Art With Teeth: Why SNIFF Magazine Scent 1 Is the Queer Publication We've Been Waiting For

Mark Dunn
2025-12-12T02:00:00-08:00

There's a particular kind of censorship that doesn't announce itself. It arrives quietly — in a shadowban, a blurred image, a content policy flagging, a gallery that passes. It accumulates, scrap by scrap, until an entire world of queer creative expression has been quietly pushed to the margins and told to stay there.

SNIFF Magazine is the door kicked off those margins entirely.

Launched by editor Mark Alan, the same mind behind the critically appreciated queer art collective magazine Inspiró, SNIFF arrives as its feral, uncompromising younger sibling. Where Inspiró cast a wide net across queer creativity, SNIFF narrows its lens to a singular, unapologetic focus: the intersection of fetish culture and fine art. No blurring, no apology, no algorithm to appease.

The inaugural issue — called Scent 1, in keeping with the magazine's olfactory conceit, makes that statement with every page.

More Than a Magazine. A Manifesto.

The founding question behind SNIFF is one that any lover of art history should sit with: why has the erotic always been treated as art's embarrassing cousin? The Marquis de Sade's manuscripts are studied in universities. Mapplethorpe's leather-clad subjects hang in galleries. Tom of Finland's drawings are in the permanent collection of major museums. And yet today, in an era of unprecedented connectivity, queer creators working in desire and kink face algorithmic erasure on a scale that would have been unimaginable to any of their predecessors.

SNIFF is built as an answer to that erasure, and as an archive. A permanent, physical record of what queer erotic creativity looks like right now, made by artists who deserve far more than a shadowban.

What's Inside Scent 1

The range of work in this debut issue is genuinely striking. This is not a publication with a single visual register or a single definition of desire, it sprawls, it contradicts itself, it moves from tender to dominant and back again, and all of it is executed with the care and technical ambition of artists who take their practice seriously.

Photography anchors much of the issue. Nige Rorbach (working under the name Immortal By Nige) brings a documentary intimacy to his work, while Geartographe contributes images that blur the line between fashion editorial and fetish portraiture, motocross gear, puppy masks, and the charged electricity of bodies in proximity. Yandrak offers a more introspective lens, his self-portrait work turned inward and raw. J Davies and S4KINK round out a photography section that treats bondage, gear, and power dynamics with the compositional seriousness they deserve.

Illustration is represented by Ivan Bubentcov, whose leather figure work carries the unmistakable lineage of Tom of Finland, bold, celebratory, unapologetically masculine and queer at once. Artist and creator Greif Lazic brings a more personal visual language, their feet-and-socks work sitting at the intersection of fetish, identity, and self-portraiture.

Painting finds its voice through Orpheus, whose oil works, including a striking muscular figure rendered in red vinyl against a dark ground, bring the kind of physical presence to the fetish form that photography can rarely achieve. These are works that belong on a gallery wall, full stop.

Photography meets fashion and queerness in unexpected ways through the interview with Abraham Saraya, whose latex mermaid work at the beach pushes fetish material into something genuinely mythological. And The Bearded Master Koldo, interviewed alongside his own visual work, brings an intimacy and warmth to the pit and sock fetish world that challenges any reductive reading of kink as purely transactional.

Written work comes from Lawrence Schimel and J Davies, whose erotic writing grounds the visual material in language, a reminder that this is a literary project as much as a visual one.

The issue is edited and also contributed to by Mark Alan himself, who brings the same curatorial intelligence that shaped Inspiró to this considerably more charged territory.

Why It Matters

It would be easy, and reductive, to discuss SNIFF purely in terms of what it contains. The more interesting conversation is about what it does.

Independent queer publishing has always operated as a counter-archive to mainstream culture. From the earliest zines circulated in LGBTQ+ communities before the internet, to the golden era of alternative queer press in the 1980s and 90s, the tradition of making physical printed objects as acts of community and resistance is long and serious. SNIFF sits squarely in that tradition.

But it also updates it. In an era when digital platforms have become the primary vehicle for queer visibility, and also its primary site of suppression, there is something genuinely radical about a beautifully produced physical magazine that cannot be shadowbanned, cannot be algorithmically buried, and does not require the approval of a content moderation team to exist.

The work inside it is gorgeous. It is also, in its own way, political. Not in a heavy-handed sense, but in the simple and profound sense that visibility itself is political when you have been made invisible.

Who Is SNIFF For?

If you've ever been frustrated by the sterility of mainstream art spaces when it comes to queer sexuality, SNIFF is for you. If you're a collector of independent publishing and care about the physical object as a cultural artifact, SNIFF is for you. If you're a lover of erotic art from Mapplethorpe to Tom of Finland and want to know who's carrying that legacy forward right now, SNIFF is absolutely for you.

It's for the Tom of Finland Foundation devotee and the leather bar regular and the person who quietly resents that their favourite queer photographer got their account deleted again. It's for anyone who has ever looked at a beautifully composed image of desire and thought: this deserves to be taken seriously.

It does. And SNIFF takes it seriously.

Get Your Copy

SNIFF Scent 1 is available now from The Male Muse Store for $40 at the time of this post. A digital edition is also available, with 10% off using the code digital at checkout. International shipping is available, however US customers will need to order through the Blurb store linked on the product page.

This is a debut issue. Get it now, before it's the one you're hunting for in five years.

Order SNIFF Scent 1 here →