Double Dutch
THEIR PUBLISHING EMPIRE CONSISTS OF TWO TITLES, AND ONE OF THEM’S CALLED BUTT. HOW GERT JONKERS AND JOP VAN BENNEKOM ARE QUIETLY SAVING MAGAZINES.
BY CATHY HORYN
The story of how Gert Jonkers and Jop van Bennekom, two Dutchmen from the Bible Belt of the Netherlands, came to found a magazine for gays called Butt, followed by a style magazine for anyone called Fantastic Man, is a story of dreams, dreams being really the start of identity. If it weren’t for the fact that Jonkers’s father was a Protestant minister who made his six children read on Sundays — reading was the only activity allowed except church services— would Jonkers have found a way through the boringness of his youth to make a magazine that was essentially about reading? It is an interesting question. And van Bennekom, whose father owned a garage in the same region and whose aunts, uncles and grandparents were all farmers: would van Bennekom, without such humbleness, have quite so clearly identified that the central experience missing in magazines in the early part of the 21st century was a feeling for simplicity and directness?
Of course, there were other influences, as you’d expect from two men pushing 40 and living in Amsterdam. Jonkers is also a fashion critic for De Volkskrant, a Dutch daily newspaper, and van Bennekom freelances for a few fashion labels, though he won’t reveal which ones. But the striking quality about Butt and Fantastic Man is that, though they provide the same distractions as any p*rn or fashion magazine — the same bun shots (although Butt’s are usually less muscular) and designer sandals — that’s not why people go to them. They go to them to learn about people, famous ones like Michael Stipe, Rufus Wainwright and Marc Jacobs, who have appeared in Butt, or Helmut Lang, who gave his first real interview in several years to Fantastic Man. But they also go to find out about obscure ones like the Dutch graphic designer Wim Crouwel or a New Zealand hand model with a foot fetish named Stuart. At a time when mainstream media have lost readers to the Internet, Butt and Fantastic Man have steadily grown in numbers and influence, despite using the traditional means that many magazines reject, like liberal amounts of text and black-and-white photos. At the same time, however, the magazines are anything but nostalgic. That’s why my mind did a loop when van Bennekom said during our lunch with Jonkers in Paris: "I think traditional things are right now the most interesting. There’s always a chance in five years that Fantastic Man will be the most modern style magazine that there is.”
What makes a magazine modern, I asked him.
"That’s a question we ask ourselves all the time,” van Bennekom said. "I think it’s reading — the whole idea of concentrating and being alone in a room. I think that’s what a magazine has to offer: a reading experience.”
Both Butt and Fantastic Man are audacious in style and content — and for completely different reasons. Butt, printed on 9-by-13-inch pink paper, folded and staple-bound, has retained its homemade look since its debut, 22 issues ago, in 2001. It presumes that its readers, who now number some 24,000, are not only intelligent but also friendly and preoccupied at least part of the time with things other than sex, although nudity and discussions about sex are integral to the magazine and offered as casually as a ham at Christmas. Starting from its title, Butt is also very funny in the silly rather than campy sense. Consider some of its headlines: "Boring Interview With a Random Gay Stranger”; "Embarrassing Interview With a One-Night Stand”; and "Disgusting Interview With a Toilet Cleaner.” Because there is nothing specifically gay about photos of a flaccid fat man poised on a gym ball or a Q. & A. with Gore Vidal that ends with the interviewer (in this case, Jonkers) being neatly dismissed in the Vidal mode, the humor feels inclusive and therefore funnier. As van Bennekom said, describing the magazine’s essence, he and Jonkers got the idea for the title while drinking one night in an old-school leather bar in Amsterdam called De Spijker. "The bar had two TV screens, one with p*rn and the other would be playing cartoons, like ‘Tom & Jerry,’ " van Bennekom said. "I thought it was so funny.”
To the extent that Butt’s playfulness and lack of snob appeal is about undressing, Fantastic Man, first published in 2005, is about dressing up.
Printed on matte light-gray paper at the standard size, Fantastic Man projects a dashing smartness that makes it look not only more mature than glossy style magazines but also more genuinely interested in sartorial points. The latest issue, autumn/winter 2007-8, contains an eight-page spread on classic haircuts by Guido Palau, shot in the portrait style of a barbershop magazine, followed by an article on hosiery, complete with details about fiber content. Yet despite such fastidiousness and an arched tone, there is no homosexual subtext; and in contrast to Butt, Fantastic Man does not show nudity or expect its subjects to discuss their sex lives, though they might.
Yves Saint Laurent’s Stefano Pilati, a 2006 cover, said, "It’s one of the first male magazines that I really considered male.” He added: "It has an appreciation for people and what they’re doing with their lives. You feel quite relieved in a sense to let yourself go and say what you want. You feel a dialogue with the magazine that you don’t have with many others.” Given the flexible range of topics — from profiles of artists and musicians to a piece about the joys of lake swimming — and the magazine’s tailored design and refreshing distance from consumer trends and credits, it’s easy to imagine almost anyone as a Fantastic Man.
I asked Jonkers and van Bennekom who they thought qualified. "Morrissey,” van Bennekom replied quickly.
"I think Steve Jobs is a Fantastic Man,” Jonkers said. "This may sound surprising to some Americans, but I think Bill Clinton is a Fantastic Man. The mayor of Berlin would be good for the magazine.”
What is remarkable about both Butt and Fantastic Man, perhaps more so with Butt, is that they are political but not in an obvious way. They tapped into a constituency that was going unrepresented in both the gay and mainstream media: people not so much interested in being sexually explicit as sexually honest. Jonkers and van Bennekom, who met in the ’90s while working on separate publications, produced the first Butt for about $2,000.
They asked Wolfgang Tillmans to shoot the designer Bernhard Willhelm, a rather daunting gambit since Tillmans had recently won the Turner Prize and they didn’t know him; but as van Bennekom put it mildly, "Who else?”
Tillmans did photograph Willhelm in a series of revealing poses, and is now sort of the conscience of Butt. But while Tillmans is always encouraging the men to move in a more political direction, they say it has done enough by recognizing a community, one that now stretches from the Netherlands to China and Peru and that has produced several pinkish clones. When Butt started, van Bennekom said, the emancipation of gays in Europe was more or less over. "Gay marriage had come through, not only in the Netherlands but also in countries like Spain,” he said. "The whole political movement was bankrupt intellectually.” He added: "Nothing felt underground or funny. I mean, where did the humor go? Did the humor really end with [the artists] Pierre and Gilles and that kind of camp? Do we all have to aim at one type of body?” (They started a publication for lesbians — its title unprintable here — but it soon died. Apparently lesbians don’t have the same sense of humor.)
Butt makes a small profit, and Jonkers and van Bennekom recently moved into a tiny office in a modern building overlooking a square. But while the magazines are influential (it’s hard not to credit them for a new appreciation in fashion ads for mature-looking men), they are precise about what they want. It’s the Dutch in them. As van Bennekom said, "there’s an undeniable magic and integrity in reality,” and as Jonkers added, "We found out we can do things that we ourselves like.”
