Leo Season

All you need to know about Leo season: queering sex and astrology

Leo season (23 July to 23 August) strikes the match in the dead of winter. Heat climbs back into the body, the kind you generate: skin to skin, or all on your own. The Sun that rules this month wears the face of the Goddess: Sekhmet, the lioness of Ancient Egypt, feared and adored in the same breath. She destroys to heal and burns to purify, so take her warmth and mind the burn.

And this SZN runs hotter still. The Sun sits at home in Leo and Jupiter pulls up beside it: a power couple, doubling everything the Lion touches. More appetite, more nerve. Take a seat, your throne is waiting.

The sky turns you toward your people: North Node in Aquarius, South Node in Leo (27 July)

The lunar nodes are the axis the whole collective moves along, and today it swings: North Node into Aquarius, South Node into Leo, setting the agenda for the next eighteen months.

Leo, the sign we’re releasing, runs on being seen: earn the light, prove you’re worth the attention. Plenty of us learned that hustle by heart, an experience that bi and pan folks often know too well. Now the energy turns. Aquarius asks for something braver: let your people hold you with nothing to prove. Remember, you have always been queer enough all along.

Coming out is this transit. Transition is this transit. Every time you quit performing for a room that was never yours and turn toward the people who already see you, you walk the axis exactly where it points.

The heart of the matter: Jupiter cazimi and Aquarius full moon (29 July)

A cazimi is when a planet conjoins the Sun. The word comes from an Arabic phrase meaning “in the heart of the Sun.” Today Jupiter, the great amplifier, presses into Leo’s chest and magnifies whatever it finds there. Whatever truth you’ve been circling, whatever want you’ve only whispered, this energy blazes it up bold and undeniable.

Hours later the Moon comes full in Aquarius, directly opposite the cazimi, and Pluto has it under surveillance. Nothing buried stays buried: the hunger you hid, the names you moaned quietly, the people who would stand in your wanting with you.

The cazimi shows you the truth; The full moon shows you who it’s for.

Lights up, no going back: Leo Solar Eclipse (13 August) 

Eclipses hit like power surges. A new moon plants a seed and lets you tend it slowly; an eclipse throws the switch, floods the room, and suddenly everything you hid in the dark is glaring back at you. This one strikes in Leo, right where the South Node just landed, so it lands like fate: a turning point you only understand later. A person, a wound, a self you haven’t met yet. Some doors open once and never close the same way again.

Then Venus arrives to soothe the scorch. At home in Libra, dressed in her best, she catches Jupiter’s eye across the sky on the 18th and the current turns sweet: pleasure handed over freely, beauty that asks nothing back, being adored just for standing there. After the eclipse drags your want into the open, Venus pours honey on it. So take the softness. Let yourself be spoiled.

Leo and your body: why has my desire changed?

Leo rules the heart, the spine and the upper back: the pump that fills you and the line that holds you upright. Arousal is circulatory. Chemistry fires and the blood rushes to everywhere that fills: the clit engorging, the dick stiffening, the vulva expanding, whatever you’ve got. Your pulse climbs, your skin warms, your spine arches to meet it.

Desire itself is a different animal. Libido rises and falls with sleep, stress, hormones, health and how safe and wanted you feel, and there is no correct amount of it. Yours shifts across your life; no one else’s is the benchmark.

A quiet stretch is not a verdict on you or your love.

If your wanting shifts and worries you, don’t sit with it alone. Chat to your GP, or reach a peer who won’t make you translate yourself, free and anonymous. Being turned on is your heart taking up space, and Leo says let it.