On Ringold Street in San Francisco’s South of Market, SOMA, a public-art installation joins the neighborhood’s past to the street you can still walk. The alley runs between 8th and 9th Streets and opened in 2017, inside the Leather and LGBTQ Cultural District. It is not decoration. It is memory set into the pavement, for the gay and lesbian leather culture that once filled this part of the city, and for the leather bars, baths, and play spaces that were known well beyond San Francisco.
Landscape architect Jeffrey Miller led the work, collectively titled Leather Memoir. There are four pieces. A black granite stone carries narrative text by anthropologist Gayle Rubin, an image of Mike Caffee’s statue Leather David, and a reproduction of the mural Chuck Arnett painted in 1962 for the Tool Box, a legendary gay leather bar. Engraved standing stones honor leather institutions in the community, including the Folsom Street Fair. Leather pride flag markings run across the pavement, and the standing stones rise through that flag. The fourth piece is a line of bronze bootprints along the curb.
Those bootprints are a roll call of twenty-eight people who mattered to local leather. The names include community leader and biker Jim Kane, and biker T. Michael “Lurch” Sutton, cofounder of the Bears of SF. They include owners of famous rooms: Steve McEachern of the Catacombs, Jack Haines of Fe-Be’s and The Slot, and Alexis Muir of The Stud. They include organizers such as Cynthia Slater, a founder of the Society of Janus, Philip M. Turner, founder of Daddy’s Bar, and Alan Selby, founder of Mr. S Leather, called the Mayor of Folsom Street.
The prints also mark publishers and artists. Tony DeBlase created the leather pride flag. John Embry founded Drummer magazine. Robert Davolt edited Bound & Gagged and organized San Francisco Pride’s leather contingent. Other names on the curb include Sam Steward, Thom Gunn, and Paul Mariah, a poet, printer, and activist. The twenty-eight bootprints set bar owners, publishers, educators, and play-space operators into the street, so visitors and locals can touch the frame of SOMA leather.
For a visitor the alley is not an abstract public artwork. It is a syllabus laid on the sidewalk. It treats the San Francisco Eagle, the Folsom Street Fair, and the other rooms named here as city history confirmed by the Leather and LGBTQ Cultural District map, not as nightlife trivia. Leather culture comes up out of the basement and sits in the pavement.
