A nod to Colt Studios

I came across this picture of Steve Kelso inside a vintage 1993 Colt calendar I recently purchased. I have never seen this particular photo of Steve, and I kind of thought I had seen them all. The calendar itself was quite a find, but in a way, this little insert was even better. Colt has always had pretty impeccable taste in their promotional material, as evidenced by the other two version of their calendar inserts I have amassed over the years--featuring Stevie again and Pete Kuzak. Colt does have talented people doing their art direction.

The Gay Book Part 2, more Steve Kelso

As I continued to mangle my old Colt magazines and paste them into my new book, my fascination with Steve Kelso would become apparent to any casual observer. I once described him as looking like a Hungarian plumber to a friend, but believe me I mean that as a compliment. He's masculine, hairy, not too pretty, not too big and has that butch eagle tattoo. Once upon a time he had a website called "Hairway to Steven", but it's long since defunct. And Steve, I'm still waiting for that T-shirt I ordered in 1999, The next two pages weren't as pretty Feng Shui wise as the first but with all that Steve you can't really go wrong.

The Gay Book

So anyone who has followed this blog from the start (all 4 of you), knows that originally it was expo-ing a book in which I would paste my male-focused straight porn into as a closeted teen. The point being that so I could kind of jerk of to pictures of guys without feeling like so much of a fag. Obviously this is something I've gotten over. Somewhere in the interim between masturbating to pictures of hottish guys fucking girls and writing a blog about a gay porn there came "the gay book". The main difference between the two "projects" is that A) I knew I was gay and was relatively comfortable about it when I did my second cut and paste project. B) I had developed my "gay sensibility" enough to not use "Post-it"s and masking tape to hold my craft together. This version of my insanity was conceived and realized during a bizarre weekend where I was stranded in Illinois. I had to go to central Illinois for a grad school interview and there was one of those completely inexplicable travel restrictions that reduced the fare by 500$ if I stayed over a Saturday night, even though the interview was on a Thursday. So I had this completely unreasonable amount of downtime in a weird boring city (which btw I would ultimately spend 4 years in). So my solution to deal with that downtime was to bring along several bottles of Rush and a bunch of porn mags to try and condense them into a volume I could hide in plain sight. My volume of choice was this issue of Muscle and Fitness: It's no secret that muscle mags have a homoerotic aspect, particularly if you lean towards brawny types like I do. When no real porn was available, I've gone there. So it seemed like a logical medium to work with. The "spreads" that I came up with were hybrids of the porn and the muscleheads already in the magazine. I think I did okay aesthetically considering how much beer and poppers I consumed during my odd Illinois bender. The first two pages were this ad for some weight loss pill: And the lovely Steve Kelso, from a Colt ad: Not too different huh? More to come....