The first actual text on the website says, “Physically Documented Queer Existence,” so I ask why it’s so essential this magazine is physical.
“Because at the end of the day,” Zelda says, “when all these phones are exploded and in the ocean–and who knows where we’re gonna be–-that piece of paper is gonna be gripped in some skeleton’s hands in a nuclear wasteland. And it will be immortal.” It makes sense. I don’t know that I’m optimistic about the media in the future or how it will be regulated. A paper magazine will survive. It can’t be blocked. It can’t be censored. Pry it from my cold, dead hands.
I’m on a Zoom call sitting across from drag queens Zelda Kollins and Indigo Sparks, and I just know they’re onto something cool. I got a nose for this kind of shit sometimes. You feel the electricity sometimes–lightning–and looking at these two queens’ magazine, I can tell they’re the ones throwing the bolts. I’m getting the same feeling I got listening to Kendrick Lamar’s ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’ for the first time or watching Season 4 of Drag Race. It’s a happening. Shit’s going down. All you gotta do is focus your eyes and perk up your ears. Pay the fuck attention, I tell myself.
Zelda Kollins and Indigo Sparks are the editors and perpetrators of the gritty assault on the senses that is Edgewood Magazine. Flipping through the pages, you’re first greeted by Lydia Kollins face–yes, the Pittsburgh queen who’ll be on the upcoming season of Drag Race. And what a face. It’s a multicolored patchwork of bright flesh and stitches, like a drag Frankenstein’s monster. She’s surrounded by, and perhaps generating, an unholy green lightning.
There are gritty spreads of other drag models, too. Zelda, herself. Gwen Kollins in a bathtub with a pool of blood. The Spirit Leshy in double exposures. Piper Casket with a caption that reads, “It’s Pittsburgh dead girl superstar!”. This is to name a few.
Why these drag performers? “Because they all scream a certain uniqueness,” Zelda says, “that doesn’t get the same kind of spotlight. Edgewood is highlighting a lot of alternative queens who might not get the same limelight.”
Indigo laughingly fires back with, “Yeah, fuck my drag, right?” Indigo is more of a glam queen, one of the pretty girls. She actually has a spread in the upcoming issue. She continues, “We match each entertainer where they’re at for their aesthetic.” What she’s saying is that Zelda and her try to match the look and vibe of the queen to the look and vibe of the spread in the magazine.
Indigo is a graphic designer by trade and makes her own drag flyers. She describes her work up to this point as, “clean-cut, concise, twinkle-and-sparkle”. You can see in the magazine that she opened herself up to other, grittier visuals.
If the production value weren’t so good, I’d say the vibe is straight out of a punk zine from New York in the 1980s. Zelda had a mood board when she was trying to develop ideas for the mag. It had a lot of what she calls “Y2K kinda shit”–noisy, dirty, grungy stuff. Think Playstation ads from 2006, Nirvana photos, and promotions for Bjork. The two of them liked the idea of the imperfections, the pixelation and graininess of photos, and the digital noise. Yeah, this first issue definitely has a grunge, punk vibe.
“It’s punk in a way where we’re not boxing punk in,” Indigo says. “It’s just kinda there. Every page, you’re turning to a new thing, a new model, a new aesthetic. A new visual story.”
I say to them some intellectual, high-minded horseshit about are-bure-bokeh, the concept in Japanese photography of photos being “grainy, blurry and out-of-focus.” It’s not an insult. It’s intentionally messing up an image. In this magazine, some of that’s in the photos themselves, and some of it’s in the editing.
“Even if we wanted to make some edits,” Zelda says, “and I knew I was missing something, I would think, ’How can I make this dirtier? How can I make this dirty and gross?”
That’s visuals in this issue, but don’t put Edgewood Magazine into a box. The two queens give me a little cocktease of what’s going on in the upcoming issue. Indigo’s spread in the next issue should definitely be glam. But like she said before, every page, every queen is something different—an aesthetic built organically around the model. The two editors also tipped me off that there will be more text in the next issue, like interviews and articles.
Edgewood Magazine VOL. TWO drops New Year’s Eve (tomorrow!). Indigo will be selling them in person at the festivities at P Town. Zelda will be selling them at Babylon Nightclub in West Virginia. Copies will also be available at Steel City Vintage in Squirrel Hill. Only $10 per copy. Don’t miss out on the birth of the cool!
