New York photographer Paul Mpagi Sepuya interviews the staff of BUTT Magazine's New York office: Michael Bullock, Felix Burrichter, and Adam Baran.

[We are sitting in the BUTT office in Chinatown, New York City on the evening of Monday January 26th, 2009]

PS: Hey Felix, Michael, Adam! How are you guys doing?
FB: Very good, we are just getting started to work on the next issue.

PS: It's funny I met each of you before I knew you were involved with BUTT magazine. Adam and Michael through mutual friends, and you Felix from your work on PIN–UP. Starting with you Adam, tell me, how long have you been working on BUTT?
AB: : I've been writing for the magazine for about 5 years or so, my first piece was a fan letter I wrote to the editors telling them how Butt had got me laid.

PS: How did that happen?
AB: Oh well, this guy came over my house and we were just hanging out as friends, and then before he left he started to look at Butt and he started saying how turned on he was by this one guy who was hairy. I'm sort of absurdly hairy on my ass and chest, and so I mentioned this and asked if he would like to see and we ended up having sex. So it was sort of like a Penthouse letter... anyway then I just started submitting ideas since Butt was always very big on letting readers submit stories and do interviews and now here I am.

PS: Michael?
MB: I have been working at BUTT since the 4th issue. I met Gert and Jop, who founded BUTT in 2001, in a bathhouse in Milan, and we started talking and they told me about the magazine – and at some point they asked if I would help out from New York. The reason I really wanted to get involved was because I wanted to see a change in gay culture. There wasn't anything that was sexual, masculine, creative, all of those kinds of things that now seem such an integral part of our culture. But at the time I wasn't seeing any of that and I think BUTT has been a big part of bringing that forward.

PS: Felix, what about you?
FB: Well, I actually worked as an intern at BUTT in Amsterdam a couple of years ago. I'd submitted a picture with my resume showing me hanging off a window grill in my underwear – they must have liked it because they wrote back to me and we had a phone conversation and for some reason they hired me, even though we'd never actually met before. But we got along really well – and after I left Amsterdam for New York again I started my own magazine, PIN–UP, a design and architecture magazine, and Jop and Gert have been a huge inspiration and support throughout that process. And when I finally left my day job at an architecture office last year, they asked me whether I wanted to help them edit BUTT from New York, since they're more and more busy with their other magazine, Fantastic Man, and have less and less time to devote to BUTT. And so here I am. My role is kind of to build the bridge between the HQ in Amsterdam and the office here in New York – bringing new and old world together, me being German and all...

PS: And what goes on in the BUTT office here in New York?
AB: Well we've had this office for a few years now...
MB: We've only had it for six months!!!!
AB: I thought it was longer than that.
MB: What? Did you think we never invited you until six months ago?
AB: I never actually came to the opening party; I thought it was just always here. You know, Michael and Felix mainly work out of this office and I work from home, doing the blog.

PS: And so were Michael and Felix until now, I witnessed the messes! But I always thought of the center of gravity as Amsterdam, and it had a very sexy Dutch-German-French attraction for me. But you tell me you three have had more involvement than I realized, that it's not the Old World but the New? Felix, you just returned recently from Amsterdam where you were working on the latest issue...
FB: The magazine is still being published in Amsterdam. The Mother Publishing House is in Amsterdam, and Jop and Gert still are very much the publishers, and give editorial direction.

PS: As you have shifted the day-to-day to New York, can you tell me some of the things that have been happening with the magazine? You've tried out new formats for articles; you had the glossy cover for an issue or two. Are these examples of more American experiments?
FB: Oh god, the glossy cover – people hated it! We got serious hate mail for that one. But I thought it actually quite good, especially for the summer issue with Slava on the cover. For the current issue we actually went back to almost the same paper stock that was used for the very first issue of BUTT in 2001, with Bernhard Willhelm on the cover.
AB: We never want to get to a place where we or people think – oh this is how the magazine is, this is how it will continue for eternity – so we're always trying new things: Experimenting with formats, experimenting with text placement and types of images...
FB: ...and I want to say that the current issue is number 25! The twenty-fifth issue of BUTT, an anniversary issue of sorts. So it's nice to do an anniversary issue with a new structure in place and sort of shake things up a bit.
AB: Yeah, this issue has a very diverse group of people. We even have a woman in this issue, Jayne County.
FB: Well, she still has her dick!

PS: It's all in how you use it.
FB: But it's a very nice kind of fresh and new mix of people.

PS: So what can we expect for the future from BUTT?
FB: We're working on two things right now. The next issue, number 26, for spring - and then for the summer is going to be a special issue... a straight issue. Because, you know, it's always been a policy that all of the people in Butt had to be gay exclusively, or bisexual, but not straight. But with this one we wanna show that gay culture isn't just defined by gay people, it's also shaped by straight people.
MB: Straight people steal gay culture, and use it for much bigger profit, so we're taking some of that back! Plus, there are lots of straight bottoms and we haven't talked to them yet.
FB: There'll be the straight men who bottom. There'll be the haters. The enablers, the sex objects – it'll run the whole gay/straight gamut. And the other thing we're tentatively working on for the summer is a pride event: BUTT Pride - basically be a concert event around the same time as the regular Gay Pride. We just feel that there should be an alternative to Gay Pride the way it's celebrated in New York, because so many people we know have absolutely no feeling of connection to the gay pride parade, and we think there should be an alternative.
AB: We're thinking more like a gay county fair than the actual Pride parade.

PS: When's your next office party? At your first party I broke my glasses.
MB: Didn't we make out that night?
PS: Did we?
FB: You and I also did!

PS: I remember that. So next time, would it be a sex party?
MB: Would we really want to do that?

[END]