“The Men Were His Life”: Inside the Sordid World of Photographer David Hurles

Last month, a long-overdue survey of the work of David Hurles, better known as Old Reliable, opened at MASS Gallery in Austin, Texas, the first such exhibition since John Waters presented the photographer’s work in New York City 15 years ago. As comprehensive as it is sexy, Toxic Masculinity: The Old Reliable World of David Hurles includes everything from mug shots and old driver’s licenses to video installations and debt records. Of course, there are dicks too, of every size and color, immortalized by Hurles’ wobbly camera. “He would be so excited shooting them that he would start to shake from the excitement, but also from the fear,” says Dian Hanson, a long-time friend and confidant of Hurles’ who curated the show with Beth Schindler and Christopher Trout. Last week, Hanson and Schindler got on a call with our editor-in-chief Mel Ottenberg to talk about the retrospective, as well as Hurles’s friendship with Bob Mizer and his particular fetish for straight, blue-collar, slightly sociopathic male models.

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MEL OTTENBERG: Hey, Beth.

BETH SCHINDLER: How’s it going?

OTTENBERG: Are you guys together?

DIAN HANSON: It’s Dian. I’m in L.A.

OTTENBERG: Oh, hey, Dian. So nice to talk to you. Thank you for talking to me about this David Hurles show.

HANSON: So you’re a fan of the man?

OTTENBERG: I’m a long-time fan of the man. Speeding came out in 2005, so it’s the 20th anniversary of my being a fan of the man, David Hurles.

HANSON: And then his next one, Outcast, came out actually after he’d had the stroke. I helped him with that. He was working on that at the time when he had the stroke. And so all that info in the back about the models, I had to drag out of him when he was lying there, half-paralyzed. I was trying to figure out what he was saying and holding up photos for him.

OTTENBERG: Wow. Let’s go backwards a second. When did he really come into being Old Reliable?

HANSON: He started taking photographs in 1968, right on the cusp of when it became legal to show full male nudity.  He had come out to San Francisco and immediately hooked up with the head of the Mattachine Society. And he did a little modeling, because he had a huge penis. Just an enormous penis. Wasn’t much of a model otherwise, but he had this huge dick. And he was able to suck his own dick. So that was one of the first things he did. He was asked by Lynn Womack, the 300-pound albino who produced a lot of physique magazines back in the 1950s, to do a book on self-sucking. David had no idea how to find other guys who could suck their own dicks, so he just photographed himself. And around 1971, I think, he picked up the name Old Reliable.

OTTENBERG: Before 1970, his real sexual taste had been solidified as specifically sociopathic, straight, blue-collar types. Right?

HANSON: Yeah. I did extensive interviews with him because I met him when I was doing The Big Penis Book–

OTTENBERG: Dian, wait. We’ve just got to shout out The Big Penis Book. My bookshelf is plentiful, but I really, truly think this is one of the best books on there. Do you think this is your best book?

HANSON: It’s my best-selling book.

OTTENBERG: Okay.

HANSON: My best-selling book of all time. I became aware of David when I was working at Mavety Media, where all the gay magazines were made. I was making straight magazines there. They made Honcho, Playguy, Inches, all of that. We got some photo sets in, in the mid-90s, and guys were all gathered around saying, “Who is this guy? What kind of person does this?” The envelope was dirty, so they all thought he was just some real low-level scroungy guy. And I remember one of the guys saying, “Well, I like those guys too. I’d like to do them if there was an armed guard at the door.” And that was how it was for David. He should have had an armed guard at the door.

OTTENBERG: Did his pictures do well in Honcho and things like that, even though they figured the Old Reliable guy was probably disgusting?

HANSON: No, because that was near the end of his career. He started really spinning out of control with meth and medical problems. And the guys were just eating him alive by then. They were coming in the window. They were coming in the door. He had lost his beautiful home in Los Angeles to them.

OTTENBERG: Wow.

HANSON: They were stealing the mail out of the neighbor’s mailboxes. His career started to falter, and in 1989, he defaulted on his mortgage and the bank took his home. From that point on, he went and lived in a trailer down in Long Beach with his last partner, who’s just a bad, stupid straight boy. And that guy kept making friends and they just stole everything he had until he came home one day and there was nothing. There was zero in the trailer. They took his furniture, they took his bed. And he then moved up here to within a few blocks of where I work, which is where I finally tracked him down in a very, very smelly room.

OTTENBERG: Wow.

HANSON: I knew I wanted him in The Big Penis Book because I’d just been so curious about him, so I managed to track him down. And again I was told, “He’s crazy. He’s in prison. He won’t talk to anyone.” Blah, blah, blah, blah. I was determined to meet him. And when I finally got a phone number, he answered the phone. He was really pleasant. I went over to his stinky, horrible, crammed-up apartment. He was just this fabulous storyteller. We just clicked right away. He was living on $1,100 a month from Social Security at that point. And I started giving him $100 a week just to keep him going and doing interviews with him as a reason to be giving him this money. And then when he had the stroke, two years into our friendship, the kid he was living with called me up because he did not want to have power of attorney. And they needed someone to take power of attorney to turn off the ventilator because they said he was going to die, that the stroke was so catastrophic it was not survivable. So I took power of attorney to tell them to let him die. We took the ventilator off and sat there and he just kept breathing. And then Christopher Trout, who’s also involved in this show, came down. He had met him before a couple of times and interviewed him. He was reading him a dirty book and David’s eyes opened.

OTTENBERG: I love that.

HANSON: He had no health insurance, so I called up Paul Reubens, who was also a huge fan. And he came right down to the hospital and walked around up there and said “hello” to everyone and thanked the nurses and talked like Pee-wee Herman. And that was what kept him in a decent hospital.

OTTENBERG: So this was right when the stroke happened, in 2007?

HANSON: Yeah, 2008 actually. Because he didn’t die, and then they shipped him out to a nursing home in Orange County. At that point, we didn’t even know if he had a brain left.  I got on the train and went down there and walked into his room and they had taken the tube out. And his first words were, “Get me out of this hell hole.” So I’m like, “Damn, the boy’s still there.”

OTTENBERG: Right.

HANSON: I took care of him for 14-and-a-half years. He and I made a will early on. He wanted everything left to that kid he’d been living with, with the idea that I would sell his archive to somebody. He kept thinking that Paul would buy it or John Waters, or some other fan would buy it, but they really were not in a position for that. I just took care of it, moved it from space to space to space. I started organizing it and I have it all organized now, which made it possible for us to put a show together.

OTTENBERG: Fantastic. So tell me about the show that you, Beth, and Christopher have put together.

HANSON: Beth, do you want to talk about the organization?

SCHINDLER: We’re at MASS Gallery, which is a gay-run, volunteer, nonprofit art space here in Austin. I’m friends with Christopher, and we both reached out to Dian about possibly collaborating on this. It happened pretty organically and pretty quickly. We’ve been working on it for about a year. It’s a showcase of most of his life. It’s audio, it’s video, it’s installation, it’s old driver’s licenses, mug shots. There’s prison correspondence with pen pals there. There’s arrest records. It’s debt records, model intake forms. It’s like a little bit of everything. 

OTTENBERG: Wow. The pictures look so good. So Dian, was organizing this thing your COVID project?

HANSON: Well, David was a tweaker himself. He was shooting meth and that’s why he had the stroke. Being a tweaker, he was a hyper-active organizer and writer. He has daily diaries going back three decades. He wrote up descriptions of every model and all the crazy stuff that they did and did to his life. His writing is really, really interesting. It’s full of humor and jaw-dropping stories. It’s like a textbook of psychopathy. And men, young men who, as he would always say, “have no futures.” He was fascinated by the way they were just barreling through life with no thought to the future, no thought to their own survival. Now, all the written material is in one place. But he has everything and he has thousands of audio cassettes. He really liked to hear them talk. So he started leaving them alone in a room with a tape recorder. They talk about their hustling and their hatreds and what they would like to do to him often, how they would like to kill him. And he would not listen to it until they left so they felt free to speak. So yeah, everything is there, and it was hard to know what to include because there’s simply so much.

OTTENBERG: They’re such great photographs of such exciting men. What are the years that he’s really killing it? Mid-’70s to very early ’80s, is that his prime time?

HANSON: I would say the ’80s, start to finish. He got down how to do it, but also in the ’70s he kept moving back and forth between San Francisco and L.A. When I cleaned out his hoarded-up little room there, I found he had this horrible homemade computer. I had the hard drive downloaded into my computer. When he died, I thought, “Well, let’s see what was in his computer.” And again, it’s just fascinating stuff, like a list of every place he lived from the time he got to San Francisco up until the time he had the stroke. He lived in 42 places in that period. So during the 1970s, he was going back and forth so frequently between L.A. and San Francisco that he didn’t have the chance to really organize his scouting technique. But once he was in L.A. permanently, he knew where to go.

OTTENBERG: And what was his scouting technique?

HANSON: Cruising. Cruising out on the streets, going down to Santa Monica Boulevard to look for the hustlers, going to the Gold Cup, which was like a hustler diner hangout. He was not a drinker, but he knew the bars to go to. He would just go around and make this circuit. And he always had some kind of showy car—a Lincoln, a Cadillac. The cars were invariably borrowed or stolen by a model and wrecked. But he’d drive around the block and document, refusing to give up on a particular guy until he got him in the car.

OTTENBERG: So he would be saying to the guys, “Hey, I want you to come over to my house so I can photograph you.”

HANSON: As he said, it began with saying, “Get into my car, because I want to have sex with you.” The photography was secondary. Then he moved to the photography being the first thing and the sex coming after that.

OTTENBERG: I love that intro that he wrote in Outcast, where he talks about how sometimes it was like some hot guy with his family in the car outside waiting for him. And these guys would go in, fuck him, do meth, and take pictures and video. How important was the video compared to the photos to David?

HANSON: The video was a good source of income for him, but it also required a lot more of the models. I would say he spent the same amount of time on video as photos, but it was less important to him personally because, after the stroke, he was willing to sell off his video, but didn’t really want to sell off any of his photographs or his tapes until his death.

OTTENBERG: Was there any inspiration from any particular place for the videos? I ask because I was just watching some videos today and they really reminded me of some of Warhol’s Blue Movies, which were pretty much unseen before they were in the Museum of Sex last fall. 

HANSON: When I would talk to him about well-known movies or well-known photographers, he never knew what anything was. He was completely isolated. The men were his life. He did not go to the movies. He did not read books. He listened to Peter, Paul, and Mary, they were his favorite band. He had some books that I found in his storage unit, but they would largely be tech books because he was a very, very early adopter of computers and this and that. His whole life was these men.

OTTENBERG: And how many men do you think there would be per year in the ’80s?

HANSON: 300? Like Bob Mizer, he wanted to shoot every day, and if he didn’t shoot every day, it was a loss to him. They were as much of a stimulant to him as the meth was. And meth was just perfect for him because he lived on terror, he lived on adrenaline. And so the meth kind of amplified that and was also a bond with his models.

OTTENBERG: Was he looking for acceptance from anyone?

HANSON: No. He drove away all of his friends. Most of his old friends abandoned him. They got disgusted. They didn’t like his drug use. They didn’t like how he just gave up everything for these guys. He really did not care. The only people he wanted to like him were the models, of course, and the people who would pay him money. But he was also this very sweet, romantic guy. And one of the things that I found when I went through his hard drive—I’m sorry, this makes me sad—was that he kept copies of every letter he ever sent. And he had written letters to people about me and said, “We’re extremely copacetic. We like the same guys. I know that we are going to be friends for a long, long time.” I was really his sole friend. I was the only one who visited him for all those years in the nursing home.

OTTENBERG: Wow, that’s beautiful.

HANSON: I mean, he was a very lovable guy. He dealt with psychopaths all the time so he had to have a certain kind of warm, supportive, non-confrontational attitude. He didn’t criticize people. I could talk to him about anything. I wouldn’t have spent that many days in a nursing home for anyone else.

OTTENBERG: When putting together this show, Dian, did you know what some of his favorite photos or models were?

HANSON: Yeah. After he went to the nursing home and we really didn’t have money to pay for the storage unit, John Waters stepped in and arranged a show for him at his gallery in New York. And we made, I don’t know, $12,500 something, selling stuff to take care of him. But when we were preparing for that show, I brought in his catalogs so that he could point out pictures he really liked and models he really liked. Mongoose, on the cover of Speeding.

OTTENBERG: Yes.

HANSON: He really liked that Mongoose picture. And you say, “Well, that’s certainly not the hottest picture.” But it was hot to him because he liked Mongoose and it just had that threat factor. Some of the models who are the most popular were not his favorites. When you open up the chapter in The Penis Book, the guy who’s on the gallery poster too. I love that guy.

SCHINDLER: Oh, Bill Morgan?

HANSON: Yeah, Bill Morgan. It’s the same guy.

OTTENBERG: I mean, come on. This fucking guy.

HANSON: He’s just so hot. But for David, the problem was that he was gay. So as attractive as he was, it just dropped him down a few notches. David loved Powerful Pierre.

OTTENBERG: His giant penis ruined his life.

HANSON: Yeah, his giant penis ruined his life, but it certainly wasn’t as giant as David’s.

OTTENBERG: This guy on the cover, is that Gentleman Dan?

SCHINDLER: Yeah, in the jockstrap.

HANSON: Mm-hmm.

OTTENBERG: Oh my god. This fucking picture with the socks.

HANSON: There are pictures of Gentleman Dan that we couldn’t put in the show. Now, Gentleman Dan actually came to visit David the week he died. He had not seen him in all the time since he had the stroke and he came and was horrified. But he was crying and telling David he loved him and he’d become the man he wanted him to be and all of that. And Gentleman Dan said that he was 19 when he started modeling for David. Bullshit—he was much younger. But there are so many pictures of Gentleman Dan.

OTTENBERG: These old pictures really sum up the magic of David Hurles and Old Reliable. Super macho, super nasty. But really, he just looks so great. I mean, it’s just very convincing. By the way, I would go for guys like Spider if they existed anymore, but they’re all dead. No one’s as cool as that.

HANSON: Yes. Spider was from Arkansas as I recall. That was one that he wrote about that he had to keep going around the block until he got him in the car. There are a lot of pictures of Spider. One time I asked David, “Why are so many of your best photos out of focus?” He said, “Because I would be trembling too hard.”

OTTENBERG: Oh my god.

HANSON: He would be so excited shooting them that he would start to shake from the excitement, but also from the fear. In the brain, the centers for fear and excitement are right side by side, so things that frighten us can also arouse us. It’s not uncommon for men to get erections in a state of extreme fear. And David just combined all that at an early age.

OTTENBERG: This one is another absolute favorite and it connects with what you’re saying, because the meth face in this picture is so hardcore.

HANSON: That’s Mike Burger. There are so many pictures of Mike Burger. David wrote that Mike Burger ended up on a fish processing boat in Alaska and married an Eskimo.

OTTENBERG: Yes, I read that in Speeding last night. That’s incredible. This might be my favorite picture in the book. I mean, have you heard this from other people, that they’ve been really influenced by him? More than just liking him, I’ve made a million moodboards with him.

HANSON: Oh, I know. 

OTTENBERG: That real man vibe. 

HANSON: I mean, the two that I know personally were Paul Reubens and John Waters. And John Waters wrote about him in his book Role Models.

OTTENBERG: What a great book.

HANSON: Yeah, wonderful, wonderful book. He came out and met David at his horrible filthy apartment and he had him come outside, because it was hard to take the smell. He and the guy who was living there just piled their dirty clothes by the front door with the idea that they were going to get washed sometime, but they didn’t. If he hadn’t had the stroke, it’s hard to imagine how much further down he could have gone at that point. He was gluing his teeth in when he came to see me, so he always looked like he had a full mouth of teeth, but he’d lost them to meth. Then he’d had them capped. And then the caps had fallen off.

OTTENBERG: Going back for one second, what do you think the soundtrack of these photo shoots are? Is it “If I Had a Hammer” or is it Slayer or is it both? I really need to know.

SCHINDLER: I’ve been playing some Peter, Paul and Mary, which I think is really blowing people’s minds. They’re like, “Why is this music happening?” And I just get to just tell them, “This is what David listened to.” And there’s an audio recording of Gentleman Dan underneath the poster of him where he starts singing that Foghat song, “Feel Like Making Love.”

OTTENBERG: Wait, wait, wait. Do you have a full playlist?

SCHINDLER: Yeah, I’ve got a playlist.

OTTENBERG: Oh my god. So how has it been going with the show? What are people’s reactions?

SCHINDLER: I’ve been blown away. Given all the circumstances—where we are in the world and in the state—it’s been shocking. People have been incredibly moved. It’s been a really emotional show, which I think was unexpected. I was holding my breath until we opened. Then on opening night, people were in tears. His cremains box is here as soon as you walk in the door, so there’s a feeling of him being present. And I feel like people feel seen, they feel heard, they’re able to relate. There’s been a lot of confessing happening here, which has actually been wonderful. I’ve been working gallery hours a lot, and people come up to the counter where I’m sitting just wanting to tell me about their experiences—with sex work, being with people who aren’t out of the closet, with navigating blue-collar drug addiction, being on the DL, all the things this work compacts into. They’re seeing the humanity in this work and in his relationship with these men, as opposed to it just being a salacious display of naked men. They’re very moved by the experience and by getting to be close to these archival pieces in an accessible space. It’s really different from having it in some institution or giant museum behind glass. People get to be immersed in it and feel like they’re a part of this in some way.

OTTENBERG: Who are the quintessential models that those bins would be filled with?

HANSON: Tico was a perennial favorite. Everyone loves Tico, except me. I don’t care for Tico. Springer lived with him off and on. He was a big favorite. Kermit, who he used all the time, who was just a sweet-looking guy with a huge penis.

OTTENBERG: There’s a lot of Springer in this book.

HANSON: Yeah, there’s a lot of Springer. Springer was there. Springer lived in his garage with his 15-year-old wife and their children at one point.

OTTENBERG: Kermit’s dick is huge. Where’s Tico now?

HANSON: Tico is probably still okay because as he said, Tico was just a really good guy. He was a good human being and he was always employed, this and that. But he did like to model. A lot of these guys were modeling not because they had to, but because they wanted to be appreciated. And being straight, women will not appreciate a man the way a man will appreciate a man. They will not get the same props from a woman. However, the guy who he had the most sex with in his life over the years was no one you would ever expect. And now I’m trying to remember his name.

SCHINDLER: Eddie Perez.

HANSON: It was Eddie Perez.

SCHINDLER: Yeah. I’ve got a great picture of Eddie Perez up right next to David’s desk where it’s like him by the Christmas tree and I think he’s got his kind of business casual outfit on. It’s really cute.

HANSON: Eddie Perez, I found his collected arrest records and David was always bailing him out. It would always just be bullshit things they’d take him in for. Eddie Perez was 5’4”. Eddie Perez was also Bob Mizer’s most frequent sex partner. And yet again, he was straight, supposedly.

OTTENBERG: So Eddie Perez is a very Bob Mizer type of guy. What’s the cross-section between these two? David Hurles is later than Bob Mizer, right?

HANSON: Yeah. When David arrived in L.A, in like 1970, he went right down to Bob Mizer’s compound and Bob invited him in and gave him tips and they talked. And then Bob gave him a model to take with him and gave him fatherly advice. He said, “Don’t give him too much because he’s always going to want more the next time, and he’ll always be worth less the next time.” They talked on the phone every day through the years, as long as Bob Mizer was alive. They shared models and gossip back and forth. They shared warnings back and forth. Bob had his regular line that people would be talking on, but he had also rigged it up. He had a second line where another caller could listen in. Bob would get a model on the line and talk to the model so that David could listen and they would sort of share their arousal.

OTTENBERG: Wow. What have I not asked you about that you think is important for people to know about David Hurles and this show in particular?

HANSON: As Beth was saying, it’s how extremely personal it all is. David was one of the first people to sign up for the Neptune Society back in the 1980s, and therefore he only paid $75 or something to be cremated some time way in the future, and they honored that. I had the box, the very simple plastic box that the Neptune Society gave me with his ashes. We have that in the show. Also, David was never thinking of the money. He was thinking of what aroused him personally when he took these photos. So when you look at the models and say, “Why are they different than other photographers? It’s because everyone was directed by David to his own maximum arousal. So when they make a fist, that’s because that excited David. When their hands are dirty, that excited David. When they’re looking down at him, it’s because that excited him. When they’re blowing cigar smoke, that’s because that excited him. He communicated his excitement to these men, and even though they were straight men, they picked up on it and had a visual relationship with him as a photographer.

SCHINDLER: One of the things that’s so powerful about this work too is that it really is this point of view. You’re seeing things through David’s eyes in a way, the camera is coming through him, and I don’t think that translates for a lot of other photography work that I see. You feel like you’re inhabiting his brain space in this way at the same time. 

OTTENBERG: Without a doubt. Well guys, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. It was really a pleasure.

SCHINDLER: Thank you so much.

HANSON: Pleasure talking to you. Bye-bye.