Alan Selby (1929–2004), born Alan Henry Sniders, was an English-born American gay businessman and a central figure in San Francisco leather. People called him “the Mayor of Folsom Street.” He founded the fetish clothing house Mr. S Leather, claimed a role in the first hanky code, raised money for AIDS care after his partner died, and ended up on bronze bootprints in the South of Market Leather History Alley. For leather readers this is not a side-character bio. Selby is one of the men who made Folsom a street with a shop, a code, and a funeral circuit.
Yorkshire, the Navy, and Mr. S Leather
He was born Alan Henry Sniders in Yorkshire and served in the Royal Navy. In 1979 he moved to San Francisco and founded Mr. S Leather, the fetish clothing manufacturer that still sits in the city’s leather memory. Judy Tallwing McCarthey ran the company at one point. The shop was the public face; the street was the politics. Selby’s nickname — Mayor of Folsom Street — is the kind of joke that only works if everyone already knows who signs the checks and shows up at the memorials.
Hanky code, with a dispute attached
Selby said he and his business partners created the first hanky code at Leather ’n’ Things in 1972, after a bandana supplier accidentally doubled their order and they needed a way to sell the extra colors. Other sources dispute that origin story. The code — color and pocket meaning what you want to do, and on which side — became leather’s walking classified ad either way. What the page can honestly say is that Selby claimed the 1972 shop accident as the start, and that the claim is contested. The practice outlived the argument.
AIDS work, death, and the alley of bootprints
Selby co-founded and fundraised for the San Francisco AIDS Emergency Fund, started in 1982. After his partner Peter Jacklin died of AIDS in 1987, Selby became a visible part of the community response. He died in San Francisco in May 2004 of emphysema complications, at seventy-five. In 2019 the GLBT Historical Society Museum mounted an exhibition on his life and legacy.
The awards track how the leather institutions saw him. In 1988 the National Leather Association International gave him the Steve Maidhof Award for National or International Work. Pantheon of Leather named him Man of the Year in 1989, gave him and Leonard Dworkin the Forebear Award in 1999, and gave Selby the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004. He was inducted posthumously into the Leather Hall of Fame in 2013. In 2017 San Francisco’s South of Market Leather History Alley put him on a bronze bootprint with the other notables. That is the civic version of “Mayor of Folsom Street”: a name in metal on the sidewalk where the fairs still run.
