When one imagines a late artist’s preserved portfolio, they may picture an accordion folder lined with tissue paper, a big zippered binder, or even a simple cardboard packing box. Yet when presented with photographer David Hurles’ entire life’s archive, MASS Gallery President Beth Schindler was handed a Ziploc bag. The contents of that bag, along with personal effects, comprises the Eastside venue’s newest exhibition – “Toxic Masculinity: The Old Reliable World of David Hurles.”
While in San Francisco working on West Coast lesbian party Power Snatch, Schindler was introduced to Hurles through archivist Christopher Trout, whose couch she crashed on. “[Trout] had been working on this big gay archive – the Bob Mizer archive – in San Francisco,” Schindler recalled, “and through that process, became friends with David, one of his closest friends up until the day that he died.” Schindler’s own interest in gay historical archives – and their more messy elements – inspired Trout to share his collection of Hurles’ work.
“He went into this other room,” Schindler said, “and grabbed these Ziplocs, like gallon-sized freezer bags packed full of individual old photos from the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s. And he was like, ‘Check these out.’ And I was like, ‘What in the fuck is this?’”
Those photos form the bulk of “Toxic Masculinity,” a title reflective of Hurles’ particular taste in men. His lovers – and photographic subjects – were often violent heterosexual criminals, aka rough trade. “99.9% of these guys were gay for pay,” Schindler explained. “They’re in all kinds of dire straits. They’re real rough trade, you know: lots of black eyes, chipped teeth, bad tattoos.” In an interview with Hurles’ peer and “Toxic Masculinity” collaborator Dian Hanson, Hurles described his type as “bank robbers, strong-arm men and murderers.”
“Would a person appeal to me more if he were straight?” the photographer said to Hanson. “I have to say so. If he’d been to prison … ten extra points for that. I came to realize I was attracted to sociopaths.”
These men – all examples of the titular toxic masculinity – were captured by Hurles’ lens in various states of undress. Under the business name Old Reliable, he distributed the nudes through the mail, which ended up getting him in legal hot water. But his urgency in taking the photos didn’t come from any artistic ambition. His desire was his work’s entire fuel. In copy Hanson wrote for the exhibition, she described a particular phenomenon Hurles experienced where the more out of focus his photos were, the more attracted he was to their subjects.
“While other photographers worked at making saleable products,” Hanson wrote, “Hurles concentrated on getting close to the men who made him tremble.”
For Schindler, there’s power in preserving the whole of Hurles in MASS’s upcoming exhibition: not just his photographs but his life’s ephemera. “The main focus for me as an archivist is to really honor the broad scope of what was in the archives of David,” she said. “He was a really amazing note taker. He logged everything.” Pen-pal correspondence with Gore Vidal and John Waters; the letters Hurles wrote his imprisoned boyfriends; Hurles’ driver’s licenses; his mug shots; eviction notices and neighborly complaints: All of these items stand just as tall in the story of the photographer’s life as his pornographic work.
“People will really get a feel for who he was as a person, not just what he was excited about in photographs,” Schindler said of the show. “Because, honestly, what he was excited about, for photographing, was men with boners.”
Toxic Masculinity: The Old Reliable World of David Hurles
Opening: Saturday 18, MASS Gallery
Runs through February 21; massgallery.org
This article appears in January 17 • 2025.