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SF's Folsom St. Fair a meat-and-greet.
As soon as I get to the Folsom Street Fair, I notice two things-both of them being sausage. And if you're looking for a good time at this perennial party in San Francisco, it's probably best that you enjoy at least one of them. The first variety I notice, as I enter the throng via one of the large food-serving tents, is the family-friendly one. You know, actual sausage. And it occurs to me how relentlessly large the wieners at Folsom are. It almost makes me uncomfortable.
"Sure," I say, "a little booze, a little amyl, no problem, right?" My friend, who I'll deem Miss Thang for the purposes of anonymity, quickly disperses my conspiracy theory that fair operators are intentionally trying to undermine my heterosexuality by throwing obscenely large tubes of meat on grills throughout the event. "Nah, it's all catered by Aramark," she says. "They do all of these big events." Miss Thang knows way too much for being such a hottie. I mean, most girls like her don't even bother with being as smart. God knows I wouldn't be so intellectually inclined if I wasn't a hideous gargoyle … fuck, why bother? And while there are a few girls to gander at, and this is not an officially queer event (it's mostly about leather), one can't help but suss out that the participants having the most fun here are the homos. Which brings me to the "other" form of sausage. "Are the guys, umm, well-endowed?" my almost-proper Catholic friend Gigi nervously asks me later.
As I do the rounds through the bizarre bazaar, I encounter booths selling the requisite BDSM, leather, rubber and fetish gear, along with everything from dual-gender aphrodisiacs (10 hours, they promise, though the girl selling 'em readily admits that she'd surely have to throw her lover off of her long before that …) to a whole line of mixed CDs designed to help bugger away the evening after a sweaty love connection at the Men's Room. (Though, contrary to misconception, not all fags flounce away to bad techno-one guy had a great t-shirt that read "I am gay and I don't listen to dance music," followed by a list of indie bands like Wilco, who he fancied instead.) Along the way I encounter the kids at www.healthypenis2002.com. As previously reported on this very site, syphilis has slunk back from the recesses of time (shit, the last person I heard of with the syphilis was Adolf Hitler, for fuck's sake) to plague barebackers and safer sex participants alike (it's pretty easy to contract), affecting the gay community in particular. To battle this epidemic, this group is using a slightly less dramatic approach than that of AIDS-related public service announcements-at the Fair, this meant a cartoon poster depicting a happy, unaffected penis and a menacing syphilis spore out to sabotage the doomed dork. To my delight, both were made into cute little foam rubber effigies! We re-enter the fray, which has become pretty thick and is jostling us about. My companion, Miss Thang, a well-connected Fair vet, comments that, despite of (or because of) the size of the crowd, far fewer people are dressed up this year than normal. I notice the same. Sure, there's a fair amount of fetish followers decked out in their Sunday best, but the gawkers prevent the feeling of being swallowed up in the atmosphere a la Burning Man, one of the better aspects of former Fairs. Apparently, it has been co-opted by the San Francisco community in general, which is great for the sellers of the former brand of sausage, maybe not so great for the latter form.
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