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I'm here to tell you about the greatest magazine being published today.
It's called Butt magazine, it's A5, and it's pink. It's for homos. They
call it a 'fagazine' or a 'fag mag'. Here are some things that are great
about Butt.
1) The titles
The titles of the articles are very long, like this:
'Matt Bernstein Sycamore: Top Whore From San Francisco Edits Books About
Sex Workers and is One of The 100 Most Interesting People On Earth'
'Thomas Engel Hart is a Non-Vegetarian, American Men's Wear Fashion Designer
Living In Paris Who Loves to be Beaten Up Every Now and Then and is Married
to a Lesbian.'
Butt doesn't bother with vague, non-specific titles that attempt to intrigue
the reader: their titles work more like web headings, spelling out exactly
what's to come. Modern!
2) The interviewees
Sometimes you'll know who they are, like Jeremy Scott or Ryan McGuinley
or Casey Spooner, but most of the time you won't have a clue. Most of
the time they're artists or activists or sound engineers or party organisers;
and most of the time they're total sluts who are happy to pose in their
underwear or with their cocks hanging out, and more than happy to talk
about it. Often they despise gay marriage, gym bunnies, gay people having
kids, assimilation in all its forms. Always they are open about fucking
in toilets, fucking in parks, violence, ex-lovers, whoring, fetishes and
fashion. There's none of this 'I'm a musician, honey, so don't talk to
me about my private life, talk to me about chords' bullshit in Butt magazine.
Of course, they do talk about chords, and songs, and the fabric they use
to make clothes - they just also talk about their fetishes for straight
skater boys, or how William Burroughs was 'one hot daddy' because he had
this porcelain heroin skin, or the time they got fucked by a policeman
when they were fourteen.
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3) The interviewers
I've never heard of the interviewers either, but the interviews read more
like conversations between friends than anything else. Like one guy will
start the interview 'So. I've been working on an opening gambit for
this interview. How's this. Matt Bernstien Sycamore, what do you want?'
And the interviewee is just thrown, and stutters 'world peace?'.
And you know that the interviewer has completely won from that moment
on. Or the other interview where one moment they're talking about sexuality
and radical left-wing politics, and then how European left-wing activist
parties suck and how the music at these parties is all terrible Eurythmics
or Latin American folk music, and then suddenly the interviewer says
'When we first met - years ago, in the mid-nineties - I was turned on
by your marginal position in the gay scene as a radical-left activist.
You belonged to this group called 'Rebel' and that's the main reason I
slept with you. Why did you sleep with me by the way?' How cool is
that? In real life so many conversations are about sex, and they're graphic,
and sordid, and crude - yet it's so rare to see that reflected in a magazine.
Most magazines separate sex and intelligence - it's either dumb jackoff
porn with no text, or the intelligence is sublimated into artsiness, as
seen in the vague and pretentious creative non-fiction text pieces in
Richardson or Purple Sexe. Butt retains both. It keeps it 'real'. It sounds
like a taped conversation from a group of rude filthy post-grad urbanites
coming up on drugs. In the toilets. After a day at the Sorbonne.
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4) Butt teaches you things
Did you know that there's this new breed of gay that only NY could produce
- the Puerto Rican, Hip-Hop Homo Thug? Me neither. As a straight girl,
there's a fuckload of this stuff that I might never find out. That there's
a club in King's Cross where gay men go to pee on each other, called Streams
of Desire. How would I find out about that? I'm not a homo or a pee-lover.
I'm never going to know about it. I want to know about it. I hate the
limits of this body. Is this voyeurism? Is that wrong?
5) Butt isn't Kutt
I'm sorry, lesbians, but you really, really suck. Listen, your brother
magazine is talking about sticking their cocks through glory-holes, about
getting straight boys to audition for gay porn films and how they'll make
them all bend over and pull their asses open, about 'Fuck Around' actions
where boys hand out schnapps and play music on ghettoblasters to protest
against the police in Copenhagen trying to cut down on cruising and public
sex…… and you're all just like 'I am not much of a one-night
stander…' and 'What is falling in love to you anyway?…
what is the one aspect a person needs for you to fall in love with them?'
and 'If I get to the point of wanting sex with someone I am already
in love, so then it becomes really hard not to want more'. OH SHUT
THE FUCK UP! It's not your fault, girls, that you're girls - and that
even the sluttiest of you are still girls and thus can't help but talk
of love - it just doesn't make very good copy. Poor women. I feel sorry
for my own gender. We are so not fun. I bet lesbians read Butt and feel
ashamed of themselves for being so boring.
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6) The photographs
Butt isn't gay porn. Butt is a magazine that has photos of its
interviewees in their underwear or in the nude. Or fully clothed. Or with
erections. This is a bonus. (Look at Heinz from issue 6. LOOK
AT HIM!) I can't think of a single other magazine that caters for
girls' scopophilic pleasure to the same extent. I'm not saying you could
get off on it - though the extremely hot photo of Matt Bernstein Sycamore
dressed only in a plastic apron and a semi did pop into my mind at an
opportune moment the other day - but if you're a lady who likes
attractive gentlemen, politics, and hot, transgressive sex, then you've
come to the right place.
Butt magazine is available from Magma in
London, but it costs £6. Six pounds! It's only five fucking euros
in Amsterdam, what's *that* about? Or you can order it from their website,
www.buttmagazine.com,
which also features articles and photographs from past issues of the magazine.
What else can I say? Get in.
MISS AMP
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