“Only 3 booths were identifiable as kink or kink-related” at Megahood, Dr.
Even someone called the Concerned Republicans had a registered booth at the first Folsom Street Fair. Marga Gomez performed at Megahood on the Folsom Stage. The musical headliners were Jane Dornacker and the Geraldine Ferraro All-Star Emancipated Blues Band. Other booths offered handmade pottery, crystal renderings and ceramic ware. The largest attraction at the fair was a 200-foot line-up of restored vintage muscle cars. “The first fair was leather-friendly, but it was not a leather event,” Dr. Connell’s history of the Folsom Street Fair should also be considered required reading.) Megahood was organized by Kathleen Connell and Michael Valerio, two neighborhood activists who cared a lot more about protesting gentrification than they did about promoting the BDSM lifestyle. (The Fair will be selling replicas of this original poster Sunday, for you memorabilia buffs.) Here we see the last existing original-print flyer for Megahood ’84, now acknowledged as the first incarnation of the Folsom Street Fair. The HIV/AIDS crisis gave the SF Planning Commission the hammer it needed to bring all this bathhousing and assfisting to a complete halt.īut they underestimated the community’s response. “But it’s right next to Union Square, which is Park Avenue.”Īnd little mustachioed men in top hats will not be denied their bags of money for long. “If you think of it in Monopoly terms, was Baltic Avenue, the cheapest one,” she said. “It was ideal for renewal, redevelopment and what we would eventually call gentrification.” Rubin explains, describing SoMA’s role in the 1980s ‘Urban Renewal’ period. “SoMA was targeted both socially and politically by City Hall,” Dr. Even our old friend 1015 Folsom used to be a gay bathhouse, the only one open to all sexes, called Sutro Baths.Īnd SF City Hall hated all of this. 1981).Īt the time, you also had The Bootcamp (a gay BDSM bathhouse), The Catacombs (an assfisting private club) and the Handball Express. A few go-to gay bars from that era still survive, like The Stud (Est. 1961, 4 th & Harrison, now a Whole Foods). The Tool Box was the first established SF gay bar (Est. To understand how the Folsom Street Fair was born, we first have to understand the political war SF City Hall was waging against the South of Market gay leather community in the mid-1980s at the height of the AIDS epidemic.įrom the 1960s to the early 1980s, the Folsom “Miracle Mile” was unquestionably the hottest gay sex hook-up neighborhood on earth with more than 30 different gay leather sex bars. For a more immersive and historically accurate Ken Burns kind of experience, I’d recommend Mike Skriff’s documentary Folsom Forever which played at this year’s Frameline.) The Folsom ‘Miracle Mile’ of Gay Leather Clubs (1964-1984) ( NOTE: This write-up is just some half-ass Cliff’s Notes shit that I cranked out in the hours immediately following Dr. Her findings were a rollicking ride through the kinky, politically charged and deeply perverted 30-year history of our beloved annual blow-jobs-and-assfucking street fair. Rubin presented The History of the Folsom Street Fair Wednesday night of Leather Week at a session presented by the SF Leathermen’s Discussion Group.
Gayle Rubin, UM professor and one of the world’s leading authorities on contemporary gender politics and sexual subcultures. “The Folsom Fair did not start out as a leather event,” explains Dr.
The origins and backstory of what is now “the world’s largest leather event” deserve to be acknowledged for this year’s 34th annual Folsom Street Fair, expected to draw almost half a million leather and BDSM fetishists to San Francisco’s SoMA District on Sunday. The Folsom Street Fair didn’t used to be called the Folsom Street Fair, it used to be an outlaw, anti-gentrification event and it was definitely not sanctioned by SF City Hall. 1880 Shares Share on Facebook Share on Twitterįolsom Street Fair was not always welcomed in SF with city-sponsored banners all over Market St.