Dore Alley Street Fair: Iconic Event
Like the Folsom Street Fair, the event sits in the heart of the South of Market neighborhood, the same part of the city where Jack Fritscher spent the 1970s covering leather bars, clubs and publications for Drummer. That history is why a smaller street party there belongs among the icons on this site. Fritscher’s writing on the neighborhood runs from the Catacombs and the CMC Carnival to the Folsom Street Fair itself, and the footage of this fair picks up the same story in a later era.
The video on this page was shot by Fritscher and Mark Hemry as a Palm Drive Video production. Watching it alongside his written profiles gives a sense of how the leather traditions of South of Market carried forward from the bars of the 1970s into the street fairs of today. For more on the larger fair that inspired it, see the Folsom Street Fair on Wikipedia.
Readers interested in the city’s other celebrations can also explore Jack Fritscher’s pages on the Folsom Street Fair, the CMC Carnival, the Castro Street Fair and the San Francisco Pride Parade, each of which documents a different part of San Francisco’s gay street culture.