I’ll admit I went to Kink’s baroque bordello atop the Mission Tuesday night to check out the fine china and torpedo breasted, roped-up female statues – but I stayed to watch men in leather pants give away monies to local angels.
Those dashing fellows would be Folsom Street Events, who used the ambiance of the Amory’s penthouse to donate $326,161 in 2010 proceeds from the Fair, Up Your Alley, and Magnitude to their 16 beneficiary non-profits. It was a gentle flog on the ass of a reminder to anyone who says that perverts never did anything for our city, not to mention a welcome sign that our great grant-making institutions haven’t completely gone under yet.
Who got their sticky paws on the giant cardboard signifier? Everyone from Pets Are Wonderful, the support agency for low income patients and their animals, to the Queer Cultural Center, to SF Sex Information (for a full list of the leather set’s lucky ones go here). The presenter and announcer of all this do-gooding fuzziness celebrated our momentouxxx surroundings by thanking Kink creator Peter Acworth, who was padding about in baggy jeans and flip-flops, for using the space “even if we don’t enjoy it quite the way you do – or maybe we do, just in different clubs.”
FSE executive director Demetri Moshoyannis told me that the most that his organization has ever donated in a year is $350,000 – but at close to $4.5 million over the history of the fair, Folsom’s making the SF’s charitable contributions look like they just got done skinny dipping in a frigid mountain pool.
But who can focus on non-profit pissing matches when there’s cock ring cake to be had? Not to mention the well-scrubbed, epically proportioned dinner tables on which one ponders setting down one’s app plate, the chains hanging becomingly from the rather sumptuous ceilings, and the fifteen-foot high oil painting in the Amory stairwell of a well dressed woman offering scraps to a dignified greyhound and crouching blonde clad in nothing but a leather doggie mask?
Fire and Icing cock ring cake: so good, it was real hard to get a slice. Photo by Caitlin Donohue
“Did you notice the statue?” a spiky haired attache in leather pants inquired in the midst of our reluctant retreat from the Armory’s philanthropic festivities. We had, possessing the facility of sight and rudimentary powers of observation – she stands four feet tall and occupies the center stage of the sitting room upstairs.
“Did you know that Peter Acworth’s mother sculpted that?” We are treated to the history of the busty bust, who apparently went through three drafts before Acworth told Momma that her lady’s tits were of a prominence suitable for placement in his debauched drawing room.
As this conversation took place alongside a glass case containing Kink’s gift shop, we had the chance to admire the red and black towels for sale (at one point complimentary clean ups for the on-screen talent, recently put into production when guests started filching them for their own). And then off into the night we went, grateful to see that San Francisco’s sex community is still well endowed in the areas of financial generosity, artistic vision, and commercial enterprise.