NSFW: This essay includes explicit language, images, hyperlinks, verbatim-era slurs, and graphic descriptions of sexual material.
I, Rick
Rick sits on a brown couch, naked except for a black Budweiser “King of Beers” cap and a half-burned cigar between his fingers. A car alarm bleats outside. Rick is unbothered, focused on the matter at hand. In his right hand. His eyes closed, he moans meditatively, holding command over viewers he knows are watching.
“When I cum, I want everybody to cum with me,” he says, stroking slowly. “Especially because I know you guys are watchin’ it. That makes it all the better.”
Then he grins—mischievous, menacing. “If you don’t, well then fuck you.”
It’s 1986. The tape is I, Rick. Directed by a 5’8”, unassuming former wedding photographer—a man whose models (including Rick) often called gay men “faggots.” The lens trembled when the roughest men—the ones he most craved—walked toward him.
The man behind the camera, David Hurles, known as Old Reliable, was the only person who could have captured it. I, Rick earned him an AVN nomination for Best Director. He lost to John Travis for Powertool, starring another cocksure gay-for-pay model, Jeff Stryker.
A Promise of Potency
The name Old Reliable began as marketing pragmatism. “I figured people will feel they can trust a place called Old Reliable … you wouldn’t be ripped off by Old Reliable,” Hurles told photographer Jim Stewart.
But Jack Fritscher— author and former editor of Drummer magazine—noted that “old reliable” was hustler shorthand for a dick that always works: a promise of potency, reliability, repeat business.
Hurles’s sensibility didn’t begin in a vacuum. As Fritscher observed, Hurles was “fascinated in 1963” by John Rechy’s City of Night, a semi-autobiographical novel mapping America’s underground world of hustlers, drifters, and street trade—the men Hurles would later document and desire.
The following summer, Life magazine published its landmark article “Homosexuality in America,” featuring Chuck Arnett’s now-iconic mural of leathermen inside the Tool Box—a two-page spread that “tightened the knot” in Hurles’s stomach and made San Francisco feel less like a fantasy and more a calling.
Even earlier, as a teenager in Cincinnati, he’d discovered Bob Mizer’s Physique Pictorial on a newsstand. “I came face to face with the awesome and wonderful knowledge of a place somewhere different from any place I yet knew.”
After moving to the Bay Area, Hurles placed a sex ad in The Berkeley Barb. “Oh, straight guys, you know, blow jobs,” he recalled. A nineteen-year-old, fresh out of San Quentin, answered—“beautiful, big dick, great sex,” Hurles said. When they finished, the kid pulled a gun and tried to rob him.
“Please don’t tie me up,” Hurles told him. “Bondage is not my thing.” The hustler warned he’d return and kill him if he called the police. “Of course I had no intention of doing that,” Hurles said. “As soon as he was gone, I realized I was turned on. I had to jerk off.”
That was the moment Hurles understood what truly aroused him: men who scared him. Truck drivers. Vagrants. Speed freaks. Men whose danger matched his desire.
The Audio Tapes
By 1971, Hurles had built a mail-order business selling audio tapes, pictures, and Super-8 reels to men across the country—recordings with titles like Heavy Rap with a Solitary Ex-Con and Ex-Cons: We Abuse Fags. Hurles would leave hustlers alone with a tape recorder and tell them, “You’re hustling; tell ’em about yourself, about some experiences. What you would do with the listener if he were here?”
Only after the models left would Hurles listen to the recordings. What the men recorded was often terrifying. They talked about hustling, tricks, getting high, contempt for gay men, violence—and sometimes about killing him outright.
Hurles believed them. Two were convicted of murder. Many were addicts who vanished into prisons, relapses, or back alleys. “They would kill many people, but not me,” Hurles said. “They liked me somehow, because I respected them.”
Waters later proclaimed that Hurles invented “verbal-abuse porn.” Old Reliable distributed more than 400 such tapes.
“Prison turns out some of the best trade in the country.”
Hurles filmed, photographed, fed, fucked, rescued, and was robbed by the men that most of society refused to see: parolees, speed freaks, drifters, street hustlers, vagrants. Mostly straight men needing money, drugs, rent, or thrills. He directed them to actualize his desires: naked bodies, muscles, erect cocks, hairy ass cracks, deviant machismo—and often, their sociopathy.
Before “rough-trade porn” became a search term, long before studios polished gay-for-pay into a commodity, Hurles made rough-trade porn out of the world he already lived in.
“Rough trade” refers to the tough, streetwise, often straight-identified men whose masculinity carries both sexual charge and genuine danger.
As Hurles declared to Fritscher: “Terror is my only hardon.”
Cincinnati Fireball
Hurles’s attraction to rough men began long before the camera. As he told BUTT magazine, he gravitated toward the tough kids in Cincinnati. He picked fights with the biggest boys, knowing he’d lose.
This fascination was never cynical or performative. His models were as alive, full-fledged, and dangerous as the men in his fantasies. He simply documented the world he already inhabited.
“When I was with a boy (man) and he took off his clothes I knew he was trouble from the looks of him. I knew he was going to take the money for drugs. But I could deal with it. They were nice boys, turned aside by society. They were my people.”
Hurles understood exactly where he sat in queer culture. In 1981, he told Fritscher:
“It’s ironic … that just as the media accepts the word ‘gay,’ homosexuals realize that ‘gay’ has reduced itself to mean no more than the lifestyles of the disco clone and the political activist. That does not, by any stretch, represent the extraordinary range of queerness. I think it was better before we divided ourselves … when we were all just outlaws.”
Before Old Reliable, Hurles photographed weddings in Ohio. After high school, he joined the Air Force to “man up,” but communal showers complicated things. He was discharged after admitting his attraction to men. He drifted to San Francisco, fell into Hal Call’s orbit, and began nude modeling—an experience that taught him what it felt like to be the object of another man’s gaze.
At Guild Press in D.C., H. Lynn Womack commissioned Auto-Fellatio & Masturbation. Unable to find a model who could suck his own dick, Hurles did it himself. The book was seized in a raid, and Hurles was summoned to D.C. to testify. After five hours sweating outside the courtroom, he was told to go home. The judge, apparently, could not face asking a man about sucking his own cock. Hurles returned to San Francisco.
On Christmas Eve, 1970, Hurles’s partner, Robert Dickinson, jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge. They had been together for years. Dickinson left a note reading, “The last selfish act.” Hurles kept a binder labeled “Robert” in his archives for decades. He never partnered again, instead forming unorthodox emotional bonds with the men he filmed.
In These Streets
San Francisco in the early 1970s was a sanctuary for sexual actualization. Polk Street. The Tenderloin. Flagg Brothers shoe store (“The Meat Rack”). The Old Crow. The Doggie Diner. Hurles sought out men who made his stomach “freeze” and his groin “jump.” “Sometimes I had to follow them for blocks,” he recalled.
According to Fritscher, Hurles photographed his first model, Richard Jalakas, in 1968—on Polk Street, while Jalakas’ wife was in the hospital giving birth. Hurles’s world expanded quickly. He found hustlers at movie theaters, bus terminals, and bars. Hurles paid his models for the session and to fuck him. He was upfront about the arrangement.
In 1972, Hurles was raided three times in a single week. The San Francisco Chronicle ran the headline “Mass Arrests of Homosexuals.” The Chronicle called him “the main producer of homosexual films in San Francisco” and printed the address of his studio on Howard Street. Police seized his equipment, films, photos, and paperwork. Almost everything was lost and his landlord evicted him.
In 1979, Hurles was arrested again, an incident he later believed had been triggered by a disgruntled model. Police found marijuana in his apartment, leading to a drug charge. The case was ultimately dismissed but, by then, the pattern was painfully familiar: raids, seizures, legal fees, and the constant sense that everything he built could be confiscated in one fell swoop.
Hurles used a booking photo as street cred with potential models: proof he wasn’t a nervous queen but someone who’d gone to jail for the very work he was asking them to do. He invited models into his home—unlike mentor Bob Mizer—and was repeatedly robbed, threatened, and beaten up. “I didn’t know any better,” he laughed later, recalling those years. Hurles and Mizer were close friends who often referred models to one another—including Rick, who first appeared at Mizer’s AMG studio before Hurles photographed him.
Hurles estimated he’d been with “at least a thousand” men. He loved them even when they treated him terribly. They belonged to him, and he to them.
Mild to Wild
To understand what Hurles changed, it helps to understand what preceded him.
Postwar America already had a conveyor belt of cockiness: a wild one like Marlon Brando, gangster James Cagney, Tom of Finland’s leather men, and Joe Dallesandro’s brooding beauty. Gay men cultivated the Castro Clone look, while Joe Gage glorified working-class lust. But these archetypes were structured, marketed, and stylized.
Old Reliable men were the opposite. They didn’t dress up as bikers—they were bikers. They didn’t cosplay street life; they lived it. They were anti-social, unpredictable, and often violent.
Hurles ate it up. “I’m 80 percent impotent unless I get sex my way, unless I’m with these ex-con biker boys.” He picked up the thread that Kinsey, Rechy, and Samuel Steward—men who documented erotic lives that existed outside identity and respectability. Hurles did it instinctively, creating images both erotic and anthropological.
The most famous porn studios and directors of the era—Falcon, Colt, William Higgins, and Matt Sterling—offered polished, White, and symmetrical men living in a silo of gay upward mobility. Hurles photographed men those studios wouldn’t touch. “I would rather sniff the armpits of a tough young Mexican boxer after a fight than climb between clean sheets with a Colt model.”
Rick (I, Rick) was one of Hurles’s favorites, whom he once called “the ultimate hustler.” When Hurles first photographed him, Rick appeared handsome, healthy, sun-kissed, and self-assured. In later videos, Rick resurfaced pale, hardened, and heavily tatted—an SS bolt on one arm and a swastika on another—ink he gave himself during his recent prison stint. Rick was cagey about why he’d been arrested, how old he really was, and just how rapidly he was coming undone.
Hurles filmed another favorite model, Mike Doll, jacking off while Anne Murray’s “You Needed Me” plays in the background—the tenderness of the song clashing with Doll’s stoic intensity. Hurles also worked with several porn models of the day, including Barry Hoffman, Scott O’Hara, Rod Garetto, Dennis Johnson, Gene Lamar, Greg Rome—who mainly appeared in straight films—and Eric Ryan.
Hurles also filmed Black, Brown, Asian, and mixed-race men—those outside the era’s racist erotic hierarchies. As Fritscher noted, “Hurles filmed men of any race as long as they were tough, had attitude, could smoke, fight, spit, jerk off, and talk abusively into the camera.”
Hurles’s work exploded into view in early 1978, when Fritscher—then editor of Drummer—published him across multiple fronts: a co-written article, a profile, Hurles’s photographs, and transcripts from two of his infamous audiotapes. Fritscher recognized immediately that Hurles’s images were an unfiltered slice of the sexually subversive South of Market (SoMA) zeitgeist.
After his breakthrough in Drummer, Hurles’s photographs began appearing in other gay adult magazines, including Inches, Honcho, Skin, Just Men, Skinflicks, Straight to Hell, and Man2Man Quarterly.
John Waters once marveled that Hurles’s photographs “forever scarred some gay men’s ability to be attracted to another average gay man.”
Rocket Fuel
By the early 1980s, Old Reliable had gone from underground sideline to a thriving enterprise. Hurles’s first videotapes were distributed in 1982 and quickly became his most lucrative work, which consisted of raw, unvarnished reels of rough-trade models smoking cigars, posing, masturbating, wrestling, boxing, flipping off the camera, and showing off every inch of their bodies.
Money finally began to flow, but Hurles hid it. His Hollywood apartment—camouflaged in Salvation Army furniture to keep the models, trade, and hustlers from suspecting he had anything worth stealing—became an echo chamber of danger. Men crawled through windows, tied him up, robbed him, beat him, stole or wrecked his cars. “They played out the violence he filmed,” said Dian Hanson, his closest advocate. “He lived on terror.”
The breaking point came in 1991, when a model accidentally kicked Hurles in the head while they were wrestling.
The blow ruptured the bones around his left eye—leaving him with double vision—a disaster for a photographer whose work depended on intimacy and precision.
In the 1990s, meth took hold of Hurles and didn’t let go. It intensified everything—sex, fear, chaos—as he tried to keep pace with increasingly volatile models, dwindling income, and growing constraints of his eye injury, which sharply reduced what he could film. Loved ones intervened more than once, but meth—once it rewires a person’s desire and reward systems—rarely loosens its grip.
The landscape around Hurles was shifting, too. AIDS decimated the pool of models he relied on. Internet porn crushed the mail-order business that had kept him afloat. The rough trade aesthetic fell out of fashion—supplanted by the straight-military boom and later by the deluge of early-2000s “amateur straight guy” sites. Rough trade didn’t vanish; it simply reemerged in new forms, repeating what Hurles had captured decades earlier.
By 2002, the bank seized the Hollywood Hills home he had purchased in 1989. Hurles and Myke—his off-and-on boyfriend, who had first modeled for him in the late ’90s—moved to a trailer in Long Beach, which was burglarized repeatedly until nothing remained. Old Reliable effectively ended there.
Over the next years, Hurles drifted among cheap motels, pushing a shopping cart filled with photos, tapes, and notes—the last remnants of a world only he had the balls to put on tape.
Then in 2008, at age 64, he had a massive stroke from shooting meth.
Outsider Porn
Hurles was paralyzed, tube-fed, but mentally intact. In a twist almost too bittersweet to bear, those years coincided with sudden, widespread interest in his life’s work
Two photography books—Speeding (2005) and Outcast (2010)—became collectors’ items. His images appeared in The Big Penis Book (2008), edited by Dian Hanson, who became his closest friend and fiercest champion. Also in 2008, an exhibit that included his photos, Straight to Hell Presents: In Cock We Trust, was presented at Berlin’s EXILE Gallery.
John Waters devoted an entire chapter of his 2010 book Role Models (“Outsider Porn”) to celebrating Hurles and fellow renegade director Bobby Garcia, giving their iconoclastic artistry the serious attention it deserved. Waters and Hanson curated the Outsider Porn exhibition in New York in 2010. In 2016, Hurles was inducted into the Tom of Finland Foundation’s Hall of Fame.
David Randolph Hurles died on April 12, 2023. He was 78.
In early 2025, MASS Gallery unveiled Toxic Masculinity: The Old Reliable World of David Hurles, co-curated by Hanson, Christopher Trout of the Bob Mizer Foundation, and Beth Schneider. The exhibition presented his archives in full: mugshots, driver’s licenses, audio tapes, model intake forms, prison correspondence, and thousands of contact sheets capturing a world no one else dared to touch.
The Outlier
Most of the men in those contact sheets had long since vanished. Myke, his off-and-on straight boyfriend, died in a car accident. Rick—already unraveling when Hurles last filmed him in 1988—disappeared without a trace; in Hurles’s world, that usually meant only two outcomes. He once told Waters, “Most of them are dead or in prison.” And yet all of them were preserved by Hurles’s work, the only witness to lives otherwise lost to time and circumstance.
Until one man returned.
Gentleman Dan—a model who had been nineteen (or younger) when he first worked for Hurles, and whom Hurles once called “the closest I came to a son”—came to visit during Hurles’s final week. Dan had not seen him since Hurles’s 2008 stroke.
Hanson remembered: “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….”
After decades of giving his men care, loyalty, safety—and a kind of love rarely returned, one person came back to acknowledge it. Perhaps that is all Hurles ever wanted.
Denouement
David Hurles’s legacy is not tidy, but it’s undeniable. He did something no one else dared to do—and kept doing it long after the world changed around him. Despite homophobia, raids, arrests, the HIV/AIDS crisis, poverty, assaults, addiction, and the erosion of every queer safety net, he built an archive from instinct and obsession alone.
Hurles’s influence runs deeper than most people realize. He reshaped the visual language of outlaw masculinity, creating images that felt real rather than rehearsed. He refused to sanitize what he saw. He accepted these men—parolees, day laborers, drifters, bikers, men who could be racist, sexist, violent, sociopathic, or all of the above—exactly as they were.
In that honesty, Hurles created a documentary record of sex, class, danger, and desire that critics, studios, and even queer historians often avoided. John Waters has openly cited Hurles as an inspiration, and several photographers and porn creators have borrowed his visual language—whether knowingly or not.
You can see Hurles’s imprint all over the early digital era of rough-trade porn: the home-shot, low-lit, “Danny in Distress” aesthetic that still defines many of today’s roughest amateur films and fansites (more on this in an upcoming essay). Queer men, young and old, still marvel at Hurles’s work across online forums, archives, and gay porn blogs.
Hurles’s world was shaped as much by class and violence as by homophobia—the homophobia that exiled him from the Air Force, his family, surrounded him with men encouraged to despise him, and ultimately left him as unprotected as the lives he documented.
For all the danger, Hurles understood a basic tenet about men: they want to be wanted. His models were straight, bi, gay, or unclassifiable—men who took $20 or $50 not just for sex but for the rare experience of being admired in ways the world never offered them. Hurles filmed them without forcing labels, letting desire be what it was: unruly, inexplicable, unkempt, defiantly outside the lines.
A handful of people ensured Hurles wasn’t lost entirely: Dian Hanson, his closest confidant and keeper of his estate; John Waters, who lauded him as an visionary; the Bob Mizer Foundation which preserved what could have otherwise disappeared; and the fans who mailed checks, drove hours to rent his VHS tapes, and kept his work in circulation.
What remains now is Hurles’s full, unvarnished archive: unpolished, unflinching, and exactly as he lived it. He didn’t just document men the world feared, he gave them a lifeline: dignity, heat, and humanity.
David Hurles gave rough trade its soul. Old Reliable rough trade—the real thing—died with him.
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Special Acknowledgements: My sincere gratitude to the David Hurles Estate, Dian Hanson, Christopher Trout, the Bob Mizer Foundation, John Waters, Jack Fritscher, and Susie Bright for their longstanding roles in preserving, documenting, and honoring the life and work of David Hurles. Where applicable, links to their work can be found in the “References” and “Further Reading & Listening” sections below.
References
Flanagan, M. The Golden Age of Hustlers. Bay Area Reporter, February 26, 2017.
Fritscher, J. Old Reliable: A Legend in His Own Time. California Action Guide, Volume 1, #3, September 1982, at JackFritscher.com
Fritscher, J. Terror Is My Only Hardon! Profiles in Gay Courage: Leatherfolk, Arts and Ideas, Palm Drive Publishing, 2002, at JackFritscher.com
Hurles, D, director. I, Rick. Old Reliable, Volume 51, 1986. Old Reliable. Courtesy of Bob Mizer Foundation.
Johnson, D. K. Buying Gay: How Physique Entrepreneurs Sparked a Movement. Columbia University Press, 2019.
Liebert, L. “Police Raids: Mass Arrests of Homosexuals.” San Francisco Chronicle, February 12, 1972. Accessed via paid San Francisco Chronicle archival PDF (in author’s possession).
Ottenberg, M. The Men Were His Life: Inside the Sordid World of Photographer David Hurles. Interview Magazine, February 13, 2025.
Rechy, J. City of Night. Grove Press, 1963.
Stewart, J. Folsom Street Blues: A Memoir of 1970s SoMa and Leatherfolk in Gay San Francisco. Palm Drive Publishing, 2011.
Trout, C. Legendary Pornographer Talks Rough Trade, Homeless Lovers, and Spontaneous Erections. Butt Magazine, Issue 37, March 30, 2010.
Waters, J. Role Models. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.
Welch. P. (writer) and Eppridge, B. (photographer). Homosexuality in America. Life, June 26, 1964, pp. 66-80.
Archival Sources (NSFW)
Some archival Old Reliable stills and scans used in this essay were sourced from long-running gay pornographic blogs that document David Hurles’s enduring legacy. These blogs were invaluable during research and preparations to publish this essay. My sincere gratitude to the bloggers of the following sites (NSFW).
Vintage Old Reliable: vintageoldreliable.blogspot.com (NSFW)
Bj’s Gay Porno-Crazed Ramblings: bjland.ws/wordpress/category/old-reliable (NSFW)
Men From Back Then: menfrombackthen.blogspot.com—search term “old reliable’ (NSFW)
PAST EXHIBITIONS
David Hurles | Outsider Porn. Curated by John Waters and Dian Hanson. June 4 - 25, 2010. Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, NY.
Toxic Masculinity: The Old Reliable World Of David Hurles. Curated by Dian Hanson, Christopher Trout, and Beth Schneider. January 18 - February 23, 2025, MASS Gallery, Austin, TX.
Further Reading & Listening
Kelvin: Thanks for a well-researched and masterfully written profile on a critical figure in male adult entertainment. I hadn't heard of Hurles; you paint a vibrant, full-bodied portrait of the man. Kudos!
An education discovering this post.