I had on a black leather cap, a leather harness, stretchy and atrociously cute booty shorts, boots, and a bandana with an enamel pin that says “They/Them” in fancy script. The harness framed my smallish but quite noticeable breasts. In other words: While walking through San Francisco’s most famous leather and kink event in the city’s historically queer South of Market neighborhood, I looked damn good.
I have a sexy silver daddy who’s six-foot-eight, and we get a fair amount of attention on normal days. So it felt incredible to strut around that sea of flesh and tattoos, back after a one-year COVID-19 hiatus (that saw last year’s Folsom Street Fair move to a largely virtual affair).
A few friends said the crowds felt thin, while others thought it was too packed and bailed early.
There were no booths selling alcohol this year, but otherwise, it was more or less a classic Folsom — something the producers were clearly going for since they resurrected the name “Megahood,” its original moniker from its days channeling anti-gentrification energy in a hypersexual direction. Occasional fog and chill notwithstanding, the vibe was certainly much closer to prior fairs than this year’s Up Your Alley (Folsom’s kink-positive little sibling, which is held in July).
Still, the distressingly long tail of this raggedy pandemic has us all in different phases of social ease. A few friends said the crowds felt thin, while others thought it was too packed and bailed early. I didn’t go inside any bars, but that was more because the lines were longer than because it felt too risky.
And I wanted to drink champagne in the street and feel the sun on my chest. After quite a while on hormone replacement therapy (HRT), the body I have feels closer to the body I want, every single day. It’s easier to inhabit, and it’s easier to write about.
My nipples are constantly sore. Going through what is effectively Puberty 2.0 when you’re 40 years old can be almost as awkward as the first go-round. You have to celebrate all the many firsts, public or private, however large or small.
That relationship didn’t last, for many reasons, only one of which was the chilly reception I got when drunkenly working up the courage to express my gender feels.
Attending Megahood2021 in a body that I felt more closely mirrored my authentic self was right up there with getting an X on my driver’s license to denote my nonbinary gender. Or like how it felt to read my chosen name as a byline for a story in The Guardian last December. (I’ve hyphenated my given name because the male-female balance feels right and it announces a certain trans-ness to anyone who reads my stuff without knowing anything else about me.)
And now my nonbinary body has caught up to my nonbinary name.
The fair and I have a pretty long history. In 2007, on my last visit to San Francisco before I became a resident, my then-boyfriend and I came to Folsom and had the time of our best lives.
That year was a warm one, and the sight of a guy dancing 70 feet in the air, inside a cage supported by a crane — back when they used to do that — and across the street from a deconsecrated Catholic Church felt so fiendishly hedonistic that I was transfixed. I went home with a boy who later cut my hair for several years.
I might have a Master’s degree, but I’m still as shallow as world peace.
.Just under a year later, the then-boyfriend and I packed up his mother’s Chrysler Voyager and drove across the country for three weeks, timing it to arrive in San Francisco a couple of days before Folsom. That relationship didn’t last, for many reasons, only one of which was the chilly reception I got when drunkenly working up the courage to express my gender feels.
Folsom was outstanding that year, too. Thirteen years later, dudes have come in and out of my life, but I’ve never missed a single fair and all the glorious people-watching it entails.
I’m kinkier now, with more piercings and tattoos. And I might have a Master’s degree, but I’m still as shallow as world peace. I want to be ogled at and objectified — as long as it’s by sex-positive cuties, in a designated freak zone like Folsom.
When I started getting into various fetishes and wrestling with questions of gender identity, I would breezily refer to myself as a freak. I don’t really use that word anymore, because trans and gender-nonconforming people are so loathed and at such risk of physical violence that even playfully describing myself that way feels irresponsible; a failure of solidarity.
All-male erotic environments felt extremely liberating to me once, but they feel ordinary now… with a tinge of exclusion. After the fair wrapped up at 6 p.m. and the army of brooms got to work sweeping up the detritus in preparation for the streets to reopen to cars, my hot daddy and I went to a combination barbecue/sex party in a friend’s garden.
The guest list was private. You had to be fully vaccinated. It was explicitly very welcoming to all kinds of bodies. But, like all of these things, it was mostly attended by cis gays.
Trans people are constantly in the news, and a number of gender-variant people seem to have used the pandemic as a pretext to come out, but still, you realize there are very few of us. While waiting for the bathroom, I was amiably chatting with the guy in front of me, a beefy cis guy in his 50s. He asked my name.
I didn’t tweak my name only for people to default to the one I was given!
“Are you ready?” I said. “It’s complicated. Lots of syllables: Peter-Astrid.”
“Astrid?” he said, unsure.
So I spelled it out, as I have learned to do through my mask with every single barista.
“Like the author of Pippi Longstocking?” he said, with a perceptible tone.
“Yes,” I said, although I never read those books and only learned this fact after I spent the better part of a decade mulling over a name. “Did you enjoy the fair?”
“Yeah,” he said. “But there were too many women this year. I found that triggering.”
At that moment, a commie-punk friend who also happens to use they/them pronouns got behind me in line and immediately sniffed out what was transpiring. It was awesome to know they had my back, but I have a jovial temperament and I’m not always primed for combat.
The bathroom opened up, and the casual misogynist went in. I turned to my friend to roll my eyes dramatically and reassure them that I was fine because I could tell they were ready to gouge out this dude’s eyeballs if I so much as gave the word. We had a good laugh to break the tension.
“I’m fine, and I love you,” I said.
What I didn’t add, because I didn’t have to, was “Yup, that shit happens even here.”
Then the guy came out of the bathroom, looked at me, and said, “Pippi.”
“Argh,” I said to my friend, with the intensity of Dorothy Zbornak biting her entire fist in the opening credits to The Golden Girls. The air was thick with pheromones, and in the next room, the sling was getting some good use.
Nobody died that day, and I had a fun evening. I kept my shirt off until it was too cold to do it another minute, and there were no further microaggressions.
The next afternoon, we had a dozen people over for post-Folsom champagne and oysters and a bit of rowdiness. (If you don’t turn Folsom into a three-day thing, you’re not doing it right.) A few of those friends call me Pete; others call me Astrid. I kind of like it that way. The only name I don’t like is the standalone “Peter.” I didn’t tweak my name only for people to default to the one I was given!
And I’m not even that vigilant about pronouns as long as I know someone loves me, because policing your friends can sometimes be the most stressful thing about all this. But hearing people make the effort with they/them causes my heart to become radiant.
I wore a caftan, boots, and a smoky eye. It felt great to hold court and go to a moderate amount of trouble entertaining for a group. The last friend to leave, a muscly chef visiting from Hawaii, bear-hugged me so hard that my nipples were in true agony.
Believe me when I say that that was the best feeling.
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