ABSTRACT
The focus of this study is the gay fanzine Butt, a transnational project published between 2001 and 2011. Beyond gay porn culture, the style of Butt has long since entered mainstream youth culture and fashion, especially through the category of the hipster. In the gay context, the images of less normative male bodies document a “post-AIDS” moment: As a document of survival, HIV and AIDS appear dedramatized in Butt. Hipster Porn suggests that queer post-pornographic online and fanzine culture is different from mainstream porn pop; that in this subcultural site, a different notion of sexuality and a different image of men are at play. Analyzing Butt's significance entails a return to the queerness of sexuality as the center of gay culture. In this respect, Hipster Porn is committed to understanding queerness as a form of critique that takes the sexual as its point of departure, while it also proceeds intersectionally and includes forms of power such as race, class, and nation. Butt indicates a paradigmatic shift in the understanding of gender, sex, and desire. Contemporary queer post-pornographic culture, as evidenced by interactive online pornography and the gay fanzine Butt, necessitates a rearticulation of some of the basic assumptions of queer theory.
