Common Sense	Common Sense Archive

For some reason I found myself more fascinated with Speeding than I expected. Speeding is a collection of the Old Reliable photos of David Hurles. As a bookseller, I see just about all the photo collections of the male body. Some have more charms than others. But all are important documents of the artistic side of homoeroticism.

Hurles was born in the late 1940s and grew up in Cincinnati, as did I. Early on he figured out he was attracted to the roughs and the bad boys. He turned this into a career. He moved to California and worked in San Francisco and Los Angeles, specializing in photographing a variety of male hustlers. He's been at it for nearly forty years, amassing a catalogue of tens of thousands of images, and creating a successful business enterprise. Rex, the noted illustrator, selected the photos for Speeding and wrote the text. Rex notes: Hurles "photographed these men not as a hobby or an obsession, but as a successful business venture in the highly competitive porno industry. His photos competed head-on with multi-million-dollar porn corporations and publishing companies with large staffs, in-house lawyers, and technicians at their disposal. Next to their cookie-cutter products-- indistinguishable from one another-- Hurles's work stood out as unique and distinctive. What it lacked in volume it more than made up for in originality." I don't know about the volume part; Old Reliable has a thick catalogue of photos, videos, interviews, etc. Old Reliable was the late Boyd McDonald's favorite studio and Old Reliable models would often grace the pages of Boyd's seminal publication, Straight To Hell.

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All gay men's erotica is divided into three parts. There is the Olympus world of Rip Colt, founder of Colt Studios, who actually named one of his magazines "Olympus." There's the Mom's Good Eats world of Bob Mizer's Athletic Model Guild, and then there's the Bus Station/Back Alley feel of Old Reliable. (Mizer was a mentor to Hurles.) There are subdivisions within these realms, of course, as is typical of all real estate, but we haven't world or time for more detailed pictorial parsing. Colt models are, generally, hypermasculine Adonises, bulging muscles, round butts, manly facial features. A lot of Mizer's work makes me think of a Judy Garland-Mike Rooney musical: "Come on, Judy! Let's put on a show!" The costumes the models sometimes wear are out of the trunk. The guys look sweet if not too bright; I suspect for most of them, this was a highlight in their careers. And you can almost imagine Mizer's Mom in the other room, stirring a pot of tomato sauce and spaghetti to feed the boys. Mom was very much part of the family operation, which is a statement about family values in the world of male erotica.

One of Hurles's former models is quoted by Rex: "I think surviving his models was David's REAL talentwhat David really wanted was that dangerous attitude-- the more over-the-top psycho you were, the more top dollar you could earn. David had no match in selecting white trash in the golden age of white trash, when that term was not necessarily derogatory." Some of Hurles's sessions put him at high risk with the possibility of a beating or a robbery ever likely. This is leagues away from the photo-world of Bruce Weber, with perhaps a way-stop at planet Mapplethorpe along the way. His time in San Francisco did well by him and financed his move to Los Angeles. He bought a home, socialized with celebrities-- Rex even drops the name of Gore Vidal-- and took to calling himself "The Prince of Hollywood." The nature of his work changed after the move to Hollywood. He didn't go out and haunt the dives. The models arrived at his comfortable Hollywood home to pose on his furniture, swanker than that in his digs in San Francisco. The men looked different. These were not the down-on-their-luck scruffy hustlers; these looked like professional escorts. It seemed as though mean-looking and acting straight guys were getting harder to find at least in LA. I would imagine that even Hollywood hustlers have a screenplay in their back pockets to pitch after the photo-shoot. Rex notes that in the San Francisco days, all the models smoked like crazy but in the 1990s, in Hollywood, some of the guys looked at a complete loss when Hurles asked them to puff on a cigar. Hurles began as a contemporary of most of his models; in recent years he's assumed the mentor role, creating a different quality of tension, if any at all. Even if you get what you want, it changes. Bummer. His best work is from the early years, the late sixties and early seventies. His models were very much a part of a certain, specifically configured, demimonde, a version of which could be found in every city-- yes, Virginia, even Cincinnati. But the gay revolution, changing fashions in masculinity, the HIV pandemic and gentrification have dissolved that world into trace memories. Speeding is like a splendid sayonara.

Speeding is a trade paperback published by Green Candy Press. All the photos are black-and-white.

Author Profile:  Mitzel
	Mitzel was a founding member of the Fag Rag collective, and has been a Guide columnist since 1986. He manages Calamus Books near Boston's South Station.
	Email:	mitzel@calamusbooks.com
	Website:	calamusbooks.com