Dore Alley: San Francisco Leather’s Neighborhood Warm-Up

On the last Sunday in July, San Francisco’s midsummer streets hold a leather and fetish event called Up Your Alley Fair. Locals are more likely to say Dore Alley Fair, or just Dore Alley. It runs along Folsom Street between 9th and 10th, and along Dore Street from Howard Street to about half a block southeast of Folsom. The closed streets are lined with booths, and at the 10th Street end there is a sound stage for dancing. For people who travel the leather calendar, Dore Alley is the warm-up before the season’s main event, the Folsom Street Fair. It comes from the same nonprofit family, but it is smaller, heavier with locals, and closer to a neighborhood gathering than a carnival built for tourists.

Up Your Alley goes back to 1985, when the first fair was on Ringold Street between 8th and 9th. In 1987 it moved to the Folsom and Dore streets it uses now. The move had a political and spatial point. South of Market was under redevelopment pressure, and the leather community wanted to show that an active subculture still lived there. The AIDS pandemic was moving through that community, and people still got the fair organized. For many who were there, the street fair was proof of life you could mark on a map. While SOMA real estate and collective memory push against each other, Dore Alley has kept the reason it was started: leather as an ordinary fact of the neighborhood, shown with booths, sound, and bodies, not a temporary theme party.

Up Your Alley is now produced by the same nonprofit that runs the Folsom Street Fair, the world’s largest BDSM, fetish, and leather street event. The alley fair draws on the order of ten thousand fetish enthusiasts and onlookers. Organizers treat it as a warm-up. Many locals would rather have this day, because it is not flooded with tourists the way Folsom is. Steamworks Baths has hosted a Twister stage. The program includes dancing, DJs, STI testing, and fetish-wear vendors. The crowd skews more gay-male than Folsom’s, and it stays open to all sexes and sexual orientations. Leather, rubber, and uniforms are out, and public play stays inside the fair’s rules. San Francisco’s sex-positive infrastructure sits next to street-party logistics: a health booth beside a harness vendor, bathhouse signs beside the dance speakers.