David Hurles

David Randolph Hurles (born September 12, 1944, Cincinnati) is a gay pornographer, whose one-man company, run from a private mailbox, was called Old Reliable Tape and Picture Company. His work, produced primarily in the 1970s and 1980s, falls into three categories: photographs, audio tapes, and videotapes. Hurles' models were typically ex-cons, hustlers, drifters, and lowlifes.

In the 1960s, Hurles appeared in movies and magazines, with Guild Press, Washington D.C., for whom he was also a photographer.

In 1975, already filming in Super-8 format used by his mentor and longtime 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". The character Solly Blue in Fritscher's novel Some Dance to Remember has much in common with Hurles.

Hurles has written of San Francisco at the time: "Perhaps you had to be there...the 70's, San Francisco, the blossoming and peak of the gay sexual culture. It was a rare time; everything, it seemed, was perfect. So perfect, in fact, that those of us there could not have possibly imagined it might ever be otherwise!" Jim Stewart describes his encounter with Hurles, and the neighborhood they both lived in, in the first chapter of his Folsom Street Blues.

His first published pictures appeared in Drummer, 21 (January 1978); no other magazine would touch them. He also shot many covers and centerfolds for Fritscher's zine Man2Man Quarterly (1980-1982), whose mailing address was Hurles' San Francisco apartment. Subsequently Hurles' photos have appeared in dozens of gay magazines. He moved to Los Angeles shortly.

In 1990, Hurles issued a catalog of his Old Reliable material, "a guide to nearly 500 Men and the hundreds of original Old Reliable Video Tapes", as well as the "audio cassettes and photos in which they [the men] appear" (56 pp.). In 1995, a second volume was published, taking up where the first one left off, also "a guide to nearly 500 men" (64 pp.).

Models were recruited among ex-convicts and addicts. "David likes psychos. Nude ones. Money-hungry drug addicts with big dicks. Rage-filled robbers without rubbers. And of course, convicts." Many of them were dangerous—he wanted them to be, that was a key part of their attractiveness for him—but part of David's skill, which no one since has duplicated, was being able to manage them so that they would perform as instructed and not attack him. However, Hurles also said: "There have been several thousand models. When they are not in prison, or very married, it has been my practice to stay in touch with many of them, often over decades. They are my friends." On another occasion he said that one of the hardest parts of his job was not getting caught up "in the miserable lives of my models".

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