BUTT was a revolution. With its trademark soft pink paper and sensual, unretouched photographs of gay men, the quarterly indie magazine — founded in Amsterdam in 2001 by Jop van Bennekom and Gert Jonkers — opened new ground by rejecting the conventional, well-groomed aesthetic of mainstream gay media in favour of something dirtier, raunchier, and more real. The men in BUTT were not aspirational bodies from a gym advertisement. They were hairy, imperfect, funny, sexual, and entirely themselves.
The magazine's influence on queer visual culture is difficult to overstate. It normalised a kind of intimate, unpolished portraiture that has since become standard in independent publishing, and it created a community of readers who recognised themselves — perhaps for the first time — in the pages of a magazine. The interviews were candid, often explicit, always warm. The photography was direct and unadorned. The whole thing felt like a private conversation made public, which is exactly what it was.
BUTT ceased regular publication in 2011 but has made occasional returns, and its archive remains one of the most significant documents of early twenty-first-century gay culture. For a magazine printed on cheap pink paper with no advertising budget, that is not a bad legacy.