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12 Titillating Teases From Folsom

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Last week San Francisco celebrated its annual Folsom Street Fair after being canceled last year due to COVID.

Folsom for the uninitiated is sex positive, leather and kink fundraising fair whose origins began with the poor and working classes resistance against corporate gentrification efforts in San Francisco. But the first iteration of the fair as it’s known now began in 1984. Entitled “Megahood” and taking place in 1984 on the autumnal equinox (when the weather is seasonally at its warmest and fairest in foggy SF), the Folsom Street Fair was a complex beast, created to accomplish many ambitious goals at once: supporting local SOMA businesses; bringing together the diverse, eclectic populations South of Market and attempting to unite them; and placing SOMA on the city map and in the public’s eye as not a “blighted zone” awaiting redevelopment, but as a vital, energetic part of the city desiring further development of its existing potentials. It also had one other crucial overarching purpose—helping to fight for the survival of the LGBT communities South of Market—including leather—as the full realization of the onset of AIDS and its harrowing and devastating implications was reverberating throughout the city. The fair was to be a healing, celebratory response.

Celebrated to coincide with the Autumnal Equinox, Folsom officially marks the end of summer in San Francisco. The Folsom Fair was also a venue for local crafts persons and entrepreneurs to sell their wares, and a large public site for the leather community to celebrate and revel in itself.

In its first year, professionally run by paid subcontractors and a volunteer staff of 400 individuals and 50 supporting organizations and businesses, the fair managed to do at the outset what most street fairs are unable to do after years of operation—turn a profit that was all returned to charity. A surprisingly large turnout of 30,000 persons at the first fair helped return roughly $20,000 to community coffers. The word of the first fair’s success spread, and the attendance in 1985 and beyond—like a living cell—continued to double each year for many years, expanding the fair to Division Street and the side streets.

The South of Market gay scene was never more robust than in these salad days before AIDS. The long-established leather haunts were hives of parties, fetes, steamy back rooms and sexual freedom. Whatever their preference or gender, the Stonewall generation was coming into its own not only in the Castro, but migrating to South of Market, as the so-called Golden Age of the Gay Mecca raved on—culturally, politically and personally for the eager refugees from homophobic America. By day, a quick walk down Castro might result in an invitation to join a mass rally against Anita Bryant, the Florida orange juice right-wing spokesmodel, and by night anything could happen, and often did, all over town.

 

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