Introducing Our Spring/Summer 2025 Print Issue: Queer Alchemy
An article into our new Vol. 1 Issue 2 Print
Queer Alchemy is finally here. Pride is not a product. Queerness is not a performance. And for us at Kailon, this issue was never just a seasonal theme or a trending hashtag — it was inevitable. Kailon is proudly queer owned and led and we absolutely wanted to show our love and our pride.
Vol. 1 Issue 2, Queer Alchemy, is a bold, loving tribute to the transformation, resistance, and creative force of queer history and culture. More than 40 pages of original writing, photography, interviews, and visual essays from all around the world– stitched together with one guiding belief– queerness is magic. Queerness is protest, joy and a force that remakes the world.
Inside, you’ll find voices that crack open the archive and reimagine it queerly—like Indie Sinclair, whose raw reflections leave smoke on the page; No Parts, a local music collective challenging genre and gender in one breath; and Nikola Djukic, whose visual storytelling flips the lens on beauty, sexuality and social defiance. Alongside them are emerging artists, writers, and visionaries, whose work pulses with the same energy: of becoming, of survival and of boundless self-definition.
This is not rainbow capitalism. This is not commodified pride. This is our living document of what it means to create, to remember, and to imagine as queer people across borders, lineages, and identities.
In the words of our Editor-in-Chief and Publisher, Nidia Álvarez-Nguyen:
“This is not just any issue—it’s a collective pulse, a fierce and affectionate offering. When we released our first print issue last December, there was no question what the next one would be. A celebration of queer life. A mirror held up to joy and resistance. A tribute.”
Born from months of intimate labor—conceptualizing, rewriting, revising, rebuilding—Queer Alchemy is more than a finished product. It’s a process we’re proud to show the seams of. As Nidia writes:
“There is an entire universe that exists behind every page: the editorial labor, photoshoots, the months of correspondence and conceptualizing, the rewrites, the doubt, the breakthroughs. To echo our incredible Executive Editor, Lilli, the process itself is a work of art.”
Queer Alchemy is also a deeply personal issue. Kailon is queer, woman, and minority-owned, and we carry those truths proudly into our work. What we’re building here isn’t just a magazine—it’s a sanctuary. A challenge. A community built on trust, vision, and wild creativity.
In our first year of public life, we’ve grown faster and farther than we could’ve dreamed—now read in over 18 countries and counting. Our network of interns, artists, writers, and collaborators grows daily, and every voice that joins us shapes who we are becoming.
Queer Alchemy is for the visionaries. The rebels. The lovers and the fighters. For those who know that queerness is not just an identity, but a way of reshaping the world around us. A form of alchemy—where fear becomes freedom, survival becomes art, and beauty walks hand in hand with truth, loudly and proudly.
We invite you into this constellation. Into this living, breathing collection of queer stories and queer futures, with no apologies.
Get your own digital or print copy of Kailon Magazine’s new print, ‘Queer Alchemy’
