Folsom Street Fair 2011, in Pictures

Photo: Le FagWe came, we saw, we took a few pictures, we drank a few beers, we left. Oh, and actually we didn't come. Not in that way. But anyhow, please enjoy this semi-NSFW photo gallery of the day that was on Folsom Street yesterday in S.F., where most of the day was cloudy and gray, but the sun poked it's head out in the afternoon like a glory hole pig coming up for air, only to get engulfed in fog and spunk once more. Oh, and there were a bunch of hot guys wearing very little. The end.

See Le Fag's full photo gallery now.

Photos From Folsom Street Fair 2010

Courtesy of The SwordSadly, we weren't there for the first time in many years. Instead, we were getting our holes plugged in New York. And so far, the trusty photographer we assigned hasn't come through. But please take a look at the fine collections of photos of this years dirty, dirty festivities from SFist, The Sword, and Gay Daily Hot.

Damiana Garcia Gets Down With the Daddies at the Faultline

Daily Freakshow correspondent Damiana Garcia (Michael Lucid) headed over to renowned Los Angeles leather bar The Faultline for the annual Tom of Finland Foundation celebration known as Tom's Bar. All of LaLa Land's most notable bears and leather queens were on hand, and Damiana manages to squeeze in a smarmy chat with most of them.

See the full sunny-day-in-L.A., NSFW awesomeness below. [WOW]

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Grabby Awards/Int'l Mr. Leather Weekend Kicks Off In Chi-Town

We aren't there, and given our recent spate of hangovers and VD scares we're happy not to be. But last night was the kickoff of Grabbys weekend in Chicago, and Unzipped's Zach Sire has a bunch of from-the-hip photos from Chi Chi Larue's party last night at Hydrate (those are Austin Wilde's abs in the above photo, btw). The Sword also promises some coverage, which will likely be more leather-daddy-heavy, but so far they're probably still sleeping it off.

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Historical Homosexuals: A Look at 'Drummer,' The First Leather Fag Mag

While reading Edmund White's memoir of gay New York in the 70s, City Boy, we came across this pair of sentences that pricked up our ears: "In 1975 a hard-core S&M monthly magazine, Drummer, started publishing. It had fairly technical information about how to torture and submit to it—we read it with avidity."

Le Fag immediately took to the web and found a fully scanned and archived second issue of the magazine. It contains all of the hot photos, porn reviews, personal ads, and erotic fiction you might expect from a mid-seventies gay periodical, as well as a few oddities—a poem by Radclyffe Hall? 

White explains that leather, in the 60s and early 70s, was seen as kind of tacky, something only middle-aged Jersey fags took part in. But by the mid-70s, as gay mens' visions of themselves started to change toward the hyper-masculine, it was embraced by the young and you saw the birth of a dozen leather bars (including one in Queens that had probably been a standard campy fag bar previously, called What a Dump — see the leather bar listings on pages 44-45).

Behold, after the jump, documentation of the golden age of the NYC leather community.

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Daddy of Leather Daddies Dead

Mr. Marcus Hernandez, a one-time columnist on the leather scene for The Advocate and a longtime fixture in the community in San Francisco, has passed away. Herewith, we give you some footage of Mr. Marcus performing in semi-drag at a benefit with some 90s-era leather queens. R.I.P.

Steven Meisel Gets Leather-y in Italian VOGUE

Blah blah, leather's all the rage in fashion, and basically everywhere besides Folsom Street and other gay ghettos around the U.S., where leather bars and shops are a dying breed and the fetish is treated by most as a once-annual hobby. See the full Steven Meisel spread here. [Homotography]

The Le Fag Guide to Folsom Weekend 2009

Being headquartered in San Francisco, we at Le Fag have weathered a good many Folsom Street Fairs and survived to tell the tale.  Is leather still relevant? We don't know. It's kind of like asking if drag is still relevant, and our answer would of course be Fuck Yes, but many would argue otherwise... because they're morons. In any event, Folsom is still a big gay holiday here and a moment for hard-core fetish queens to find new daddies, and for the rest of us to pull out our harnesses and leather jocks for the second time this year and play at being old-school gay.

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