RACHEL GRACE POLLACK was an transgender American science fiction author, comic book writer, and expert on divinatory tarot. She earned an honours degree in English from New York University and a master’s in English from Claremont Graduate University.
Ms. Pollack’s professional writing career began in 1971, when she sold her first short story, “Pandora’s Bust,” which was featured in New Worlds, a quarterly science-fiction anthology edited by the author Michael Moorcock. But she soon became better known for her writings on tarot cards, to which she had been introduced a year earlier. She was immediately drawn in.
She parlayed her passion for the cards, which are used to provide life guidance to believers, into “Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom,” a modern guide to the history and interpretation of tarot. Originally published in two parts, in 1980 and 1983, and later combined into one volume, it became a widely used resource and earned her recognition as a tarot authority.
Five years later, Ms. Pollack, Mr. Gaiman and the artist Dave McKean joined forces to create “Vertigo Tarot,” a guidebook and a set of cards featuring many of DC Comics’ mystical characters.
The writer Susie Bright worked with Ms. Pollack to record the audio version of “Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom,” which was released in 2021. But the women had been aware of each other long before that. In the 1990s, they admired each other’s work: Ms. Bright was a contributor to the lesbian sex publication On Our Backs (and eventually as its editor-in-chief), and Ms. Pollack was a regular contributor to TransSisters: The Journal of Transsexual Feminism.
Her “Salvador Dalí’s Tarot,” a guidebook to tarot paintings by Dalí that were commissioned for the James Bond film “Live and Let Die” (the deal fell through, but Dalí completed the work), was published in 1985 and brought her to the attention of Neil Gaiman. Mr. Gaiman, who would soon become a well-known fantasy author, was then a journalist and interviewed her for the British newspaper Today. In 1990, when Mr. Gaiman wanted to include a tarot reading in a comic book he was writing, he asked Ms. Pollack for help.
Writing in TransSisters in 1995, Ms. Pollack said she came out as transgender and lesbian in 1971 and underwent transition surgery in 1976. In an interview this year with LGBT Health and Wellbeing, a charitable organization in Scotland, she talked about having the surgery in the Netherlands.
“There was a surgeon, and then there was a psychiatrist, and I had to go get his permission,” she recalled. “So I went to see him, and I knew him because I was in a support group that he officially monitored, so I talked to him, and he said: ‘Well, you obviously know yourself better than I do, and you know what you’re getting into, so that’s fine. I will give permission.’ My entire time with the psychiatrist was 20 minutes.”
In that same interview, she noted a difference between when she underwent her transition 47 years ago and today. “The big thing that’s changed, an astonishing change, is that transgender people are now visible,” she said. “Society recognizes that this is something people can be. Obviously, there is a strong reactionary element fighting change, as always, but the difference is remarkable.”
Ms. Pollack’s 1988 fantasy novel, “Unquenchable Fire,” the story of a divorced woman in New York State who becomes pregnant with the messiah in a United States where miracles are commonplace, won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science-fiction novel.
As Ms. Pollack knew, representation matters. In 1993, DC Comics began publishing her work in Doom Patrol, a comic book about heroes with strange powers that often made them outsiders. She created the company’s first transgender hero: Kate Godwin, also known as Coagula, who could dissolve things with one hand and solidify them with the other.
In Coagula’s first appearance, she talked about being brushed off by that DC superhero collective the Justice League of America. “I suspect they liked my powers, but couldn’t handle me,” she says. The “me” is rendered in bold. In the next panel, readers get a close-up of a button on her jacket that reads, “Put a transsexual lesbian on the Supreme Court.”
She met Zoe Matoff through an online tarot discussion group in 2000, and the two met in person later that year at a pagan convention in San Francisco. “It became romantic the night we met,” Ms. Matoff said. They were married [in 2022] in the intensive care unit at Northern Dutchess Hospital in Rhinebeck, where Ms. Pollack was undergoing treatment.
Pollack died from Non-Hodgkin lymphoma on April 7, 2023, at the age of 77.