Deified gay porn star Colby Keller announced several months ago that he’d be kicking off a new chapter of his life without any of the earthly possessions he came to amass in the last ten years.
Thanks to an unceremonious eviction notice he attributes to the sweeping gentrification of his former Baltimore neighborhood, the Texas native revealed that his “well-fucked ass” had been kicked out on the street back in April. His next adventure was planned to be a pilgrimage further west, one that couldn’t accommodate his “many treasures.”
In order to rid himself of his possessions, Keller staged a cheeky “POT-latch” in his apartment on April 20th (420), where he invited fans to come and take his things:
I’ve initiated a project I’m calling “Everything But Lenin” (a partial pun– dumb– on the sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond”). I intend to give everything I own away for free, everything except a large metal plaque of Lenin I bought off the black market in Ukraine thanks to Ebay. Each exchange comes with a handwritten drawing/document declaring the piece a work of art (both the document and the exchange it represents). The only thing I ask in return is a photograph together with the object(s) of your choosing.
Art often shies from the implications of transparency. Obfuscation captures greater intensity. A constitution of unwritten laws governs our collective aesthetic temperament– appearance over insistence. That said: every rule should be broken. I’ve embedded another “utopian clause” in the project that deserves a concise explanation:
His ambitious goal to find a “buyer” to purchase the entire building and turn it into a utopian artist collective ultimately failed, so he began giving away literally everything he owned. His smart phone, his wallet, his computer, all of his clothes.
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This week, Colby’s life/art project reaches a new height as he gives away his Instagram account. On Tuesday, a female named Dena Jones uploaded a selfie to his account with the caption “Sorry to disappoint, but I own this account now. Stay if you like, everyone is welcome.”
Lord knows where Colby Keller is headed next. Let’s just hope he at least stays in porn.
Update: Colby says his former Instagram account has been “removed for violating terms of service” since Dena took over.
Dena's Instagram was removed for violating terms of service. . . Facebook/Instagram are opponents of communalism. http://t.co/OfIVt7mIMB
— Colby Keller (@colbykeller) June 6, 2014
babybabybaby
He can give me that hot bod….
Nowuvedoneit
@babybabybaby: I think he has to a great many people. Not s!ut shaming just saying. Maybe if he applied himself more to his work he’d have more money? I don’t know just thinking out loud.
sfbeast
I have a feeling someone might want to offer him free room and board. Just till he gets back on his feet, you know.
Tackle
Being evicted and giving away all of your possessions that you have amassed in the last ten yrs except one. And it’s for a new life art project? Sounds like he’s depressed and going through a life crisis due to being evicted.
Phillip
@babybabybaby: Had the pleasure of attending and grabbing more than a few things. Sadly his body wasn’t up for grabs, but handshakes and hugs were up for the taking. He was such a kind and generous sweetie pie. Hope the road treats him well.
Maximilian
Why is Queerty obsessed with this effeminate ‘weird without a beard’ hobo ?!?
carey579
^ So,
He is a HOBO both lookwise and literally 😀
robirob
Getting rid of all your posessions in combination of being evicted? That doesn’t sound good. What happened to all the money he made or makes with gay porn?
barkomatic
I hope this wasn’t inspired by a reading of “Into the Wild”.
Alan down in Florida
@ robirob They still make money in gay porn? That’s a surprise with all the free stuff floating around online.
mz.sam
Kolby is one among the small stable of hot fourty-something porn models. Hope he continues his career.
jwrappaport
“Obfuscation captures greater intensity”? The fashionable nonsense of radical chic.
Obfuscation doesn’t help a writer capture greater intensity at all – that’s exactly the opposite of what the word means, i.e., to render something unclear and unintelligible. What obfuscation does do, however, is allow someone so clearly devoid of inspiration and creativity to masquerade not only as an artist, but a poet too.
pinkie
He’s adorable, but I wonder if he’s a little mentally ill.
Billy Budd
I would give him a home and lots of tenderness if he came to live with me here in Brazil.
muscl954
Colby: If you need a place to crash, please contact me. Anytime. Really. I’m not kidding. Sigh.
DickieJohnson
@All the judgemental B!tches: WTF business of yours is it for Colby to do whatever he likes? For some reason, I can’t quite picture him living under a bridge, or anything like that.
Billy Budd
He is so sexy. He should have been well paid. It is a shame.
arsondude
He’s pulling a joaquin phoenix.
sejjo
Love the hairdo Dena Jones …
pickles
Jeesh- why do y’all think he’s crazy just because he doesn’t want stuff? Does your stuff really make your life better? Unlikely. Stuff is fun because the hunt is neat. The gather is kinda cool. Hoarding things just for the sake of having it- not so sexy. Good for him. Have less, very likely, smile more.
Palto
Take it from personal experience , the less stuff you have the less headaches you have. And I’m saying this as a person who has a pretty decent chunk of change.
frankpoor
@robirob: This doesn’t sound like a money issue, eviction aside (gentrification can price out even those with a modest amount in the bank)… He didn’t SELL all of his stuff. He gave it all away, as a creative experiment and in the name of letting go of material possessions.
frankpoor
@jwrappaport: I think he knows that and that was his point. What he seems to have meant was “obfuscation creates the impression of greater intensity” and it’s one of the unwritten rules he’s trying to break.
jwrappaport
@frankpoor: I don’t think that’s what he means. I think what he means is that the accessibility of art and the clarity of its creator’s message are two unwritten rules of aesthetics that ought to be broken. He uses the phrase about obfuscation as a premise to argue that there can indeed be great art that breaks those rules by being unintelligible.
He’s right to imply that there’s plenty of great art that isn’t accessible and that requires more than simply passive engagement, but the bit about obfuscation, once again, is not so much wrong as it is nonsensical. Clarity isn’t a “rule” or subjective aesthetic preference, but rather a natural product of our cognitive faculties. We can’t derive any meaning from something that is unintelligible – that’s what unintelligible means. The reason art is exciting to us and the reason we react to it is because it plays with our expectations or, what we think of as “breaking the rules.” Aesthetics is about the play of forms – you can’t have aesthetics without forms to manipulate and at least a common frame of reference that the observer can understand. It’s the same reason you can’t have poetry without an intelligible language. E. E. Cummings and Lewis Carroll are great examples of this: their work is full of deliberately misused punctuation, typographical and formatting inconsistencies, and even made-up words – yet there is no question that their work, unconventional as it is, is intelligible to any English speaker as poetry.
What he seems to be getting at is the idea that to confuse and perplex observers is somehow a virtue in the arts and some key to deeper meaning or power. This literally doesn’t make sense. It’s not an aesthetic debate, but a definitional one that seems pretty clear. To obfuscate is not to make more complex or texturally rich (say, in music). It means to deliberately make something unclear and unintelligible so that it’s harder for people to make sense of.
princess ida
From the interviews he’s given, he seems a genuinely nice guy, totally at ease with himself, and enjoying his porn career. I wish him well. As for his attractiveness, well, don’t get me started…………