Mercury retrograde has tipped us over the edge: what it did to the gays, sign by sign

Mercury has spent three weeks moonwalking through Cancer, both sides of the Atlantic have been hotter than a Berghain dark room, and Madonna just played a football match.

"I delayed signing a radio contract because of Mercury retrograde... This month proved me right"

Graeme Smith, who once made a major career decision wait for the planets, on why queer people cling to the stars when the apps and the office have abandoned us.

A few years into my time at Capital FM, a new contract landed for me to host my show. Good terms, exciting stuff, the sort of thing you are supposed to sign the moment the ink arrives in case anyone changes their mind. I did not sign it. I could not sign it. Mercury was retrograde, and I do not sign things when Mercury is retrograde, and so I sat on a national radio contract like a hen on an egg while management gently asked if everything was alright at home. When I explained why, it became a running joke. The astrology guy. The presenter who runs his career past the solar system. They thought I was mental, and they said so, (with love I am sure...), repeatedly, for ten long years.

Here is the thing though. Every time I have signed something during a retrograde, and there have been a few, because sometimes life does not wait for the planets, it has fallen over. Deals that evaporated. Projects that collapsed in ways nobody saw coming. Agreements that turned out to mean something different to the other party than they meant to me, which is extremely on brand for a transit that supposedly governs communication. So I have a rule now, arrived at through experience rather than faith, and I will give it to you for free: the retrograde brings the information, and you act when it is over. Gather everything. Read everything. Sign nothing. THE RETROGRADE BRINGS YOU THE ANSWERS. YOU JUST DO NOT ACT ON THEM UNTIL IT LEAVES!!!

Which brings me to this month, because it has been Mercury retrograde since 29 June, it does not end until this Thursday, 23 July, and it has been in Cancer, which for the astrologically uninitiated is a bit like being trapped in a lift with every feeling you have successfully repressed since 2019. And I have felt every single day of it.

I should confess the full extent of it while we are here. I read my horoscope every morning. Not one horoscope. Several. I will work through them like a man doing a tasting menu until I find the one I like, at which point that becomes the official forecast and the others are dismissed as poorly sourced. I am aware of what this says about me. I am doing it anyway. When a big decision looms and the stars have not signed off, I stress about it in a way my husband finds either endearing or exhausting depending on the week. I hate, genuinely hate, making a life decision that is not backed astrologically, in the same way some people cannot book a holiday without reading four hundred reviews. The reviews are my reviews. Mine just happen to be written about a planet.

And let me be clear, because I respect you too much to pretend otherwise: I know Mercury does not actually go backwards. What we call a retrograde is an optical illusion, a trick of perspective as the planets orbit at different speeds. There is no peer-reviewed mechanism by which a small hot rock 77 million kilometres away can make your Hinge date ghost you or your calendar double-book you. Science has looked into it. Science remains unmoved. I have read the science, nodded respectfully, and then not signed the contract anyway. Because the science has never sat where I have sat, watching a signed-in-retrograde deal quietly disintegrate over six weeks while Mercury smirks its way back to direct motion.

The perfect storm

The problem with this particular retrograde is that it did not arrive alone. It turned up mob-handed, flanked by two accomplices that would have flattened the community on their own, and unusually for a queer crisis, it achieved full transatlantic coverage.

First, the heat, which this year did not bother picking a hemisphere. Britain has spent July in the grip of one of its longest-lasting heatwaves since 1976, with amber health alerts stretching across weeks, temperatures peaking at 35.2C in Derbyshire, wildfires burning across the country and a new record for the most 34C days in a single year. Meanwhile a heat dome parked itself over North America and trapped more than 200 million people beneath it, heat index values pushing towards 110F across the eastern United States, Atlantic City hitting 106F on the Fourth of July itself, Phoenix at 113F, all-time records falling in Montana and Utah, the whole thing garnished with drifting Canadian wildfire smoke for atmosphere. We do not do well in this. We are a community that runs hot at the best of times, and there is only so long a man can sit on a pub terrace in south east London or a Fire Island deck in a mesh vest, cheating on his water with a frozen margarita, before the combination of dehydration, retrograde and a passing jogger tips him into sending a message he will regret. The heatwave did not cause the horniness. The heatwave is an accelerant. The entire English-speaking queer world has spent three weeks marinating at gas mark four while a retrograde in the sign of feelings whispered "text him" into the shimmer.

Second, the football. The 2026 World Cup, hosted across the United States, Canada and Mexico, wrapped up this weekend after six solid weeks of international thigh, a tournament that gave us England beating France 6-4 in a scoreline that had never happened before in World Cup history, and which concluded on Sunday in New Jersey with the first ever World Cup final half-time show, headlined by Madonna, Shakira and BTS with Justin Bieber, Burna Boy and the Muppets, all curated by Coldplay's Chris Martin, at which point the last remaining heterosexual explanation for watching collapsed entirely. Madonna arrived on a dune buggy driven by actual Ronaldo. I have spent 25 years in broadcasting and I have never programmed anything as unhinged as that sentence. American gays who had spent the tournament learning what a false nine is, and British gays who already knew but were pretending the appeal was tactical, were united at last in a single global realisation: we had been watching a month and a half of the world's finest quadriceps, in record heat, during a retrograde, and now the Queen of Pop was performing at a football match in a stadium usually occupied by the New York Jets. Something in the collective psyche gave way around the second chorus. Mine certainly did.

So that is the setting. Cosmic miscommunication, meteorological punishment on two continents and more exposed hamstring than a Mykonos beach club. THE RETROGRADE HAS TIPPED US OVER THE EDGE was not, in the end, a headline. It was a diagnosis. I would know. I have been reading five of them a day.

Why we believe

Here is the bit where I get serious for a moment, because "gays love astrology" is a punchline that conceals something genuinely interesting, and the numbers are startling. According to Pew Research, 54 per cent of LGBTQ+ Americans consult astrology or horoscopes at least once a year, nearly double the 28 per cent of the general adult population, a third of us consult tarot cards compared with 11 per cent of everyone else, and more than one in five queer adults rely at least a little on the stars when making major life decisions, a larger share than any other demographic group measured. Nobody has run the equivalent study over here, but I am one man in Kent single-handedly holding up the British end of that bar chart, and anyone who has ever stood in a smoking area in Soho or WeHo while a stranger correctly guesses their rising sign knows the findings would travel.

Why do we do it? The queer astrologer Chani Nicholas put it better than anyone when she explained that queer people need alternative ways of seeing ourselves and being witnessed, because when the religious institutions we came from have shunned us, we still, on a deep soul level, want to be seen. That lands hard for me, a Liverpool Catholic school boy who spent his adolescence being told with great confidence what he was, none of it flattering, and it holds whether you grew up Catholic on Merseyside, Baptist in Texas or vaguely Anglican and confused in the Home Counties. Astrology is one of the few cosmologies going that has never once suggested we are an abomination. Nobody has ever been excommunicated from being a Gemini. The stars take you exactly as you are, which is more than can be said for several major world religions, most workplaces and the entire cast of your last three situationships.

But there is a more modern, more cynical reason too, and it is this: horoscopes are currently offering better customer service than either of the two systems that are supposed to structure adult life, namely love and work.

Consider dating, which I observe these days from the safety of marriage, the way you watch a house fire from across the road. Romance in 2026 is a duopoly. Just two corporations, Match Group and Bumble, control the majority of the dating app market worldwide, running near identical tactics to funnel users towards subscriptions without any competitive pressure to lower prices, while 78 per cent of users report feeling emotionally, mentally or physically exhausted by the apps. Whether you are swiping in Manchester or Minneapolis, the machinery of flirting has been gamified into a fruit machine that eats your dignity, with basic subscription prices up by as much as 200 per cent over the past decade and evidence of apps charging different users different prices for the same product. You cannot see who fancies you without paying. You cannot send a like without rationing it. The apps that promised to end loneliness have put it behind a paywall, priced it dynamically and pushed a notification about it at 11pm. And the paying customers are fleeing: Tinder lost 8 per cent of its paying subscribers in late 2025 and Bumble shed 16 per cent, the biggest subscriber haemorrhage in the industry, because people on every continent tried handing over their card details and discovered that money cannot buy you a man who texts back.

Now consider work. I will not insult you by explaining that work is bad. I have spent a quarter of a century in an industry where a 25-year career gets you a LinkedIn post beginning "some personal news", and every other sector is playing its own version of the same game, restructures announced by all-staff email, jobs applied for into a void patrolled by AI screening software, and a housing market on both sides of the Atlantic that treats a one-bedroom flat as a luxury asset class. Certainty is not on offer anywhere. Not from your employer, not from your landlord, not from the man you have been seeing for eleven weeks who describes what you have as "vibes".

And into this vacuum steps the horoscope, which will look you dead in the eye and tell you, with total unearned confidence, that things will improve on the 23rd. Is it true? Scientifically, no. Is it more certainty than anyone else is offering? Absolutely. Astrology has become the last institution willing to make you a promise, and I am a man who once made a national radio station wait for one. We do not believe in Mercury retrograde the way we believe in gravity. We believe in it the way we believe in a good outfit: not because it is provable, but because it works. And my personal jury, which convened over that contract and has been sitting ever since, keeps returning the same verdict.

What this retrograde actually did to you, by sign

A retrograde in Cancer is a retrograde in the sign of home, memory, family and unprocessed emotion, which is why the past month has felt like the universe going through your camera roll and holding up the worst ones. It finally stations direct on Thursday 23 July, the very same day the Sun swaggers into Leo, meaning we go straight from three weeks of crying into our phones to the season of main character energy with no transition whatsoever. Classic. Until then, here is my damage report, valid in all time zones, compiled by a man who has read enough horoscopes this month to qualify for a loyalty card.

Aries. You started an argument in the group chat about the World Cup final half-time show and you are still in it. You were wrong about Shakira. Apologise before Thursday and blame the planet; that is what it is for.

Taurus. You spent the heatwave refusing to buy a fan on principle and the retrograde redecorating your flat, or your apartment, at 2am. The candle you panic-ordered during the cazimi on 12 July arrives Tuesday. It is the wrong scent. Keep it anyway.

Gemini. Mercury is your ruler, so this was personal. You sent a voice note to the wrong person, a CV to an expired job listing and "u up" to a man you matched with in 2021. Leo season will forgive you. His boyfriend will not.

Cancer. The retrograde happened in your sign, in your house, drinking your oat milk. You have felt everything, twice, in temperatures no reasonable god would sanction. You are owed a lie-down and you will claim it, on Thursday, dramatically, with the curtains drawn.

Leo. You have been waiting all month for your season like a diva in the wings, and the retrograde made you rehearse your entrance emails to at least three exes. Delete the drafts. Your era starts Thursday and it does not need an opening act.

Virgo. You made a spreadsheet to track the retrograde's disruptions and the spreadsheet corrupted. This is the funniest thing the universe has done all year and deep down even you know it.

Libra. You could not decide between two men for the entire retrograde and both of them have now, independently, decided for you. The stars call this balance. You may call it what you like.

Scorpio. You said "I don't believe in astrology" at a barbecue, or a cookout, and then explained your ex's entire birth chart unprompted for forty minutes. Your retrograde arrives in October, in your own sign. Start stretching now.

Sagittarius. You booked a spontaneous trip during a retrograde, in a heatwave, in the busiest air travel summer either continent has ever staged. The delay you are currently sitting in is not bad luck. It is a syllabus.

Capricorn. Cancer is your opposite sign, so this retrograde sat directly across the table from you asking about your feelings while you tried to talk about your five-year plan. You cried once, in private, at the Muppets bit of the half-time show. This information dies with us.

Aquarius. You have spent the month explaining to everyone that retrogrades are an optical illusion with no scientific basis, which is true, and also your phone died, your flight was cancelled and your ex resurfaced, which is data. The Full Moon in your sign on the 29th will make you insufferable. More so.

Pisces. You knew all of this already. You dreamt it in March. You told us and we did not listen, and for that, from all of us, I am sorry.

The moral of the story

Mercury goes direct on Thursday. The heat will break, eventually, probably violently, in thunderstorms that Britain and America will both film vertically and both caption "end times lol". The World Cup thighs have gone home to their respective federations. And we will all emerge, blinking and lightly poached, from beer gardens and rooftop bars and the air-conditioned corners of Provincetown, into Leo season, having survived a month that threw everything at us at once.

As for me, I will do what I always do. I have spent three weeks gathering the information this retrograde so generously delivered, about people, about projects, about which plans hold up in the heat and which ones wilt, and from Thursday I will start acting on it, because that is the system, and the system has never once let me down. The people at Capital laughed, and fair enough, it is funny. But the contract I made wait got signed in clean air and served me well, and the ones I rushed through retrogrades are a graveyard I could give you a guided tour of.

The science says the stars have no power over us. My lived experience, and my career, respectfully disagree. And until the apps stop charging us to flirt and the economy stops treating employment as a limited-time offer, the horoscope remains the only thing in a queer person's life that shows up daily, asks for nothing, and promises it all gets better on the 23rd. Five of them do, in fact, if you read enough of them. I would know.

See you on the other side. Wear sunscreen. Do not text him. And whatever lands in your inbox this week, do not sign it until Thursday.