from the clubs to the street: how leather culture built folsom

Every year on the last Sunday in September, roughly 250,000 people fill a stretch of Folsom Street in San Francisco's South of Market district for the Folsom Street Fair, the largest leather and fetish event in the world. Most people know it as a party. Its actual history is longer and more specific than that, and it runs from a postwar motorcycle club through a set of unwritten rules and into a fight over a neighborhood.

the motorcycle clubs

Leather culture in the United States grew out of gay motorcycle clubs formed after World War II. Veterans came home to a country with no place for what they had experienced in the service, and some of them found each other through motorcycles, which were cheap and widely available as war surplus.

The first openly gay motorcycle club was the Satyrs, founded in Los Angeles on November 5, 1954, by Chapin "Smitty" Smith and seven other men, several of them veterans. It was the first gay organization in the country with its own bylaws and constitution, and it remains one of the longest continuously running gay organizations in the world. It was founded during the McCarthy era, when being identified as gay could cost a man his job or worse.

Other clubs followed quickly: Oedipus in Los Angeles in 1958, and the Warlocks and the California Motor Club in San Francisco. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Los Angeles County alone had more than a dozen gay motorcycle and uniform clubs.

The clubs borrowed heavily from the military structures the founders had left. They wore back patches they called colors, made medals modeled on wartime sortie pins, and organized around a clear hierarchy with pledges and probationary periods. Membership meant something: men went through real pledge periods to get in, and the alternative, being an unaffiliated "GDI" (god-damned independent), meant standing outside the brotherhood the clubs provided. The tough reputation also worked as protection against harassment.

the old guard

The culture that came out of the clubs is often called the "old guard." It was a code passed down in person, from one man to another, over time.

Under that code, leather was earned rather than bought. Gear carried specific meaning, including which side you wore your keys on and what your colors signified, and there were established protocols for behavior and rank. The structure came directly from men who had learned in the service that trust between people has to be built and that power exchanged without discipline is dangerous. The protocols were a way to make intense experience both safer and more serious, and to hand down an ethic, not just techniques.

the miracle mile

The bars gave the culture a physical home, and in San Francisco that home was Folsom Street.

The Tool Box opened in 1962. FeBe's opened on Folsom in 1966, run by two men who had met in military service. Through the 1960s and 1970s, the blocks South of Market filled with leather bars, bathhouses, and related businesses, until the area held more than two dozen leather venues within walking distance of each other. It became known as the "Miracle Mile" and the "Valley of the Kings." The scene ran on bar nights, weekend motorcycle "runs," title contests, and fundraisers.

what the fair was for

By the early 1980s, two threats were closing in on the neighborhood at once.

The first was development. Developers had targeted a large section of South of Market for redevelopment, which would have displaced many of the businesses and residents, including the leather establishments. The second was AIDS, which hit the leather community hard and gave the city a public-health rationale to shut down bars and bathhouses.

In 1984, a group of community organizers and housing activists responded by starting a street fair, originally called "Megahood." Founders Kathleen Connell and Michael Valerio built it to do several things at once: make the political point that South of Market was an occupied, living neighborhood rather than an empty slum awaiting redevelopment; raise money for the legal defense of leather bars; connect people with health services and AIDS-prevention information; and move the leather community into public view. In the process it reframed that community as a set of activists rather than only a collection of fetishists.

Valerio embodied the neighborhood's history directly. He was Filipino, his father and grandfather had worked in the South of Market maritime trades, and he was himself a leatherman.

The key fact is that the fair did not begin as a celebration. It began as a defense of a neighborhood and a community that were both under threat.

today

More than forty years later, the Folsom Street Fair is the world's largest leather gathering, and most attendees have never heard of the Satyrs. The line from a 1954 motorcycle club to a modern street fair of a quarter-million people is indirect, and the culture has been rewritten many times along the way, but the connection is real: the clubs created the structure, the bars gave it a home, and the fight to save that home created the event that now carries the whole history forward.