ALPHATRIBE
No 6 September 2011
NO CAMERAS ALLOWED: 1984
SELFIES EVERYWHERE: 2017
ARCHETRIBE PARTY ANIMALS
What Happened at Folsom 1984,
Didn’t Stay at Folsom
by Jack Fritscher
Also available in PDF
AT THE FIRST FOLSOM STREET FAIR IN 1984, LEATHER CULTURE CHANGED. During that year made infamous by George Orwell, leatherfolk, on September 23, fell out of more than 30 dark bars, and down Alice’s Rabbit Hole toward transparent afternoon light. As an eyewitness videographer, and as Drummer editor shooting the popular culture of “gay street life,” I watched us leathermen blink when, for the first time outside of a bike run in the woods, we saw ourselves not “mythic” under the red bulbs of bars, but, like glorious mad dogs and Englishmen, out in the noonday sun. It was as if Chuck Arnett’s 1963 “shadow mural” in the Plato’s cave of the Tool Box exploded from b&w into living color.
For leather and kink men, a hot afternoon on the bright pavement was a 180-degree spin as we claimed the industrial streets South of Market Street (SOMA)—including Ringold Alley and Dore Alley—as OUT gay space by day as well as by night. Our leather Archetribe endorsement was welcome support to Folsom Fair founders, Kathleen Connell and leatherman Michael Valerio, who invented the local neighborhood activist party titled “Megahood: Attack of the Street Faire” to protest San Francisco’s gentrification of the bohemian SOMA slums housing minorities, the elderly, and gay men.
SEX TOURISTS: LET THEM EAT PORNCAKE
Before that first Folsom Fair, who knew you could get the kind of public caning criminals get in Singapore? Who knew that leather-curious Castronauts would tiptoe down from their Clone Gayborhood to twirl a little black-and-blue S&M magic into their twinky vanilla latte? Who knew that a weird diversity of non-ironic Millennial yuppies with strollers, and counterspy Christian preachers shooting exposé footage of sin, and rich Mormon election fixers would eventually crash the party? Who knew that mime-faced Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence would become the brawny gatekeepers who set up checkpoints at all the Fair entrances shaking their can-cans for cash donations totaling millions for charity? Who knew that Folsom’s first little local neighborhood block party would turn into a de rigueur destination for international sex tourists who think San Francisco feasts on Street Porncake like this all year long?
FOLSOM FAIR ORIGIN STORY
In the Folsom Fair origin story, our leather Archetribe anxiety ran deep in that Orwellian dystopia of 1984 when we suspected the US government was the inventor of the AIDS “Final Solution of the Homosexual Question.” Adding ironic cruelty, many politically correct vanilla gays despised our romantic outlaw leather culture of the 1950-1980s, and screamed that leather sex was the cause of AIDS.
By 1984, plague had made gay culture hysterical. AIDS was everywhere. Its baffling cause seemed to be homosexuality itself. There was no cure.
HIV testing had yet to be invented. We knew we were all going to die.
The last thing we needed to make the horror show complete, some early HIV privacy activists complained, was a street party with noon light bright as an X-ray revealing the secrets of one another’s health status.
Pursuing counter-phobic optimism, the 1980s rise of Fakir Musafar’s iconic “Modern Primitives” body modification tribal scene, along with the Goth scene, romanced the careful joys of body fluids. Their performance art rituals of music, costumes, tattoos, piercings, and scarification offered a reassuring spiritual psychology to GLBTQ youngbloods. The counter-culture of leather biochemist Geoff Mains’ new “Urban Aboriginals” was taking a walk on the wild side. Sadomasochists paraded like penitentes, proud of bleeding whip marks, raw razor cuts, second-degree burns, and higher consciousness in the years after the first Folsom Fair debuted as Street Theater.
In our kinky BDSM “street performance art,” we seemed to be acting out Edgar Allan Poe’s famous horror story “The Masque of the Red Death” in which diversely costumed characters, threatened by an unnamed plague, retreat to party at a masquerade ball in rainbow-colored rooms, seizing the day, not knowing who of the masked guests is Death itself.
In our constantly evolving and necessarily survivalist gay culture, AIDS was just one more death-defying challenge to invent new kink identities and come out strong into a leather street fair to party hard, cast our fates to the wind, and sing with gay-icon Miss Peggy Lee: “Is that all there is to a plague? If that’s all there is, keep on dancing.”
MR. DRUMMER: “BE OUR GUEST! BE OUR GUEST!”
As a Pop-Up event, Folsom Fair became San Francisco’s biggest No-Host Bar because it sucked our funky Folsom bar crowds out onto sidewalks where, like Rocky Horror Creatures of the Night, some of us were dissolved by the Sunlight.
Historically, on a cautionary note, because our underground grassroots leather culture was like a Private Circuit Party of cloak-and-dagger clubs, bars, wild bike runs, orgiastic baths, and fucknsuck back rooms, a public leather street fair seemed dangerously invasive to the secrecy of the “Archetribal Cult of Leather” as invented and inherited from before Stonewall.
So, swelling the protest crowd of Connell and Valerio’s tenant activists and patchouli hippies at that first Folsom Fair protesting the “Manhattanization of San Francisco,” a thousand local leathermen stuck skeptical heads out of smoky bars to discover that this event had potential as a kind of “Second-Wave Gay Liberation.” Out of the Closet and into the Streets! We could booze, cruise, flip dick, twist tits, and piss play shamelessly in public. Jeers turned to cheers!
In 1984, Drummer was the magazine of record for leather culture. Drummer was then “New Media” alerting leathermen to our news craic and to our Classified Personals ads for pre-Grindr hookups. We quickly endorsed the potential of Folsom Fair, anchoring the infant neighborhood fete with our wildly popular “Mr.Drummer Contest” as a Destination Leather Event that we had started at the 1979 CMC Carnival. As the international voice of leather identity, Drummer helped create the very Folsom Fair culture it reported on.
“Be our Guest! Come for Mr. Drummer. Stay for the Fair.”
Archetribe Game Show Trivia Fact: Drummer publisher Anthony DeBlase conceived and designed the “Leather Flag” that flies its black-and-blue stripes and big red heart over Folsom Fair.
Our Drummer endorsement—20 years before Instagram and Twitter—launched an inter-continental ballistic missile of sex, armed with a warhead of atomic fuckery.
Drummer introduced our local fair to hundreds of thousands of globe-trotting sex tourists who ate up the increasingly sexy coverage Drummer gave each year to promote the fair internationally.
Every Drummer photo-spread of Folsom Fair was like an engraved invitation sent to every leatherman on the planet. It was a travel agent’s dream brochure sent worldwide to the Mineshaft in New York, the Argos in Amsterdam, and the Coleherne in Earl’s Court. Not since leathered prospectors wearing Levi’s discovered “Gold at Sutter’s Mill” and started the 1849 California Gold Rush has any proclamation started such a stampede west to San Francisco. More than 400,000 people showed up for Folsom Fair 2017.
SPANK-BANK CAMERAS (ONCE VERBOTEN) DOCUMENT LEATHER CH-CH-CH-CHANGES
Cameras have come to define Folsom Fair as a giant “Pop Culture Photo Op” where the more outrageous you are in public the more legal right paparazzi have to shoot you and publish your newsworthy image anywhere so long as they don’t use you for advertising, or ridicule you the way Christian preachers do screening their Folsom Fair footage in church basements to teach homophobia. As a journalist and videographer shooting documentaries of many Folsom Fairs since 1984 (when cameras were not welcome because cops used them for entrapment), I have noticed that—like an ever-changing college campus—the leather “look” changes every three or four years.
Think of Marlon Brando’s styling World-War-II veteran bikers in The Wild One (1953), and Kenneth Anger’s psychedelic bikers in Scorpio Rising (1964), and leather clones’ debut in bars (1974), followed by Drummer’s inauguration of Leather Daddies (1979), and by Richard Bulger’s Bear magazine (1986) identifying the new generation of Leather Muscle Bears, and finally of the queer-theory influx of multiple morphing genders (1990). Like other erotic video directors, I’ve scouted every Folsom Fair for porn talent, casting dozens of fresh faces, many HIV positive, whose dream visit to San Francisco suddenly gave them an on-location leathersex experience, screen immortality, and memories money can’t buy.
In the Darwin drawing, “The Ascent of (Leather) Man,” marching out of Chuck Arnett’s archetypal 1963 Tool Box mural, made famous by LIFE magazine in 1964, 1980s leatherfolk looked primally different from our binary 1950s past, as well as from our postmodern leatherfolk in 2017 believing gay identities to be diverse, plural, and relative in gender, gear, grooming, and girth. In terms of evolutionary documentary, the Folsom Fair as an event is a riotous Sex Comedy Update of what’s new in the streets, on the screen, and on the Internet.
SNAP! go the lusting curbside photographers harvesting fresh Spank Bank images: “He’s a JPEG! He’s a JPEG! He’s not a JPEG. Wow! Over there! He’s a SCREEN-SAVER!”
My dear friend, the late and beloved documentary filmmaker Mike Skiff, director of Kink Crusaders, shot a perfect eyewitness Folsom Fair History in his excellent 2015 feature, Folsom Forever. See the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ENOyoCqHto
For me, the most dramatic Folsom Fair video documentary I shot was in 2001, less than three weeks after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. That tragedy spun Folsom back to its roots as a local event because air-travel and American national PTSD issues shrank the attendance of the incoming tourist crowd. That year, the SFPD embedded SWAT cops in tactical-military gear, armed with sniper rifles on the rooftops of bars up and down Folsom Street to protect the public sex party.
TRANSFORM YOURSELF: FELLINI DOES LA DOLCE FOLSOM
Like Fashion Week itself, Folsom Fair is a Fashion Runway. New leather-fetish-kink styles continually evolve like a Fellini film marking another year of Gay Magical Thinking (aka masturbation) about BDSM sexuality. Your new leather clothing can conjure up your alternative identities for sex play. Ask anyone who has ever jerked off into a mirror, wearing a new harness, with tit clamps and cigar in his teeth, about the transformative power of bespoke fetish clothing. On Halloween, folks dress to conceal themselves. At Folsom Fair, folks dress to reveal themselves. For all its expensive fetishwear, Folsom Fair is like a wild nudist camp event. All you need buy to party on the wild side are boots, jockstrap, cock ring, and harness or vest.
What Folsom Fair reveals about human nature is that sadomasochism is nearly everyone’s Secret Guilty Pleasure. The opportunity for BDSM exhibitionism and voyeurism is the Siren Call for the hot Twittering international players now recruited on the Internet. The perennial Folsom Fair is our Archetribal leather culture stepping forward into its own future.
PETER SHAPIRO: THE LEATHER PLEASURE MACHINE
Peter Shapiro in his remarkable book Turn the Beat Around wrote about the “collective power” of disco crowds as a mass “pleasure machine,” but he might also have included the Folsom Fair mob collective.
There is, he writes: “…a new kind of political resistance, of what French theorists and psychoanalysts Felix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, and Guy Hocquenghem call a ‘revolution machine.’ As opposed to the individual expressions of desire in capitalist societies that necessarily force one to view the world in either/or structures, Guattari and Delueze proposed a collective linking of libidos and desires that would open up innumerable possibilities for sexuality other than the oedipal death drive of capitalism. Liberated from social, economic, and political forces, desire is set free and humans become pure ‘desiring machines’ that interface with any and every other ‘machine’ with no hang-ups, no repression, no constraints. The group grope of the disco dance floor, the anonymous antics of the back room, and the heedless hedonism of the bathhouse [and, he may as well have added, the mass mob of the Folsom Street Fair] were [are] probably as close to such a polymorphously perverse paradise as humans will ever get. [All italics added] (p. 65)
FOLSOM FAIR BUILDS ARCHETRIBE CHARACTER
The Archetribe folk truth may be that we leathermen massed together in Deleuze’s “pleasure machine,” gather individual erotic strength that can help sustain us in our personal lives, our sex play, and our community. What happens on Folsom doesn’t stay on Folsom. You internalize the energy, horse-play, and roughhousing, and take it all home. Been there! Done that! So, after the ball is over, and when you, back at home, are being whipped or fisted or water-boarded, and you think you can’t take anymore, “Close your eyes and think of Folsom!”
Photographer Jack Fritscher is the founding San Francisco editor of Drummer magazine, and the author of 20 books like his award-winning leather history Gay San Francisco. You can read the texts of his leather books and kink articles free, with more details about FOLSOM FAIR at DrummerArchives.com