American Savage: Insights, Slights, and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics

by Dan Savage

  A Holiday Inn.

  There’s not a lot gay men won’t do—go look at the photos on IML’s website if you don’t believe me—but we draw the line at spending a weekend at a Holiday Inn in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio.

  Here are six words that I never thought I would type in this precise order: In all fairness to Peter LaBarbera…

  Porno Pete appears to have lost interest in shutting down International Mr. Leather. He didn’t attend the most recent IML; some other mole was dispatched from AFTAH World Headquarters. LaBarbera’s compatriot was so distressed by what she saw in the Leather Market—gay men shopping—that she had to retreat to her car “to settle [her] nerves” before diving back in again and again. The steam also seems to have gone out of LaBarbera’s efforts to harass IML’s host hotel into dropping the event. Maybe it was the glowing feature about IML in the Chicago Tribune a few years ago. If the editors of a reliably Republican paper like the Tribune see IML as essentially harmless—as evidenced by their willingness to publish a long puff piece about it—what hope does LaBarbera have of convincing the average Chicagoan, much less the Hyatt Hotel Corporation, that IML is a feces-flinging “perversion-fest” that must be stopped?

  But Porno Pete hasn’t entirely lost his passion for large gatherings of gay men in leather, rubber, and bondage gear. His focus has simply shifted from gay men behaving badly in the city by the lake to gay men behaving badly in the city on the bay.

  The Folsom Street Fair is an annual one-day leather/fetish street party that has been taking place on a Sunday in late September in San Francisco every year since 1984. Unlike IML, which requires attendees to sign waivers before they can enter spaces where adults are wearing revealing outfits and purchasing sex toys, the Folsom Street Fair is, as attentive readers may have already deduced, a street fair. The guys, the goods, and the gear are out in the open. Attendees do have to pass through gates to enter the fair, there are signs at every entrance warning people they are about to enter an adult-themed fetish festival, and the whole thing takes place in the South of Market neighborhood, long home to San Francisco’s leather bars, BDSM-gear shops, and sex clubs.

  “Nothing screams ‘Perversion!’ like the annual Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco, America’s first homosexual Mecca,” LaBarbera wrote on AFTAH’s website in August of 2012. “AFTAH has documented the unprecedented public perversions and nudity of this bizarre outdoor ‘fair’ as police stand idly by.” LaBarbera then invites his readers to peruse six different archives of pictures taken at Folsom by undercover AFTAH operatives. (Needless to say, the attendees and organizers of the Folsom Street Fair post thousands of pictures to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and hundreds of photos are posted every year at the organization’s official website: www.folsomstreetevents.org.)

  Some ask why kinksters feel a need to have street fairs and conventions. Kinks are well and good, but why gather in groups to celebrate and practice them? Why do this stuff in public? Why create a community around kink?

  Here’s why:

  An Alabama minister who died in June of “accidental mechanical asphyxia” was found hogtied and wearing two complete wet suits, including a face mask, diving gloves and slippers, rubberized underwear, and a head mask, according to an autopsy report. Investigators determined that Rev. Gary Aldridge’s death was not caused by foul play and that the 51-year-old pastor of Montgomery’s Thorington Road Baptist Church was alone in his home at the time he died (while apparently in the midst of some autoerotic undertaking). While the Montgomery Advertiser, which first obtained the autopsy records, reported on Aldridge’s two wet suits, the family newspaper chose not to mention what police discovered inside the minister’s rubber briefs.

  That’s from a report on the website The Smoking Gun.

  Thorington Road Baptist Church issued a press release asking people to “refrain from speculation” about Aldridge’s death. So I won’t speculate about the death of the married Baptist minister—and former Liberty University dean—or the contents of his rubber briefs at the time he died. (A big, black dildo.) But I will say this: The pastor of Thorington Road Baptist would probably still be alive today if he had been indulging his passion for bondage, wet suits, diving gloves, hoods, rubber briefs, and black dildos on the streets of San Francisco during Folsom or at the Leather Market in Chicago during IML and not home alone in Montgomery, Alabama.

  The late Reverend Aldridge’s kinks aren’t uncommon and neither is solo-bondage play. There are thousands of hours of digital video on Xtube and other amateur porn sites showing men—and it’s always men—in elaborate “self-bondage” scenarios. Many of them are wearing wet suits, like Rev. Aldridge, and the hogtie seems to be a popular position with self-bondage enthusiasts. Bondage is inherently dangerous, particularly when combined with autoerotic asphyxiation, and no one should experiment with bondage alone, and a tied-up person should never be left alone. And Rev. Aldridge might be alive today if he had been shameless about his sexual depravity—that is, if he were part of a kinky community, just another masked-and-gagged face in the crowd at Folsom or IML.

  I don’t want to be Pollyannaish about this. Even simple BDSM is varsity-level sex play; some BDSM activities are Olympic-level. BDSM can be dangerous. A person can get hurt; a person can hurt others. But BDSM is infinitely more dangerous when people do it alone, or when they do it with someone who isn’t a part of, and therefore answerable to, others in the kink community. An organized kink scene isn’t foolproof: Experienced kinksters have died during BDSM scenes that went disastrously wrong; people have been sexually assaulted by predators that gravitated toward the kink scene. But most deaths in BDSM scenes gone wrong—all of them senseless and tragic deaths—are similar to Rev. Aldridge’s death: People died playing alone while engaged in a self-bondage scenario that restricted their breathing. Considered in that light, events like Folsom and IML actually do a public good. They are probably even saving lives. People at Folsom and IML don’t just engage in BDSM sex; they share skills and enforce community norms around safe BDSM play.

  And, once again, in all fairness to Peter LaBarbera (I can’t believe I had to type that twice), not every critic of Folsom or IML is an anti-gay nut running a hate group out of his basement. Some of Folsom’s most annoying critics are gay.

  Every year, after Folsom or IML or a pride parade with a BDSM contingent, letters appear in gay newspapers and posts appear on gay blogs expressing “concern.” At a time when gay people are struggling for equality, the concern trolls fret in unison: We can’t afford to have leathermen and BDSMers and kinksters walking around in public. They’re setting back the gay rights movement!

  Any attempt to shut down the Folsom Street Fair—or to ban leathermen or drag queens or go-go boys from pride parades—would be so poisonously divisive that it would do more harm to the gay rights movement than a thousand Folsom Street Fairs ever could.

  And the Folsom Street Fair isn’t and hasn’t been exclusively gay for a long time. Thousands of straight kinksters attend Folsom, to the dismay of some gay attendees. The only difference between straight and gay Folsom attendees is that the straight ones aren’t told that they’re making all heterosexuals look like sex-crazed sadomasochists. (In my opinion, sex-crazed sadomasochists are the best kind of sadomasochists.) Straight people aren’t fighting for their civil equality, of course; kinky straights can marry in all fifty states, kinky straights can serve openly in the armed forces, and no one is pledging to write anti-kinky-straight bigotry into the US Constitution. (Although kinky straight people have been discriminated against in divorce proceedings and child custody arrangements.) So maybe it’s not the same—maybe it’s not as politically risky—when straight people come out in bondage gear, leather chaps, and pony masks.

  Despite the protests of anti-gay nuts and concern trolls alike, the Folsom Street Fair is almost thirty years old now; IML is well into its fourth decade; and pride parades, complete with go-go boys and drag queens and leathermen, have been taking pl
ace on Sundays in June in cities all over the country since the early 1970s. And everyone acknowledges, even our enemies, that the gay rights movement has made extraordinary strides in the forty-three years since the Stonewall Riots in New York City. We’re not all the way there yet; we have yet to secure our full civil equality, but the pace of progress has been unprecedented in the history of social justice movements. The women’s suffrage movement, for example, was launched in the United States in 1848. It took more than seventy years to pass the Nineteenth Amendment, which extended the vote to women. In 1969, at the time of the Stonewall Riots, gay sex was illegal in forty-nine states. Gay sex is now legal in every US state; gay marriage is legal in nine states and our nation’s capital (and in all of Canada); and gays, lesbians, and bisexuals can serve openly in the military. (The armed forces still discriminate against trans people.) The president of the United States even mentioned the Stonewall Riots in his 2013 inaugural speech. And we’ve made this progress despite fierce opposition from the religious right, a deadly plague that wiped out a generation of gay men, and—horrors—all those leather guys at Folsom and all those go-go boys and drag queens at Pride.

  We couldn’t have come so far, so fast if Folsom or pride parades were harming our movement. And I would argue that all those leather guys, dykes on bikes, go-go boys, and drag queens have actually helped our movement. They demonstrate to all people, gay and straight, that the gay rights movement isn’t just about the freedom to be gay or straight. It’s about the freedom to be whatever kind of straight, gay, lesbian, bi, or trans person you want to be.

  Joining LaBarbera and his rinky-dink hate group in an obsession with the Folsom Street Fair is Bill Donohue, the head of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, an organization with a multimillion-dollar annual budget. Donohue has been having a highly public, er, stroke about the Folsom Street Fair since 2007.

  Geologists have yet to discover a rock that Donohue can’t find anti-Catholic bigotry lurking under, it should be said first. And no one on cable news has the balls to call Donohue on his own bigotry. Here’s a Donohue classic: “Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular.”

  And Donohue had this to say to a man who was molested by a priest when he was a minor: “Most 15-year-old teenage boys wouldn’t allow themselves to be molested. So why did you?” The blame for clerical sexual abuse scandals that have rocked the Catholic Church, in Donohue’s mind, seems to rest squarely on the narrow shoulders of all those children who “allowed” themselves to be molested. (Doing Donohue one better, Father Benedict Groeschel, of the conservative Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, told the National Catholic Register that Catholic priests are the real victims. “Suppose you have a man having a nervous breakdown and a youngster comes after him. A lot of the cases, the youngster—14, 16, 18—is the seducer.” Groeschel went on to say that boys with “holes in their lives” that needed filling were drawn to priests, and that priests who slept with minors shouldn’t go to prison for their “first offense.” So reassuring to know that Father Groeschel is a professor of pastoral psychology at St. Joseph’s Seminary in New York, isn’t it?)

  So what happened in 2007 that brought Donohue’s wrath down on the Folsom Street Fair?

  The organizers of Folsom produced a promotional poster that featured male and female BDSM and leather fetishists arrayed around a table in a familiar tableau: It was Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic Last Supper, with a shirtless, African-American leatherman sitting in for Christ and other leather- and-rubber-clad kinksters standing in for the apostles. Donohue’s head exploded. He called the poster blasphemous, spat out press releases claiming that The Last Supper was “sacred” to Catholics, and finally he called for a boycott—these people and their boycotts—of Folsom’s large corporate sponsors.

  I was one of very few people who came to the defense of the Folsom Street Fair during the Last Supper controversy. Even my friend Andrew Sullivan, a man with an irreverent sense of humor and a booming laugh, slammed Folsom’s Last Supper poster, calling it “a provocation…cheap blasphemy.” In response, I posted scores of other Last Supper parodies that no one objected to when they were created, much less condemned as “blasphemous.” Donohue didn’t object when The Simpsons parodied Leonardo’s suddenly sacred Last Supper, nor did Donohue object to Last Supper parodies featuring the casts of The Sopranos and That ’70s Show. There were no objections I could find to Last Supper parodies that featured supermodels, Ronald McDonald, the Boston Red Sox, Count Chocula and other children’s cereal mascots, flesh-eating zombies, Star Wars characters, Big Bird and the Muppets, dogs, cats, Popeye, Donkey Kong, and on and on.

  Apparently there’s nothing blasphemous about Tony Soprano or Big Bird or a flesh-eating zombie sitting in for Christ—nothing blasphemous at all—but a leatherman crosses the line.

  Fox News called and invited me to debate Bill Donohue about the Folsom poster. As qualified as I am to debate Bill Donohue (I was raised Catholic, my dad was a deacon, I’ve been known to shout), and as much fun as the interview sounded, I had to pass. First, it was Fox News, and I’ve made a policy of passing on Fox News. Second, the interview was scheduled for seven forty-five in the morning New York City time, which would’ve been four forty-five in the morning Seattle time. That’s too early to get into a shouting match with a Catholic to whom I’m not related.

  Donohue’s obsession with Folsom hasn’t let up in the five years since the poster controversy.

  “Last Sunday, homosexuals paraded around naked in the streets of San Francisco at the annual Folsom Street Fair,” Bill Donohue wrote in a news release on the organization’s website after the 2012 Folsom Street Fair. “They did more than walk the streets nude—they beat each other with whips. The leather/fetish homosexuals led each other around like dogs with metal collars; they set up booths where visitors could get flogged; they sold hard-core pornography…. And after promoting lethal sex acts—the kind that causes AIDS—they raised money for AIDS.”

  “There were no arrests,” Donohue glumly noted.

  I have to break in here with a public service announcement: Not only has Folsom raised 5 million dollars for charity over its lifetime, more than 2 million dollars of that in the last few years, but leading someone around the streets of San Francisco on a leash doesn’t spread AIDS. Whips and chains and flogging and pornography don’t spread AIDS. In the early years of the AIDS epidemic, when HIV-prevention campaigns were entirely grassroots efforts (i.e., not reliant on government grants), HIV educators actually stressed the relative safety of BDSM play. Indeed, the onset of the AIDS epidemic forced sex educators to recognize that BDSM—both the gay and straight varieties—was safer than “normal” anal or vaginal intercourse. Someone who gets off having his ass spanked is actually less likely to contract the human immunodeficiency virus than someone who needs to have his ass fucked. Please make a note of it, Bill.

  It’s not just public nudity and flogging that annoy Donohue. “As always, the homosexuals mocked the Catholic clergy and religious,” Donohue complained. “They dressed as cardinals, bishops, and nuns. There was even a group that disparaged the Jesuits, the ‘Society of Janus’; their specialty is BDSM. The anti-Catholic aspects of this grand exhibition of moral destitution are not hard to understand: the participants are in a constant state of rebellion against truth.”

  Donohue seems to think that gay men are kinky just to annoy Catholics, and that the Catholic imagery you see at Folsom—kinky priests, kinky nuns, kinky Jesuits—is a gratuitous insult. In fact, many people, gay and straight, are kinky not to annoy Catholics, but because they are Catholics, and the Catholic imagery on display is included for a good reason.

  The science writer Jesse Bering’s most recent book, Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That? And Other Reflections on Being Human, included a chapter on the origins of kinks. It turns out that random but emotionally significant childhood experiences play a big role.

  “This ba
sic developmental system, one in which certain salient childhood events ‘imprint’ our psychosexuality, may not be terribly uncommon,” Bering writes. “In fact, that early childhood experiences mold our adult sexual preferences—specifically, what turns us on and off, however subtle or even unconscious these particular biases may be—could even be run-of-the-mill.”

  Consider what Catholic schoolchildren are busily imprinting on as their sexualities develop. They are told to worship a man who was tortured to death. And what do we Catholics call His grisly execution? Oh, that’s right: the Passion. Catholic children kneel in front of life-size representations—some highly realistic—of a ripped dude in a loincloth nailed to a cross with a look of ecstasy on his face. They’re taught stories about gruesomely martyred saints. When I was in Catholic schools, I was told by nuns and priests that pain and suffering wouldn’t just bring me closer to God—although they would do that—but that pain and suffering were gifts from God. I was told that pain and suffering were signs of God’s favor. I was told that God tormented us—even us children—to test the depths of our love for Him.

  And we were constantly warned to avoid sin, particularly sexual sins. Premarital sex. Homosexuality. Adultery. Masturbation. It seems that God created us horny but—psych—God doesn’t approve of this sex business at all. It is easy, as a young Catholic, to embrace God’s hatred of sex; sex seems so disgusting and squalid when you’re a child. Then puberty comes along and suddenly your crotch is at war with your faith.

  There’s a good reason Donohue doesn’t see Muslim or Hindu or Jewish imagery at Folsom or IML, another of his perennial complaints. Those religions aren’t dominant in our culture: We are a majority Christian nation; Catholics are the largest single Christian denomination in the United States. And those other religions, each one messed up about sex in its own special way, don’t have salvation narratives that lend themselves so readily to both the formation and expression of BDSM fantasies. (Sin, torture, torment, and a Big Sky Daddy who punishes you because he loves you.)