Why did you came to Buenos Aires?
I came to Buenos Aires cause I'm on holiday. A friend of us invited us over because he bought a house two years ago and he loves the city. He always says how he feels very comfortable and at home, so he wanted to show us around. But I had no expectations. Its a beautiful city, but it feels very much like being in New York, it feels very American. But then this is America too. But the funny thing is I read a little bit before I came here and it said it was all very oriented to Europe. So its also surprising to be on the street and suddenly you feel like you're in Europe. But now we are going to Salta.

 

Can you talk about your upbringing?
I was born in the middle of Holland in 1966, my father was a preacher, protestan of course, otherwise he wouldn't have children. My mather was a linguist. I'm the youngest of six children and I wanted to become an architect. But the only thing I wanted when I was 16 or 17 was going to Amsterdam. I couldn't study architecture in Amsterdam, I mean, I could, but not in big school. So I went to Amsterdam and studied Dutch language, but I didn't like that very much so I became a singer, a pop singer for 7 years or so. And I played piano and guitar and harmonica.

 

Did you have a band?
Yes. At first we were called The Landlords, a rock band, with wigs and velvet suits. And then we became a country band and we started wearing cowboy hats, cowboy suits, accosutic guitar.

 

So it was the music you were interested or you actually wanted to wear those outfits?
No, no. I was honestly interested in country music. But that was when techno started, and house music happened. I couldn't start all over again, I was very based in traditional music, with piano and guitar, old fashioned structured songs. So when electronica happened I tried to do it, but I couldn't do it, trying to write old fashioned structures on a synthesizer. It sounded like early Duran Duran or Depeche Mode, that's how they started probably, trained musicians using synthesizers.

 

And you got depressed for that?
No. Well, maybe I was depressed for a while. But then again, music is always a big source of depression and I was always depressed anyways as a musician. Because you try to write sad songs... staring out of the window... looking for inspiration... So then I became a photographer but then I stoped taking photographs and I became a writer, a journalist.

 

And that was the begining of the magazine projects?
That came a little bit later. I worked for a weekly magazine of a newspaper and then I was asked to be the editor of a kind of style magazine, like The Face, or i-D but for Holland. It was called Boulevard. And I did that and I hired Jop Van Bennekom as the an art director, so that's how we met. I didn't really know Jop, we were introduced by a friend once. And I knew he was doing Re- magazine and I liked that very much. So I hired him as art director but we both hated working for Boulevard. I did it for two years and Jop lasted for about a year. The magazine was too commercial, too maistream, like you had to give a free lipstick sometimes with the issue. You had to do something funny with that, it was just too boring.
So we stayed in contact with Jop, I started writing for a newspaper again and we just kept talking about the idea of making a gay magazine, because we were always complaining there were not interesting. Everything we read focused on being accepted, gay marriage, gay adoption, gay pride, where we go on holidays, gay shopping. So it overlaped that we were making magazines and we didn't like how it was portrayed the lifestyle gay life. We wanted all the issues to be exciting and sexy things. And we knew some exciting and sexy things, so we should be able to put all that in a magazine. So we started Butt in 2001.

 

You do 3 or four issues a year, and now you are about to put out the 19th. Did you had good expectations when you started with it?
No.

 

What was the advertising in the beginning? Now they're big like Gucci, Dior, Helmut Lang.
The advertising were local shops and a gallery and a bar we always went to.

 

But the first issue was with Bernhard Willhelm on the cover photographed by Wolfgang Tillmans. It stared with a high standard.
Well, we were very serious about starting the magazine, but we didn't have any expectations. We just did 700 numbers and we thought "Well, maybe we can give away a hundred to our friends and they we'll end up with 600 copies that nobody wants".

 

And now how many you print?
Now it's 12.000.

 

And recently you put out the Butt Book with Taschen.
The book idea was because we realized the magazine became something more, a kind of anthological study of gays in the first part of the 21st century. I think Butt laid bare a network of gay men who didn't have a platform.

 

Do you have an office?
There is an office for Butt, but it's only Jop and me.

 

So how did you get Bernhard and Wolfgang for the first issue?
That was very coincidental. We know Bernhard Willhelm but he said maybe. "Sexy magazine? Well, I'll only do it if you can make a really sexy photographer take the picture." Se we said ok but we were thinking "Who is a sexy good photographer?". And then we thought of Wolfgang Tillmans. We didn't knew him but I had his fax number from the times that I worked at that newspaper magazine. So I faxed him and told him: "This is the idea. We want to have good pictures so that's why we come to you". So I called a few days later to check if the fax had arrived and he was "Yeah! I'd love to do it. I'd love to meet Bernhard" I think he accepted because they're both german and they're from the same generation. And we didn't even ask for nude pictures, we just told him if he wanted to do portraits or going to a shopping mall, anything. I mean, we said it would be nice if there were sexy pictures. And joking he said "Oh, I'll make nude pictures".

 

But then the next issue the fashion designers didn't go naked.
Marc Jacobs didn't go naked. Jeremy Scott was in the second issue, he was naked but you coudn't see his cock. Although you could see his balls. But then people were saying "Oh who's going to be the next fashion designer?" But that was never the concept for the magazine, cause what other fashion designers we would like to see naked? Christian Lacroix is not going to go naked and we're not going to ask him. Karl Lagerfeld won't do it. We had to do something exciting for ourselves cause we could do "naked fashion designer" forever and it would be just that.

 

The titles are very funny. How do you came out with that?
Usually the article and the photos give you a like sketch for it. Something ridiculous like "Cocksucker designer loves cocks and cooking". We sit under the computer, Jop types something in, and I say "Mmmm, well maybe". And then I type something in. And we both look at it. It's kind of like poetry made by two people.

 

So now you're also doing Fantastic Man.
Fantastic Man we do it because we thought that fashion magazines weren't about people anymore. There's this cliche that fashion magazines are all about advertising but it's true. Even when there's people it's because they're trying to sell something. If someone famous is on the cover it's because he just had an album out, not because he's necessarily an interesting person. But now there's going to be a lot of mens magazines coming out: Vogue Man from the US, Another Man from the people that make Another Magazine, GQ Style. But they're all going to be about cars and naked girls so we really don't worry about it.

 

Maybe the competition is better to try to do better.
Exctacly. They try to make the best product and it benefits all. Actually a lot of people are complaing about how boring is menswear, always suits. They should have fun with the clothes, and maybe with the magazines they'll get more hysterical.

 

Also in Butt you design many of the adverts. How do you make them accept?
At the beginning it wasn't that hard because they were very small brands. With the smaller ones most of them don't have and ad anyway, so they're happy if you design it. With the bigger ones it's hard but we still try with some. We also explain them why we want to do that, and it's becuase we really thought that it would be nice if the advertsing became a part of the magazine and not standing out as something external.

 

How much preproduction you did for Fantastic Man?
Like almost a year trying to do the concept and what kind of aesthetic we wanted it to have. You change when you do it. Too undergroung, or too bizarre. We wanted to make a supper happy lifestyle menswear magazine. And then also it's really about the paper, that it has a nice texture, that has a certain chicness.

 

What's it's frequency?
It comes out every season.

 

Most people here know about your magazine through the internet. Do you use the internet?
Yeah, I Google myself to death. Three or four hours a day.

 

Do you think if it's not in Google it doesn't exist?
Yeah.

 

Did you search for your name in Google?
Yes. I am there. It's funny, it's and fascinating. I find a lot of reviews of the magazines. Altough there is another person with my same name who is a nuclear expert but he's disappearing slowly on the internet. Also if you use Google Image there are eight pictures of a really ugly guy, and I want to say here that that's not me.

 

 

 

 

UP