FoundSF

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.

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).

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

Bannon, Race. “50 Years of Leather in the B.A.R.” Bay Area Reporter, March 31, 2021.

Boyd, Nan Alamilla . Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965. University of California Press, 2003.

Conkin, Dennis. “Tobacco $$ for the Gay Community: a Lucky Strike – or a Cancer?” Bay Area Reporter, December 5, 1996.

Connell, Kathleen. “Folsom Artifacts Needed.” Bay Area Reporter, August 23, 2001.

Connell, Kathleen and Paul Gabriel. “The Power of Broken Hearts: The Origin and Evolution of the Folsom Street Fair.” Leather Coming of Age: Folsom Street Fair Turns 18. Folsom Street Fair program, 2001.

“Folsom Street Fair 1991.” Bay Area Reporter, September 26, 1991.

Fritscher, Jack. “Archetribe Party Animals: What Happened at Folsom 1984, Didn’t Stay at Folsom.” Alphatribe no. 6, 2017.

Fritscher, Jack. “First for Folsom.” Drummer, no. 79, 1984.

Gentile, Dan. “Folsom Street Fair Ties Up San Francisco Neighborhood.” San Francisco Chronicle, September 29, 2025.

Gerald, Adams. “Controversy Missing from New Yerba Buena Plan.” San Francisco Examiner, April 13, 1984.

Gilden, Dave. “Miller, ACT UP Reports Conflict.” Bay Area Reporter, September 27, 1990.

Hartman, Chester. City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco. University of California, 2002.

Heath, Emma. “Where Leather Daddies Meet Anti-Gentrification: Folsom Street Fair’s Surprising Roots.” SFGate, September 25, 2018. Accessed October 1, 2025. https://www.sfgate.com/local-donotuse/article/Folson-Street-Fair-Gay-leather-prom-history-SoMa-13248943.php

Hernandez, Marcus. “Drummer Judges Named.” Bay Area Reporter, September 11, 1997.

Hernandez, Marcus, “International Mr. Drummer 1997… Jeffrey Adler!” Bay Area Reporter, October 2, 1997.

Hernandez, Marcus. “Mr. Drummer and Leather Pride Week.” Bay Area Reporter, September 14, 1989.

Hernandez, Marcus, “SF Gets Wrapped Up in Leather This Week.” Bay Area Reporter, September 25, 1997.

Hernandez, Marcus. “SMMILE’s Folsom Street Fair Raises $63,000.” Bay Area Reporter, November 23, 1995.

Hernandez, Marcus. “So. Cal’s Brian Dawson is Mr. Drummer 1989-90.” Bay Area Reporter, September 28, 1989.

Highleyman, Liz. “What is the History of the Folsom Street Fair?” Bay Area Reporter, September 25, 2003.

Lackey, Ken. “Mr. Drummer Contest Update.” Drummer, no. 120, August 1988.

Leather and LGBTQ Cultural District: Cultural History, Housing, and Economic Sustainability Strategies (CHHESS) Report. San Francisco Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, April 2024. Accessed October 1, 2025. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_fyW4mdK_MCCXvhzKZhxBYRoFhOkZ2jP/view

“Leather Pride Weekend: September 21-25, 1988 Calendar of Events.” Drummer, no. 121, September 1988.

Marinucci, Carla. “Folsom Street Fair Less Kinky, More Corporate.” SFGate, September 28, 2013. Accessed October 1, 2025. https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/folsom-street-fair-less-kinky-more-corporate-4851461.php

Pepper, Rachel. “Folsom Street’s Fair; Wilson Isn’t.” Bay Area Reporter, September 17, 1992.

Gayle S. Rubin, “Elegy for the Valley of the Kings: AIDS and the Leather Community in San Francisco, 32 1981-1996,” in In Changing Times: Gay Men and Lesbians Encounter HIV/AIDS, edited by Martin P. Levine, Peter M. Nardi, and John H. Gagnon. University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Rubin, Gayle. “History of the Folsom Street Fair.” Presentation at the Leathermen’s Discussion Group in San Francisco, September 17, 2015. Accessed October 1, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SylZOzsgj2E

Rubin, Gayle. “The Miracle Mile: South of Market and Gay Male Leather, 1962-1997.” In Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture, edited by James Brook, Chris Carlsson, and Nancy J. Peters. City Lights Books, 1998.

Skiff, Mike. Folsom Forever. QC Cinema: Breaking Glass Pictures. 2015.

Spada, Ry. The Fols/m Street Fair: The Making of a Sexual Tourist Attraction and the Selling of San Francisco’s South of Market, 1984-1997. Undergraduate thesis for the American Studies Department at Columbia University, April 2, 2024.

Walker, Richard. “The Financial District.” FoundSF: the San Francisco Digital History Archive. Accessed October 1, 2025. https://www.foundsf.org/THE_FINANCIAL_DISTRICT

Weiss, Margot. Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality. Duke University Press, 2011.

White, Allen. “Dancin’ in the Street: South of Market Shows its Stuff at the Fair.” Bay Area Reporter, September 29, 1988.