Inside KUTT, the cult lesbian 00s magazine

KUTT

Like many good ideas, KUTT began half as a joke and half as a dare. In 2002, Jessica Gysel was in a bar with Jop van Bennekom and Gert Jonkers, the editors who had just launched BUTT magazine, when they started talking about making a lesbian counterpart. “It was really this drunk bar moment where you’re making plans, and are like: oh my god, let’s make a lesbian version of this, more as a joke,” says Gysel, speaking from her office in Brussels. “But then we did it, so voila!”

The result was KUTT, a cult dyke zine that is now rarer than rare. Where BUTT had quickly become a phenomenon for its frank, funny and sexually direct portrait of gay male life, KUTT asked a simple question: “Why isn’t [there] all that also for lesbians?”

During its comet-like run between 2002 and 2003, KUTT published just three issues, featuring it-girl actor Chloë Sevigny, acclaimed writer and activist Eileen Myles, experimental filmmaker K8 Hardy, and feminist queer icon Merrill Nisker, aka Peaches, to name a few. Its signature lilac pages were filled with photography by Ryan McGinley, Collier Schorr, Viviane Sassen, Martien Mulder and many more. Capturing a burgeoning queer scene, KUTT was, according to Myles, “evidence of how cool the new generation of lesbians who were around at that time were”.

24 years later, a compendium of KUTT is being reproduced in facsimile by IDEA, bringing all three issues together in one volume. “Most people who want them cannot afford them. Of all the rare and out-of-print books and magazines IDEA has written about, KUTT is the most popular,” says IDEA co-founder David Owen, the D in IDEA.

The magazine’s name – a derivative of the Dutch “kut”, meaning cunt – was thought up over dinner. Its reclamation of the word now feels prescient of contemporary feminist reappropriations. “Even though BUTT and KUTT are a bit of a statement, it’s not a statement of defensiveness,” Mulder says. “It was more: this is who we are, this is what we love, this is how we have sex, this is what we talk about.”

“Around that time, I started to discover photographers who photographed real things,” Gysel says. Visually, KUTT drew on the direct, unvarnished style of photographers like Nan Goldin and Corinne Day. “I am really more interested in this kind of photography than the high-end, highly produced and elaborate.” The result was photography that felt “unstaged and very reportage-driven”, focused on “not making it look like anything other than itself”. For Mulder, that approach was partly instinctive and partly practical. “I was at the very beginning of my career,” she explains. “I didn’t know how to do it differently. I didn’t even know how big shoots worked […] So, that was just me and a camera, meeting people.”

KUTT cover star Chloë Sevigny remembers the magazine arriving at a moment when print culture felt newly experimental. “Magazines kind of ruled,” she tells Dazed. “Everyone was trying to reshape what a magazine was, every photo shoot was trying to one-up the last one and redesign the wheel. When BUTT came out in its starkness and text-heavy form that was not about fashion, per se, it was arresting, and everybody took notice.”

These days, Mulder says, “everybody’s guarded”, but back when KUTT met Sevigny, “it was just like, let’s meet up and see what happens”. Sevigny remembers “just smoking and it being very casual. Those photos are very beautiful now that I look at them”. Her hoodie was her “uniform at the time,” and The Smiths’ 45 of “Sheila Take a Bow” was her attempt at decorating the flat, complete with bedspreads thrown over the “dingy blue… stained and gross” sofas. It was not meticulously planned, nor executed by whole teams of people whose job it is to protect a carefully curated, perfectly poised image. “We just talked to the subjects, reported it, wrote it down verbatim,” Mulder says. “There [was] no polishing.”

More often than not, Mulder says, the subjects “already had a relationship with a photographer”. Rather than being commissioned from the outside, the shoots tended to come from within the same social world: “It was always in the family, or inside the friend circle.” One favourite was Ryan McGinley’s photo series Lizzy the Lezzy, which captured singer and model Lissy Trullie with the looseness and confidence of friends playing for the camera.

McGinley remembers Trullie, who he describes as “one of the most angelic gay girls downtown,” as part of a tight-knit queer nightlife scene. “We went to college together, we are still close two decades later,” McGinley tells Dazed. “We were the artsy, fashionable queer kids who loved New York nightlife. At the time, we had a gay bar crawl down Avenue A in the East Village. The Cock was our favourite bar because our friends who wrote graffiti bartended and our queer girlfriends DJ-ed. The bar felt like our clubhouse and we could drink for free.” McGinley and Trullie set up a mini trampoline in the bathroom: “Lissy jumped for about an hour under the fluorescent lights, against the tagged-up astronaut wallpaper. The photos ended up in KUTT a few months later, and she garnered lesbian worldwide fame in the before-internet-times.”

Collier Schorr’s series My Girlfriend’s Cousin Karin actually featured her girlfriend’s niece. The portraits were taken “over time, maybe a whole summer”, while Schorr was in Germany living with her girlfriend’s family. “Her niece started dating the girl from across the street. It was beautiful to see and share and support, and I was always photographing them,” Schorr remembers. “Photography is a strange brew,” she says. “Years later, family pressures created rifts. The pictures are a treasure, but maybe also led to some stress.”

KUTT’s aesthetic of ease is remarkable. Its look is inimitable because it was not really manufactured in the first place. Mulder’s Mattress Series is erotic rather than pornographic, and not without the tender impishness of an adolescent sleepover. The first two images were of Mulder and her then-girlfriend: while on holiday, they took Polaroids of each other in bed – or, rather, on it. The intimate set-up reframes the images almost entirely. Knowing they were shot through the lens of lovers makes their headless bodies feel alive again, freed from the objectification of the male gaze.

When there was little lesbian visibility, KUTT filled a gap in the landscape. Much of the project was about “talking from a lived experience”, Gysel says, addressing “what it means to be a lesbian: how do you deal with your exes? How do you build relationships? How do you come out?” Gysel was particularly interested in lives “outside of the spotlight”. “So much work is done there that goes unnoticed. Like in the Aids crisis, so many lesbians did so much work,” she says. These stories about regular women were crucial to a fuller representation of lesbian life, showing that queer lives are ordinary and varied. These women love, work, hang out, write, play and have sex.

“KUTT was really curious about the peculiar and the specific of each person,” Mulder says. At the core of the project was a desire to be as honest as possible – an impulse Gysel also found in Eileen Myles’s writing. She describes Myles’s work as “an honest story of their struggles; the alcohol, drug problems,” adding, “I was also not very sober in those days, so I could click.” When Gysel met Myles a few years ago, the two spent the day together, going for lunch and attending a pro-Palestine demonstration. “It was so fun,” Gysel says. Myles, contacted for comment, offers a neat encapsulation of why KUTT remains so compelling: “honesty is the most attractive quality in a living thing.” Like Myles’s writing, KUTT does not beat around the bush.

For Myles, publications like KUTT remain “culty ways of sharing information – conversations, pictures, drawings… most importantly, they are cause for a party. Since about the 90s, parties and art events are about the only queer trans gatherings that occur other than political actions or memorials.”

KUTT’s closure in 2003 was not abrupt, but considered. By then, those involved felt the magazine had run up against the limits of its own format. “Maybe in the end, it felt too much like a derivative and I think Gysel was sensitive to that, and we were sensitive to that as well,” van Bennekom says. Gysel felt similarly. “KUTT didn’t fully represent lesbian culture as it was at that moment,” she reflects. “I felt we first had to make something that had more visibility, that was a bit more uplifting.” The straight-shooting sexual aspect – so central to BUTT – “was quite hard to translate to a lesbian context,” Gysel says. Van Bennekom agrees that “lots of lesbian culture was left a little bit in the shadows”, adding, “it’s always hard to create a world that doesn’t exist yet. I think the format of the magazine was sort of invented for the gay male identity. And maybe less so for the lesbian woman.”

“It feels very far away, in a way,” says Gysel, reflecting on what the return of KUTT means. “I have mixed feelings about it. I have fond memories of the time making it. The aftermath, I'm not so sure… the fact that we were women, we didn't have all the chances that BUTT had.”

Maybe now, van Bennekom suggests, people are more ready and willing to engage with something as honestly queer as KUTT. Maybe its “in-your-face visibility” will resonate with another generation. “We’re living in a much more feminine moment than 25 years ago,” he observes. “I think that’s a big shift. Also, the cis gay male world is 200% more feminine than it was, because there was always a bit of a stigma around femininity. And now femininity, it's very much embraced.”

As Sevigny says, “It is a nice object, and it is important.” Sparse and coolly understated, this may sum it up. KUTT’s photography and design alone are enrapturing; the magazine as a whole is something more. It is as much about sex as it is about love, as much about love as daily life, as much about daily life as cult celebrity, and as much about cult celebrity as erotic comics. As Gysel wrote in the magazine’s reprint, “It took 25 years to get here! Long live the lesbians!”

KUTT is published by IDEA and is available here now.