The Catacombs sat in San Francisco’s South of Market district as a gay and lesbian leather fisting club. It ran from 1975 to 1981, then reopened at another address from 1982 to 1984. In its time it was widely treated as the most famous fisting club in the world: semi-secret, referral-only, built for extreme leather sex rather than casual bar cruise energy. Founder and owner Steve McEachern set that tone. The name still anchors histories of SoMa leather and of how the early AIDS-era community tried to respond.
Admission depended on skill, trust, and an existing network before you walked in. The club began as a gay men’s space. Sex educator and SM activist Cynthia Slater pushed management to open the door to lesbians. Known patrons included writer and activist Patrick Califia, then known as Pat Califia. Carol Queen later called Catacombs the place to be seen and to play at during the 1980s.
Sexual anthropologist Gayle Rubin wrote extensively about the Catacombs and called the club exemplary in how it tried to confront the AIDS crisis, even though the epidemic still helped force the venue’s end. Patrick Moore devoted a chapter to it in Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality, placing fisting culture inside a larger recovery of radical gay sexual history. In 2017 the San Francisco South of Market Leather History Alley opened to honor leather community members and culture, including McEachern. For BDSM and leather readers, Catacombs is the referral-only SoMa fisting institution that mixed men’s and later women’s play, left a paper trail through Rubin, Moore, Califia, and Queen, and still has a name on the city’s leather memorial landscape.
