Report from the Folsom Street Fair

After my last few posts on homophobia, the Family Research Council, and the U.S. Republican Party - It's a lot more fun to write about the Folsom Street Fair, which I attended last weekend with my husband, my boyfriend, and a couple friends. I'd been hearing about it for years: the third largest street fair in the state of California, with about 300,000 - 400,000 people celebrating the BDSM subculture in the open air. It's an opportunity for a dazzling mass of kinky people to get together in public without any of the usual constraints of subtlety or discretion. And when I say that it isn't subtle or discrete, I mean that they have someone in leather dancing in a cage suspended from a crane in front of a church.

I didn't come away from the fair with any new revelations, but it's a heck of a great party. I'm also glad that we showed up early, before it was too crowded. Shortly after the fair opened, we paid the suggested donation supporting local charities and started exploring. (People who don't donate are still allowed in, but don't get the sticker good for $1 off some of the food and drink items.) There were booths promoting various BDSM social organizations, and awareness of various health issues, and gay men's sports teams, and a gay-friendly, woman-pastored Evangelical church, and the the Sex Workers Outreach Project. There were booths selling metal jewelry, and the standard street-festival food and overpriced beer, and mostly there were booths selling all kinds of BDSM toys and fetish-wear. There were people in leather and latex, and people in drag, and people in jeans, and naked people. There were a few organized spectacles, including live music and the cage-dancer. Kink.com elaborately tied up some porn stars; the Society of Janus ran a charity spanking and flogging booth; a local bathhouse ran a Nearly Naked Twister game to benefit a clinic that provides health care and social services to sex workers. And with another eye toward environmentalism, next to almost every trash can was a recycling bin and a compost bin, with volunteers making sure refuse went to the right bin.

...And for all that excitement, my one complaint is that by one o'clock it was too crowded to see much. I was also wearing latex, which always makes me feel deliciously sexy - except that it's also hot temperature-wise, and in San Francisco September is still summer. When I couldn't stand my own sweat anymore, I took my top off entirely. I'd never before gone entirely topless in a public crowd - not because I'm shy, but because it's usually illegal. In the context of the Folsom Street Fair, the usually male privilege of going shirtless when the weather is just too hot for a shirt was mine.

No one has to join a public spectacle in order to enjoy kinky sex. But it is a welcoming and celebratory culture, and an awful lot of fun.