There are plenty of ways to find yourself. Vixen Maheu found himself in hotel rooms, bathhouses, Grindr meetups and, eventually, through tarot cards.
The former gay escort has since built a community of more than 100,000 followers around tarot, astrology and shadow work, turning some of the most painful chapters of his life into a platform where queer people can talk about shame, desire, relationships and healing.
It’s an unconventional journey, but after speaking with Vixen Maheu for this exclusive Gayety interview, I found that the thread connecting each chapter is surprisingly simple: intimacy.
“Escorting, tarot, astrology, writing… they all deal with intimacy, performance, shame, desire, and truth,” Vixen Maheu tells me. “They just enter the room through different doors.”
That perspective is central to understanding how Vixen Maheu went from escorting to writing his novel Rent Boy to creating tarot decks and building an online audience that now numbers more than 100,000 people.
And, yes, he says he was using tarot while escorting.
But not quite in the way you might imagine.
The Escort Who Was Reading More Than Cards
Vixen Maheu says tarot and astrology were always part of how he understood people. While escorting, those tools became a way to listen more closely to what his clients were actually looking for.
Because, he quickly realized, it often wasn’t just sex.
“They wanted to feel understood,” he says. “They wanted to be desired without having to explain themselves.”
That became especially apparent with closeted clients, who often arrived carrying a complicated mix of desire and shame.
Vixen Maheu remembers seeing a pattern: people wanted something but struggled to find the words for it after years of feeling afraid of their own desires.
Sometimes, tarot gave them those words.
“After sex, we could sit together, pull cards, and suddenly there was a way to talk about what they were feeling without making them feel exposed or judged,” he says.
That experience changed his understanding of intimacy.
“I realized people are not just craving sex, or attention, or escape,” Vixen tells me. “They are craving someone who can see the whole complicated truth of them and not flinch.”
For Vixen, the cards weren’t necessarily about predicting what would happen next. They were about paying attention to what was already happening.
“I was actually just reading their present,” he explains. “Their wounds, their trauma, the things they were feeling but couldn’t put into words.”
In that sense, tarot became less about fortune-telling and more about listening.
What Is Shadow Work, Anyway?
If you’ve spent any time scrolling TikTok or Instagram, you’ve probably encountered the phrase “shadow work.”
It has become something of a wellness buzzword, but Vixendescribes the concept in much simpler terms.
“To me, shadow work is simple: it’s getting brutally honest about the fears, shame, patterns, and old wounds quietly running your life,” he says.
That means asking uncomfortable questions about why we repeat certain behaviors.
Why do I keep wanting this? Why do I keep choosing that? What am I trying to prove?
Vixen points to the jokingly familiar phrase “daddy issues” as an example. Beneath the joke, he says, there can be a real emotional wound involving a lack of love, protection or validation.
That wound can later show up in relationships with older partners, unavailable people or anyone who provides a familiar kind of approval.
“Shadow work is not about becoming perfect,” he says. “It’s about understanding yourself so deeply that your wounds stop steering your life for you.”
Turning Shame Into Something Powerful
Vixen doesn’t shy away from the shame that followed him through much of his life.
He says he developed a complicated relationship with being seen, something he believes many queer people can understand.
“People saw my appearance before they cared who I was,” he tells me. “Attention felt powerful and humiliating. Desire felt like proof, even when it wasn’t love.”
That realization didn’t happen overnight.
He describes escorting as one of the experiences that ultimately forced him to confront those feelings. He met men who were carrying their own shame and looking for many of the same things he was: desire, connection, understanding and forgiveness.
“It taught me that being guarded wasn’t power,” he says. “It was disconnection. Vulnerability and accountability were.”
That shift eventually allowed Vixen to reclaim a part of his past he once wanted to hide.
He started going by Vixen. He wrote a book about his experiences. Then he began sharing the lessons he had learned with an increasingly large online audience.
“My biggest insecurity was actually my biggest strength,” he says.
Rent Boy Was His Phoenix Moment
Vixen’s novel Rent Boy takes readers into a particularly painful period of his life, exploring abuse, manipulation, queer violence and abandonment.
Writing it required him to be brutally honest about who he was at the time, including the ways he sometimes behaved in opposition to his own healing.
“You kind of hate me at first,” he says. “And that’s the point.”
He wasn’t interested in creating a polished version of himself for readers.
Instead, he wanted them to see someone confronting the parts of himself that needed to change.
“For me, it was a phoenix story,” Vixen says. “Death, rebirth, reinvention.”
That metaphor also happens to align with the tarot card he associates with the book: Death.
The escort era gets The Moon, representing a hidden life and the intuition he developed while navigating spaces where things weren’t always as they appeared.
His life as a creator gets The Magician.
“I took everything I had lived through, the shame, the desire, the trauma, the intuition, and turned it into art, a business, and a community,” he says.
It’s hard to imagine a more fitting card for the transformation.
Why Queer People Are Connecting
Vixen has expanded that story far beyond Rent Boy. His work now includes tarot decks, astrology content, shadow work and the TV show Destiny Decoded on Spark, alongside podcast appearances and a social following of more than 100,000.
But what struck me most about our conversation was how often he returned to the idea of being seen.
He believes that is part of why his story resonates with queer audiences, including people who have never worked in sex work.
“Even if they’ve never been an escort, they know what it feels like to be judged, misunderstood, or made to feel like an outsider,” he says.
That sense of recognition has become the foundation of his community.
And perhaps that explains why one of his most surprising observations about tarot readings has nothing to do with money, careers or the future.
It’s love.
According to Vixen, people are often embarrassed to ask about their romantic lives.
“Everyone wants love, but so many people are afraid to admit how deeply it matters to them,” he says.
In an internet culture that can make sincerity feel embarrassing, Vixen wants to give people permission to hope for it anyway.
For someone carrying shame or wondering whether healing is possible, he has a simple message: “Embracing the light within your shadows will set you free.”
Then, because this is Vixen and apparently no conversation about healing can stay completely serious, he adds one final piece of advice.
“Sometimes you need to laugh at the chaos and loosen your grip.”
As RuPaul famously put it, “We’re all born naked, and the rest is drag.”
Vixen’s version?
“Stop treating your shadows like a nip slip. They’re part of the look.”
