Buttfeed

It's not yet Spring, but Craig Hermes in San Francisco is seeing butts around every bend.

Originally from Chicago, now happily transplanted to sunny Southern California, John Parot has held a number of odd jobs to support his art career. He moonlights as a certified Pantone color consultant, does illustration for Mattel toys, and occasionally plays chauffeur to child actress Grace Peyton when she’s in LA for auditions and the awards season. Back in the Spring of 2010, there was nothing really going on for John except a humdrum art studio manager job, so when he was offered a part on Bravo’s ‘Work of Art: The Next Great Artist,’ his curiosity about the reality TV phenomenon got the best of him. We talked about his experience on the show, via a network PR mediator, just after he was eliminated in the third week of the season.

Sunfire Thunderbird is a 72-year-old resident of a gay retreat in upstate New York called the Easton Mountain Center. He teaches meditation, energy healing, and erotic spirituality while wearing some of the most amazing T-shirts and sweatshirts with images of wolves and dream catchers.

This fantastically close-up photograph shows the nipple of the Greek ex-boyfriend of Benjamin Jones, a 28-year-old paramedic from London via Brisbane.

The first fan MAURICE ever saw was the one his mother used in church, a little cedar one that she kept in a metallic box.

This super special close up comes care of Rob, 26, from San Francisco. He has found true love in his postal worker boyfriend Jakob, 28. As this week's calendar so wonderfully demonstrates, Jakob is an A-plus plus deep throater. Says Rob of his boyfriend's passion, "We were getting into a long, sweaty session, and my camera was on the bedside table. I love the way the light catches his neck and the bulge of my cock in his throat. He's a beautiful thing." Most fortunate for Rob — and for us.

Thanks heavens for email and internet, ‘cause that’s how we found out about the phantasmagorical crochet works of Mike Andrews. Sorry that we’re too slow to coincide with the opening or closing of his recent show in Chicago, but there’ll be more of Mike’s amazingness in the future. I rang him up recently.

Thomas Dozol, the French photographer who is based in New York and bites both his finger and toenails (that's beside the point) spent all last summer in Europe attempting to find a new utopia. Good idea. He visited the Wannsee in Berlin, and the Cité Radieuse in Marseilles, intrigued by the idea modernist architecture could help bring about a ‘new way of living'.

This month the BUTT calendar is dedicated to the art of SUPER CLOSE UPS. The first outing shows a luscious lash submitted by BAPTISTE BERNARD. It’s a picture of his first boyfriend that he took about five years ago. Baptiste makes clear that he did not use Photoshop or other technical jokes — the blur effect, he assumes, is because of the temperature and the humidity in the room. ‘It was a sweaty day,’ he says.

Zach was surprised while taking a pee in the restrooms of what used to be one of New York City's most notorious cruising areas, the Port Authority Bus Terminal near Times Square.

Louis Zoellar Bickett, founder of the Archive Louis Zoellar Bicket in Lexington, Kentucky, photographed his 21-year-old friend Skolnick, who is an artist also residing in Lexington. It's a great collaboration between two native Kentuckians.

The last of our series of boyfriend-themed calendar images comes from photographer and self-proclaimed voyeur Frank Boulanger. Frank photographed his boyfriend Sylvain — who according to French law is actually his husband — fingering his sweaty hole on their bed in Paris.

The little doggie that looks straight into the camera on next week’s calendar page goes by the name Moose, is two years old, and lives together with a gay couple, Seth and Tyler. The three share an apartment in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Scott is one of the many men photographed by Greg Endries in the new issue of Cameron Dailey's ScumBag Magazine. The special feature of the zine is that it's designed like a children's book with each guy cut up into three sections: head, chest, and cock. The reader can flip backwards or forwards to create the perfect guy. It's a simple trick, but very effective.

Meet Levan and Juan Cruz from Buenos Aires, Argentina, the handsome couple who is gracing next week’s calendar page. Unlike most of us in the northern hemisphere who are suffering from winter depression, Levan and Juan Cruz are enjoying the Argentinian summer heat.

The other day the world lost one of the most brilliant badass punk rock DIY faggots that has ever walked the face of the earth. I'm talking about my dear friend, Stephen Irwin, from Louisville, KY, who I attempted to interview for BUTT 24.

By now the glitz and glamour of the holidays has faded and all the stresses of the pre-holiday period have come back full force — your work is due, it's super cold, and you didn't get any presents thanks to the economic crisis — but we hope you'll calm down for a moment and download this week's page from the BUTT 2011 digital calendar!

Last March, the small Parisian gallery 12 Mail devoted itself to a retrospective of one of my favorite publications: Didier Lestrade’s pioneering gay zine Magazine. The walls were collaged with the incredibly influential homoerotic photography and drawings featured in Magazine throughout the course of its seven-year run from 1980 through 1987, as well as framed portraits of legendary interview subjects such as Sylvester, Jimmy Somerville, Divine, Edmund White, Erté, and Tom of Finland. With the younger generation’s interest reignited, Didier has now begun uploading the entire Magazine archive to his website, as a gift to both the fans and the Tumblr crowd, who he hopes will go crazy grabbing pictures and articles for their own sites. After many years working as an outspoken AIDS activist, founding and leading the first French chapter of ACT UP, and co-founding Têtu, Lestrade moved to the French countryside, where he’s busy writing for minorites.org and working on his next book. We spoke by phone last week.

Hello and welcome to 2011!! We hope you found a great way to celebrate the new year. And perhaps you even woke up to a similar scene like the one above, as witnessed by BUTT reporter Ilan Wainstein in London recently. This is what he had to say:

There’s a kind of disorientation that occurs on New Year’s Eve after the clock ticks from 11:59 PM to midnight. You’ll have to mentally adjust yourself, tell your brain not to say 2010 anymore, and get settled with the fact that it’s now January again.