Buttfeed

Meet music-making Aussie “bros” 2charm. After dropping their cum-drenched music video boyfriend last year, the internet has been trying to suss out the nature of their relationship... maybe they really are boyfriends? Currently touring the US with Ninajirachi ahead of their own self-described “g00ner pop” album launch next month, we caught up with the photo booth aficionados while they were sheltering from the winter storm in their motel room on the latest stop of their tour in Dallas, Texas.

Muscle-worship, milking, ab-trampling, navel torture and gut punching can all be found on the horny online community, meetfighters.com. Technically the term for getting hot from fighting and contact sports is called Agonophilia, but insiders just call it a good fight. Alongside private meet-ups, there are wrestling camps for passionate punch-ups between friends and rivals all over the world. For years now, Colombian-born photographer Danny Aros has been traveling around the world for testosterone-fueled gatherings, and only recently has turned his camera to the community for his series ‘Agonophiliac’, shot between bedrooms, hotels and Camp Wrestlefest, a sexed-up camp-out for the community in Pennsylvania last summer.

Kinky Bangkok-born artist Riven Ratanavanh put their body – and their sub – at the center of a performance at our Bangkok celebration last Thursday. As BUTTendees sipped on queer cocktails, Riven put the party gimp in the corner and passed out ABC crackers. The task – spell whatever you wanted the sub to eat on the table of magazines. In a country where tourists expect Thais to serve them, Riven wants to flip the script. Before the panel and film program, the sub crawled across the table eating up words to applause, including – a favorite – “OK TO EAT C*NT”.

Before the performance, we asked Riven a few key questions, including about their recent performance inspired by the Thai devotional ritual of gilding Buddha statues. In it, Riven let the audience place gold leaf all over their lubed-up body, piece by piece.

The rumors are true… Next week, BUTT will be in Bangkok! Who better to introduce us to the sex drenched metropolis than erotic artist Oat Montien. Having grown up among sex workers, the city’s queer underbelly unravels in the Krung Thep native’s kaleidoscopic video works – one of which will be screened at the Bangkok Kunsthalle on 18 December.

Vaginal Davis is experiencing her well-earned cultural turning point, and I’m lucky enough to be spending time with her. While her social world was forged in the golden age of 1980s Los Angeles punk and performance culture, the beloved underground queer icon is no longer a star only for the in-the-know crowd. At a time when America is retrofitting itself back into fear, Vaginal Davis appears as an institutional fact. MoMA PS1 is currently presenting her archive through 2 March 2026, and has done so without taming its content. Canonized without apology. 

The terms of her life were never subtle. Born intersex to a Black Creole mother from Louisiana. A Mexican-Jewish father. And a chosen name as an act of deliberate self-mythology – a tribute to the Black Panther Angela Davis. The name alone announces almost everything you need to know before she even arrives: sexual, political, irreverent. In person, Vaginal carries a double authority. There is the matriarchal warmth and generosity of spirit that pulls strangers into her orbit without effort, packaged in a commanding physique (a towering 6'6"). From that body, language comes fast, obscene and excessive. Honesty, bravado and showmanship arrive tangled together with a humor that tightropes between sweet curiosity and total scandal. The combination is addictive. True to form, what follows does not proceed politely.

Pups on the red carpet? Yes, please. This week, Harry Lighton’s kinky debut feature film, ‘Pillion’, is out in the UK after much anticipation, thanks to its leather-friendly press tour. Based on the novella ‘Box Hill’ by Adam Mars Jones, it follows a shy guy who meets a hot biker and quickly becomes his devoted sub. Swedish sexpot Alexander Skarsgård — leather clad, cock pierced — plays Ray, the dom. Harry Melling of Harry Potter fame plays Colin, the sub. Much sweeter than the film may suggest, and fresh off a train from Manchester, where he presented the film at a preview screening, the 33-year-old director met with BUTT reporter Douglas Greenwood at the Admiral Duncan, famous gay watering-hole in London’s Soho. 

All tied up and surrounded by robot arms, meet the frisky Montréal-born performance artist Miles Greenberg. During rehearsals for his latest shibari-happy durational performance at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, we asked what it takes to be a living sculpture — and some s-e-x questions, of course.

Ahh, faint memories of sex in summer. Are you yearning for an ocean breeze between your ass crack after a beachy tug-and-go? Or perhaps the bliss after you and your ultra-extra-exclusive lover orgasmed on top of a Swiss mountain? Isn’t it so goddam poetic? It could even be nice to write a poem about it.

As you may have read on the last page of the new issue, we’re launching a WIDE OPEN CALL for poetry about memorable outdoor fun. Short is king. Send your raunchy rhymes, lusty limericks and horny haikus to office@buttmagazine.com before 15 December for a chance to be featured in our special ‘AL FRESCO’ poetry project in the new year.

Are you more visually inclined? Alexios Seilopoulos sent us this snapshot of an idyllic island rendezvous!

As a norm-defying and pleasure-pushing force in New York’s underground nightlife scene, poet and organizer Kay Gabriel knows a thing or two about perverts. In fact, she just wrote a whole book about the subject framed as “an epic poem stitched together from the dreams of friends or strangers”. To celebrate the launch of ‘Perverts’ — out now on Nightboat Books — we asked Kay seven perverted questions.

A mattress on the floor littered with dirty socks, multiple X-rated browser tabs open at once, and one hand constantly refreshing the apps, just in case. Sound familiar? This sordid tableau takes centre stage in artist Ignasi Monreal’s solo show, ‘Only Friends’. The exhibition just opened at Fertile, the little sister of the ultra chic art space Palazzo Monti, in the Northern Italian gem of Brescia. Fresh from launching our latest issue – featuring a selection of Ignasi’s sext paintings – BUTT co-hosted the buzzy opening party in a former glass factory. Some of the painted dicks were even in the room with us that night.

Sporting a t-shirt emblazoned with the words “your nudes are safe with me”, Ignasi walked us through his love-hate relationship with digital intimacy. In one room is a replica of horny teenage Ignasi’s desk, with the webcam on the family computer streaming live to strangers online, and well within reach of a box of tissues. In the next, a table full of devices resembling an Apple store, each with intricately painted thirst traps sent by friends and anonymous lovers. Usually known for his high-fashion collabs, this is the artist’s first pivot to the pornier side of life.

Ray Yeung is the go-to Hong Kong filmmaker of all things gay — so gay, in fact, that we just featured him in BUTT 37. This month, Hong Kong’s Legislative Council voted down a government bill that would have granted limited legal rights such as hospital visitation and post-death arrangements, to same-sex couples registered overseas. The bill was defeated by a significant margin, revealing rampant institutionalized homophobia in the East Asian megalopolis. Still, that doesn’t stop queer audiences from flocking each year to the Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, which Ray has led for the past 25 years, pushing for sex-friendly film on the silver screen, in spite of government censors.

This year’s festival is happening from now until 27 September at multiple venues across the city, with plenty of parties in-between. We asked Ray for some highlights from the program that best capture the mood of the vertical city. He told us: ‘don’t forget to bring a box of tissues along with your popcorn — you might need them for tears, laughter…or cum!’

We’re used to seeing visual artworks from a generation tragically lost to AIDS. The work of Felix Gonzales-Torres, David Wojnarowicz and Robert Mapplethorpe, to name a few, can still be found in a gallery, just as it's easy to come across the music of Arthur Russel or Freddie Mercury today through recordings. For something as ephemeral as a play though – which relies on live staging, bodies, and audiences – protecting a legacy can be tricky. In comes Alastair Curtis, a writer and director based in London who has spent the last two years resurrecting seemingly forgotten works through ‘The AIDS Plays Project’. Through a series of rehearsed readings, each performance convenes with a different writer lost throughout the peak of the epidemic, breathing new life into their work and leaving the next generation of theater gays gagging for more. I caught up with the project’s mastermind just before rehearsals began for the upcoming season at London Performance Studios, starting with the world premiere of Alan Bowne’s horny ghost comedy, ‘Spook’.

We reached out to eight taste-making BUTT readers around the world to ask ‘What the BUTT are you reading right now?’ Here’s what they had to say!

XXX-clusive premiere! Mustachioed disc jockey Cormac has a new EP, “Gone”, out today, with a super porned-up video shot by Heavy Load Studio. The Hi-NRG selector teamed up with the Berlin alt-pornographer Juan Saez to imagine a retro fuckfest in a green-screen fantasy world. Cormac tells us ‘Back in the 80s, gay porn was a massive industry. It wasn’t just sex, it was resistance, community, an outlet, a subculture – I wanted to channel that energy, but evolve it. Not just man-on-man. Not  just one kind of body or story.’ Watch the fun times below.

As far as English traditions go, buggery is right up there with tea and scones. With a long history of homosexuality among the upper class, it wouldn’t be too farfetched to imagine it taking place in the near future within the uppermost family. Well, that’s exactly the departure point of “Prince Faggot”, the new play written by BUTT contributor Jordan Tannahill: What would happen if twelve-year-old Prince George grew up to be a full raging homo? Of course, the rest is fiction.

Starring alongside John McCrea – who plays the titular twink – is Mihir Kumar as Dev, his hunky yet pensive boyfriend. Here we asked Mihir a few questions about swapping royal pomp and ceremony with poppers and pup play...

Ahoy there! Our castaway this week is the sensationally blue-eyed Dutch author, Raoul de Jong. Raoul is no stranger to the idea of being marooned, having recently rewritten the story of gay sailor Leendert Hasenbosch getting dumped on Ascension island in 1725 after getting caught in the act with one of his fellow seamen. Yikes! Here, Raoul shares his own survival tips ahead of a live reading of his piece in BUTT 36 on July 2, at Sadie Coles HQ in London (also on an island).

A debut album, a world tour, and an evolution later I met Evita Manji in Athens after their homecoming show. At the Lycabettus Theatre, on a hill with all of ancient-chic Athens behind them, Evita opened for Arca before a hot and excited crowd of Greek queers. Later that week, after I'd lost my phone and spent the week living a Mediterranean lifestyle of sun, beaches and lunches that turn into dinners, I linked up with Evita at their studio to play with some music toys and ask about their sex icons. I ended up learning a lot more about birds, wolves, love and what they like to play while hooking up...

There are a few constants in Joe Westermoreland’s ‘Tramps Like Us’ – sex, hitchhiking, getting arrested, friendship, love, drugs, and, most of all, music. Joni Mitchell, The Ramones, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Blondie, Television, The Buzzcocks. The list goes on and on, mapping the slide from punk into new wave. It’s the type of ambient detail, overwhelming in sensory and descriptive power, that gives the recently reissued novel an epic, all-encompsing feel. A life. Joe’s language is generous, if simple. It struck me back to my most raw, early observations of what it means to be a gay kid in America. It made me reach out to my first ever kiss just to see how he’s doing. It made me cry.

Tramps Like Us also is a sharp reminder that gay culture is not linear. If the rightward political lurch of today confirms it, so does the irresistible feeling of liberation flowing through Joe’s ecstasy-and-sex fueled life in New Orleans and San Francisco before the death and fear took root. Or take the time when Joe’s homophobic dad clocks him for bringing home his friend, “that queer”. Joe retorts, “They’re not called ‘queers’ anymore. They’re calls ‘Gays’. Language is cyclical too.

In the early 90s, after arriving in New York, Joe started jotting down these tales in an attempt to hold on to the good times and make sense of the recent deaths of his friends, one by one. Throughout the 90s, the scope of the project expanded into the coming-of-age novel now reissued by MCD Books. Back then, at readings Downtown, people would walk out on Joe, uncomfortable with his realness.

Finally the book was due to launch on September 11th, 2001. We know what happens next. Despite praise from the likes of Denis Cooper, Hilton Als, Kevin Killian, and Sarah Schulman, ‘Tramps Like Us’ fell out of print and into obscurity. Now, the faggy bildungsroman is improbably resurrected thanks to a cadre of devoted fans, chief among them our lord and savior Eileen Myles. It’s a sure entry into gay literary canon for its uncommon honesty to self that’s both wide-eyed and infectious.

To get the lowdown on the wild book and Joe’s own sex predilections, I met him for a Quickie…

In London leather lore, The Backstreet is canon. Set up in 1985 by solicitor John Edwards, the men-only bar served a fetty clientele of daddies, rubberists and – as the changing winds of fetish took hold – puppies and superheroes. Formally closing in 2022, the bar had weathered the AIDS epidemic, fickle queens and seven prime ministers. While it’s no longer in business, The Backstreet lives on through a bountiful archive of medieval-style body-cages, dog toys and dusty horse-guard boots.