ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a description of the gay fanzine Butt and situates it in the context of post-pornographic culture. The subcultural appropriation of new media technologies and the reworking of pornography's representational conventions work against the commodification and ideological regulation of naked bodies and sexualities. The question is, however, whether the fan perspective of celebrating male bodies in Butt can still be understood as queer in a political sense. Although with its post-phallic imagery Butt articulates a critique of hegemonic images of masculinity, at the same time, these visual politics are framed by an insistence on “naturalness.” This somewhat surprising, or even contradictory, politics of representation is first to be read in the context of HIV and AIDS. While the trauma of AIDS was countered with a strategy of fit masculinity as seen in 1980s and 1990s porn, Butt's less striking masculinity manifests a historical distance from HIV and AIDS. Butt's aesthetic, however, is not just a return to 1970s indie porn – the time before AIDS – but is also in dialogue with media changes around 2000. The aesthetics of DIY porn and cam chat provide the other source for staging Butt boys in mostly private spaces. Butt provides a visual chronic of the first decade of the 21st century, in which digital visual media began to define the representation of gay masculinity.
