In Defense of Rough Trade: Old Reliable Images of David Hurles (Patreon)

In the modern gay community, trade is a slang term for non gay-identified men who have sex with other men, usually for economic benefit.

Rough trade, then, implies that the trick may end up robbing you, roughing you up (or worse)- often after the sexual arrangement has concluded.

If you’re wondering what that has to do with Sacred Debris (and Occult Vibrations) and our mission to document, archive, and contextualize body art & modification history, the answer is David Hurles.

Born David Randolph Hurles in Cincinnati, Ohio on the 12th of September, 1944, Hurles is an American photographer who specialized in documenting the roughest of rough trade, selling photographs and audio and video tapes from his legendary Old Reliable Tape and Picture Company. Wikipedia, in their profile of Hurles, notes that his models were typically ex-conviicts, hustlers, drifters, and low-lifes. Cult film director John Waters, a longtime fan of Hurles’s work, paints a much rosier picture:

Truck drivers. Vagrants. Speed freaks. Halfway house hunks. Tattooed mutants. With hard-ons. 

(Waters, John. Role Models . Farrar, Straus and Giroux.)

His models, more often than not, were tattooed, but not tattooed well. Carny work, prison tattoos - the marks they wore were more about the rough and tumble masculine archetype of being tattooed rather than than any concern for artistic or technical merit. They stared at his camera making direct eye contact, contempt in their eyes and drugs, usually speed, in their system, flexing their muscles or flipping the viewer off - sending a clear message that while you may be sexualizing them, they’re just biding their time to take you for all that you’re worth.

Also from Waters:

Hurles took these outlaw studs, who may never have even realized they could be sexy, to his home like a fool-saint, paid them money, and photographed them for your sick, self-loathing enjoyment. Old Reliable models snarled at the camera nude. They gave you the finger, bent over with their asshole showing, looking through their legs. And in what became Mr. Hurles’s signature photo pose, they smoked a big steaming cigar, nude, with an angry leer. These danger-to-any-community Romeos burned their way into the consciousness of my generation of gay men. In the same way Douglas Sirk’s romantic films could make some straight people feel real-life love was disappointing compared to the melodramatic cinematic kind, David Hurles’s photographs forever scarred some gay men’s ability to be attracted to another average gay man. 

(Waters, John. Role Models . Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

For a generation of gay men, Old Reliable became the de facto source for a certain kind of arousal, with those tattooed roughs providing inspiration for their own tattoos; totemic etchings that transcended subject matter and did what tattoos are supposed to do: say everything that needs to be said without saying a word.

Our archives contain a few dozen Old Reliable/Hurles photos, if you'd like to see more  you can track down his book, SPEEDING: The Old Reliable Photos of David Hurles (Green Candy Press, November 21, 2005) via used bookstores online. 

The model in this photo went by "Snake"- he's been identified as a Hurles model, but this print seems to be directly from him, with his name and home address written on the back in pen.