How Santa Monica Blvd inspired queer classic film Hustler White

While working as a wardrobe stylist in Los Angeles during the mid-1980s for photographers Herb Ritts and George Hurrell, Rick Castro was called to the camera. Four decades later he revisits his singular journey to become the ​‘King of Fetish’ with the new exhibition Baal – Retrospective. 1986 – 2025, opening at Semjon Contemporary in Berlin.

Ever since he was a young teen, Castro had been fascinated by young men who came to California, only to end up in the ​“world’s oldest profession” aka sex work. And just around the corner from his home was Santa Monica Boulevard, the throbbing heart of Hollywood’s flourishing hustler scene.

To explore the scene more, while aiming to provide a new perspective on them, Castro hopped into his white 1967 Mercury Cougar muscle car, cruising up and down the strip, discovering pleasures that surpassed those of the flesh. Photography gave him license to go the distance and bring these men home for a portrait session. In this moment of being seen, they began to share their stories.

• Read next: Rick Castro’s intimate portraits of love and remembrance

“The majority had great stories, but nobody ever asked them because it was all about sex,” says Castro, who became obsessed. He began hitting up Santa Monica weekly, sometimes daily, compiling an archive of portraits and stories, some filmed on VHS tape, which would become the basis for the 1996 cult classic dark comedy movie Hustler White, starring filmmaker Bruce LaBruce and model Tony Ward as star-crossed lovers in the urban jungle.

Castro cast actual hustlers from the street in the film, which was shot guerrilla style in broad daylight, blurring the lines between a classic Hollywood romp and cinéma vérite, with perhaps the most scandalous sex scene committed to film. And that is where our story begins.

Among Castro’s pictures of hustlers, a 1995 portrait of Kevin P. Scott caught the eye of Paul Martineau, Associate Curator in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The photograph, now on view in Queer Lens: A History of Photography at the Getty in Los Angeles, shows Scott from the chest down, posted up on the sidewalk wearing little more than cut off jeans, combat boots, and a prosthetic lower leg that bears his weight with sensual confidence.

• Read next: The ​“King of Fetish” Revisits the Golden Age of Zines

For Hustler White, Castro cast Scott as Eigil Vesti, a street hustler who loses his leg during a hit and run, with Tony Ward’s character Montgomery Ward behind the wheel of Castro’s muscle car. Vesti becomes the object of desire for a character named Billy Ray Jaded, played by Paul ​‘Superhustler’ Bateman. ​“It’s a cinematic first,” Castro says of the amputee sex scene. ​“We made sure to make it looked as beautiful as possible; we diffused it and had romantic music because it was such a hardcore scene. It was a scene where people ran out of the theatre. There were a few of those where people would leave on the regular.”

Castro points to Vesti’s tragic fate in the film, in which mortician Seymour Kasabian’s (played by performance artist Ron Athey) embalming kink goes too far. The scene, shot without permits in Hollywood Memorial Park, would go on to inspire Tyler Cassidy to purchase and refurbish the historic cemetery, and relaunch it as Hollywood Forever, now home to the Columbarium Continuum by Rick Castro. It’s the perfect full circle moment, a return to where it all began on the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Gordon Street, where Castro photographed Scott in 1995.

Rick Castro: Baal – Retrospective. 1986 – 2025 is on view September 4 – October 7, 2025, at Semjon Contemporary in Berlin. Queer Lens: A History of Photography is on view through September 25, 2025 at the Getty in Los Angeles.