BUTT: The Amsterdam Revolution

The Founding

Gert Jonkers and Jop van Bennekom were not, when they launched BUTT, outsiders to the media world. Van Bennekom had a background in design; Jonkers in journalism. They were also, very specifically, products of Amsterdam's early 2000s gay culture — a world that was post-Aids in its psychological register, post-queer-theory in its intellectual framework, and thoroughly unimpressed by the polished, sanitised, aggressively aspirational gay media that the 1990s had produced.

The 1990s had given gay men Attitude in Britain, Out in America, and dozens of similar lifestyle publications: glossy, advertiser-friendly, populated by beautiful people in designer clothes, politically non-threatening enough to sit comfortably on mainstream newsstands. These magazines were valuable in many ways. They were not, by any reasonable measure, honest about what gay men actually looked like, talked like, thought about, or wanted from each other.

BUTT's founding act was to be honest instead. The men in BUTT were not models. They were real gay men — artists, writers, musicians, friends of the editors, people the editors found interesting — photographed in their own homes, in their own clothes and occasionally out of them, and interviewed about their actual lives in a register of frank, sometimes explicit candour that no mainstream gay publication had attempted.

The First Issue

The first issue featured Bernhard Willhelm — the German-born fashion designer based in Antwerp — photographed nude by Wolfgang Tillmans. The choice of photographer was a statement. Tillmans was, by 2001, already an important figure in both fine art photography and the gay visual culture of Northern Europe; his images of gay life in London, Berlin, and beyond had been exhibited in major galleries and had developed a visual language for gay intimacy that was genuinely new. Having him shoot the first BUTT cover established the magazine's aesthetic ambitions from the first issue.

The Willhelm photographs — casual, intimate, explicitly nude without being pornographic, shot with the specific quality of natural light and genuine relationship that characterises Tillmans's best work — announced what BUTT was: a publication in which the erotic and the artistic were not separated, in which the naked male body was a natural presence rather than a special event, in which the quality of the attention brought to the image was as important as the image itself.

The BUTT Aesthetic

BUTT's aesthetic was a deliberate rejection of the perfected masculine ideal that had dominated gay erotic publishing since the physique era. Where Falcon gave gay men the all-American athlete and BelAmi gave them the Czech twink, BUTT gave them the ordinary: scruffy, sometimes pudgy, heavily tattooed, bearded, interesting-looking rather than classically handsome. The pot belly and the chest hair that had been obstacles to appearing in other gay publications were, in BUTT, features.

This was not simply an aesthetic choice. It was a political one. The idealised body in mainstream gay culture — the gym-built, smooth, symmetrical ideal — is an excluding body, one that communicates to the majority of gay men that their actual bodies are insufficient. BUTT's embrace of the ordinary and the specific communicated the opposite: that the interesting man is more compelling than the conventionally beautiful one, that desire doesn't require idealisation, that the male body in all its actual variety is worth looking at.

The editorial content supported this position consistently. BUTT's interviews were conducted without the defensive irony that afflicts most celebrity-culture journalism, without the PR management that sanitises public figures into safety, without the editorial decisions that filter out anything that might make readers uncomfortable. People talked in BUTT in the way they actually talked — about sex, about work, about failure, about their bodies, about desire — and the frankness was, and remains, extraordinary.

The Hiatus and Return

BUTT published its twenty-ninth issue in December 2011 and then went quiet for eleven years. The economics of independent print publishing in the digital era had made the quarterly schedule untenable. Van Bennekom had launched Fantastic Man — a men's style magazine that applied the BUTT sensibility to a more commercial format — and the demands of that publication absorbed the editorial energy that BUTT had required.

The return in 2022 was enabled by an unlikely partnership: Bottega Veneta, the Italian luxury house then under the creative direction of Matthieu Blazy, provided the financial support for a relaunch. The partnership raised questions about the independence of a magazine that had always defined itself against commercial culture, and those questions are legitimate. The issues produced since the relaunch — including issue 33 in 2023 — have maintained the editorial voice and the visual intelligence that made BUTT's reputation. The pink paper is back. So are the Buttheads.

The influence of BUTT on the aesthetic sensibility of [BoysDo](https://boysdo.com) is direct rather than incidental. BUTT established the proposition that an independently published gay magazine, committed to genuine visual quality and editorial intelligence, could find an international audience on its own terms without commercial compromise. It demonstrated that the male body photographed with genuine attention — not the idealised body, but the real body, in real light, by photographers who genuinely care about what they are making — is more interesting than the manufactured ideal.

BoysDo is a digital platform rather than a print magazine, and its aesthetic relationship to BUTT is a matter of shared conviction rather than direct influence. But both are built on the same refusal: the refusal to pretend that gay male desire is compatible with the sanitised, commercially managed imagery that mainstream culture makes available. The honest image, made with genuine craft, for the viewer who will look at it properly — this is what BUTT built, and what BoysDo continues.