Folsom Forever

By: Amos Lassen

The Folsom Street Fair is San Francisco's most notorious bacchanal. We tend to think of it a leather and kink festival but it is so much more than that. Mike Skiff, in his new film "Folsom Forever" now making the rounds at film festivals, looks at the social, political, charitable and cultural aspects of the fair.

It all began back in 1984 in a neighborhood of low-income tenants and in the heart of the gay leather scene. There were plans to destroy the neighborhood but the Folsom Street Fair was created to bring attention to gentrification and to raise money for AIDS charities. To show us this, Skiff uses interviews with the organizers as well as with politicians and scholars as well as archival footage and newer film (the 2012 fair). This is the story of how one little fair became the largest outdoor fetish event in the world and at same time did a lot of good.

Folsom Street Fair came into being at the height of the AIDS epidemic when public opinion called for the closing of sex clubs and bathhouses as we learn from scholar and former publisher of "Drummer Magazine". He saw this as "a Puritan reaction to the pleasure houses". The response was to market BDSM as the ultimate safe sex and therefore the Folsom Street Fair became the place to be and it was there that all kinds of people came and expressed their sexual; proclivities. Today some 400,000 people from all over the world come to it and the fair supports indie bands and brings a lot of money into the city. Just last year the fair awarded $330,000 in grants to local nonprofit organizations.

There is also the other side of the fair-the nudity and the kink, as important as they may be to some, play a second fiddle to the good that the fair does. Below is a trailer for the film and the question and answer session with Mike Skiff (filmmaker), Gayle Rubin (cultural anthropologist), Race Bannon (SF BDSM Educator), Paul Lester (Folsom Street Fair executive producer in '90s), Rachele Sullivan (Folsom Street Fair board member). It is moderated by Des Buford of Frameline.


"The screening was part of San Francisco's celebration of Leather Week, held by Frameline as part of their monthly Encore series. This panel provided richer details about the origins of South of Market as a queer leather mecca and the adminsterial changes through out Folsom Street Fair's 30 years".