No One Mag #2: HCMC & Hanoi

We're proud to stock No One Magazine again. After the inaugural edition about Amsterdam, the team now heads to Vietnam.

No One Magazine is a print publication about underground queer nightlife around the world. Each issue takes readers to a different city’s queer scene, featuring communities and collectives who promote connection and identity building through electronic music. Together, these intimate records seek to create a growing time capsule of our shared, yet very own, queer identities. For we’re no one without each other. And none of us is like another.

158 pages
140 × 245 × 111 mm
ISSN: 2950-5585
Language: English

No One in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi presents an all-enveloping world of Vietnamese queer nightlife, swerving between its cities’ euphoric fumes, sobering humidity, celebratory shrieks, and ongoing dialogue between past and present.

Some histories sleep in textbooks, others are kept alive through modern practices. “The Queer Art That Counts” traces Vietnam’s earliest decolonized folk art led by trans performers, “The Flamboyant Divine” shadows a contemporary interpretation of genderfluid religious rituals, while “Where Do We Meet?” draws a mental map of Hanoi’s queer spaces between the ’70s and today.

On other pages, colors saturate and the volume rises: “The Cinema of Dancing Sapphics,” “Saigon’s Queer Quintet,” “Stumbling Towards Queer Joy,” and “Drag Our Way Forward” give a glimpse of the boundless energy of local bê-đê, Vietnam’s once derogatory term for faggot, but now a term of empowerment, turning absurdity and the grotesque into irresistibility.

The issue highlights how nightlife is more than a space—it’s a home for one and for all: “Homecoming,” “About Our Place,” and “A Sleepless Night at Equation” are personal recollections of self-realization and belonging. They tell stories of a Vietnamese diaspora returning to their homeland at a ball, the formation of a local refuge, and a slap of reality that punctured our protective veil. These narratives challenge the one-dimensionalization of nightlife, asking both its participants and observers to seek deeper meaning between its highs and lows.

Beyond the dance floor, queerness permeates through the cities. “Hear from Hanoi’s Queers” and “Bê-Đê by Night” take life at night into its quiet hours, tracing moments of connection that unfold not just in the rush of a crowd but in the stillness of care and companionship.

ISSUE 02 also embraces new rhythms and forms: “Như Bóng Nào Mà Chẳng Nổi Trên Nước” weaves poetry into the reading flow, inviting readers to drift, dance, and surrender—only held together by the echoes of hearts moved by the night.

With hearts in mind, “A Heart Moved by a Dance” and “Through Another Lens” frame nightlife as both a space to inhabit and a collective of people to relate to, and connect with. Moving between these focal points, these photo stories paint the evening as abundant and expansive, as it is intimate and personal.

Through it all, ISSUE 02 stands as both a reflection and a call to keep moving, creating, and gathering—because while these spaces may be fleeting, their impact is indelible.