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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.

BUTT first featured the work of underground gay graffiti artist ‘prvtdncr’ in issue 20, the LA issue, back in 2007. Since then, the artist, whose name is an internet-style abbreviation of ‘private dancer’, the title of Tina Turner’s classic solo album, has continued making funny homo sex-themed public art. His latest project has been stealing and recreating a series of homemade posters by an erotic masseuse/sex worker that have been popping up in East L.A. I called him in his studio to talk about the project. Though he’s very secretive about his true identity (à la Banksy), he’s very articulate when describing his process.

Last summer, BUTT and Honey Soundsystem made a limited edition mixtape to be given out at Honey Sundays, their weekly party in San Francisco, CA. The mixtape featured several music-making homos readers know from the magazine as well as acts who have performed at previous BUTT parties. Honey Soundsystem crafted an exclusive mix from a number of previously unreleased tracks including some of their and BUTT's favorite artists.

In the Eighties, Paul Thek was called ‘one of the great failures in contemporary art.’ Now, a posthumous retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York seeks to change all that. Thek’s work ranges from casts of various body parts to ethereal paintings of gnomes, dinosaurs, mushrooms and other fits of ’60s and ’70s psychedelia. While considered an artist’s artist today, Thek made quite a few friends throughout his brief career, which spanned from the mid-60s until his death in the late 80s. Photographs by his lover, the late Peter Hujar, are included in the show. So is a painting he made for Susan Sontag, who dedicated Against Interpretation and AIDS and its Metaphors to him.

Prolific Roy aka Dorian Black is known around London and beyond as a party host, fashion model, and singer (for his own band, Roy Inc.). Born in Birmingham to Jamaican parents, 5’-10”-tall Roy is, funny, polite, and endearingly old-fashioned, someone who prefers sending handwritten letters to emails, or chatting online. But Roy’s most prominent feature is without a doubt his magnificent set of nipples, two enormous pointy ones that measure two inches in length and protrude from two tattooed aureolae about the size of the inside ring of a teacup saucer.

David Wojnarowicz died of AIDS on July 22, 1992 in New York City, a sad end for an artist whose complex work had been so tied to the rage, pain, and horror he and millions of other people experienced going through the plague in the ‘80s and ‘90s. His work brought attention to the ways in which the US government ignored the plight of AIDS victims, and toward the end of his life had to fight against conservative Republicans threatened by his work. Over 20 years later, his work still threatens the same types of people, in this case future Republican House Speaker John Boehner, who, with the support of other leading Republicans, threatened to defund the Smithsonian unless they removed Wojnarowicz’s video Fire In My Belly from the groundbreaking gay art show Hide/Seek: Desire and Difference in American Portraiture, which is now up at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Barcelona-based photographer Miguel Figueroa resting in the bushes of a garden next to the Church of Santa Barbara in Madrid. His ex-boyfriend, appreciative of Miguel's 'Georgia-peach ass', took the photo.

BERLIN, GERMANY — When my Abe Vigoda bandmates and I reach Berlin we are almost a month into tour and I haven’t been this horny in forever. It’s a mix of seeing a shitload of hot guys all over Europe and not being able to jack off daily that’s to blame for this hypersexual mood. Luckily, I have a gay friend in Berlin named Steve. He is pretty much one of the coolest guys I can think of. We both share a love of Dennis Cooper and he has impeccable taste in dance music. It also doesn’t hurt that he is really, really hot. He’s a lot taller than me, which doesn’t take much since I'm 5’7”. He’s a bit scruffy but pretty well built: broad shoulders, thick arms, long muscular legs and as I later find out, an amazing cock.

'Open' is the latest film from Teddy Award-winning director Jake Yuzna. The film follows two love stories. The first story is based on the story of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, leader of the bands Psychic TV and Throbbing Gristle, and features a couple who have plastic surgery to combine each other’s features in a process they call pandrogyny. While recovering from surgery, one member of the couple meets a young intersexed person and go on a strange road trip. The second story centers around a transman and a biological gay man who fall in love. Before heading off to tonight’s screening of his film at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City, Jake took the time to answer some pondering questions from BUTT.

As you may have noticed BUTT’s FAG MAP section doesn’t provide any tips yet for Amsterdam, the magazine’s founding home. One of the reasons is that homo clubbing in the former gay capital of the universe is in quite a dead state – what with lots clubs closing recently, including the legendary trashy Cockring. Latest news is that Argos, a fine old leather bar where a lot of fun can be had, is facing a grim future — the building is crumbling down while police keeps coming up with impossible new rules and regulations. The only good things happening in Amsterdam are one-off nights that need a lot of careful planning; Hoerenbal at Church, UNK at Club 8, Spellbound at OCCI, and the young but absolute hysterical F*cking Pop Queers. FPQ is a disco night held once a month in the basement of an otherwise to-be-avoided-like-the-plague club called Jimmy Woo. Last Saturday’s FPQ was a total revelation, with a basement packed with drunk guys jumping up and down on a nice mix of current pop hits and pure eurotrash, from The Vengaboys’s ‘Shalala Lala’ to Shania Twain to Corona’s ‘Rhythm of the Night’. Sorry if that sounds like absolute gay hell, but for all attending it was Amsterdam's most fun dance night out in ages. Next one’s on December 11.

Visitors to this past weekend's MIX Festival in New York City got the unique opportunity to hang out in the apartment of English writer and homosexual icon Quentin Crisp, despite the fact that Crisp has been dead for the past 11 years.

21 years ago today, on November 9th, 1989, two independent events occurred simultaneously. The one would affect the entire world — the fall of the Berlin Wall — and the other touched only a few in a country that has long since been absorbed into greater Germany: the release of Coming Out, the first East German film on homosexuality, in which a school teacher struggles with accepting that he’s gay. Michael R. was a 17-year-old high school student at the time when he became an extra in the film. For BUTT he shares how he was affected by both the movie and the unexpected end of the German Democratic Republic.

'This is about the boys of summer, Provincetown, Massachusetts, 2010,' writes BUTT’s friend and fabulous contributor Cesar Padilla, who lately has been concentrating on shooting the male crotches belonging to his circle of friends in the gay Cape Cod summer town. 'It’s for those, like me, that love what you can’t have, what you can’t see and what you can’t touch.'

This coming weekend BUTT will be manning its own booth at the New York Art Book Fair where we’ll be offering all kinds of goodies, from back issues and posters to the always handy BUTT towels (Christmas gift, perhaps?). But most importantly on Saturday afternoon, starting at 1:00 p.m., on we’ll have a photographer on hand to do headshots of willing homosexual men to join the super successful CLUB BUTT. Whether you’ve been a BUTTHEAD for years and want to update your picture or if you just decided to join, this will be your chance to get a shot of your best angle at no cost. And – internets permitting – you’ll also be assisted in setting up your account right then and there by a handsome and charming BUTT employee. Looking forward to seeing you there!

There are certain books without which the homophile library is simply incomplete, and $5k says Jean Genet's Querelle de Brest is one of them. Mr. Genet, juvenile delinquent turned occasional prostitute and cultural heavyweight, completed the controversial tale of a homicidal bisexual sailor in 1947, no doubt drawing on his own experience in the French Foreign Legion. Just one year after completing the manuscript, Mr. Genet faced a life sentence for repeat offenses, dating back to his teens.