Dead but Delicious
Dead but Delicious
the daddy card - tarot + leather identity
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the daddy card - tarot + leather identity

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CW: sexual violence, patriarchy play, mention of tenderqueers

My first tarot deck was gifted to me by an old friend L, who was very serious about the superstition that you had to be gifted your first tarot deck. The gift came with a certificate to call on M, someone I had never met, for a lesson in how to read the cards. As an introvert, the idea of meeting someone I didn’t know at all made me anxious, like being set up on date. I never cashed in on that lesson, but we did end up meeting in a less anxious circumstance when the three of us went to a mediumship circle at the Theosophical Society. 

We all met at the building on East 53rd Street, a part of town unfamiliar to us, unsure of what to expect. Meeting a new friend immediately before you see a medium together is a distinctly queer femme experience. We climbed the stairs and were ushered through a narrow hallway with about eight other people into a small, dark room. We sat in chairs forming a circle and could see each other only by the light of the candles and salt lamp. The medium was a woman who went to each of us one by one describing which dead person was present to speak to us. For me, it was a young girl who came through. When I said that I didn’t know any children that had died, the medium named the lonely spirit as my deceased inner child. Great save, really hit the nail on the head.

We all left that experience feeling very suspicious of the authenticity of this medium, and while I was out $20 I had at least made a new friend. L, M, and I began to hang out a lot together after this. M lived down the street from me, we were all femmes, and interested in magic and the supernatural. Over time we got more familiar with a group dynamic and an inside joke amongst us had formed—M started calling L “Mom” and me “Daddy.” L was extremely maternal and nurturing and always wanted to hear about everyone’s feelings. In stark polar opposition, I was just learning that I even had feelings. I was the logical, practical, authority figure (I swear I’m fun). In addition, due to income differences I would often pay for most, if not all, of our meals when we went out to eat. At the time I worked at a fancy handbag company so I was also always giving everyone gifts. Daddy made perfect sense. M being our daughter also made perfect sense—she was younger, a bottom, and definitely baby long before the “I’m baby” meme entered the lexicon.

There was something really exciting about being called Daddy and having this platonic daughter-friend that really made me feel new things. It made me dream about what it would be like to be called Daddy by a lover who let me do filthy things to her. At this time I was still discovering my pervert identity, I identified as a switch, I was just starting to dabble with learning rope, and just starting to top. I felt that I must be a Daddy, but I wasn’t ready to fully claim it; I didn’t really know how or what that meant beyond it made me feel good. I needed to understand the history, the weight, and the responsibility of this identity before I claimed it, which I realize now was very Daddy of me.

The cards I was gifted never really resonated with me (a queer deck that felt too tender with art that I would not hang on my walls) and I eventually started searching for a more on-brand tarot deck. I wanted to feel something from the imagery and a connection when I held them in my hands, a feeling like M described from her beautiful deck adorned with flowers and ladies. The witch shops in New York unfortunately didn’t have anything that did that for me. On destination trips to visit a long distance witch girlfriend, we would stop at the local occult shops as part of our tourist activities. She had just moved to San Diego and had already found a favorite shop to show me on my first visit to her new home. The occult shop was perfectly situated right by the ocean and happened to have the largest variety of tarot decks that I had ever seen. 

A few minutes after we entered the shop, my girlfriend saw her uncle—also gay, also psychic, and a world-renowned tarot scholar (I honestly cannot make this up). This gave me time to browse the shelves alone and focus. I pulled out one that caught my eye —The Byzantine Tarot — I felt the vibration in my hands, it was the one I had been looking for. The cards felt erotic, adorned in Byzantine-style art and themed for the Christian empire. My Catholic fetish was very pleased and the idea of drawing from my erotic energy to read cards felt extremely right. Along with the deck, that day I also bought a new book that had some interesting concepts I hadn’t explored before.

In the book I learned that you can calculate your tarot birth card by adding up all your 2-digit birthday numbers and continuing to add them until they reduce completely. Like horoscopes, birth cards are another way that divine intervention puts people into easily understood boxes. My birthday is 12/05/1986, which translates to:

12 + 05 + 19 + 86 = 122

12+2 = 14

1+4 = 5

Thus, my birth cards are 14 and 5. In the major arcana Temperance is XIV, and The Hierophant is V. 

The more well known Hierophant card translates in the Byzantine deck to The Patriarch or, as I immediately saw it, The Daddy Card. Obviously there are lots of negative connotations with the history of a patriarch—namely patriarchy, which is systemically responsible for ruining all our lives. Additionally, it’s not like many people I know have pure and good associations with their actual fathers. But with every tarot card there is both an upright and a reversed position. When upright, Patriarch stands for all the positive ways I wished to embody this Daddy archetype.

“In the tarot system, the Pope, known since the early twentieth century as the Hierophant, acts as a teacher, guide, and guardian, thus ably fulfilling the role of his more ancient counterparts, while not necessarily being Christian. In the Byzantine tarot, he continues to be a source of knowledge and wisdom to whom all may apply.

This is a card that has most to do with long-established wisdom, with rigorous and sometimes hidebound patterns that lead to certain specific revelations. The word ‘hierophant’ refers to one who brings light where there is darkness — who illuminates the path of the seeker of traditional wisdom, and offers illumination and inspiration to all. 

Key words: Inspiration - alliances - overseeing others - teaching - tradition - acknowledging the lessons of the past”

Maybe it’s because I had to grow up too fast, but this card description is extremely close to how I have always been. I read, I learn, I push, I tell it like it is, I am disciplined, I support and build my people up. Even before I was in any D/s relationship I often fell into playing this role for other people in my life. It wasn’t negotiated, but it also didn’t need to be. It was an easy transition to consensual D/s relationships where I am actually *someone’s Daddy* very intentionally and specifically negotiate the ways I show up for another person. Even the imagery on this card resonates with me. The Byzantine art famous for gold paint and deep gem colors screams with all the faggotry and sparkling regalia of the church. I see The Patriarch immortalized as a femme daddy, he says I look damn good when I’m telling you what to do. 

In the tarot practice when you lay down a card upside down it’s called the reverse position. In a reading, this shows up as the negative, stuck, or opposite aspects of what the card symbolizes. The reverse Patriarch card can be read as a projection of all the ways we think of the Patriarch as an evil force. The shadow side of the Patriarch gets off on control, has sinister motives, and has absolute power that corrupts absolutely.

This is also me. 

The reverse side of this identity is the perverted and sinister Daddy, the Daddy who corrupts. What’s different between the benevolent and evil Daddy is that in contrast to everyday life, when I am in these scenes or slip into these roles, I actually embody a male persona—Doctor Daddy, the Priest, the breeding demon, the serial killer, the creepy virgin pervert who orders a sex doll (you know, just to name a few). My most fucked up fantasies are informed by two things: 1) the real life horror stories that happen to real people and are most often perpetrated by real men 2) fake horror stories inspired by books, movies, and TV perpetrated by either men or monsters, and sometimes both. When I’m embodying a backwoods butcher stalking victims for my kill room, I may be wearing extremely femme lingerie but it is the dark energy of the Patriarch that I channel to get off. 

There is a lesbian stereotype that no one makes the first move because both people are terrified of recreating the ways that men prey on women. This palpable sexuality-as-predatory, avoidant, overly cautious vibe is something I have experienced many times, although mostly outside kink community. There’s that pesky yearning for something you’ll never do. The repercussions of this fear are vast, from tenderqueers desexualizing everything, to the insidious ways our own community treats trans women, to everyone being afraid to cruise. This has me wondering if my Daddy identity is somehow a response to this fear I have internalized. Maybe embodying Daddy is a way to feel less shame about my aggressive and dark sexual fantasies by enacting them (always consensually) through a persona that doesn’t “look like” my actual identity. Channeling the monstrous and evil reverse Patriarch as the sexual predator feels better, feels right, feels natural, when it’s a man.

In the queer bubble where anything goes I know that Daddy has no gender, but that hasn’t stopped me from interrogating why I, as a cis femme woman, am erotically drawn to embody a traditionally masculine Leather archetype. And further, why specifically the “dark side” of this persona shows up for me as a man. Why didn’t the equally nurturing but traditionally feminine Matriarch appeal to me as much? While I’ve only ever met Mommies who are femme, I have absolutely met many Daddies of all gender presentations. I have heard many of my peers name the popularity of Daddy over Mommy within the dyke community as old fashioned misogyny. I don’t think this is completely wrong, but I also think it’s not so simple. I speak for myself when I say that misogyny is not why I didn’t choose Mommy, but it may be a big part of why I did choose Daddy. 

Leather is beautiful because it gives us a container to play and create community around a culture of sexy make-believe (as much as I absolutely hate some of the outcomes of this I must respect that we all deserve love). We choose new personas for ourselves, sometimes several, that make us feel good and powerful, and let us enact our wildest fantasies. While kink doesn’t exist in a silo and we should work to challenge recreating harmful aspects of dominant culture, it is also deeply personal and driven by experience. Daddy has always clicked for me in the positive archetypal ways the Patriarch tarot card describes. It also serves my shadow side in all the ways I desire to devour, to draw blood, and be violent. I would be lying to myself if I didn’t admit that for me it is easy to draw a connection between the (consensual!!!) sexual violence from my fantasies and the violent misogyny of this same Patriarch. 

Good thing my other birth card is Temperance.

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 Dead but Delicious
Dead but Delicious
dyke drama, BDSM, polyamory, evil, etc.
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