Butt
Pleasures
Interview
When artist Chivas Clem moved back to Paris, Texas after more than a decade in NYC, he didn’t have the warmest memories of his rural hometown. As a kid, he sometimes felt like the only gay in the village. But starting in 2016, he started befriending young men in his neighborhood, many of them drifters — the kinds of guys who were stereotyped as bigots and blamed for Donald Trump’s election, when most of them didn’t even have the right to vote. All of them seemed misunderstood, and some of them a little bit gay. His exhibition ‘Shirttail Kin’, now up at Dallas Contemporary, shows a tender and sexy side to these tough, scruffy bros, but it’s no redneck romance. The show’s title is a Southern term for “chosen family”. Sweet!
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On the cover of BUTT no. 35 is Giorgi, a fixture of Tbilisi dancefloors and demos. The activist gave Anton Shebetko a wet and wild tour of the Georgian capital, from cafés to bathhouses, plus shared what he’s been doing to fight the country’s new anti-gay “propaganda” law.
Interview
Notorious for his outsized ability to excavate America’s underbelly, Gary Indiana writes about alienation, power and perversion with searing frankness and delight. He sat down with Michael Bullock for this confessional — and sadly, final — interview before his recent passing.
