Move over, BUTT.

Up-and-coming Portland photographer Sushuma has a hot new men’s magazine hitting the streets and the internets this weekend that could rock the international erotic mag industry right out of its sleepy sling.

The new quarterly magazine, which celebrates male eroticism in photos and commentary from around the world, is called FLIT – after the 1950’s slang deragatory term for homosexual, most famously used in J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye” – and debuts this weekend online, Sushuma says, adding that he’s got plans for the glossy mag to reach audiences across the globe.

“I’m definitely excited,” Sushuma said yesterday by phone, as he hustled to bring together the final elements of FLIT’s 148-page debut issue, which the photographer designed and edited wholly on his own. Of his impetus for founding the mag, he says he “wanted a place for artists to express themselves freely,” noting a particular frustration with the censorship constraints of social networking sites or other places that artists congregate online.

So he decided, in typical Portland fashion, to go DIY with his dream, and started getting the word out about FLIT in May of 2008 through MySpace and his own new FLIT mag networking site. He began accepting contributions in June, and was surprised at the range and volume of responses he got to his call for submissions, not to mention the international scope: the debut issue features 42 contributors from about a dozen countries, including France, Italy, Switzerland and Poland. There are some Portland contributors among them, too: former Sissyboy turned manic queer artist-about-town Lee Kyle and emerging fashion photog Rudy Valdez.

As to whether Sushuma sees FLIT as a specifically gay mag, the editor says he’s “not identifying it as a gay magazine or queer. There are a couple of texts that make reference to gay men, but it’s not in-your-face-this-is-gay. It is what it is.” He added that although FLIT is definitely a men’s publication, he does have women contributors, and hopes the mag will “appeal to women who enjoy men’s bodies as well as men who enjoy men’s bodies.”

In addition to its online debut this weekend – he’s charging 7 bucks to download the mag from the website – Sushuma says FLIT will be available soon in its hard-copy form at Portland indie media staples like Reading Frenzy and Counter Media for $15. He’s also in conversations with distributors and bookstores across the U.S. and Europe, and will print, on demand, as many copies as his international erotic audience is hungry for.

One last note: the mag’s debut issue coverboy? None other than up-and-comer indie film actor Matt Riddlehoover, the star of Steve Balderson’s controversial new film making the festival circuit rounds, “Watch Out.” The shot of Riddlehoover – contemplative, with a deflated blow up doll’s head in his hands like some type of queer Hamlet – was taken by Tennessee photog Ethan James, and selected by FLIT fans in an open vote as the image most worthy of the mag’s debut cover.

“It’s kind of cool to have someone who’s already having national exposure on the cover of the magazine,” Sushuma says. But of finally getting his mag launched after months of work – all of it, so far, unpaid – he says he’s “more relieved because it’s been such a long process to put it together – but very rewarding.”