My Celestial Stick People color test should arrive today. For those just joining in, this is a Tarot deck I’ve been working on since November 2000, and I’m agonizingly close to getting it printed finally.

As part of getting all this wrapped up, I’ve been slowly adding captions to the images in my web site galleries, which includes images from the deck, trying to give just a couple sentences’ worth of history or inspiration for each piece if I can remember it.

And then I got to the Lovers. It looks like this:

I bring this up because it used to look like this:

The Lovers is supposed to represent love overcoming obstacles. It’s about fighting for love. So very late in this whole process, I changed the characters from a boy and a girl to just two boys.

My color test is not making me nervous. The possibility that this project is simply going to disappear into the Internet upon completion does not make me nervous.

This card makes me nervous.

I’m usually not real vocal about my political or social views. I’m generally not one to post righteously indignat rants; I don’t re-post articles or images on Facebook with statistics or quotes or jokes about causes I care about. I would prefer to express my convictions through the actions I take and the work I do.

This slight rearranging of blue lines, this removal of one yellow blob and one green blob — this is me, taking a stand.

Within my own group of friends, the change to this card was met with nothing but support. However, if my more conservative relatives see this deck and this image — and it’s likely they will; they may even see this post — it could add a bit of tension to some relationships that could already stand to be a lot better, that I would very much like to be better.

Just thinking about this is making my pulse go up a bit.

But I’m not about to change my mind on this. I’m firmly of the opinion that this shouldn’t even be an issue; that, hopefully, most people won’t even notice or care that my two Lovers are presumably the same sex. It’s not a particularly loud statement I’ve got here, my two kissing stick figures, but my feeling is that whispers can have more of an effect on people than shouts.