Folsom Street Fair

Historical Essay

By Drew Bourn PhD MLIS for San Francisco Heritage, October 2025

U.S. Army Captain Joseph Folsom, after whom San Francisco’s Folsom Street is named, made a fortune by speculating in California real estate during the Gold Rush. His land dealings foreshadowed the role that real estate development would play in the city’s South of Market.

Joseph Folsom (1817-1855) as depicted in Frank Soulé, John Gihon, and James Nisbet’s 1855 publication, The Annals of San Francisco, p. 754.

Since the nineteenth century the South of Market has largely been an industrial neighborhood with housing for working class and transient residents. By the twentieth century this included many single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels and businesses that catered to low-income retirees. The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency classified parts of the neighborhood as “blighted,” making them eligible for demolition. One development project, Yerba Buena Center, began clearing entire city blocks of South of Market SROs in the 1960s.

In 1969 neighborhood residents responded by organizing Tenants and Owners in Opposition to Redevelopment (TOOR), which two years later formed the Tenants and Owners Development Corporation (TODCO)—a non-profit to build housing for residents being displaced by the Yerba Buena Center project.

In 1979 TODCO hired Michael Valerio to develop affordable senior housing. Valerio embodied multiple aspects of the neighborhood’s history. He was Filipino, and his father and grandfather had worked in the South of Market’s maritime trades. Valerio was also a leatherman.

“Leather” is a subculture that emerged after WWII in which gay men turned to motorcycle clubs, the military, and other sources to imagine new and queer forms of masculinity. They sought each other out for heighted sexual experiences that involved role-play, bondage, and fetishes. Beginning in the 1960s Folsom Street and the surrounding area became the “Miracle Mile” or the “Valley of the Kings”—a concentration of bars, bathhouses, and other businesses that catered to leathermen.

Another TODCO employee was Kathleen Connell, an out lesbian who had worked with the United Farm Workers. Connell met Valerio at the South of Market Alliance, a group that advocated for residents in the South of Market. Together, Valerio and Connell strategized how they could support residents in the face of urban redevelopment.

They turned for ideas to Harry Britt, the San Francisco Supervisor who was appointed to replace Harvey Milk after Milk’s assassination in 1978. Britt encouraged them to consider Milk’s tactic of creating the Castro Street Fair to promote that neighborhood. Inspired by Britt’s suggestion, Valerio and Connell decided to create a street fair for the South of Market. The first Folsom Street Fair took place on September 23, 1984. Over 30,000 people attended and approximately $20,000 was raised for community-based non-profits. Encouraged by their success, Valerio and Connell moved forward with their plans to make the fair an annual event.

Program cover for the first Folsom Street Fair, held in 1984. Valerio and Connell called the event “Megahood” to counter developers’ language of the South of Market as empty or slums.

Image: “Folsom Street Fair, 1984-2013,” San Francisco Ephemera Collection (SFH 753), San Francisco Public Library.

The fair grew quickly. In its second year the number of attendees roughly doubled. The following year the number doubled again to more than 125,000. In 1989 an estimated 250,000 people participated. By 1995 the fair organizers noted that “for the last several years more than 300,000 people” attended. Folsom Street Fair had become the third largest single-day public event in California, surpassed only by the Rose Parade in Pasadena and San Francisco Pride.

Funding for the fair also grew. It began receiving support from San Francisco’s hotel tax fund at least as early as 1988. That year also saw substantial corporate sponsorship from Budweiser. Other major corporations increasingly contributed. By 2014 the sponsorship of companies like American Airlines and Marriott Hotels underscored the fair’s value for tourism and hospitality.

Program cover for “Attack of the Street Faire,” the second Folsom Street Fair, held in 1985.

Image: “Folsom Street Fair, 1984-2013,” San Francisco Ephemera Collection (SFH 753), San Francisco Public Library.

In its earliest years the fair was not primarily about leather. As Jack Fritscher noted in the leather magazine Drummer about the fair in 1984:

“Crowds were… curiously mixed. There was certainly more leather in evidence than at this year’s Castro Street Fair – and maybe more straights as well. The fair was, after all, a neighborhood effort, not just a leather festival.”

Rather than a leather event, Valerio and Connell had created Folsom Street Fair as a strategy to protect the neighborhood from real estate developers. But the threats they were responding to were soon mitigated. In 1984 the South of Market Alliance reached an agreement with the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency and the developers of the Yerba Buena Center. Connell said of the deal, “we are extremely gratified.” Another development threat to the South of Market came in 1983 in the form a policy proposal by San Francisco Planning Director Dean Macris called the Downtown Plan (while it helped preserve some downtown historic buildings, it did shift development pressures to South of Market). But three years later San Franciscans voted in favor of Proposition M; that victory put limits on the ambitious scope of Macris’s agenda.

While the fair’s role as a strategy for neighborhood advocacy became less pressing, two other changes resulted in Folsom Street Fair becoming more of a leather event.

The first had to do with San Francisco-based Drummer magazine. The magazine produced an annual contest called International Mr. Drummer. In 1988 the magazine’s owner, Tony DeBlase, changed the date for the Mr. Drummer contest to coincide with the Folsom Street Fair. He also came up with a branding strategy: in the pages of Drummer he announced that the weekend of the contest and fair was Leather Pride Weekend. By the following year, Bay Area Reporter leather columnist Mr. Marcus (aka Marcus Hernandez) was calling the week before the fair Leather Pride Week. That convention has continued to the present as a seven-day period of leather-oriented fundraisers, dances, performances, and other events culminating in the fair.

An attendee shows off his leather gear at the 1989 Folsom Street Fair.

Photo by Marcus Hernandez. Marcus Hernandez (Mister Marcus) collection, The Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society.

The second development came in 1990. Producers of the Folsom Street Fair merged their organization with the organization that produced Up Your Alley (sometimes called Dore Alley), a smaller but more explicitly leather-focused street fair also held in the South of Market. The new joint corporation was called South of Market Merchants’ and Individuals’ Lifestyle Events (SMMILE).

1996 Folsom Street Fair flyer: The program cover for the 1996 Folsom Street Fair. Twelve years after the fair’s inception, this was the first program cover that featured leathermen.

“Folsom Street Fair,” San Francisco LGBT General Subjects Ephemera Collection, SUB EPH, The Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society.

1997 publicity for the Folsom Street Fair: Publicity for the 1997 Folsom Street Fair. By this point, advertising focused on the leather / bondage / fetish aspects of the fair that increasingly attracted San Francisco residents and visitors from around the world.

“Folsom Street Fair,” San Francisco LGBT General Subjects Ephemera Collection, SUB EPH, The Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society.

“Lurch” at the 1995 Folsom Street Fair: “Lurch” (T. Michael Sutton) with his pet boa at the 1995 Folsom Street Fair. Sutton co-founded the Bears of San Francisco and was a member of the Centaur Motorcycle Club.

Album 21 in the Lynn Ludwig Photographs Collection (GLC 65), LGBTQIA Center, San Francisco Public Library.

Folsom Street Fair attendees in 1995: Attendees of the 1995 Folsom Street Fair.

Album 21 in the Lynn Ludwig Photographs Collection (GLC 65), LGBTQIA Center, San Francisco Public Library.

SMMILE reports that Folsom Street Fair has raised over seven million dollars since its inception. Those funds get donated to local and national non-profits such as the AIDS Emergency Fund, Bayview/Hunter’s Point Community Legal, the Tenderloin AIDS Resource Center, the GLBT Historical Society, Pets Are Wonderful Support (PAWS), the Transgender Law Center, The Women’s Building / Women’s HIV Support Group, Frameline, the Metropolitan Community Church, Episcopal Community Services, Shanti, Project Open Hand, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the University of California San Francisco AIDS Health Project, and many others.

Folsom Street Fair has become the largest leather event in the world. It has given rise to similar events in New York City (Folsom East) and Berlin (Folsom Europe). In San Francisco, it is the culmination of a week-long plethora of leather events. The fair itself provides a safe space for people of all genders and sexualities to enjoy live music, demonstrations, vendors’ offerings, and the public spectacle of one another to affirm the joys and mysteries of human sexuality.

Sources

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