will even miss some things just because there’s been so much it’s been kind of like, impossible trying to keep track of everything that has already happened. And of course, you know, we can’t yet know what will happen around the direct station.
CB: Right. One of the things about this, because right away we’ll get into stuff on the 20th, but looking back at some of the past retrogrades and how that’s worked out now makes me understand this inauguration chart better, which is like, Trump gets into office on January 20th, and this is the inauguration day chart. And one of the signatures in the chart was it was Taurus rising and Venus at 17 degrees of Pisces conjunction Saturn at 16 degrees of Pisces, as well as widely conjunct Neptune at 27 Pisces. So part of the flavor of this Venus retrograde is that the pre-retrograde shadow period starts with Venus conjunct Saturn, and you know, Trump’s inauguration chart and the chart for his presidency has Venus conjunct Saturn, and I think that’s very characteristic of then some of what would follow. What was the earlier one? Oh yeah, it was —
EH: 1969.
CB: — 1969! Yeah.
EH: Yeah.
CB: So all of the like, oppression and police beatings and other stuff as well as like, people being killed that built up to and then eventually like, culminated in and exploded with Stonewall – that was the previous like, Venus retrograde conjunct Saturn that we talked about.
EH: Yeah. And yeah, you can really feel Saturn’s presence right now, and yeah.
CB: Yeah. So what was the first one? So as soon as he gets into office, he immediately issues an executive order.
EH: Yeah. I mean, there’s like, kind of a series of executive orders. One of the first ones that comes on January 20th, the day that he’s inaugurated, is this executive order saying that there are two genders and essentially like, we need to end “extreme gender ideology.” That executive order is called “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” which —
CB: Oh my god.
EH: Yeah! I know! It’s like, it would be funny if it weren’t incredibly damaging.
CB: Right.
EH: But yeah, just again we see this like, idea of like, we need to defend women, and yeah. Just like, this attack on trans people. I’m pretty sure this is the executive order where he says that gender begins at conception, which of course —
CB: Oh right!
EH: — like, would mean that technically every single person is biologically female.
CB: Right. And everyone like, made fun of them for that afterwards.
EH: Exactly. Yeah. So, you know, not that we had any questions about whether this is actually based in reality, but…
CB: Well, and that’s the funny thing about it is like, in the order title, it’s incredible to me that it uses the word like, “restoring biological truth.” And that really invokes that this wasn’t just like, a Venus-Saturn conjunction, but it was like, also activating that Neptune. It’s part of that Saturn-Neptune conjunction that’s so prominent right now, which is really about like, bending and distorting the truth and like, hiding the truth and trying to sweep things under the rug for ideological purposes. But it’s like, you can really hear that in this title, this like, what is the phrase? This sort of like, Orwellian type thing where you do like, the reverse of what something actually is. I can’t remember what the – there’s a phrase for that.
EH: Yeah. I know what you mean, but I’m not remembering the phrase.
CB: Okay. All right. So that was the first executive order that he shoots off right away, and that’s very Venus retrograde because it’s coming right back to basic things like gender and gender identity and things like that.
EH: Yeah. And of course, this is, you know, followed by a series of other executive orders. On January 24th, we get one that bans new government spending on foreign aid projects, and then is quickly followed by a stop-work order for current aid. And this is important here because it effectively dismantles PEPFAR, which is the President’s Emergency Plan to Fight AIDS. And essentially, this is like, a global health initiative that is designed to help prevent the spread of HIV and AIDS and up until this point had been providing HIV and AIDS treatment, and I believe also PrEP, which is pre-exposure prophylaxis, which is a medication that helps prevent the spread of HIV and AIDS to over 20 million people around the world. So again, we see HIV and AIDS coming through this Venus retrograde cycle.
CB: And ironically, that program was started by President Bush in like, 2003. So it’s like, they’re repealing like, a conservative program that was helping out to stop the spread of AIDS in different countries.
EH: Yeah. I didn’t realize that was a Bush era, but yeah.
CB: Yeah. Bush was – one of the like, few things that Bush did that was good was he did, for some reason, have a thing in that range around 2002, 2003 of wanting to do some major anti-AIDS efforts overseas. So there were some things like that that were started in like, 2003. You know, in addition to like, starting wars and —
EH: Wars, yeah. That little thing.
CB: You know, killing millions of people, civilians, and other things like that, so.
EH: Yeah.
CB: All right. So moving on. The next major one was on January 27th, right?
EH: Yes. So this is the executive order where Trump puts through a trans military ban. So repetition of 2017, repetition of 1993, 1997. It just goes back and back and back.
CB: Yeah. Serious echoes of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell from ‘93, especially. Which this was the not just Venus retrograde, but also Mars retrograde in Cancer repetition of.
EH: Yes. We follow that up with the next day, the 28th, an executive order banning gender-affirming care for people under 19. So again, we get that focus on youth and also just like, repetition from I think 2009 was the one where we get the advice about trans youth healthcare. And then here is the like, reversal of that.
CB: Right. And taking it away from that being something between like, the doctor and their patient or even the family and the patient and making it something where the government is imposing, you know, an unnecessary ideologically based decision that takes that choice away from the people involved and the people it affects.
EH: Yeah. And we know that that has like, incredibly dangerous effects for trans youth who do much better when they have access to things like puberty blockers and then age-appropriate gender-affirming care as they get into their later teens, so.
CB: Right. Because the science has shown that it dramatically drops especially like, suicide rates.
EH: Absolutely. Yeah.
CB: All right. Next?
EH: Yeah, so we’ve got another executive order on February 5th, 2025, this time banning trans women from participating in sports. Yeah. So this is that repetition of in 2017, the trans boy who was forced to participate in the like, girls’ team wrestling, and then also 1977, the trans woman who was able to participate in women’s tennis, so.
CB: Okay. And I hadn’t noticed this until now, but it’s really striking – all the executive orders up to this point have been Venus in Pisces conjoining Saturn and Neptune. This is the first one in our list where Venus has just moved into Aries. So here’s the chart; it’s at one degree. Actually, it starts at zero and then moves into one degree halfway through the day of Aries on February 5th, the day this sports order is passed. But it’s like, all the other ones earlier have been this like, Venus going through the second half and especially the last decan of Pisces.
EH: Yeah.
CB: I think that’s kind of like, interesting, just the sport component coming into play once Venus goes into Aries.
EH: Yeah.
CB: All right. What’s next?
EH: So the next day, there is this huge protest – so February 6th with ACTU UP, Housing Works, the Treatment Action Group, and some other groups basically protest the defunding of PEPFAR at the US State Department. And so here we start to see some like, organizing happening in response to some of these executive orders and the like, message there is “Hands off PEPFAR.” Like, calling on the government to reinstate the funding in order to make sure that people have access to their HIV and AIDS medications.
CB: Right. Because this is very tangibly going to kill lots of people, just removing this funding for not just stopping AIDS from spreading in terms of prophylactics or whatever, but also you know, taking away people’s AIDS medication and other things like that that is actually extending and saving lives. This stuff will kill like, thousands and thousands of people.
EH: Absolutely. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right.
EH: Yeah. The next thing is that within the span of like, five days, two different trans people – two different Black trans people – are killed. The first is on February 9th. Tahiry Broom, who was a Black trans woman, was killed in Michigan, and then just a couple days later on February 13th, the body of Sam Nordquist, who was a Black transgender man, was found, and that case got a lot of media attention and news coverage because he was violently attacked for several weeks before his death. And so it was just this really heartbreaking, terrifying case of transphobic violence. And in particular with that one, there was some question about whether or not they would pursue hate crime charges with that. And I don’t know where it is at this point, but at least in the middle of February, they were talking about not doing that because the people who had killed him were also like, members of the LGBT community. But as we’ve seen, there has been this like, split that has been happening such that that’s not necessarily the case that it wouldn’t have been, you know, motivated by transphobia. So.
CB: Okay. Yeah. All right. That’s pretty horrific. And then on the same day, of course, that that happens, then there’s another major turning point.
EH: Yeah. So on that same day, we get the first kind of like, I think this is the first – I honestly don’t know, just because so much has happened in the last two months, but one of the first federal judge blocks the Trump ban on gender-affirming care for people under the age of 19. And so kind of from this point, we’re gonna start to see a whole bunch of judges blocking the executive orders and also people going to court to fight some of these.
CB: Right. And then this is also, though, and then now they’re starting to like, target judges basically, because they’re going after judges because they keep getting blocked in court for some of these ultimately like, unconstitutional or legally overreach, like, oppressive executive orders and stuff. So judges are obviously like, blocking it when it’s not something that’s consistent with the law at this point, but now they’re starting to like, target judges and like, put their pictures and even target their family members and things like that.
EH: Yeah. The next day on February 14th, 2025, the National Parks Service removes the word “transgender” from the Stonewall Monument webpage. And this is part of a like, larger kind of scrubbing of mentions of trans people from various government websites, along with like, removal of funding for grants and things. But this specific one is so important because Stonewall is, of course, like, symbolically this birth moment of the contemporary queer liberation movement, and also because trans people were some of the like, crucial players at the Stonewall Riots. Much like in 1993 when they like, grossly underestimated the amount of people at the March on Washington and were kind of like, laughed at because it was like, so ridiculously wrong, there was kind of this like, similar response to this of people being like, “How could you possibly remove trans people from the Stonewall Monument webpage?” Like, that feels like, so laughably, obviously wrong.
CB: Right.
EH: But of course, you know, this has like, serious impacts in terms of like,not everybody knows that history, and so.
CB: Right.
EH: Yeah.
CB: The NPR article that you linked to – the title is “Park Service erases ‘transgender’ on Stonewall website; uses the term ‘LGB movement.’” Erasure is part of what’s happening now, and especially when it comes to like, all of the government websites, because it’s across the board. It’s like, a lot of different things, and this is part of the Saturn-Neptune conjunction but also the Venus retrograde and the backtracking, but just like, erasing stuff about trans people, erasing some things about LGB and other queer areas, but also like, Black people and different Black moments in history and different things like that are being erased. There’s also like, data – like, scientific data’s being erased from these websites, especially things related to like, gender or sexual orientation or things like that.
EH: Yes. Yeah.
CB: All right. So what’s the next one?
EH: So the next one is a few days later, February 19th, we get a new Health and Human Services page on protecting women and children. So again, we get this repetition of this idea of like, needing to protect the children – like Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children. Just like, over and over again, that becomes kind of the reasoning for why we have these like, discriminatory practices that are being put in place.
CB: Right. It’s like, the false excuse for discriminating against or oppressing a class of people.
EH: Exactly. On February 22nd, we get Transexual Menace, which was first formed in 1993, holds their first ever event after returning in 2025 in response to the removal of the ‘T’ from the Stonewall monument. So there’s this big event at Stonewall – like, “No LGB without the T.” In their like, marketing materials for that march, they are spelling Stonewall without the ‘T’ in Stonewall to kind of like, make it obvious how absurd that removal is. But yeah, just that repetition from 1993 and then this like, direct action group coming back.
We also start getting like, articles about like, the new Lavender Scare and yeah. I mean, there’s really just like, so, so much. On the 27th, Iowa passes a bill that removes protections for trans people.
CB: That’s incredible about the Lavender Scare thing, just because like I was saying, in 1953 when the Red Scare was at its height and the original Lavender Scare was at its height under that not just Venus retrograde in Aries but also a Saturn-Neptune conjunction, which in the Saturn-Neptune episode I found you often get heightened periods of paranoia. Like the late ‘80s – another period of paranoia was like, the Satanic Panic where people were convinced that like, Satanism was everywhere, and that’s incredible that this term actually comes up again in this repetition this time.
EH: Yeah. As I was listening to your episode with Nick about the Saturn-Neptune conjunctions, I was thinking about this repetition that’s happening right now. Yeah.
What else happens? We get on the 28th, DHS now allows for surveillance based on sexual orientation and gender identity. So they are now allowed to surveil you on that basis after not being allowed to do that for a little while. In kind of a similar way, on March 1st, the day that Venus stations – so everything up to this point has been pre-retrograde station and all just like, up into the run-up, but on March 1st, conservative Senator Mike Lee introduces the SCREEN Act, which is a bill that applies the harmful to minors standard against like, LGBTQ content. Like, so books and resources in schools and libraries, and it wants to apply it to the internet. So any website that has any amount of material that is considered harmful to minors, which is again, in this conception, anything that has to do with queerness or transness at all, would be forced to employ surveillance technology. Which means things like biometric scans, ID uploads, background checks, which is supposedly to prevent minors from accessing “pornography.” But of course, what we know is that that makes it much harder for information about queer people to be read and understood, and also brings in this like, huge issue of government surveillance of like, private internet use through this language again of protecting minors.
CB: Right. And just an excuse about banning books, basically. Like, banning books and resources and the flow of information to attempt to suppress information that they don’t like for ideological reasons and to make it harder to access. So and this piece of legislation was backed by the Heritage Foundation, you said?
EH: Yeah. Who are like, the architects of Project 2025, so.
CB: Right. And that’s the difference between this – Trump’s term now versus 2017 is like, 2017 like, he really did not seem like he thought he was gonna win, and he seemed surprised. Like, that night when he gets up and gives his acceptance speech, I watched it, and he seemed like, shocked that he won. And then a lot of the opening of his first term was very chaotic because they didn’t have like, a transition team in place or anything like that. But with this one, you know, they had these ultra-conservative like, think groups that were doing game plans and like, writing out entire books about what he should do as soon as he gets into office, and that’s where so much of this is coming from these days. It’s coming from these outside ultra-conservative organizations that are giving them, telling him what to do basically, and then he’s just signing off on everything.
EH: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. One of the ones I noticed on March 2nd, which is literally the day after Venus stationed retrograde, is the Oscars happened, and the first trans woman was nominated for Best Actress, which was Karla Sofia Gascon for the movie Emilia Perez. And in the lead up to this, there was – she didn’t end up winning, and in the lead up to this got mired in a bunch of controversies and stuff that happened. But it was still a notable first in addition to a number of other firsts related to the Oscars this year under this Venus retrograde.
EH: Yeah. We also have… So March 3rd, State Senator Elena Parent of Georgia says that she’s gonna vote for a Republican trans healthcare ban because trans rights are unpopular. But then the same day, actually, the United States Senate declines to advance a bill that would exclude trans teen athletes from playing on sports teams that align with their gender identity. So we get this like, on a like, lower level, a state senator saying that she’s gonna vote on a Republican trans healthcare ban because trans rights are unpopular, but then on the like, federal government level in the Senate, they actually don’t bring forward this bill that would exclude trans teen athletes. And from here we —
CB: Right.
EH: — start to get a couple more —
CB: There’s real like, discussions that are like, coming up in the Democratic party about whether defending trans people is like, a winning issue or not or something like that in terms of the political game. And some of those discussions are still ongoing, but it’s part of the post-election sort of like, finger-pointing and analysis about how did we get to where we are today and yeah, different people like, saying different things.
EH: Yeah. Yeah. Now that Venus is retrograde, though, we start to get like, some kind of like, pushing back against some of these executive orders. Not all effectively, and certainly the, you know, climate is not rapidly changing. But on March 4th, we get a court injunction against Trump’s anti-trans healthcare order. A couple days later on the 7th, three trans people who are held in federal prisons sue Trump over bans on accessing gender-affirming care in prison. On March 11th, ACT UP New York, which is that radical HIV and AIDS activist group, they hold an emergency town hall to denounce cuts to federal funding and organize local politicians and healthcare officials to like, ask them to commit to protect New Yorkers’ healthcare in light of these cuts. And critically, one of the things that they say on their website about this was “the activists seek to unite the movements supporting HIV and AIDS justice, reproductive rights, transgender healthcare, pandemic preparedness, immigrant protections, and housing” because these struggles are deeply connected. So even though this is like, an HIV and AIDS focused group, they’re seeing all of these cuts to government funding and drawing out these connections between all these groups who have been oppressed and trying to like, create this multi-issue, multi-pronged fight.
CB: Got it. Yeah. The connections between different marginalized groups.
EH: On March 12th, we get some doctors suing over the removal of their research due to use of words like “LGBTQ” and “transgender” in their research. On March 18th, there’s a court that blocks Ohio’s ban on gender-affirming care for trans minors. On March 26th, the ACLU goes to court to fight Trump’s ban on accurate passports for trans people. I don’t know that we mentioned this is in the pre-retrograde phase of this, but there was essentially part of one of these executive orders had to do with like, gender markers on passports, which of course brings us back to the 1977 retrograde, which is when the gender markers first appeared on passports. And now people who are trying to renew their passports or get passports are having them returned with like, the wrong gender markers on them.
CB: Right. Trump’s trying to force people to use the whatever gender they were assigned at birth on their passports.
EH: Exactly. Yeah.
CB: Got it. Okay. Yeah, that’s quite an echo then, going back to what was that? ‘77?
EH: Yes. Yeah.
CB: Got it. Okay. Let’s move on.
EH: Yeah. We also that same day the ACLU also sues the Greenville Public Library of South Carolina for systematically censoring books about queer and trans people. A few days later, Utah becomes the first state to prohibit flying Pride flags at schools and all government buildings. On March 28th, so that same day, we have at least two courts have blocked Trump’s trans military ban. And then on March 29th, ACT UP has their 38th anniversary event, and it’s this huge protest that is called “Death by a Thousand Musk Cuts,” referring to Elon Musk’s role in federal government spending cuts.
CB: Okay. Right, because he’s the architect of a lot of these cutting of different government agencies at this point that’s cutting aid, both internationally and nationally.
I noticed one on the same day on the 29th. This was just a little sort of cultural one, but perhaps notable that on the 29th, Elon on Twitter had attacked a leftist streamer, Hasan Piker, on Twitter, and then Hassan had Elon’s trans daughter on his very popular like, streaming show on Twitch and like, YouTube on March 29th, and interviewed Vivian for I think one of the few – like, maybe it was only like, the second interview she’s ever done on his livestream. And I looked up her chart, and she was born four days before a solar eclipse in Aries. And then this interview came out the day of the solar eclipse in Aries. And Vivian came out as a trans woman in 2020, and she disowned Elon for what he’s been doing over the past few years, although he also disparagingly like, refers to her and says that she’s dead to him and stuff like that. And at one point in the interview, she speculated, she brought up that people often speculate about whether her transition is the reason why he’s swung so hard to the right over the past few years. But she clarified that she didn’t think that was the case, but instead that he had been that way or had been going that way for some time, and that a lot of it had to do with covid and the way that pandemic and some of the stuff that happened with that broke a lot of people’s brains, honestly. So that was one of the last notable things that I noticed, though, was just a, you know, because Elon’s become so prominent, the drama of his trans daughter has also become very prominent and notable during this retrograde as she’s done more and more interviews and spoken out against what he’s doing.
EH: Yeah. She’s become like, quite vocal and I think like, part of what seems to be her message is kind of like, “I’m not scared of you,” which also feels really like, appropriate and similar to like, the ‘93 like, Lesbian Avengers eating fire. Like, we’re gonna take this thing that could be scary and like, not let it be scary but move forward and fight it. So yeah.
CB: Yeah. And her name’s Vivian Wilson; I don’t know if I mentioned that already. Yeah. But I think that’s actually the last event we have on our list. Was there any other 2025 events you wanted to mention?
EH: No, I mean, I’m sure there’s plenty of other things that we will realize as soon as we’re done recording, but I feel like that gives a good kind of array of what’s been happening over the last six weeks or so. Yeah, I mean, I think the only thing that I just wanted to mention is just this one thing that I briefly mentioned, but it goes back further; we just don’t have exact dates for it, so I didn’t include it as we went. But just this group, Transexual Menace, that was like, refounded in February of this year in the run-up to this Venus retrograde. They were originally founded in 1993, the last Venus retrograde. Or not the last, but one of the Venus retrogrades. And they’re one of the like, early trans rights direct action groups. They are named after the Lavender Menace group, which formed out of the 1969 Venus retrograde when Betty Friedan used the phrase “Lavender Menace” to refer to lesbians “derailing” the women’s movement, for which she like, apologizes for in 1977. And so out of the 1969 Betty Friedan saying “Lavender Menace,” we get this group of like, direct action lesbian group called Lavender Menace. And then from that in 1993 we get Transexual Menace that then comes back in 2025. And they’re one of the like, main architects for the like, Stonewall protests that happened a couple weeks ago.
CB: Nice. That’s incredible. That’s a nice throughline.
EH: Yeah.
CB: All right. Well, let’s bring things full circle here and sort of reflect on what we’ve learned, some of the themes that have come up, some of the implications and where things are headed in the future, I guess. Obviously, this retrograde is still playing out. We haven’t even had the direct station yet, and our full time window to match the time window we’ve been applying to all of the other ones is gonna continue all the way up until June 5th, so we’ll be paying attention to and documenting events between now and then since there will probably be some other really important turning points, both positive and negative, over the course of that time in the next, what, two months now. But I think despite that, we’ve seen – we now have a better understanding of why this current period has been such an important and pivotal turning point, and you know, honestly, unfortunately, with a lot of setbacks and a lot of bad things happening. But we can see the throughline where both progress and positive advancements were made under this retrograde in the past, but also there were periods of similar setbacks and oppressions and other not-good things. But the good point from all of this, at least, is that we did see progress. Like, we do see progress under some of these successive retrogrades; it just sometimes takes a long, long timeline.
EH: Yeah. And I mean, I think one of the things that I was noticing is like, there’s both the time moving on this eight-year increment, but also the things that grow out of the Venus retrograde. Like, often these Venus retrogrades are periods that involve these like, setbacks and challenges, and you can’t quite see what’s like, growing out of them. But then looking at these events like Stonewall, which occurs not during the Venus retrograde but a couple months later, these new movements and like, these real shifts and changes do occur in the like, months following the Venus retrograde. Like, it doesn’t stop once Venus stations direct. This is really like, something is beginning now that we will continue to see grow over the course of the next several months.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. That the Venus retrograde acts as an inflection point or a turning point and can bring up a bunch of stuff, but it also will – especially due to the cazimi halfway through – like, lay the seeds or the foundations for a new cycle of the growth and development of some different things for the eight years in between now and the next Venus retrograde in Aries.
EH: Yeah.
CB: So one of the things I wrote to try to summarize some of what I learned from going through this is that I keep thinking about over the past couple of months is just that social progress is never a straight line, because sometimes society goes retrograde for a while and backtracks or walks backward for a period of time. But that ultimately in the long span of human history, these detours lay the foundations for future advancements and milestones. And I think one of the great things about your research and everything you’ve compiled here today is you’ve really shown that, that these detours are oftentimes like, temporary and that it does every setback sets up a baseline for like, a target for a future victory and positive period of advancement and positive milestone so that some, you know, some astrologers like someday are gonna be on a subsequent retrograde, like, looking back at the one that we’re experiencing now. And they’re gonna be remarking about how terrible that was and what a hard time that was for so many people. But luckily, hopefully they’re gonna be remarking on it with having the vantage point of how far things have progressed since that time and that they no longer have to deal with some of those issues because of the hardship of earlier generations and how those hardships forced people to rise up and to fight for things that needed to be fought for.
EH: Yeah. And I think with that, like, one of the main themes that I think kind of kept coming up throughout this particular set of Venus retrogrades is this like, question of like, do we view – whether it’s sexuality or gender – as like, a single issue on its own, or do we take it in like, concert with all of these other issues and like, build up a intersectional approach or like, multi-faceted, multi-pronged approach that understands how, you know, all of these interlocking webs of oppression I think is the language that was used in the Combahee River Collective statement. Like, the moments where like, that was happening is really where we see this kind of like, throughline of progress is through this approach that takes an understanding that like, we need to be fighting the oppression of all people in order to have a better world. Like, we can’t just be singularly focused; we need to see this like, web of oppression and fight all of the different forms of oppression.
CB: Right. Absolutely. Yeah. People have a tendency to pick their own personal area of marginalization that applies to them and to wanna fight for that, but that when one group of people is being oppressed, like, that’s usually like, a starting point, and that rarely just like, sticks to just like, one group of people. And that it’s not just like, from a moral standpoint in terms of if one group of people is being oppressed in society, than that negatively affects all of society, but that oppression also has a tendency to eventually snowball and turn into oppressing like, multiple groups of people over a period of time. It’s not gonna just stay restricted to like, one group of people that you may or may not be in, which at least in the interests even just of like, personal interest, people should understand as being dangerous when especially the government like, starts oppressing different groups of people.
EH: Absolutely. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So you had some other themes that you brought up. Do you wanna like, mention and read off some of those in terms of some of the keywords that are relevant to you?
EH: Yeah. So I think one of the big ones that we had touched on at various points is this question of like, liberation versus assimilation, and kind of at each of these retrogrades we see people finding their way into one of those two camps. And I think that, you know, makes sense in terms of like, Venus moving from evening star to morning star and these different sides of Venus. And also like, Venus being in Aries and like, yeah, just these questions of like, do we want to be part of the society that has oppressed us? Or do we want to build a different kind of society? And we see both of those approaches coming out during these Venus retrogrades.
There’s also —
CB: Right. As well as like, incremental progress versus like, huge leaps forward in progress.
EH: Yes.
CB: Or alternatively, like, that which is ideal versus that which is practical in the moment.
EH: Yeah. And then we also have themes of community organizing and uprising. The military comes up a lot, but also militancy within like, queer rights movements. HIV and AIDS comes up a lot. Police violence. The issue of – or like, “issue” of youth safety, but then also youth access to gender-affirming care and bathrooms and sports, and also that those —
CB: As well as just the – go ahead.
EH: Oh, I was just gonna say that like, denying youth access to those things is also couched in this language of like, we’re protecting the youth from themselves or from other youth who are trans.
CB: Right. That was one of the recurring themes that I thought was stood out the most was just like, this continually spreading of false narratives or false premises about protecting children but using that as an excuse in order to oppress like, minority groups essentially in society.
EH: Oh yes. We also have state and legal protections, but also persecutions. So we get like, anti-discrimination laws being passed and unpassed. We get the Lavender Scare. Hate crime laws. Marriage. So we get those things coming up over and over again.
One interesting one that I haven’t quite figured out how to make sense of as a Venus in Aries theme is queer print media comes up a lot, both through book bans but also like, newspapers and journals that are associated with queer people. And I don’t know if that’s just like, the result of like, when you’re looking at archives, one of the things that is most likely to be archived is like, journals and newspapers, or if there is some association between Venus retrograde in Aries and this particular type of media. I don’t know if you have thoughts about that, or…
CB: I don’t know. Maybe just something about visibility or other things like that. I’m not sure.
EH: Yeah. Yeah. And then I mentioned already that like, single-issue versus intersectionality. But then also gender and sexuality as distinct or non-distinct identity categories. So we kind of start in the like, early 1900s with gender and sexuality as like, non-distinct identity categories that can kind of be – or like, non-normative gender and sexuality as non-distinct identity categories. So it kind of all gets lumped into one category of like, non-normativity, and then throughout the retrogrades, we start to see gender and sexuality take shape as distinct identity categories to the point that now in 2025 we have this like, conservative LGB without the T movement that I don’t think would have been possible a hundred years ago just because of how we think about gender and sexuality having shifted and changed.
CB: Right. For sure. I like that you use the word like, “non-normative,” because I think that’s really key when it comes to Venus retrograde especially, just because you know, one of my realizations I think in 2023 is just that when most of the time, most of the planets are moving forward in the zodiac in a certain order through the signs of the zodiac, and that represents – because most of them are moving in that direction most of the time, it represents that which is normative when planets are direct. But when they go retrograde, suddenly they’re doing something non-normative. They’re moving backwards. They’re almost doing something that the other planets might consider like, odd or weird, because they’re going the opposite direction that everyone else is walking essentially. And I think there’s something about the Venus retrograde that that word “non-normative” is really key here in some of what we’re seeing as well as that how it changes in different eras – what is normative versus non-normative – especially as different things are normalized during different points in time.
EH: Definitely. Yeah.
CB: So it’s like, that’s an important insight I think, because right now I think trans issues are the non-normative thing that is the major thing that’s being attacked by the normative majority. But several Venus retrograde cycles ago, the primary non-normative thing was homosexuality and that’s what was being attacked by the normative majority. At some point in the future, probably not too long from now honestly, like, trans rights is gonna be normalized to an extent that there’s gonna be some other issue in society that’s gonna arise of some sort of non-normative approach to something related to Venus that will become the thing that the normative majority, including some trans people who once they’ve, you know, moved into the dominant normative category in society will then have their own groups that will also potentially, unfortunately – and I’m not saying that to be like, depressing or anything, but just to like, that’s what progress looks like is eventually you join the normative group. And then there will be some other minority or let’s say non-normative group that then becomes for a period of time the subject of attack and exclusion and oppression in society. And then at some point, like, society will get over that and move on and move onto like, the next thing.
But I think that’s important just because that gets like, the closest to universalizing or to identifying some sort of core archetype or like, code underlying what we’re seeing here with these Venus retrogrades and the process that’s continually unfolding during the course of them. And that also helps to identify the umbrella concept that we see shift over time as the normative and non-normative practices sort of shift.
EH: Yeah. And I think that like, gets to the point of this like, split between like, liberation and assimilation. Where like, the assimilation approach would be the like, I’m gonna get mine and then, you know, in 10 or 20 years when trans rights are more secure, like, I’ll be part of the group that’s beating down on whatever the next scapegoat becomes.
CB: Right.
EH: Versus like, the liberation mindset would be like, I wanna get out of this way of being that says that there needs to be a group that is scapegoated, and so I’m going to fight for everybody’s right to live freely and safely no matter whether or not it is like, me and my people that is currently being oppressed or if it’s another group, because the goal is that everybody’s able to live freely and safely and not to pass off the scapegoat card.
CB: Right. Yeah. I mean, I hope for that, and I wish for that. I’m so disappointed with seeing what happened in the past decade with the gay community or homosexual community and the large contingence that’s grown of like, gay people now that voted for Trump, for example, and therefore are supporting what’s happening with the attacks on trans people because they are not themselves being attacked that I’ve kind of like, lost a certain amount of hope for humanity or at least have become a little cynical when it comes to that in terms of what groups tend to do once they’ve been normalized. But you know, we’ll see what happens, and we can hope for the best in the long term of things. And hopefully generationally we can learn some things from witnessing this or, yeah, maybe that’s gonna be, you know, up to especially the trans community to hopefully take the lessons from this and going through the experience of what’s being experience right now, and hopefully, yeah, finding a way to transcend that in the future. You know, time will tell.
EH: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. All right. Let’s see – any other themes? I had keywords like concealment, coming out, being seen, being erased, inflection point, setbacks that foreshadow later progress. Yeah. Lots of things I think that we’ve discussed. But yeah, this was incredible. This is – you did so much research for this, and you found so much stuff. I am blown away. I was not fully… You know, I’ve been focusing on these other big episodes this month, so initially I thought that when you first pitched this, it was a much shorter outline, so I thought this was gonna be like, a little easy, you know, 90 minutes, like two-hour episode or something that we were gonna do. And then you put a lot more research in between when we agreed to do it versus when we started getting ready to sit down and record it. You did a lot more research and initially I just got done doing the huge, eight-hour Saturn-Neptune episode and all the research for that and just released the monthly forecast and was ready to take a break, so I was a little trepidation going into this episode about doing another long one. But then once we started talking and going through and I saw all of the amazing things that you found, I very quickly got on board with like, this is important, and this has now become like, a legendary episode. So thank you so much for everything you did here and for approaching me with this outline and having the courage even to like, pitch that as an idea was great, and I’m really glad that you did, so thank you.
EH: Thank you so much for taking the time with me to go through all of this, and yeah, give it the full treatment and yeah. I know you’ve been releasing just like, incredible like, eight- and nine-hour long episodes. So yeah, I’m just very appreciative that you took the time to do this one with me. And I hope that it will be, that people will find things that are, you know, inspiring through history to kind of like, hold onto as we continue through this current moment, and yeah. So that is how I have looked to queer history and how I have used astrology in the context of queer history is to be able to like, look back and take strength from some of these moments in the past in order to like, propel me forward. And so I hope that that will also be true for some of the people who are listening.
CB: Absolutely. Yeah. I think it should give people hope. I think that’s honestly the biggest thing from the research that you’ve outlined today is I hope it gives some people some hope for the future and for better days ahead.
EH: Yeah.
CB: Cool. All right. Well, tell me a bit about your work, your podcast. How many episodes do you have, too, with your podcast?
EH: That’s a good question. I think it’s like… A number —
CB: A lot.
EH: — of them.
CB: Yeah.
EH: Yeah.
CB: You’ve got a pretty significant archive of different episodes and different interviews with different figures, different queer astrologers and documenting different histories.
EH: Yeah. So I’ve done some – I also did an episode with Michael J. Morris and some other queer and trans astrologers, and also looking back at queer artists and activists through history. It’s been a little – on a little bit of a hiatus as I’ve been doing my Saturn return moment hermitage and preparing for this, but yeah, there’s a good backlog of episodes. And there will be more episodes coming soon.
CB: What’s the website for that?
EH: So the website for that is StarGaysAstrology.Ghost.io, and then my personal website is EllyHiggins.com, and yeah, I’m available for consultations. I’m wrapping up a workshop that I’ve been doing with a friend of mine who is an astrologer and herbalist, Ced Clearwater, about this Venus retrograde. And then also in May on May 11th, I am going to be giving a talk for ISAR for their Star Club about astrology and queer ancestors, and it’s gonna be a little bit more of like, a philosophical talk thinking about what astrology can do for our relationships with queer ancestors as opposed to this which is a little bit more like, factual, historical. But we’ll be looking a lot at the work and chart of Jose Esteban Munoz, who I mentioned at the beginning of this episode. And yeah, that’s gonna be on May 11th, and anybody who feels excited about queer astrology should come hang out.
CB: Awesome. That sounds amazing. Cool. Well, I’m excited to see, yeah, more of your work in the future. I thank you for compiling this and doing this with me, collaborating on this episode of The Astrology Podcast, and yeah. So I’ll release the notes that you took which contain links to tons of resources in terms of the research that you put into this episode, so I think that’s important for patrons. They’ll get the PDF when I release this episode. I’ll put links to your websites on the description below this video on YouTube or on the podcast website. Otherwise, do you have any like, final thoughts or is there anything we meant to mention or you meant to mention before we wrap up?
EH: No, I don’t think so. Thank you so much for having me and doing this with me. It’s a real honor to get to share all this research with you and with everybody who’s listening.
CB: Cool. Awesome. Well, yeah, the honor has been all mine. So thank you, and thanks for joining me.
EH: Yeah. Thank you.
CB: All right. Thanks everyone for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast, and we’ll see you again next time!
[END CREDITS]
If you’re a fan of the podcast and you’d like to find a way to help support my research, then consider becoming a patron through my page on Patreon.com. In exchange, you’ll get access to subscriber benefits such as early access to new episodes, the ability to attend live recordings, the monthly electional astrology podcast, an exclusive podcast series called The Secret Astrology Podcast that’s only available to patrons, or you can even get your name listed in the credits. For more information, go to Patreon.com/AstrologyPodcast.
Special thanks to the patrons on my Producers tier, including patrons Kristi Moe, Ariana Amour, Mandi Rae, Angelic Nambo, Issa Sabah, Jeanne Marie Kaplan, Melissa DeLano, Sonny Bazbaz, Kwatsi Alibaruho, Annie Newman, Ginger Sadlier, Berlynn West, Nicki Crawford, and Vivi Henriette.
People often ask me if I’m available for consultations, but unfortunately I’m not right now because the podcast takes up so much of my time. However, I did create a consultations page on The Astrology Podcast website that has a list of astrologers that I recommend for astrological consultations. You can find that at TheAstrologyPodcast.com/Consultations.
The astrology software we use here on the podcast is called Solar Fire for Windows, which is astrology software for the PC. You can get a 15% discount by using the promo code ‘AP15’ at the website Alabe.com.
For Mac users, I recommend the software Astro Gold for Mac OS, which is astrology software for the Mac computer made by the creators of Solar Fire for the PC. You can get a 15% discount with the promo code ‘ASTROPODCAST15’ through their website at AstroGold.io.
If you’re really looking to deepen your studies of astrology, then I would recommend signing up for my Hellenistic Astrology course, which is an online course in ancient astrology where I take people from basic concepts up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts. There’s over a hundred hours of video lectures, plus monthly webinars and Q&A sessions. And then at the end of the course, you get a certificate of completion saying that you studied with me if you pass the final written test. Find out more information at TheAstrologySchool.com.
Finally, shout out to our sponsor for this episode, which is the Northwest Astrological Conference, which is happening May 22nd through the 26th, 2025. Their in-person conference is sold out, but you can still register to get a virtual ticket where they’re gonna stream the conference simultaneously online in May, and you can register for that now through their website at NORWAC.net.