GAYLETTER

BUTT Magazine has a long, impeccable past in the world of queer publishing. Since its first issue in the spring of 2001, BUTT has gleefully reveled in an unabashed, sex-positive approach to covering gay men, from an extensive range of very candid interviews to tasteful nude photography. Over the past 13 years, BUTT has carved its own very large, pink name into the publishing world at large, throwing BUTT parties, forming the CLUB BUTT social network, and putting together the sumptuous BUTT BOOK, a digest of the first five years of the magazine, in late 2006 through TASCHEN.

Now, TASCHEN is releasing FOREVER BUTT, a hardcover sequel to its popular first book. FOREVER BUTT is a handsome, faux leather-bound anthology of the mag’s best interviews and photography, a massive 536-page tome that is already an assured must-have item for any self-respecting gay creative. Slated for a December 20 release, the book is a perfect holiday gift, featuring hallmark interviews with Andy Butler, Bruce LaBruce, François Sagat, Gore Vidal, John Waters, Nico Muhly, Slava Mogutin, Wolfgang Tillmans, and many, many more. Be sure to preorder your copy now — the last time BUTT released a book, it sold out very quickly.

Photo: Wolfgang Tillmans

Photo: Neal Franc

FOREVER BUTT is out December 20 via TASCHEN. You can pre-order it now! …

Casey Spooner and Warren Fischer from the electroclash band Fischerspooner are hosting the official release for their new book today, Oct. 28th, at VFILES in SoHo. The book tittled Fischerspooner: New Truth, “visualizes the colorful beginnings of Fischerspooner with photography, costumes, ephemera, documentation of performances, props, studio portraiture and film stills. Original essays by Klaus Biesenbach, Gavin Brown, Jeffrey Deitch, Warren Fischer and Casey Spooner, provide unique and personal accounts of Fischerspooner’s historical and conceptual implications. Edited with an introduction by Meredith Mowder.“

In addition to the book they are going to be celebrating the “archival reissue” of the T-shirt “Artists Have More Fun” by Jeremiah Clansy — the shirt will be exclusively available at VFILES.

We had a peek at the book and it feels like a personal diary, it contains lots of interesting images highlighting the band’s relationship with performance art, their amazing wigs, their costumes, and all the elements and diverse references that made up their unique performances. It’s an interesting look at their process and an insight to how much Casey loves to wear sexy little underwear. He’s a fan of getting nudey — clearly aware that sex sells!

Here are some inside images from the book:

FREE, 6:00-8:00PM, VFILES, 12 Mercer St. NY, NY.

  …

When tracing our sexual exploration, most of us use puberty as the starting point. Not so for Adam Seymour, aka Rural Ranga. This red-headed Aussie from the back country (or Rural Ranga) says that he was sexual “right from the beginning.” And he doesn’t find this out of the ordinary. “Most people feel uncomfortable discussing the sexuality of children,” he told me, “but I feel my childhood was full of these experiences, and I’m sure others will relate.” Well, he certainly isn’t shy about sharing sexual past in his two art books, available for purchase. HOMOlita and Wank Bank may document two very different times in his life — childhood and his thirties — but they’re joined by his unique aesthetic and playful prose. And, of course, all the sex.

HOMOlita begins with his birth and offers a series of sexual vignettes, one for each year, until puberty struck at the age of 16. At three, he was kissing photos of the men scattered throughout his father’s secret porn collection. At nine, he’d wait until his brother fell asleep at sleepovers before climbing over to the friends to 69. At 13, he fucked a blow-up alien toy till it popped. With such a colorful beginning, perhaps it’s not surprised that he took to erotic massages to help make ends meet as a newly arrived artist in New York City. As he so perfectly puts it on the first page of Wank Bank, the book was 100% funded “by the flicks of my wrist” — he wanked guys off to make bank. …

Tommaso Speretta‘s Rebels Rebel: AIDS, Art and Activism in New York, 1979-1989 is the most recent in a series of works that bring to light the activism surrounding the outbreak of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Along with the documentaries How to Survive a Plague and United in Anger, Rebels Rebel joins an emergent history, giving voice to a Queer movement born out of crisis. In order to construct his narrative, Speretta looks to the art collectives involved in producing art propaganda, or agitprop. Merging written and visual histories, Rebels Rebel reflects a moment where the lines between art, politics, pop culture and social theory were purposefully blurred by AIDS activists bent on creating greater awareness for the growing epidemic. Speretta adeptly articulates the ways artists, and those involved in AIDS activism, repurposed advertising, marketing and communication techniques to combat an indifferent media and government.

Tracing the multiple axes of resistance utilized by ACT UP, Rebels Rebel paints an unsentimental picture of both the pain that comes with losing loved ones and the artistic pleasures that come with using art to make a difference. In the process, Speretta gives readers a look at life and death in queer New York before marriage equality and the mainstreaming of the Gay Rights Movement.

He concludes the book with an essay on his personal experience of coming out at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic and working alongside AIDS activists to create a voice for people largely ignored or deemed undeserving of help by an increasingly conservative public. …

Early on in Ben Kline’s newest poetry collection, Going Fast in Loose Directions, a poem titled ‘A Minor Lament‘ opens with the following deceptively simple lines: “He unseated good sense. / The best lovers often do.” The declaration is purposefully economical, shortened to a mere nine words in order to speak in the simplest of terms to experiences of love and loss, desire and mania, sex and loneliness. Kline is adept at this trick of economy; none of the eighty poems that make up Going Fast in Loose Directions surpass two pages, and yet not a single one lacks for emotional depth or shrewd observation. Take the numbered sequences that recur under the titles ‘Propositions‘ and ‘Men I Know.’ Depicting blunt sexual advances in haiku form and ended relationships in free verse respectively, the numbered poems feel like interludes: sometimes steamy, sometimes heartbreaking, but always loaded with infinite possibility for what comes next.

It’s that sense of giddy unpredictability that makes Going Fast in Loose Directions, Kline’s first full collection to be published by Johnny Murdoc’s erotica micro-pub Queer Young Cowboys, so invigorating to read in the first place. Over the course of eighty poems, Ohio-native Kline offers readers a candid look at sex and love, detailing intense erotic encounters and damaging break-ups with matching elegance. Some of the poems, including the ‘Propositions‘ and ‘Men I Know‘ sequences, are culled from Kline’s Tumblr, Original Content Required, which serves as a public forum for writing exercises and selfies alike. …

My first job as an adult in New York City was working for this tiny PR agency but we had two big clients — Grace Jones and Peter Gatien who owned the Limelight. It was then back in 83′ at the tender age of twenty that I had my first experience of the mega paparazzo Ron Gallela. He came to everything we produced, invited or not, with camera in hand, pushing, shoving, maneuvering, and doing whatever he had to do to get the photo and he always delivered. I mean he even developed, edited, printed and serviced the images to the print media himself.

“In his nocturnal hunts Gallela captured New York as no one else had-from the melding of every strata of society into the disco demimonde on the same dance floor to the go go 80’s…” Ron photographed everyone everywhere! Marlon Brando, Liza, Halston, Naomi, Linda, Cindy, Goldie Hawn, Kurt Russell, Woody Allen, Bob Dylan, John Travolta, Al Pacino and most unforgettably his muse Jackie O. If my memory serves me correctly I think Jackie won a famous legal battle against Ron and she was awarded a restraining order against him whereby he could not come within 50 feet of her and 75 feet from her children. I mean christ, Time magazine and Vanity Fair dubbed him “The Godfather of the U.S. Paparazzi culture” AND Brando punched him in the face, (after some harassing I’m sure) breaking his jaw and knocking out five teeth! …

When I first saw the cover for this attractive coffee table book I thought is was only about the drag queens that populated Andy Warhol‘s Factory. After spending some time flicking through the pages I discovered the real genius of this book. The editors juxtapose drag queens from the 60’s and 70’s (Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis, Marsha P. Johnson, Wilhelmina Ross) with actual royalty (Princess Caroline of Monaco, Farah Diba Pahlavi and the then-Crown Princess Sonja, of Norway). It’s a touching way to show some respect to these phenomenal ladies (I’m talking about the drag queens) who for many years languished on the fringes of society.

“As late as ’67 drag queens still weren’t accepted in the mainstream freak circles. They were still hanging around where they’d always hung around — on the fringes … sticking to their own circles — outcasts with bad teeth and body odour and cheap make-up and creepy clothes. But then, just like drugs had come into the average person’s life, sexual burs did, too, and people began identifying a little more with drag queens, seeing them more as ‘sexual radicals’ than as depressing losers… That’s how in ’68… people started accepting drag queens – even courting them, inviting them everywhere…” — Andy Warhol

Andy’s description of the queens as “outcasts with bad teeth and body odour” may come across as harsh, but he clearly loved these ladies (in as much as Andy could love anyone.) …

According to legend (aka Wikipedia), the National PTA established Teacher Appreciation Week almost thirty years ago. For most, this week means giving your favorite teacher/professor/what-have-you some semblance of thanks: a card, that requisite red apple, perhaps a present. For others, like the talent behind Providence-based queer-art mag Headmaster magazine, it means something a little more suitably suggestive. To celebrate the launch of Headmaster’s latest issue, the crew is hosting a Teacher Appreciation Week reception tonight at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. We were able to take a peek at the sixth issue, and you should trust us when we say this is something you’re definitely gonna want to get your hands on.

Headmaster takes on a unique format for an art zine, in which the editor (the eponymous Headmaster) tasks each contributor with a homework assignment that they proceed to put their own spin on. For this issue, contributors include Matt Lambert (using the vision conditions myopia and hyperopia for a photographic series), Alexander Chee (crafting a smutty narrative based on Patrick Cowley’s School Daze), Anthony DiCapua (doing a photo study of Brighton Beach’s Russian roots), Matthias Herrmann (who also created the cover image), Luka Fisher, BarryMarré, Ian Cozzens and many more, all of whom turn out fantastic work that would probably make the majority of your actual schoolteachers blush. Headmaster will also be selling handsomely packaged, deluxe six-packs at Leslie-Lohman that include all past issues for a discounted price. …

I’ve had this book in my space for months, it’s so big! I’d take it out, put it on my desk, open it, close it, put it back on the archival shelf for a few weeks then take it out again. This dance went on for months until spring arrived — suddenly it seemed like the right time to have a look at all the luscious, nubile men rendered in brightly saturated technicolor. It’s quite massive with over 45 color plates shot “en plein air” and almost sixty shots from the studio. The classic physique work finds the models brightly lit, well-oiled and nude in some cases; yes full frontal nude! There are few props in the images, a stool, a column, a plastic ball, a cowboy hat and settings that included brightly colored backdrops in the studio or scenes in nature.

“There was no shortage of fit handsome men who were willing to pose naked and the existing evidence suggests that in the beginning (after WWll) at least they were much more likely to be junior varsity quarterbacks than hustlers down on their luck.” This nuance to casting bred a wholesome athletic naiveté — almost a sense of budding optimism to the images, as opposed to a more pornographic edge.

Photographer Bruce Bellas, better known as Bruce of Los Angeles liked the “well-built All American boy, the older brother or more likely retired dad of the sports beauties Bruce Weber has turned into contemporary icons.” This quote is taken from the informative and insightful essay in the book written by longtime Village Voice photography critic Vince Aletti who gives a succinct history of this genre of photography thus gently placing Bruce into it’s midst. …

Take one glance at the digital cover for Tommy Pico’s newest poetry collection, Absent Mindr, and one thing becomes instantly clear: this is a chapbook unlike anything you’ve seen before. Touted as “the first poetry chapbook released as an app for iOS,” Absent Mindr encompasses 24 poems along with recorded audio of Pico reading them, all contained alongside artwork by Cat Glennon in a beautiful, easy-to-use app by VERBALVISUAL. Pico, who is a Lambda Literary fellow and GAYLETTER regular, has been working on the collection since September of last year, but it wasn’t until he approached the folks at VERBALVISUAL about a combination of art, writing, and audio that Absent Mindr came together. Once he knew the collection was going to be turned into a full-fledged app, the title, a play on Grindr and the absentmindedness that comes with compulsively checking one’s phone, came into clear focus. “To title it anything else,” he explains, “would have been a missed opportunity.”

The process behind creating Absent Mindr was anything but simple. As the first poetry collection made into app format, VERBALVISUAL had quite the task ahead of them in executing the collection’s fluid, four-part set-up. “No one had ever done anything quite like this before,” Pico explains of the behind-the-scenes process. “We had Skype meetings every few weeks to track the progress, both my edits and their design, but we ran into a lot of walls.” All of that trouble was definitely worth it, as Absent Mindr’s interface and implementation are both beyond smooth. …

In Christopher Stoddard‘s latest book, Limiters, troubled 16-year-old Kyle Mason leaves behind an abusive, chaotic family in search of refuge wherever he can find it, leading from the rave culture of suburban Connecticut to the harsh gleam of New York City. It’s a tale of exodus that should be familiar to readers of Stoddard’s work, whose debut novel, White, Christian, told the story of a similarly drug and sex-addled protagonist looking for a fresh start. Instead, like Kyle and so many other LGBTQI youth, he came face to face with the inescapable cruelty and duplicity of the human experience, recounted with as much heartbreaking candor as Limiters‘ often tragic subjects. Stoddard, whose prose is sharp and sometimes unforgiving in its realism, is unafraid to lend us an honest look into the lives of those who don’t end up with the longed for, “It Gets Better” version the LGBTQI story, those who are instead scattered into the fringes of American culture with little to no hope of a happily ever after.

Stoddard, who draws from personal experience for many of the misadventures his characters endure, published Limiters on ITNA Press, his own emerging Brooklyn-based press. Since August of last year, Stoddard has published two books aside from his own that focus on provocative subject matter: the surreal, “future-queer” world of La JohnJoseph‘s Everything Must Go, and incendiary artist Slava Mogutin‘s collection of poetry, essays, and collaborations, Food Chain. ITNA is already proving to be a welcome force in the publishing world for queer writers, giving further testament to Stoddard’s indomitable work ethic and perseverance to get atypical fiction published in a culture that doesn’t often give such work the platform it deserves. …