Jop and Gert, Fantastic Man's founders. By Paul Bellaart

Fantastic Man’s 9th issue with author Brett Easton Ellis on the cover is just out. Ironically it’s one of the least gay men’s fashion mags there is. Ironic because it’s put together by Dutch guys Gert Jonkers and Jop Bennekom, the founders of Butt the most fashionable fag mag ever. You should read Fantastic Man because it relies less on boring rich people stuff than massively in-depth interviews with the sort of guys worth looking up to: Writers, artists, publishers, the Mayor of Berlin, or the slightly mad sociology professor who edits Italian Rolling Stone. As for Butt before its launch in 2001 gay mags were bizarrely tame and no way as sex filled as FHM or Loaded - unless you counted the prostitutes ads in the back. In most gay mags forced boys to read about ketamine, bad house and boy-bands. Butt instead mixed hard-ons with wordy interviews, showed being gay didn’t have to be gay, and is also the reason you’re wearing a plaid shirt right now.

VICE: Didn’t you and Jop meet in an Amsterdam leather bar?

Gert Jonkers: We knew each other already but yeah we did have all our early editorial meetings surrounded by leather men.

Speaking of fetish remember the issue with the guy who ate poo on his pasta?

Oh yeah the toilet cleaner with a weird dedication to his post. We always wanted to cover all sorts of homosexuals from the super-interesting, sick, and outrageous to the super boring. In interviews we’ve been massaged, I had my toe sucked by the writer Edmund White, and I liked when artist Wolfgang Tillmans and REM’s Michael Stipe interviewed each other.

Neither of your mags bang on hysterically about having loads of money and spending it like an idiot just because everyone else is, they always seemed pretty real…

The Dutch are pretty blunt, super direct, and unashamed; we’re not scared to ask questions. When we started Butt we had a dogma, we’d never translate text for example, we wanted Butt to be a direct reflection of reality, we wanted to explore a mindset, we’re against lifestyle we don’t even use the word cool; it’s banned in the office.

Fantastic Man, unlike most men’s fashion magazines, isn’t filled with quasi-paedophilic images of 16-year-olds, but the sort of guys who have their stuff worked out, who fucked shit up and came out on top. Isn’t it?

Right - it’s a matter of having heroes, you can’t really idolize a beautiful 16-year-old model, he’s just not going to be that interesting. Being super-focused and maybe having moved beyond searching for an identity is inspiring, being a grown-up Fantastic Man means having figured out your own way of living .

Name some Fantastic Men?

There’s a real wide range from former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to Malcolm Mclaren.

Your Dad was a Vicar. How did he feel about Butt?

He actually died a long time ago but he loved dirty books.

Finally did the success of Butt turn you into a super stud?

It definitely became a little bit easier.

Thanks very much

DARYOUSH HAJ-NAJAFI