Our second Queer Utopia team-up are the super talented duo, Babs Daly and Stephen Moloney.

Stephen’s glorious essay found its beginning by actually addressing the difficulties of conceiving a utopian ideal, but in the reading you’ll find it thankfully confirms that utopia is indeed achievable, and offers how the answer can be found within yourself.

Babs, inspired by Stephen’s idea of self reflection, created a stunning photoshoot with portraits of John Mangru. While Stephen’s essay ruminates on how we might create utopia, Babs shares this insight into her own creation: “We spend too much time looking at our reflection and not enough time focusing within.” The first image of John, which graces our cover, features the subject and his mirror image, while the following series of portraits travels through the looking glass into this utopian land. Babs continues, “John is a beautiful man, and in my utopia a man can say another man is beautiful, it doesn’t matter what gender anyone is, we should feel comfortable within ourselves to recognise beauty. Figure out the inside and the outside comes along with it.”

Our glorious creatives are:

Stephen is a writer and activist and creator, see more of his work at masc.life.com.

Babs is a photographer and dreamer, follow her @babsdaly

See more of the wonderful model and designer John @johnmangru