by John Waters
But no, Bobby has little talent for money or business. “What I do, I do for love.” Bobby shrugs. He claims to be unaware of the many videos and DVDs released of his past work, and is totally surprised to hear of the great “AWOL Marine” website that is a film festival tribute to his work. Bobby admits to running his “little classified” in The Advocate in the past to “make money to pay my rent and buy beer.” But I wonder how he could possibly fill any orders from the place he was now living. He “never returns calls.” In other words, he is the Gloria Swanson of the Marine-porn world: a recluse who never quite realized the power he has over the sexual fantasies of his loyal customers. “I never knew people liked the tapes. You see where I’m living. I don’t own nothing. I live with my animals. I want to help animal shelters.”
Bobby may have a one-track mind but he puts the “gentle” in gentleman. He remembers not only big dicks but kindnesses, too. Like the time he “was out of my luck, only had a few bucks—in Los Angeles.” Lauren Hutton was in a show called Extremities (1983). “I wanted to see it so bad, but I had no money. Sitting on the curb…” Suddenly Bobby starts crying as he continues his tale and I realize the goodness in people can give Bobby an emotional hard-on. “She [came out and] said to me, ‘You go in the back. Give him food,’ she told the ushers. ‘Let him in.’”
Bobby is against the Iraq war, too, and before you cynically surmise it’s because there are no Marines left in the United States who can perform for Bobby, he’ll set you straight. “My heart goes out to the families over there and the families over here. It’s bad, hopefully we get out soon,” he says sadly. When I tell Bobby how guilty I felt when I caught myself scanning the photographs The New York Times published in 2008 of the “most recent 1000 service members in Iraq to die,” to see if I had ever been turned on by any of them in Bobby’s films, he doesn’t hear. “I don’t like nobody to get hurt,” he mumbles, “not even a butterfly.”
But Bobby can still shock me. He tells me his favorite movie is The Hours, based on my friend Michael Cunningham’s novel. “I saw it at least twenty, twenty-five times,” Bobby remembers with great respect. Just as I imagine the thrill of telling Michael about his newest fan, Bobby brings out from a special hiding place a treasure box filled with letters from English, Spanish, and Greek royalty. Real queens, not gay ones. Bobby’s hobby is writing to anyone who wears a crown. And they write back! He even shows me a polite response from Princess Di to Bobby’s fan mail! “But how do you know which ones will respond?” I ask in dumbfounded amazement. “I subscribe to Majesty and Royalty magazines,” and he starts by writing to “ladies in waiting” in each country and “they usually write back,” and then he works his way up to the top.
Bobby is royalty, too, but I have trouble making him believe in himself. I offer to take him out to dinner and he’s willing, but he picks a nearby fast-food restaurant no matter how much I stress we can go somewhere nicer. “Aren’t you proud of your great work?” I ask. “No, I no proud,” he says without ever touching a single morsel of the food we order. “I no proud. I no ashamed. I just think that was part of my life.” “Are you in touch with any of your family today?” I wonder. “No. Barely,” he says with little obvious sadness. “Is your mother still alive?” “Yes,” he admits. “Does she know about your films?” I pry. “I don’t think so. Maybe. You never know,” he reasons with a slight hint of concern. “But you don’t work anymore—why?” I plead, pretending I don’t realize he is so poor that he has no equipment left, no editing facilities. “I adore my dogs, more than movies.” “But you’ve stopped having Marine sex?” I blurt out in concern. Have no fear: Bobby still scores, just not on videotape. “Maybe in my pick-up truck or a hotel,” Bobby laughs. “Then nobody’s knocking down the door.” I don’t mention there is no door to knock down where Bobby lives now, much less the fact that even the horniest Marine might have erection issues with the pigs and rats in Bobby’s squat. Eyes lighting up, Bobby offers me a walk on the wild side. “My friend, we can go to a Marine bar three blocks away and get a guy.” Although going cruising with Bobby has a certain appeal, I cling to my journalistic standards and beg off, at least for this visit. I take Bobby back to his…ranch…hideout…whatever it is. I feel sad for Bobby and encourage him to make some more deals, get an advance from a new porn distributor, and start making movies again. He tells me he wants to go back to Oceanside and work again. All he needs is money for some cheap video equipment and he feels he could be back in business. Back on his knees. Back in the baby oil saddle. Poppers ready. Porn loaded.
Bobby gets out of my car and once again the dogs come charging out from his house, hurling themselves against the chain-link fence. He leans his head back in through the passenger window to say goodbye and wishes me well writing about him. “Be kind,” he whispers in a suddenly serious voice that doesn’t reveal if he is quoting the famous Deborah Kerr line from Tea and Sympathy or not. I will be kind, Bobby. And every time I rewatch one of your tapes and hear you say, “Call me names,” I will. You’re a genius, Bobby. A goddamn genius.
Then there is David Hurles. Maybe he is even more fanatical than Bobby in his sexual tastes for the outer limits of straight men. Danger is the turn-on for Mr. Hurles. Marines aren’t butch enough or scary enough. No, David likes psychos. Nude ones. Money-hungry drug addicts with big dicks. Rage-filled robbers without rubbers. And of course, convicts—his ultimate Prince Charmings. In the last three decades David Hurles has picked up rough trade off the streets of California, out in front of the Doggie Diner and Flagg Brothers shoes in San Francisco, and the Oki-Dog in Hollywood. Bars like the Old Crow and the Spotlight were his own personal Schwab’s Pharmacy. Only David wasn’t looking for an unknown Lana Turner in a tight sweater to turn into a star; he was looking for handsome criminals. These mostly long-forgotten locations in hustler history have become almost like stations of the cross in the mythical ritualization scenarios of old-fashioned “cruising.” 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. Without these pioneering Old Reliable photographs, homoeroticism in the art world couldn’t have existed. Robert Mapplethorpe was a pussy. Mr. Hurles is the real thing.
Like Bobby Garcia, David Hurles is not easy to locate. These outsider pornographers are mavericks, but few understand—especially not their neighbors. They move a lot. I manage to get Mr. Hurles’s phone number but am warned by a fellow Old Reliable fan that “David will never pick up, he is a total recluse.” But when I begin leaving my message on his answering machine, David does pick up. He sounds kind and gentle. He’s a fan of my work, too! What a thrill. We are a deviant mutual admiration society. He invites me to come see him on my annual upcoming trip for Oscar weekend in L.A. I wish I could bring him and his boys to the Vanity Fair party—just think of the purses they could steal.
Today, David Hurles lives in a large studio apartment in old Hollywood—not the gentrified part. As I walk up the stairs to the third floor, I realize how lucky I am to be in a profession that enables me to be this nosy. David greets me warmly and we embrace. He is a great man to me, one I have always revered. Nice-looking, too, about my age, and he doesn’t look like the stereotypical pervert like I do. He has almost no possessions but a computer, his bed on the floor, and boxes and boxes of his product—Old Reliable VHS tapes (a few transf
erred to DVD), audio cassettes, stills, and catalogs.
“So you still are in business,” I marvel, thrilled that my favorite studio since Warhol’s is still going. “What’s left of it.” He sighs. “I used to be successful…I made a half million dollars one year and paid the tax.” “But you still are successful artistically,” I gush. “You risked your safety for your customers.” “If you ask me cold I’d say I’ve had very little trouble. But if you sit down and think about it I’ve been robbed a lot…it was expensive.” When I bring up the “arousal of fear” his work celebrates, he fondly remembers a critic who claimed “that danger is my only hard-on.” “That’s one of the joys of psychopathic [men],” he explains, trying to convey his models’ mind-set. “It’s a control thing—‘Look how much I turn you on.’” Few besides David Hurles have made such a stunning, if quasi-legal, career out of their neuroses. I’m so happy he’s happy he’s fucked-up.
It all started when Hurles ran a classified sex ad in The Berkeley Barb in the seventies, when he was living in San Francisco. “What did it say?” I wondered. “Oh, straight guys, you know, blow jobs,” he vaguely recalls. But then, from what most people would call trouble, came the inspiration for a great career in filth. “A nineteen-year-old straight guy, straight out of San Quentin” answered the ad, David explains, “beautiful, big dick, great sex. When we were finally done, of course, [he] pulled a gun, wanted to rob me. ‘Please don’t tie me up,’ I asked him, ‘bondage is not my thing.’ ‘Okay,’ the criminal trick said, ‘but I’ll come back and kill you if you call the police.’ Of course I had no intention of doing that,” David admits. “As soon as he was gone I realized I was turned on, you see. I had to jerk off.” Oh.
So David started taking naked pictures of guys who scared him. Truck drivers. Vagrants. Speed freaks. Halfway house hunks. Tattooed mutants. With hard-ons. Wrestling (a Hurles favorite), boxing, shooting up in their dicks. All glaring into the camera looking like they wanted to rough you up. At first “lowly mafia” bought the stills from David to sell in porn shops, but then when he was peddling his smut photos himself in Washington, D.C., Mr. Hurles “met the most important man in my life,” the “three-hundred-pound albino from Mississippi,” Dr. Herman Lynn Womack, who owned and ran Guild Press, one of the first distributors of nude gay magazines. I remember seeing these forbidden magazines in Baltimore when I was underage and overaroused at Sherman’s Newsstand downtown. I was way too uptight to buy these titles, so I shoplifted them. When I tell David this he admits gleefully that he did, too! To get Womack to distribute his photos David “had to trick with him.” It was worth it. Hurles started getting paid a hundred dollars for each still shoot after “paying the models fifteen dollars.” “Did you have sex with the ‘talent’?” I ask. “Usually afterwards,” he fondly remembers. “I usually gave them fifteen to twenty dollars extra. The cuter ones got more.”
David had been a “model” himself. “One of the books Guild published,” David explains, “was Auto-Fellatio and Masturbation and I was in it.” It sold for a “$7.50 cover price—a lot then.” He remembers bragging, “I’m so talented I can not only suck my own dick, but I can take pictures of it at the same time.” But there was always trouble. “Dr. Womack went to prison,” David sighs. “I visited him. I was subpoenaed by the grand jury four times—that’s a hassle,” but he was never ashamed of his arrests. “No, I was rather proud,” he admits.
Suddenly David was on his own and “it was time to get creative. I had the idea for audio self-help tapes. I had a roommate who was a bartender and he used to bring home someone to fist fuck him every night and it was a turn-on to listen. I had taken this course on hypnosis once…so I put the two together…and made this tape, Painless Anal Intercourse, and it did surprisingly well.”
David Hurles agrees with me when I say, “You invented verbal-abuse porn.” One hopes The New York Times remembers the accomplishment when it is time to write his obituary. David would lock his boys in a room in his home and tell them to talk dirty into a microphone and then leave them alone to vent their sexual pathologies. Like Andy Warhol with a hard-on, David gave them little direction except “Talk about yourself.” “Did you tell them to be mean?” I quizzed. “I never directed. They felt they had my permission. I encouraged. I suggested. They pretty soon figured out where to go. When they were done, they’d give me the tape and I’d give them the money.” Old Reliable distributed “over four hundred” verbal-abuse audio tapes. “I was afraid to release some of them,” he admits. “They were so raw.”
One of the tapes is titled Ty Meltdown, and the unedited sexual ad-libbing of this psycho performer will raise the hair on even the biggest masochist’s neck. “Good voice,” David notes in his own handwriting on the label of the tape. “Criminal. Scary, and taking advantage of guys. Box their tonsils with his dick.” Ty’s calm, masculine-voiced monologue about fucking and brutalizing young punks in jail is audio sadism well beyond the comfort zone of all sexual role-playing. But not David’s. He still listens to the tape and it still turns him on. As with Bobby, the only erotica that works is his own.
Old Reliable struck a nerve in the guilt centers of radical gay porn. “Every man has a hustler in there somewhere” is how David explains his recruiting technique. Of course, he had help. Bob Mizer, the Walt Disney of beefcake, had his own big studio of musclemen, and he traded stars with David over the years. “Bob was very generous to me. I met him in 1970 and he was my closest friend for twenty years, right up to when he died.” They both worked the trenches of the hetero-hunk gutter circuit, fought the police, went to jail, and unrepentantly started right back up again. Boyd McDonald, the better-than-Maxwell-Perkins editor of Straight to Hell magazine, aka The Manhattan Review of Unnatural Acts, was later a big supporter, too. And no wonder! With titles such as Homosexuals Are the Only True Radicals, Ten Surfers Pissed on Me, and Closet Queen Cop Gets His, this all-true, reader-written journal about having sex with strangers must have been the Holy Grail to David Hurles. “Boyd was the kindest person,” David remembers, “gave me such encouragement.” He continues, “I made a lot of money,” moved from San Francisco to L.A., and became known as “the Prince of Hollywood.” He bought a “very nice condo” and later a house “near the reservoir, near Madonna’s.” He was known for his sartorial splendor—“wearing pastels”—and at the height of his career in the late eighties he “was doing two shoots a day.”
But David’s “stars” were beyond difficult. “I have always tried to be judgment free,” he confides, leafing through one of his catalogs of past product, reminiscing about each of his psycho escorts the same way Vincente Minnelli might recall the singers and dancers he had once directed. “I made a lot of money on Mike.” David beams, showing me a photo of a hillbilly trucker with a giant dick. “From New Orleans,” David remembers, “last time I heard he was in Las Vegas. Don’t believe he ever had to buy a beer [for himself] since those pictures came out.” But most of David’s memories are not so joyous. He stops and points to a specific model, one, like all of David’s boys, who looks like a homicidal maniac. “I kept track of the money I spent on this one—after a quarter of a million I stopped. You gotta understand—I got a letter from this sugar daddy back in New Jersey. He had a picture of this awful messed-up ex-model of mine and he said, ‘This is what cost my friend his home in Paris and $100,000.’ I don’t doubt it. It happened to me.” David begins turning the pages again, looking for a special one. “I had a boyfriend named Andy who’s in here somewhere…” He shows me the photo and continues, “Andy had to suddenly go home for his father’s funeral and his mother said [to me], ‘Please don’t let him come.’ But he did, so it was a cold and rainy night and I had a chance to go out and pick up somebody [else]. Danny looked awfully cute in his tight pants. Then the next twenty to thirty years whenever he had a problem he came to me. And believe me his problems added up! Each one cost money. Heroin, speed…I can go through my catalogs and point out the junkies. I couldn’t stop them
from doing it. They didn’t come to my house to take orders from somebody…This one here said he’d be dead by age twenty-five and by God, he made it with a month to spare.” “Were you a drug addict?” I wonder. “I’ve done plenty of drugs with tricks,” he admits happily. “Speed was my favorite, MDA, and then Quaaludes.”
Was David also a gay man who could only be turned on by straight men? “I try to avoid the gay ones,” he admits, but he’s more of a sexual liberal than Bobby. “Sure, I go to bed with gay people. I like getting fucked and gay people do that quite adequately, too.” He continues his capsule biography of sexual attraction as he gazes at the photos of his past leading men. “Stephen got out of prison. I was sick and he nursed me back to health but I didn’t realize he was cleaning out the house. Suddenly my linens were gone, clothes closets were empty. I never called the cops, but you couldn’t ignore his emergencies. He would climb up on the roof to get attention. He got arrested and did nine and a half years. And guess what? He’s out again and he’s been calling me!” David looks at the model on the back cover, a horse-ish oaf with a beer-can dick who either looks retarded or sexy depending on your taste. “He’s from Long Beach.” David sighs. “I remember the day he fell down my steps and broke the neon sign I had on the landing.” “But do you know where they are today?” I ask. “I know where a great many of them are,” he replies. “Six feet under.”