Book Presenation & Discussion

The Butt Years – Those were the first decade of the 21st century. From 2001 until 2011 the print version of the queer fanzine from Amsterdam was published with the image of a new kind of gay man stamped on in iconic pink colored photographs. The man: less normalized than the body ideals of the 1990’s, far more casual, hairy and sporting beards. For a time these images circulated with the label “Hipster”. But different from the its mainstream variant, the homo-hipster engaged the subversive potential of the counter-figure of the 1960’s and with this created a powerful image of queer masculinity. In the context of gay historiography, the Butt-Boys are also an answer to the history of HIV and AIDS, its medicalization and the normalities of body politics that followed. Aside from the triumphant sport-sex jock image, the men in Butt are just as sexy as they are vulnerable: Butt shows gay intimacy. This aesthetic of the non-perfect is to be understood in the background of the amateur culture of porn 2.0.

Peter Rehberg’s new book Hipster Porn takes Butt’s style-defining originality into account. The world of the fanzine is made readable through the critical lenses of queer theory, masculinity studies, media studies and affect theory, reversing as well the theoretical positions that Butt challenges.

Peter Rehberg is the Head of the Schwules Museum Archive in Berlin. He completed his doctorate at New York University in Germanic Studies and has taught and done research at many US and German universities. He was the DAAD Associate Professor at the University of Texas Austin from 2011 until 2016 and the Max Kade Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago in early-2018.

To close the presentation, Rehberg will speak with Prof. Brigitte Weingart, media researcher in Düsseldorf, and Dr. Michael Bucher, Independent Scholar in Berlin.

from 7:30pm at the Schwules Museum. Entry: 4 Euro

Peter Rehberg, Hipster Porn
2018 · 440 pgs. · full color. · ISBN 978-3-942214-35-3 Price 22,-