Colin Bedell: The Astrologer Who Treats a Birth Chart as Permission, Not Prediction

That word is his. "I frame Astrology as a permission structure," he writes on his own site. It is an unusual claim in a field that mostly sells certainty, and it is worth taking seriously — partly because it is coherent, and partly because it is the reason his particular corner of astrology exists at all.

Who Colin Bedell is

Bedell is a New York City–based astrologer, author, and the cofounder of QueerCosmos, an astrological resource built for LGBTQIA+ people and their allies. He graduated from The New School with a bachelor's degree in literature and holds a master's in fashion studies from Parsons School of Design — a background in reading texts and reading clothes, which turns out to be a reasonable description of what he does with charts.

He is the weekly horoscope writer for Cosmopolitan.com. That single fact does more work than any follower count: it is a paid, recurring editorial post at a mass-market magazine, verifiable in two independent institutional sources, and it puts his writing in front of an audience most working astrologers never touch.

The books

Four titles, three of them through established trade publishers:

• Queer Cosmos: The Astrology of Queer Identities & Relationships (2019) — the book the whole project is built around.
• A Little Bit of Astrology: An Introduction to the Zodiac — a beginner's primer that uses music as its governing metaphor: planets as instruments, signs as songs.
• Gemini — a single-sign deep dive.
• Star-Crossed: A Love and Romance Astrological Oracle Deck and Guidebook — a 44-card deck published by Simon & Schuster.

The bylines and the broadcasts

Beyond Cosmopolitan, his horoscopes have run in Them. He has appeared on Good Morning America, MTV, in New York magazine, and in The Sunday Times in the UK. He worked as an astrologer on the reality series Written in the Stars, which premiered in 2022 — a detail worth stating carefully, because the record labels it two different ways. Institutional bios describe it as a Discovery+ show; his own site credits HBO Max. Both are right in sequence: the Warner Bros. Discovery streaming catalogue was consolidated, and titles that launched on Discovery+ now sit under the HBO Max banner. It is a platform rename, not a contradiction.

The part of the résumé that does not get press

There is a professional astrology world with committees, conferences, and volunteer boards, and it is largely invisible to the readers who see the horoscope column. Bedell works in it. He has served as vice president of the Long Island chapter of the National Council for Geocosmic Research, a nonprofit that has run astrological education and certification in the United States since 1971. He has taught at the United Astrology Conference and at the Northwest Astrological Conference. He teaches at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, and at Kripalu — two of the largest retreat centres in the country, both of which vet their faculty.

Bedell also says he was ranked among NORWAC's top five lecturers. That is his own account and we have not found it independently confirmed; treat it as a self-report rather than a fact of record. The conference appearances themselves are documented.

What "permission structure" actually means

Strip away the vocabulary and Bedell's method is fairly simple to describe. A birth chart, in his hands, is not a set of instructions and not a schedule of events. It is a vocabulary — a stock of images specific enough to be about you and loose enough that you have to do the interpreting. The chart gives you a licence to say something you already suspected but had no permission to say out loud.

You can see the same logic in how he runs consultations. His single offering is a 60-minute recorded session, strengths-based, using Placidus houses, that ends with what he calls an action plan. Not a prediction. A plan. Whatever you think of astrology as a system, that is a defensible structure for a conversation: a person with an outside vantage point, a shared symbolic language, an hour of undivided attention, and a concrete next step.

It is also the same instinct behind his talk show. What Time Were You Born? launched at the start of September 2026 — it is genuinely new, with only a handful of episodes out — and the format is that he reads a guest's chart while the guest talks about their life and work. The chart is the pretext. The conversation is the product.

The problem Queer Cosmos set out to solve

Here is the part that makes Bedell's work more than a branding exercise. Traditional Western astrology is not neutral ground for queer readers. It was written down over centuries by people working inside assumptions that were never questioned, and those assumptions are baked into the technical vocabulary itself.

Where the inherited language runs into trouble — and what the reframe does

Inherited convention	The snag	The reframe
"Masculine" and "feminine" signs	A Greek polarity scheme read for centuries as a claim about gender	Treated as a rhythm — outward-directed and inward-directed — with no gender attached
Venus as "the wife", Mars as "the husband"	Role assignment by gender, in charts read for two people assumed to be a man and a woman	Two modes of desire — attraction and pursuit — present in every chart regardless of who holds them
The 7th house as "marriage"	A legal institution long closed to the readers in question	Committed partnership of any legal or social shape, chosen family included
Compatibility as a verdict	Sorts people into permitted and forbidden matches	Every sign framed as worthy of love; comparison used to describe friction, not to rule anyone out

Bedell's stated aim for Queer Cosmos is to use astrology "as a means of unlearning shame and claiming worthiness." That is a therapeutic goal wearing astrological clothes, and it is worth naming plainly: he is not recovering a lost queer astrological tradition. There isn't one to recover. He is writing a new one, using old parts.

Whether you find that legitimate probably depends on what you think astrology is. If it is a body of empirical claims, rewriting it to be kinder is a serious problem. If it is a symbolic language, then languages have always been rewritten by the people who needed to say something new in them. Bedell has clearly chosen the second view, and his work is consistent with it.

Where the evidence ends

Being fair to Bedell means being clear about what is documented and what isn't — and to his credit, he draws that line more carefully than most people in his field.

Documented: the Cosmopolitan column, the books and their publishers, the television and streaming appearances, the teaching posts at Omega and Kripalu, the NCGR role, the conference lectures.

Self-reported: that he began studying astrology at eleven, that QueerCosmos launched in 2017, the NORWAC lecturer ranking. None of this is implausible and none of it is independently verified.

Not established by evidence: that the position of planets at birth corresponds to personality, relationships, or outcomes. No controlled study has demonstrated it, and Bedell does not claim otherwise. His defence is that he is not making that kind of claim in the first place — he is offering a symbolic language, not a mechanism.

That defence is honest, and it has a cost worth naming. A claim built so that no result could contradict it has bought its safety by giving up the ability to be tested. Bedell would likely accept that trade, since he calls astrology an art form rather than a science. Readers should know the trade has been made. It is a different position from that of astrologers who lean on statistical or predictive language, and it is closer to the ground held by Jessica Lanyadoo, who says outright that astrology won't tell you the future, than to the monthly-forecast tradition.

There is a further caution specific to his subject. A chart cannot tell anyone their sexual orientation or gender identity, and no responsible reading should try. Bedell's framing runs the other way — the chart is a place to feel already worthy, not an instrument that issues a ruling — but the distinction is easy to blur in casual retelling, and it matters.

Where he sits among his peers

The current generation of widely read American astrologers is not one thing. Chani Nicholas built an app and a company around a politically explicit practice. Aliza Kelly moved astrology into mainstream magazine editorial and defends it as symbolic literacy. Lanyadoo made anti-prediction the centre of her brand.

Bedell's distinctive contribution is narrower and, for that reason, clearer: he took a body of inherited symbolism that quietly assumed its readers were straight and rebuilt the parts that assumed it. Everything else — the horoscope column, the talk show, the disco-ball tone, the sign-off dance or die — sits on top of that one structural decision.

What we don't promise

Nothing on this page is medical, psychological, or legal advice, and nothing here treats a condition. A birth chart cannot tell you who you are attracted to, who you should partner with, or how your life will go. If you are carrying shame about your identity and it is weighing on you, a qualified therapist — ideally one experienced with LGBTQIA+ clients — will do more for you than any chart. Astrology can be a good companion to that work. It is not a substitute for it, and we would not sell it to you as one.

Frequently asked questions

Who is Colin Bedell?

A New York City–based astrologer and author, cofounder of QueerCosmos, and the weekly horoscope writer for Cosmopolitan.com. He has written four astrology titles, including Queer Cosmos and the Star-Crossed oracle deck.

What is QueerCosmos?

An astrological resource Bedell cofounded for LGBTQIA+ people and their allies. He says it launched in 2017. It is also the handle he uses on Instagram and TikTok.

What does Bedell mean by calling astrology a "permission structure"?

He uses a chart as a shared vocabulary that lets someone name something about themselves they already sensed but felt they had no licence to say. The emphasis is on self-recognition and language, not on prediction.

Does he do private readings?

Yes — a single offering: a 60-minute recorded video consultation using Placidus houses, listed at $399, with a summary and transcript afterwards. He states that availability is limited and announced to his mailing list first. Details and pricing come from his own website and can change.

Is there scientific evidence that astrology works?

No. No controlled study has established that planetary positions at birth correspond to personality or life outcomes. Bedell describes astrology as an art form and a symbolic language rather than a science, which is a different claim from the one science tests.

Which of his books should I start with?

A Little Bit of Astrology if you want the basics — it uses a music metaphor to introduce planets, signs, and houses. Queer Cosmos if you want the argument the rest of his work rests on.