Pulp Issue 6: The Queer Magazine Bringing Together Photography and Verse
Since its first issue, photographer Mark Alan's limited edition queer zine has been operating in a league entirely its own, sitting somewhere between fine art photography, erotic literature, and a love letter to queer male desire in all its sweat-drenched, unfiltered glory. Published under Alan's The Male Muse brand, each issue of Pulp brings together his signature male nude photography and the voices of queer writers to create something you can hold in your hands, flip open on your nightstand, and feel in your gut. Issue 6 is no exception. If anything, it's the most fearless the series has ever been.
Limited to just 100 copies, printed on satin-finish pages, Pulp Issue 6 travels across two continents, shooting men from Alan's years in Los Angeles to his current chapter in Spain. The result is a magazine that feels both intimate and cinematic, part diary, part desire.
Here's what's waiting inside.
The Spreads
Locked Los Angeles opens the issue with a jolt. This spread features the internationally sought-after model Jonzu, whose career moves fluidly and unapologetically between the worlds of mainstream fashion and gay adult film. Jonzu is a man who owns every room he walks into, and Mark Alan's camera catches exactly that energy, raw confidence and a body made for the lens. He also graces the cover, which tells you everything you need to know about the kind of issue this is. Jonzu isn't just a subject here. He's a statement.
Sunday Afternoon is the kind of spread that feels like a memory you wish you had. Two hairy, stubbly, genuinely sexy boyfriends spend a lazy afternoon doing what couples do when no one's watching and the afternoon stretches out hot and unhurried around them. Shot in their Los Angeles home, this is intimacy without performance. No posturing, no distance. Just two men comfortable in each other's bodies, letting the heat of the day do what it wants with them. It's tender and deeply erotic in equal measure, which is exactly how the best sex tends to be.
Dark Rooms takes you somewhere else entirely. This is voyeuristic photography at its most charged, capturing men in moments of real sexual discovery in the kinds of spaces built for men to find each other in the dark. Bars, back rooms, lofts where the rules are loose and curiosity runs the show. Alan shoots these encounters with the eye of someone who understands what these spaces mean to queer men, not just as places to get off, but as sanctuaries. The images are shadowy, atmospheric, and hot as hell.
Fur is a love song for those of us who know what we like. This spread is devoted entirely to the erotic beauty of the hairy male body, from thick chest hair and sweaty, ripe pits to the full, lush bush framing a perfect cock. Alan has always shot men with a sensibility that celebrates the body as it actually exists, and Fur doubles down on that. This is masculinity that doesn't groom itself into submission. It smells like something real.
Popperbate rounds out the visual content with a spread dedicated to one of queer culture's most ritualized pleasures: the art of edging your cock while huffing poppers, delaying your orgasm for as long as your body will let you, chasing the rush that comes when the chemical hits and you're right on the edge. This is a practice with its own language, its own community, and Alan photographs it with the reverence it deserves. Unapologetic, specific, and absolutely not for the faint of heart.
The Writers
Every issue of Pulp pairs its photography with erotic literature from queer voices, and Issue 6 brings together four contributors who collectively represent the full range of what queer writing can be.
Lawrence Schimel is one of the most decorated and prolific figures in queer literature. A two-time Lambda Literary Award winner, he has published over 100 books as author, editor, and anthologist, writing in both English and Spanish from his home in Madrid. His body of work ranges from gay erotica anthologies like The Mammoth Book of Gay Erotica and His Tongue to poetry, children's books, and graphic novels. He is a founding member of the Publishing Triangle and a member of both the National Book Critics Circle and the Academy of American Poets. When Schimel brings his pen to Pulp, he brings decades of craft and a genuine commitment to queer storytelling that reaches beyond the body without ever losing sight of it.
Cinza is an emerging queer voice whose writing lives in the charged space between desire and observation. With a sensibility that feels both literary and lived-in, Cinza brings a fresh, contemporary energy to the pages of Pulp, writing queer sexuality from the inside out with the kind of specificity that only comes from someone who has actually felt what they're describing.
BrunetteApollo writes with the confidence of someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to want and be wanted. Their work has a confessional quality shot through with dark humor and heat, the kind of writing that makes you feel like you're reading someone's private thoughts and being grateful for the privilege.
I Think I'm Leon brings something harder to name to Pulp's pages: a voice that sits at the intersection of introspection and raw desire, writing queer experience with an honesty that feels almost disarming. Their work doesn't tidy itself up for the reader. It asks you to sit with it, and it rewards you for doing so.
Why Pulp Matters
In a media landscape where queer content is increasingly either scrubbed clean for mainstream consumption or buried behind paywalls and platform restrictions, Pulp is a physical act of resistance. It is a zine made with intention, printed by hand in an edition of one hundred, designed to be touched and kept and passed between people who care about this kind of work. Mark Alan has spent over two decades behind a camera building a practice rooted in the beauty of the male form, and Pulp is where that practice gets most fully and most fearlessly expressed.
Issue 6 will not be reprinted. When the hundred copies are gone, they are gone.
Get your copy at The Male Muse Store.
