BUTT

You just closed the most recent issue, how does each issue come together in terms of theme? 

We don't really work on the logic of thematics for issues. We think more in terms of interesting people who can communicate something fresh and timely to queer culture and what we're thinking about in the world right now. I think part of the magic of Butt is the unexpected mix of individuals that you meet through our interviews and the visual stories we have. So I'd say each issue is defined by who is featured and the overarching energy that emerges from each story, rather from a top-down editorial vision about, ‘this issue should be about this topic or this theme’.

How do you seek out your subjects?

Each issue we have more ‘known’ cultural figures, and we're always having conversations and developing lists of people who feel like they are leaders in their domain, whether that’s music, film, literature, or something else. Then on the other side, I think the more difficult, but as important, stories that come into Butt are the unknown people; the random hottie, the unsung hero who's doing a job that's very important for queer culture, someone who has a crazy kink or fetish and lives it in an interesting way. Those stories aren't harder to come by, but they require an embeddedness in life. So, me as an editor and other people who contribute, we always have our ears open for stories that could make sense. 

I'd say there's a bit of a sixth sense quality, it's hard to pin down exactly why you think someone will work. Over the five years that I've been editing the magazine I’ve seen my own sense develop, and now I’m definitely much more confident that I can think about a story and immediately see the vision, or not. We don't want stories that feel expected, because the magazine should be eye-opening, or make you think differently. So if it's someone who's quite well-known we want to take a left-field tact with the conversation, or focus on one thing you don't know already about the person. We're always looking for people who have an idiosyncratic mix of things that they want to share with the world. So yes, they may make porn, but they also write historical fiction novels. They’re embracing the capacity we all have to contain multitudes.

Butt started in 2001, and then relaunched in 2022. In that time the media landscape changed a lot, both in terms of the emergence of digital media, and queer culture becoming more ‘mainstream’. How do you think the magazine has changed in relation to it? 

It was founded at a time when people still really experienced media through print, and also television and radio. Butt was able to embrace the 2000s era of the early internet, producing new online community spaces and interconnectivity across borders and cities. They developed this section of the website called Buttheads. It featured personal profiles of the readers of the magazine – this predated dating and sex apps, or it coexisted with the early era of them – and it became very popular. I think Butt became something more than a print magazine quite early on,  through the network of readers seeing how they could be connected with like-minded queers around the world. Fast-forward to when the magazine relaunched and it's a very different media environment. We are oversaturated with apps, social media, and all these things. So that isn't radical anymore. But there is an interest in a return to print, or a greater respect for picking up the print object, that we have definitely been able to benefit from.

How do you think your readership might have changed?

I actually don't think the readership has changed so much. I think it's a similar sensibility of people. Generationally, there's been a shift, and we do have a lot of younger readers, but I feel that Butt has a very clear sensibility that’s remained – an alternative perspective on gay culture and queer culture. Of course, in this new era, queer culture itself has shifted. We're still a magazine made from a gay perspective, but the conversations we're having are now much more broad. We're featuring people who are trans and we have lesbian subjects, and our readers also reflect that, so I think that it's become more diverse and more international over time. At the very beginning of Butt the readership was pretty localised around a network of friends in Western Europe, but within even a few years Butt became known internationally. There were thousands of Buttheads in Brazil, even if you couldn't get the print magazine there. So the community still spoke to people, even if the print magazine wasn't so accessible.

As you say, queer culture has evolved a lot, from the hegemony of white cis gay men to a better understanding of different kinds of identities. I'm interested in how the magazine has expanded to try and accommodate that? 

Yes, in a beautiful way I think it was immediately clear for the new era of Butt that the way that queer culture and the different subgroups of the broader LGBTQ spectrum had come together has evolved since the early 2000s. What was radical back then, in terms of creating a very gay male sex-positive space, isn't necessarily what pushes the community now. Those topics aren’t what we would all benefit from in terms of the conversations we're going to read, and the kind of connectivity we can have through having an editorial vehicle. Now in this new era, there are a lot of conversations, especially in politics, around regulating the body, trans-ness, hormones, and how that relates to sexuality. So it would be completely remiss to just keep focusing on the same topics and the exact same narrow band of the queer community that we were back then. 

At the same time, I think it is totally legitimate that we're not pretending we represent everyone in this broad way, because we're also a small team making a magazine from a gay perspective. The point of the magazine is to have conversations and to bring unexpected people together. That can be through intergenerational conversations between, say someone who survived AIDS and someone from Gen Z, or through having two trans people speak to each other. We had Sophia Lamar and Arca in conversation a few issues ago, and they were talking libido, and having sex after operations, really important stuff for us all to read and consider because we all experience the queer community together. If you go out to a party today in any big city and it is only men, unless it's a sex party it is probably not a very cool party. That's not.how queer people come together anymore.

I'm interested in the decision to relaunch, what made that feel urgent, or worth doing?

It's a generational thing. When it ended, I think the founders felt they had profiled the people, it had had a good run, and it was better to pause or stop something when it still had a lot of resonance with people. Then, after eight years of it being on hiatus, and the pandemic hitting, they started to think, ‘Is there queer media that is recreating these conversations today?’ Yes, mainstream culture is a lot more queer-coded. If you open anything from major newspapers to youth culture publications, they freely talk about queer topics, but it's still not at the level of really getting into the sex of it all. So they thought, ‘Maybe it is useful to bring it back for the new generation to have these conversations.’ And also, as a venue for people to have conversations across generational divides with young people. There’s a motivation to foster a dialogue between people who grew up in different contexts, learn from each other, and make sure the community stays cross-generational.