Everyone’s favorite fetish fest, San Francisco’s Folsom Street Fair, is coming up this Sunday, and this year there is a major new addition to the mayhem. Local party favorites Honey Soundsystem, Hard French, and Something have combined kinky forces to throw a blow-out of an after party, Deviants, at Public Works in the Mission from 3pm-3am (check out their steamy, slightly NSFW promo vid above). The officially sanctioned party will spill out onto the street to accomodate the masses, and is sure to be bumping well into the wee hours.
To get you in the leathery spirit, we’ve got two tickets to give away to Deviants ($20 at folsomstreetfair.com/deviants; $30 at door). Send an e-mail to xxxxx to claim a ticket–the first two deviant readers I hear from will get in for free! UPDATE: Wow, that was fast! The tickets have been claimed, thanks for playing!
Hit the next page for a taste of what the 2010 fair looked like. You can expect, well, a lot more of this and then some. Also be sure to check out the GayCities Folsom Street Fair Event Guide, with parties and goings-on all weekend long.
party haus
ggreen
Charge extra admission to those with ugly/too many tattoos and or exposed love handles.
Michael
#5 both of them yum. #9 the one being held also hehe.
wire hangers
@ggreen: please! bring on the tattoos and love handles! this is a festival where if you feel hot, chances are you can look it!
Fitz
You can either call yourself a sub, or an equal. No one is taking you seriously if you are saying that you are both.
Mike
anyone know if #16 is James M? looks like an old bf!
jason
Folsom Street is a sad collection of perverts and fetishists. Most of the people who go there aren’t remotely interested in gay rights. The right to be a pervert is not a gay right.
ChrisC
Remind me again, what exactly is the point of these things? Whatever the objective is, the only thing that it will sucsussfully do is pull is back and keep us from achieveing equal rights. Also, there is Gay Pride Parades, something that could easily have been a wonderful way to publicly show our pride in a high-profile way, has gotten turned into almost nothing more than a sexualized mockery.
doublestandard
OMFG picture 1 started off with a bang….1 800 call me
jason
Chris C,
You are so correct.
I loathe gay men who hide their fetishes behind the gay label. They are sordid fetishists and nothing less. Yet they have the temerity to put the gay label on it as if somehow to impart on it a noble cause.
Chuck5647
A bunch of doofy dorks with mostly bad bodies, but…no big deal. It doesn’t help the gay world at large, but it probably doesn’t hurt it. Let them have their get-together.
Spike
Those have got to be the most BORING bunch of pictures from Folsom EVER!
BTW, the chick with the pink hair, the ink on her back was INCREDIBLE. Figures that the only pic Queerty would have of her are the pasties. Yawn.
ewe
I liked South of Market when the only people down there were gay men and Fillipinos. It’s just not the same.
mike128
Folsom is am amazing festival. And I don’t get the guys on here who only want to support the “sexually normal” gay guys, or just the guys with the perfect bodies. That’s absolutely not what liberation is about, from my point of view anyway.
Jay
#16 is so hot!!! call me! 🙂
QJ201
Let us not forget…half of this crowd are into wanton barebacking…and the other reason I hate going into leather bars is that there is always some dude following me into the bathroom to take my piss. I swear it’s like I have golden shower top printed on my back.
pickles55
@Jason (et al) Tara & Sybil called, they’d like some of their personalities back
Seriously, do you think folks heads screw on? You’re talking to yourself so blatantly that only someone as coo coo as you couldn’t see it.
Why in the world would someone as “upstanding and moral” as you even click on a link for Folsom. To whom exactly are you targeting your endless lectures about how others should spend their time?
When you see a post about Folsom, if it’s not your thang, why not just jog along and leave it to folks who are interested in the subject at hand? Will be such a kill joy?
Why click on it just to be judgmental and hateful.
Unless you know these folks personally, you have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA what they are like as people and NO, you can’t judge it based upon their participation in a Fetish fair.
You are exhibiting the same kind of bias and discriminatory thinking you with which you charge the larger dominant culture on a regular basis.
Some of the kinkiest people in the world have regular every day jobs doing excellent community work for LGBT rights AND some have totally boring lives other wise.
It’s one day to celebrate freedom of sexuality (not sexual orientation) in San Francisco in one part of town and it’s not just for gay men.
It’s a tradition in San Francisco and the fair is attended by ALL KINDS of people.
If you don’t ACTUALLY know, you’d better ask somebody.
People coming down on Folsom and Burning Man and other completely voluntary activities that have nothing to do with folks who aren’t attending and don’t effect other people’s lives in any way at all need a reality check.
Why you gotta be so mean?
jason
If I had the power, I would ban the Folsom Street Festival. Yes, ban it. It’s nothing more than a collection of perverts and fetishists who seek to cloak their perversions and fetishes in the gay banner. It’s a dishonest form of advertising designed to deflect criticism.
Mike in Asheville
@jason: bet you like burning books too, adolph?
Carsen Tyler
@ewe: Me too, ugh a lot of those people who are moving in and gentrifying the place are trying to shut down the children’s playground and youth center because they don’t like their dogs being bothered by the kids and they don’t like the sound coming from the youth playing. Shit when has people started to think dogs are more important than children.
B
No. 7 · ChrisC wrote, “Remind me again, what exactly is the point of these things?”
1. So “tourists” can take pictures, just gawk, or walk around for a while with some friends and then go somewhere else (and of course to have something outrageous to talk about).
2. The admission charge apparently is used for funding various organizations. According to http://www.folsomstreetevents.org/fair-press-preview.php?releaseId=104 these include:
* Breast Cancer Emergency Fund
* Central City Hospitality House
* Dimensions Clinic
* Dolores Street Community Services
* Mission Neighborhood Health Center
* Project Inform
* Project Open Hand
* Queer Cultural Center
* San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus
* Shanti
* Visual Aid
* AIDS Legal Referral Panel
* Healing Waters
* National AIDS Memorial Grove
* New Leaf
* Triangle Martial Arts Association
(List from March 2010, giving the amount raised [after expenses] at $333,000).
Little Kiwi
i feel bad for you wimps who get your panties in a bunch because you’re terrified of people being reminded of SEXUALITY.
oh, no!!!! leather chaps! fetish gear! bare bums! cockrings! OH THE HUMANNNNNNNITY!
Newsflash – 30,000 Americans die in your country every year from gun violence. worry about GUN CULTURE, not about Folsom, and how it may remind your conservative-ninny family members that you take it up the butt.
seriously. you guys come across as astonishing wimps.
sexual liberation is just that – sexual libeartion. not just for orientation, but the REALITY that being into leather, or fetish gear, doesn’t make you some awful dangerous sinner who is worthy of public or cultural derision.
for real. grow some ORBS, people.
http://littlekiwilovesbauhaus.blogspot.com/2010/06/sexual-revolution.html
derp
I second Little Kiwi!
I can’t believe you joyless puritan wannabes hate on Folsom. News flash: the puritans think you’re perverts, just for BEING who you are.
So here you are, sad parrots of an ideology that pits you against other queers that aren’t harming anybody. Tired of you ‘picket fence’ queers, screaming ‘we’re just like youuuuuu’ and constantly trying to prove yourselves to a bunch of hateful people who’d sooner see you in at BEST back in the closet. What you need to do is study up on how all these perverts and degenerates have been integral to our struggle, and how we actually just might be able to make some improvements on this crazy puritan culture that obviously suffers from its own schizophrenic relationship to sexuality.
Dave
WTF is up with the people here who are so uptight about their fellow GLBT people being open about being into leather/BDSM/kink and power exchange?
I understand that most people are not into leather, don’t have actual fetishes, and don’t practice kink/BDSM but don’t hate on us GLBT people who do and are out about it.
darkskin bttms R survivors
GOODNESS!!!! I couldn’t get pass the video.. Um. Um. Um. Tasty.. Maybe I need to “holla” at Folsom next year.
DB
Folsom Street Fair is the most wonderful and life-affirming festival on the planet. It was amazing this year as always. Although I personally do not have any kinks or fetishes, I love seeing the sex, nudity, BDSM, crazy costumes, and nudity. No other city can compare to San Francisco for this. My husband and I dropped off our son with friends right after church, changed, and went directly to the fair. I personally watched a woman be vaginally fisted in the middle of the street and a man being sounded in an outdoor booth, along with many other educational experiences (some quite difficult to watch). This weekend is Castro Street Fair and Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, but they are in some ways more bland and pedestrian than Folsom. My husband and I had friends visiting from East Tennessee who were pleasantly shocked and amazed and had never seen anything like this previously. I happened to run into the pastor from my church and a colleague from work which could have been a little awkward but turned out to be fine.
DB
@pickles55: Amen. Folsom is about a public celebration of fetishes and open BDSM sexuality but above all it is about fun, joy, and freedom. I don’t expect Kabul, Salt Lake City, Birmingham, Beijing, or Vatican City to have a similar festival any time soon. I do not practice any kinks or fetishes but I always go to Folsom because it is wonderful to see the variety of human sexual expression and to see activities, bodies, and costumes you normally never see in public. Anyone who is not interested in attending Folsom certainly should not but I would hope everyone would fight for the rights of the fair to exist. Thank you for pointing out what should be obvious about Folsom as well – it is not and has never been a gay festival. It is a fetish festival that is equally embraced by heterosexuals and does not target a specific race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, etc.