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Vol. 43 • No. 39 • September 26-October 2, 2013
Folsom fair celebrates 30th year by Seth Hemmelgarn
A Ratio Design Associates Inc.
This scale model of the 8 Washington project shows the two condominium buildings, foreground, against the existing buildings in the area.
Condo project headlines SF ballot by Matthew S. Bajko
A
proposed development along San Francisco’s waterfront has prompted an expensive ballot fight this fall, but it remains to be seen if the controversial project is enough to drive voters to the polls in a local election year devoid of contested citywide races. Known as 8 Washington, the mixed-use project would replace an asphalt parking lot owned by the Port of San Francisco and a private tennis club on the Embarcadero run by the Bay Club with 134 luxury condos, new storefronts, new public park space, and a rebuilt members-only recreation club with new swimming pools replacing the tennis courts. Because it will not include any affordable units on site, the project is expected to pay an $11 million in-lieu fee toward building belowmarket-rate housing elsewhere in the city. “It is better for the city than protecting a private tennis club at all costs,” PJ Johnston, a spokesman for the project, told the Bay Area Reporter during a recent editorial board meeting. Opponents of the project, however, have decried it as a “wall on the waterfront” due to city leaders granting the local developer, Simon W.R. Snellgrove and his Pacific Waterfront Partners, LLC, a height increase from 84 feet to 136 feet for the site. Pointing to estimates that the units could average $5 million, they also contend the building will add to the city’s rising rents and housing prices. “The city is granting to the developer the space that is there to develop their high-rise condos,” said Board of Supervisors President See page 24 >>
s it celebrates its 30th anniversary, the Folsom Street Fair is making some changes while honoring decades of leather and kink tradition, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for charity, and welcoming newcomers. “Come, have fun, dress up, and get in gear. Don’t recycle your Burning Man outfit, but come in your fetish gear, and have a good time,” said Demetri Moshoyannis, executive director of Folsom Street Events, referring to the annual art festival that, like Folsom Street, is known for its creative outfits. Last year, Moshoyannis’s nonprofit, which produces the Folsom and Up Your Alley street fairs and the Magnitude, Deviants, and Bay of Pigs parties, distributed about $324,000 from the events to AIDS-related and other charities. He hopes that this year’s checks will put the total handed out through the years over the $5 million mark. This year’s fair takes place Sunday, September 29, from 11 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. on Folsom between 7th and 12th streets in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood. There’s a $10 suggested donation. Donors will get $2 off each drink throughout the day. All gate donations go to the charities. Main stage headliners include Light Asylum,
Flag-bearers step off at Castro and Market streets for the 22nd annual LeatherWalk Sunday, September 22. This year’s walk, which kicks off Leather Week, raised $11,000 for the AIDS Emergency Fund. It concluded at the Eagle Tavern, where a giant leather flag was raised. Jane Philomen Cleland
Miami Horror, and Hercules and Love Affair. Organizers have added an extra half hour to the event, in commemoration of their 30th year. But that’s just one of the new elements for the festival, which each year draws hundreds of thousands of people dressed in everything from leather dog costumes to nothing at all.
The erotic artists’ area is moving to Eighth Street, north of Folsom, and will feature a new performance art stage. Constructs of Ritual Evolution will perform live, choreographed hook suspensions, where people will be suspended through See page 2 >>
Impromptu party spawned legendary dance fundraiser
Gina Gatta, co-curator of the exhibit “Be Bad ... Do Good,” introduced her colleagues, Matthew Johnson, Brandon Smith, and Suzan Revah, during the opening at the GLBT History Museum last month. Rick Gerharter
by Matthew S. Bajko
I
t started with, unsurprisingly, a group of gay guys looking to have a bit more fun a quarter century ago and morphed into a generator of nearly $2 million raised for local LGBT groups and AIDS agencies. The genesis for the now legendary Real Bad dance party – a private, ticketed event held after the annual Folsom Street Fair – was an impromptu gathering of a circle of friends held
after the Castro Street Fair in 1989. That Sunday night Jim Guequierre and his lover, Jeff Swenton, invited a group of friends back to their place to continue the revelry and served margaritas, which would become a hallmark of the event. “It was a group of us at the Castro Street Fair looking for something else to do. So we went to a friend’s loft to party and dance,” recalled David Barbieri, 57, a gay man who lives in San Francisco. “That was how we started it. It just
grew year after year.” By 1991 the party had moved to a club space South of Market. That year the group Grass Roots Gay Rights West, modeled after a similar organization on the East Coast, was formed to oversee the dance party and determine how to allocate the proceeds. By 1995 the group opted to move up the dance party a week sooner to coincide with the Folsom Street Fair, the city’s infamous fetish event that attracts revelers from around the globe to San Francisco the last Sunday of September. “They wanted it to be a men’s party. The Castro Street Fair was a younger crowd, it wasn’t a leather crowd,” said Barbieri, who helped sell tickets to the early dances and recruited others, known as hosts, to also promote the event and recruit their friends to attend. “It became the hottest party of the weekend, with the best looking guys and the best music.” This Sunday night, September 29, will mark the 25th anniversary of the queer dance party. To mark the occasion, organizers created a 12-minute video documenting the event’s history and contributions to the local LGBT community as part of a small, corner exhibit that opened in August at the GLBT History Museum in the Castro. See page 25 >>
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