Folsom Street Fair

The largest leather and fetish street fair in the world, held 11am to 6pm on the last Sunday of September along thirteen blocks of Folsom Street, between 8th and 13th, in SoMa. Entry is free with a suggested cash donation at the gates, which funds the community grants that Folsom Street, the producing nonprofit, hands out every year.

The fair draws crowds of up to 400,000: hundreds of vendors selling leather, latex, rubber, and gear, play stations and demos, an erotic artists' stage, community and health tables, and DJ and live-music stages running all day. It is an adults-only space, and the parties around it are 21 and up.

The whole week builds toward the Sunday: a fundraising leather march the weekend before, block parties and gear-shop events, marquee circuit and fetish parties across SoMa's clubs on Friday and Saturday nights, and a long-running community-benefit dance closing the weekend after the fair.

The first fair was held in 1984, during the AIDS crisis and a wave of redevelopment that threatened SoMa's leather bars and clubs, and it remains part street party, part act of defiance. In 2018 the city made the neighborhood the world's first Leather and LGBTQ Cultural District.