The Caldron — often misspelled Cauldron — was a gay men’s sex club at 953 Natoma Street in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood. It opened in 1980 and closed in 1984. Contemporaries called it the epitome of the uninhibited, abandoned, sleazy sex club. For early-eighties SoMa leather, fisting, watersports, and jack-off culture, this converted warehouse was a room built for sex, not a bar that happened to tolerate it. The Natoma Street address put it in the same South of Market leather geography as other notorious play spaces of that short, intense window.
Naked house rules and the warehouse floor
The site sat in a converted warehouse and made no secret of why men walked in. Patrons had to stay naked except for footwear; a clothes check took the rest. Like similar venues, the Caldron held no alcohol license. Guests brought their own drinks, usually beer. Staff parked the cans in a cooler and issued chits that could be turned in for a can of the brand each man had carried in. Lights were not dimmed, so the sex was visible rather than hidden in a back room. Sex happened on tables and benches and in slings. Two bathtubs waited for anyone who wanted to be urinated on. Theme nights locked the weekly menu: J/O party Tuesdays, wet Wednesdays for water sports, and fist-fucking Thursdays. A poster announcing the First Anniversary Orgy has been preserved, a paper remnant of how openly the club advertised group sex.
Owners, chorus nights, and safer sex
Hal Slate and Stephen Gilman owned the club. Gilman said the name Caldron was the I Ching’s commentary on itself. Both men sang in the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus; after Monday rehearsals the chorus sometimes traveled to the Caldron for private parties. Eric Rofes recalled that they played opera music while the sex was going on. Cartoonist Al Shapiro created artwork for the venue and was known to visit. The San Francisco Jacks, a masturbation club, also met there, folding organized jack-off culture into the same naked warehouse. As the AIDS crisis hit, the Caldron was described as exemplary among the first venues to promote safe sex. Four years of naked warehouse play, BYOB chits, bright lights, slings, piss tubs, and themed nights ended in 1984, but 953 Natoma still marks SoMa’s most unapologetic gay sex-club chapter.
