Speeding: The Old Reliable Photos of David Hurles Paperback – November 21, 2005

David Hurles received a lifetime achievement award at the Tom of Finland queer art Fetival in october 2016.This book, put together by that other great visual art queer cult legend Rex, portrays this living-on-the-edge pioneeras he photographs and has sex with the most dangerous gang boys, hustlers, addicts, of NYC in she sixties and seventies.

Great volume showing a very specific slice of male nude depiction. When men could sweat smoke and be as natural as the person commanding the camera would allow. Defiantly masculine and a side of the male image I fear lost to teenyboppers and religious right.Must have volume for anyone interested in male modern depiction

David Hurles photos collected here may one day be viewed as the last great expression of homoerotic Rough Trade in America. Situated mostly in the 1970s through 80s, these photos represent the author's and others' fascination with the world of hard-edged, hard-bodied working class and mostly -- though not exclusively -- white men on the fringes of society. The harsh realities of these men's lives can been seen in the details of these pictures: prison-made tattoos, young men with prematurely aged faces, bodies whose lean hardness was produced by hard physical work rather than by working out.This now lost world of hard-edged same-sex male eroticism and sociability was swept away by a New World of "gay" men in which picture-perfect air-brushed Abercrombie and Fitch chiseled physiques are the standard of male beauty, female-identified "gay" men take characters from chick-flics like "Desperate Housewives" and "Sex in the City" as their as their role-models, and in which the professional white upper-middle classes who hi-jacked direction of activism around issues of same-sex desire quashed post-Stone Wall radical sexual politics in favor of "gay" marriage. The kinds of men photographed here would probably have the cops called on them by patrons of the Castro in San Francisco, Chelsea in New York or any other chic "gay" district in any big American city were they to think about frequenting such places today; which of course they would not. Hurles photos will remain as a testament and homage to a vanished world of same-sex male eroticism whose echoes are the parodies of masculinity and virility found in various fetish-scenes in the contemporary Brave New World of "gay" male culture. They are an invaluable historical document.

There is only one David Hurles

Old Reliable was basically the second wave of male photography (with Bob Mizer's American Model Guild being the first wave).Gritty, tattooed, muscular, and usually straight, the models projected a sultry masculinity. The videos of the models posing, or wrestling, were legendary.The quality of the printing is great, and the text describing the rise and fall of David Hurles is both well-written and fascinating. (Old Reliable was finally killed by the Internet.)

REX ROCKS

From what I have read, Old Reliable Studios took photos of naked guys, who lived hard lives and were sort of down on their luck. This book contains pictures of those men. To me the pictures are more blunt, in your face. Some of the guys are flipping the middle finger as their bare their balls to the camera. There are no twinks in this bunch. The photos capture the men as they are - no coyness in the photos at all. Erections are displayed unapologetically. They look like guys who needed the money for dropping their drawers.

It's ok, but not what I was expecting- I didn't see a copy before ordering. I just didn't find a lot of the guys as stimulating as I was expecting.