This year’s Dore Alley was a mosh pit of kinky fun, sexy outfits, and playful antics. San Francisco’s kinkiest residents took over SoMa for a block party known as “Up Your Alley,” or simply “Dore.” In near-perfect sunny weather, every age, race, and body type was on display as people explored a very sexy playground for grownups.
I saw people making out, hooking up, exchanging gay handshakes, tying each other up, and spanking each other. The fashion harness industry is thriving in San Francisco as seemingly every gay in town owns at least one, and we all had them on at Dore, and for some of us, little else.
The entertainment was top-notch this year. San Francisco drag icon Juanita MORE DJed at the intersection of 10th and Folsom as dancers in fetish gear danced and teased in cages. Naked Twister is exactly what it sounds like, and it’s always a hit. There were bondage and impact play demos, arts and crafts for sale, alongside sexual education booths and places to purchase alien dildos.
As I watched a group of furries hook up on a San Francisco street under some trees, I started thinking about how we got here. It’s amazing that we can experience complete sexual liberation on the streets of our city, but was it always this way?
Folsom Street Fair history
In the 1970s, San Francisco had a thriving gay community in pockets all over the city like The Castro, and near what was called the “Miracle Mile,” the area we now know as SoMa. But city leaders tapped this area for redevelopment, and their plans seemed to specifically target the area’s high concentration of gay leather bars and bathhouses for closure.
The leather and gay communities began to organize, but before they could stop the wheels of progress, many of the original gay establishments closed and met the wrecking ball, like The Toolbox — SoMa’s first leather bar — which was razed to make room for the sparkling Yerba Buena Garden complex.
In that environment, the first-ever Folsom Street Fair called “Megahood” was held in 1984 to support SoMa businesses, unite the community, and demonstrate to the wider city that SoMa was not just a blighted zone ripe for redevelopment, but a vibrant community all its own.
Dore Alley history
After the success of the first Folsom Street Fair, the event’s smaller sibling began as The Ringold Fair in 1985, later moving from Ringold Street to Dore Street and adopting the name Dore Alley in 1987.
“The first Dore Alley street fairs were smaller,” kink educator, author, blogger, and activist Race Bannon told me. “I recall them being essentially entirely gay men, although other orientations and genders certainly attended even then.”
Dore was envisioned as a space where the gay leather and kink community could gather and express themselves out loud. In those earlier years, it was popular with cis gay men, often white. But in the time since, it has evolved into a celebration of diversity and kink culture as a whole.
Bannon said that Dore was intentionally kept smaller than its larger sibling, the Folsom Street Fair, which was advertised internationally. Dore was primarily promoted in San Francisco and as a result, had a local feel.
What Dore Alley was like in 2024
Post-pandemic, Dore was notably busier on Sunday than in years past, and seemingly more diverse in sexuality and gender presentation as well.
“It’s quite clear that the producing organization has decided to focus on bringing in a more diverse set of attendees this year,” said Bannon. “If the event becomes far less populated by gay men, it will have lost something for me. I am a gay man, and many of us feel like we have fewer public spaces in which to commune as it is.”
We both still liked it this year. I had more fun than in any prior visits to Up Your Alley or Folsom Street Fair. From the tap-to-pay donation buckets and the entry, to the clothes check, to the sheer number of food trucks and bars whose lines seemed to fly by, the execution of this year’s event was incredibly smooth.
Part circuit party, part street fair, and part open-air sex club, “Up Your Alley” was a feast for the senses. The spectacular and sexy things I saw, smelled, heard, tasted, and felt at Dore were unforgettable … IYKYK.
View our full Dore Alley albums: Safe-ish for work and decidedly NSFW.
Christopher J. Beale is an award-winning journalist, media host, producer and audio engineer based in San Francisco. Follow him on Threads, Instagram, X and others: @realchrisjbeale
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