Alan Selby is a name San Francisco leather does not go around. People called him the Mayor of Folsom Street. Born in Yorkshire, a veteran of the Royal Navy, this English-born American gay businessman moved to San Francisco in 1979 and changed how that street worked. He founded Mr. S Leather, the fetish clothing manufacturer that became the public face of the block. In those years the street was politics as much as pavement. The “mayor” joke only landed because everyone already knew who signed the checks and who showed up at the memorials that kept the community running.
On the hanky code — leather’s walking classified ad of color and pocket — Selby told a 1972 shop story. He and his partners at Leather ’n’ Things got a doubled bandana order by mistake; to move the extra colors they put different handkerchiefs in different pockets as a way to mark what you wanted. Other sources dispute that origin. True or not, the practice outlived the argument and became the circle’s silent visual language.
His AIDS-era work is the other half of the civic record. He 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 one of the most visible faces of the community response. He died in San Francisco in May 2004 of emphysema complications, at seventy-five.
Leather institutions kept the score: the National Leather Association International’s Steve Maidhof Award in 1988; Pantheon of Leather Man of the Year in 1989; the Forebear Award with Leonard Dworkin in 1999; Lifetime Achievement in 2004; posthumous induction into the Leather Hall of Fame in 2013. The most concrete memorial came in 2017, when San Francisco’s South of Market Leather History Alley put him on a bronze bootprint among the other notables — metal in the sidewalk where the fairs still walk. That is the municipal version of Mayor of Folsom Street.
