Story-Portal

The first issue of Destroyer magazine dropped like a bomb in May 2006. For the first time since the 1970s, a gay magazine  dared to openly celebrate the beauty of the teenage boy, in words and pictures.
Reactions were fierce. The Swedish LGBT establishment cried out against the magazine, claiming it gave gay people a bad  name. Neo-Nazis were just as upset, and the Ombudsman for Children demanded a change in the law to make the magazine  illegal. A police investigation was instigated and Destroyer's editor Karl Andersson was summoned to an interrogation.
Gay Man's Worst Friend is not only the thrilling story of Europe's most controversial gay magazine, told from Stockholm, Prague and Berlin. It's also the story of the gay movement in the 21st century. The outraged reactions to Destroyer expose hidden power structures and show how gay identity has been steadily shrunk over recent decades, excluding ever more expressions of homosexuality.

Quote:The only God I worship is Beauty. It’s what made me create Destroyer. The magazine was a research project through which I hoped to find Ultimate Beauty – that magical force that eludes you when you approach it and runs through your fingers if you try to grab it. This is the force I tried to capture through Destroyer. It was my way of worshipping Beauty. But what is Beauty? Beauty is ubiquitous in nature and in man’s celebration of nature. It is in a flower, and in the painting of a flower that an artist creates in an attempt to understand where its beauty resides. Is it in its petals? In its stem? In its colours? Artists in all ages have tried to capture beauty by describing it. The brush follows nature’s lines as a tribute to it, an act of worship. A work of art is more than a depiction, because the artist chooses what to depict. It is impossible to depict nature in all its nuances, and it is also pointless. A work of art must be read as a map. The spectrum of colours in the petal of flower is infinite. This infinity is simplified by the artist into a single tone – yellow, for example. That is his way of attempting to capture beauty, which according to him resides in precisely that yellow tone. At best he has seen something that the rest of us have missed. His discovery will then be regarded as a revelation and the painting will become famous. Artists are explorers – they tell us things about the world that we aren’t capable of seeing ourselves. Thus, Beauty resides in nature and art is our attempt to understand it. Through artefacts like paintings and architecture we try to recreate the line of beauty which is immanent in nature. What is the golden ratio if not a vain attempt to distil this line? In a mathematical formula we hope to find the very code of beauty.