As BUTT’s short-lived sister zine is compiled into a new book, the magazine’s former editor Jessica Gysel reflects on lesbian visibility, erotics and indie publishing
Before The L Word, there was KUTT: the short-lived sister zine to iconoclastic gay magazine BUTT. Lasting for just three issues between 2002 and 2003, the publication took BUTT’s signature pink pages and tongue-in-cheek attitude and applied them to a survey of the dyke scene in Amsterdam and beyond.
Over two decades on from its original run, copies of the magazine are scarce and in increasingly high demand. Responding to this reignited enthusiasm for the project, the contents of each zine have now been collated in a new book set to unite this cult title with a fresh generation of readers. For Jessica Gysel, KUTT’s former editor, the reissue responds to a nostalgia for tactile media among millennials and Gen Z. “I think younger people are interested in printed matter, it’s nice to make something printed in amongst this digital overload of images [on social media],” Gysel explains.
In a social media-first era, print is often seen as a rarefied, elevated medium; but KUTT is a window into an era of queer publishing that was attitude-first and proudly DIY. As Gysel confirms, the name is a cheeky take on its brother publication’s name (“‘Kutt’ is like ‘cunt’ in Dutch”) and the idea for the project wasn’t coined in a boardroom, but in a bar. “I’m good friends with the guys who make BUTT. One night, in a bar, we had this idea of making a lesbian sister version of their magazine,” she explains. “It was a bit of a joke at the beginning, but it became serious.”
So serious, in fact, that the first issue launched with a major coup: none other than perennial cool girl Chloë Sevigny, lensed by Martien Mulder, graced the cover. “I think a lot of people make magazines because they want to reach out to certain people,” Gysel laughs. “[The launch of KUTT] was definitely a perfect occasion to contact Chloë.” Gysel was able to interview the Kids actress, travelling to Paris, where she was filming. “I was such a huge fan. I think she’s straight but she’s played a lot of lesbian roles and in the interview she was quite open. It was a fun conversation,” she recalls. “I knew she liked The Smiths, so I brought her a single by them as a gift.”
The inside pages of KUTT are equally impressive: filled with interviews with the likes of Eileen Myles and Peaches, crammed with illustrations exploring sapphic sex lives in graphic detail, and featuring photographers who have gone on to shape the landscapes of fashion and art. Among the standout visuals is the spread My Girlfriend’s Cousin Karin by the American photographer Collier Schorr. The series is imbued with an understated tenderness and the kiss of youth, and spans different images of Schorr’s cousin and their then-girlfriend; a masc/femme couple wrapped up in bed or reclining on a bench in moments of quiet intimacy.
But among the best-known works to be featured within KUTT’s three issues are Ryan McGinley’s portraits of Lizzy McChesney (also known as Lissy Trullie). These infamous images show McChesney jumping, naked, on a trampoline in front of a wall plastered with graffiti and space-themed wallpaper in the toilets of NYC gay bar The Cock. These shots burst with an uninhibited, frenetic energy, and have become some of McGinley’s best-known work. “I love that shoot, you can really see that [McGinley and McChesney] were friends,” Gysel says.
There’s also a set of erotic images from a young Viviane Sassen that pulse with the candour and confrontational sexuality of a before-its-time American Apparel ad. A female sitter sits, in various states of undress, and stares down the camera as her presumed lover, face out of shot, wraps their limbs around her body in surrealist contortions. “Viviane is super successful now, but then she was just starting as a photographer,” Gysel says. “We featured a lot of artists at the beginning of their careers, and now it’s fun to see their earlier work and uninhibited interviews.”
Many might feel that KUTT came to an end prematurely. But the zine proved an invaluable experimentation ground for a cohort of queer creatives and for Gysel herself, who went on to establish the long-running queer magazine Girls Like Us. Now, she just hopes that this new book can fall into the right hands, or Instagram feed, in order to inspire a new cohort of queer editors and zine-makers. “I’m curious to see how people will react to it, and what will come out of this moment,” she says. “It would be really nice if it will inspire some people to continue KUTT, or to make other magazines. There’s an opportunity to make something more subversive and radical”
KUTT FASCIMILE is published by IDEA and is out on 21 May 2026.
