Cowboy Confessional

After 144 years you would think it odd for a black man to be publicly roped and whipped in America.

Unless it is downtown San Francisco and the one wielding the whips is a lanky blonde in a leather body suit, wearing little else aside from a maniacal grin.

San Francisco is a city where fetishes are topics of discussion at PTA meetings and where even the nuns are kinky (and the pseudo nuns are odder than the authentic variety). It is a town where you are likely to meet your neighbors at a sex club. When common debauchery is nearly communal, the truly twisted are not far beneath the surface and occasionally escape.

Such is San Francisco’s annual Folsom Street Faire, an event where the interesting and somewhat scary people come to exhibit themselves and their hardware. The Faire attracts whips and chain, BDSM and all manner of leather clad folk from around the globe, as well as a stack of innocent watchers who want only to sneak a toe into the wild side.

The rest of the attendees are happily disturbed.

Which brings us back to the whipee – a well built man (in all manner of speaking) who was roped in a spread-eagle hang, under a sign for an online fetish pornographer and before a mixed audience of the similarly situated and the utterly stunned. With each stroke of her nine tails, short whip or jolt from a miniature cattle prod, he thanked her for inflicting injury (she did stop once to get an alcohol swab for his welted rump).

The scene was almost Romanesque. With a one-handed shocking device, she jolted his back, arms, chest and then headed south to his naked nether regions. She asked the crowd which part of his genital and surrounding territories she should electrocute next. Each audience member shouted their request in an orgy of borderline blood lust. I’m sure the Coliseum saw more action than the Folsom showcases, but maybe not by much.

Shameless is our city, and more so the people who tour these event in the nude. I’m no prude and a good looking and equally naked woman always grabs my attention. Sadly most of the public nudists at the Folsom Fair are exactly he kind of people you want to keep clothed, with the majority being pale, old, fat white men. Seriously, either keep your clothing on or drop a few pounds and shave your back.

And women thought saving their legs was tricky.

In the mix are the committed and the comical. The former are those who have made their particular peccadillo an utter lifestyle. Swarms of identically clad men stand in the intersections watching for soul mates and bedmates to gravitationally attract. Women both tied to Saint Andrew’s crosses and switching the bound, the latter stopping only long enough to ponder the selection of straps with which to whip the former. Men looking particularly breathless in their corsets, women looking particularly excited about chains, and the straights looking particularly perplexed.

They contrasted sharply with the wannabes – those who may some day be devotees but for now sport dime store dog collars. As with musicians, you could tell the experienced from the amateurs by the quality of their gear. The fellow who strode mightily toward the entrance in a leather vest thinner than a politician’s promise was obviously a newcomer. The more mellow man had a think harness, double knitted chains, accessorized nipple clamps and a crotch pocket that appear to have been custom molded to his member.

And then there were the drive-by tourists who collided with one another while rubbernecking the entrance line.

Every city has an essence and San Francisco’s is merely unabashed. Local constabulary willingly allow anything (aside from smoking in public) that doesn’t result in non-consensual violence. What other Americans do in private and feel guilty about in public, San Franciscans do on street corners to exorcize their exhibitionism. The lunatics are running the asylum … and are doing a pretty good job of it.

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