David Hurles
[3][4]: 59 In 1975, already filming in Super-8 format used by his mentor and long-time friend Bob Mizer of Athletic Model Guild, he met and became a great friend of Jack Fritscher, editor of Drummer magazine, who described David as "my longtime pal and housemate".
"[8] Jim Stewart describes his encounter with Hurles, the neighborhood they both lived in, and the birth of the name Old Reliable in the first chapter of his Folsom Street Blues.
[4]: 59 He also shot many covers and centerfolds for Fritscher's zine Man2Man Quarterly (1980–1982),[4]: 59 whose mailing address was Hurles' San Francisco apartment.
[16] Hurles chose to downplay technical fireworks with his camera in order to focus on the emotional pyrotechnics of his models.
Usually they were shot solo, and with an erection; the amount paid depended on "the size of your dick and whether you could get it up in front of the camera.
"[18]: 112 They were distinguished by "attitude" - straight, in your face, angry, contemptuous of fags, dangerous, smoking cigars, giving the finger, flexing their biceps.
His photographs may most easily be consulted in two collections: Speeding, in black and white,[18] then in color Outcast,[20] and to a lesser extent in The Big Penis Book.
They are used, with permission, as illustrations in two collections of Boyd McDonald's Straight to Hell: The New York Review of Cocksucking material: Meat[22] and Skin.
[26] With the arrival of home video recording equipment around 1980, David began creating videotapes, eventually releasing over three hundred of them.
[28] The same two, plus four additional D.V.D.s transferred from Old Reliable tapes, are available from Bijou Video: 32 (Hairy Guys), 38 (Arkansas Luggage), 56 (Basic Black #5), and 82 (Boxing 1).
[29] Others are available as video-on-demand from Bijou Video; besides the ones just mentioned, these are 25 (Perfect Me), 47 (Men Worth Watching), 49 (Sizzling Solos), 154 (Innocence Explains Nothing), 211 (Ace Is The Place), 269 (Just As They Are), and 277 (Some Old Friends).
Hurles and Fritscher co-authored an interview with "Scott Smith", an ex-convict from Soledad Prison.
A Memoir of the Sex, Art, Salon, Pop Culture War, and Gay History of Drummer Magazine.
In 2008 he had a massive stroke, and more recently "is the most popular resident of a state-funded nursing home in East Hollywood".
[39] His friend Dian Hanson, who manages his financial affairs and the Old Reliable archive, described him as an "intelligent, funny, mild mannered guy who studied his models the way I’d studied my readers all the years I worked making men’s magazines.
He says we’re “simpatico”, and that seems the best description for the way we clicked immediately, sharing a taste in men and in exploring the intricacies of human psychology and sexual attraction.”[40] ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, USC Libraries, University of Southern California, has VHS videotapes of a nine-part interview conducted from August 18 to December 29, 1998, and 6 compact audiocassette tapes of what appears to be a four-part interview conducted on January 12, 1999.
