San Francisco’s Folsom Street Fair is synonymous with the gay leather scene, but its origins are firmly community-based. As it nears its 40th anniversary, the fair could not be more inclusive of the whole LGBTQ+ kink spectrum. The organisation’s president Vicente Montoya and executive director Angel Adeyoha share how their dedication has helped keep the spark alive nearly four decades on

As told to Markus Bidaux

“Disneyland for perverts”, is how San Francisco’s Folsom Street Fair has been described — both by critics and its fond admirers. The sights, sounds and smells of our “only in San Francisco” festival are difficult to put into words. Suffice it to say, you see people in every sort of dress, including nothing at all; performers and participants gleefully tying each other up and flogging one another; humans dressed and acting like any animal, real or imaginary that you can think of; giant games of Twister; amazing musicians; the hottest burlesque; and thousands of tourists with busy cameras (always ask first!).

You’ll also witness a dedicated crew of volunteers, amazing camaraderie, and people at home in their bodies and at ease with their sexualities, like nowhere else in the world.

For nearly 40 years, the area’s bars, bathhouses and street fairs have drawn new generations of LGBTQ2S+ residents and tourists eager to join in with this joyful celebration of sex, art, culture and queer history.

The fair has its roots in the local gay leather scene, which, by the mid- 1960s, was already well established in the city’s South of Market district (SoMa) — which is intersected by Folsom Street. The city’s gay population had been boosted in the 1940s, when thousands of male US servicemen were given “blue discharges” for homosexual conduct, and migrated back to America’s major port cities, including San Francisco. Many of these servicemen ended up in SoMa — then a poor, working-class neighbourhood.

SoMa’s first leather bar was The Tool Box, which opened in 1961. In 1964, the bar was profiled in Life magazine in an article headlined ‘Homosexuality in America’, which cemented San Francisco and SoMa as the capital of gay deviance in the minds of many Americans.