The first issue of Cold Cuts told a story about two drag queens getting ready to perform at a nightclub in Beirut. The text arrived in short snippets scattered through the pages, woven between photographs that carried the real weight. It was printed on newsprint — large-format, uncoated, deliberately impermanent — and delivered flat in a cardboard sleeve. Everything about it signalled that this was not a magazine interested in preciousness. It was interested in truth.
Created by Mohamad Abdouni, a Beirut-based photographer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Vogue, GQ Middle East, and campaigns for Gucci and Fendi, Cold Cuts is a photo journal exploring queer culture and history in the SWANA region — Southwest Asia and North Africa. Abdouni has described it as an extension of himself: a print-based umbrella for the curiosities, affinities, and questions he wants to explore with other artists. It is his second publication, and the flexibility he lacked in his first became the founding principle of this one. The magazine has no fixed format, no locked-in theme, no commitment to staying the same from one issue to the next.
That openness led to the project’s most ambitious undertaking: Treat Me Like Your Mother: Trans Histories From Beirut’s Forgotten Past, a special edition built from years of conversations with trans elders in Lebanon. The interviews are candid, funny, and devastating — full of stories about medals thrown at drag queens, nightclub stages in wartime, and the quiet indignities of a city that forgot its own history. The project premiered at IDFA in November 2025 and was exhibited at the Lyon Biennale. Abdouni has said that these women taught him more about his own gender and comfort in his body than any contemporary political discourse ever did.
Distributed through Stack Magazines in London and stocked at Dazed Newsagents among other outlets, Cold Cuts reaches an international audience, but its heart stays in Beirut. The newsprint format, the flat delivery, the refusal to be precious about materials — all of it mirrors the magazine’s editorial stance: that the stories it tells are too urgent and too human to be trapped behind a glossy cover. A free PDF of Treat Me Like Your Mother is available on the website, because some things matter more than sales.
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