What I Learned About Myself at the Folsom Street Fair

My NSFW confession.

I’m Alexander Cheves, and this is LOVE, BEASTLY—a blog about sex, feelings, and manhood. It’s written mostly for men—gay, straight, bi, MSM, or just curious—but some readers are women, and some don’t fit into categories. Everyone’s welcome here. 

This is one of my more personal essays. Heads up: these can sometimes include explicit content or emotionally triggering subjects.

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I had great sex and want to tell you about it. But first, a life update: I moved to Los Angeles to write for The Advocate, a dream I never imagined would or could come true. I’m here, working in the official office of a publication that shaped my life.

Last September, I went to the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco, and this was my first time going alone—I went the year before with my former sir.

I left L.A. just before dawn. Before sunrise, the hills outside the city look blue. Beyond them is the long, flat stretch of I-5 through fields of lemon trees. After five hours of driving, I rounded a corner and saw Castro Street sloping down the hill, and it felt, in a strange way, like coming home.

San Francisco was my home for a little bit last year, and the experience was not great. I would rather not go into details about it—I moved there with my former sir (my BDSM trainer, master, coach, whatever you want to call it), and the expeience was so dark and traumatising that I he is now, decidedly, my former sir. Our relationship did not recover from it, and we’re no longer speaking.

In hindsight, I should have known it would be a disaster. Jose knew it would be. All in all, it was a very San Francisco story: brief, messy, and just sad. The city left a bad taste in my mouth and I wasn’t sure how I would feel about driving back into it.

I think, in a way, I was hoping to reclaim something in San Francisco for myself this year, with this visit to the fabled festival. And boy, I sure did.

I have spent much of this year recovering from my failed attempt at living in San Francisco and wondering what my life would have been like if I had stayed. Would I still have this gig at The Advocate? Impossible to know. What if I had left the scary porn house and found a real job? Leaving Jose a second time to come to L.A. was harder than the first time, and though we are trying to do this long-distance, it's tough. I miss him so much.

Even with San Francisco memories fresh and painful, I decided to do Folsom again—the world’s largest leather and fetish festival only comes once a year.

Arriving in town, I drove past the coffee shop on Market Street where I sat on my computer the year before, sending out dozens of stupid job applications, none of which were answered. But that did not matter this time—I was here to play, not work.

The Folsom Street Fair is bewildering the first time and beginners often need a guide. The first time I came, last year, my sir was my guide. A guide is necessary. Thousands of people from all over the world gather in this small city, and they share, between them, every kink imaginable, from rubber to pup play to BDSM and everythign else. Any kink you can think of, you can find others here who share it—packs of others, hordes of them, so many others you'll never meet them all. It's a fuck fest, and it all happens in a city that looks like a toy set, a dollhouse. How can such a lovely place harbor such sordid tales? And all of them are true.

Having done Folsom once before, I had a flexible itinerary in my head and knew which parties I wantd to go to. On Friday night, I went to the Recon party, called Full Fetish.

I walked in at midnight and the place was dead. I wore assless neoprene shorts and walked from room to room wondering where everyone was. There was a large, empty dance floor bathed in red light. A gay couple was making out on some lounge chairs, but besides them, the place was empty. I turned to leave and must have looked confused because the doorman said, "They're all in the back." He pointed in the direction. "Around the corner."

Somehow I missed the black tarp hanging in a doorway. On the other side were hundreds of men milling through a dim sex maze made of tarpaulin and metal fencing, with guys doing every kind of sex imaginable in the dark cubicles. There was a stage in the middle of a large room where at least thirty guys were fucking on sex benches.

I walked through. Near the end of the maze, I saw a poor guy getting railed over a table. The top was incredible. His body moved rhythmically and gently, then jack-hammered. The bottom yelped—he was struggling to take it, and soon he had to pull off. When he did, I saw the top's dick, a monster cock, bouncing like a little arm from the man’s midsection in the dim stage light. I was staring at it and didn't realize he was looking at me.