Getting Whipped at Leather Pride

Your email has been sent.

Thanks for recommending The Daily Beast!

X Close

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images As this weekend’s gay pride parades rise to new heights of respectability, The Daily Beast goes off the beaten path to attend “Leather Pride Day,” an old-school, X-rated orgy of outrageous behavior.

“I escaped Ohio when I was 19," said Dale Vargas. He had to squat down on his stilts to talk to me. He was wearing a black leather jockstrap, red bolero jacket with epaulettes, leather mask and top hat—last Sunday on West 28th Street in Manhattan.

In Ohio, he said, "you had to be white and have 2.3 kids to fit in. I found in the gay community people who tended to lean toward leather and kink were people that didn’t box themselves into where they grew up and stay there. They explore. I found that the leather community was more honest, more worldly, more in touch, and that’s where I gravitated to.”

That day, Mr. Vargas and 7,000 others had turned the far west Chelsea block into a little slice of their own personal paradise, far over the rainbow from Ohio, Kansas, or any other place where the sight of men in leather jockstraps would hoist the eyebrows of the town matrons. They were there to celebrate “Folsom Street East,” also known as Leather Pride Day, the annual street fair put on by the Gay Male SM Association.

It's where I met 72-year-old Joe Regan, a resident of the neighborhood, as he was pulling on a pair of yellow rubber boots and getting things properly situated in his jockstrap. “I’m wearing a yellow rubber jock that the guy down there makes," he said, gesturing down the street. “He makes the best. This is all one piece of rubber, no seams.”

I asked him what Folsom Street East—the tag pays homage to the original, much larger Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco—meant to him.

“I’m basically a top," he said, " though I will play man-to-man with a lot of guys, and I really enjoy it. This one of those days where you can let it all hang out. I wouldn’t wear this anywhere except at a sex club normally.”

Of the dozen or so attendees I spoke to—from Frank Parker, a 45-year-old Ohioan who works in construction in leather suspenders; to men in leather kilts selling cigars; to “Nipple Dad,” a mainstay of Chelsea—the consensus was this: In an increasingly conformist gay world, the socially frowned-upon displays of sexuality taking place here represented a rare opportunity to openly experience homosexuality as the illicit, wanton, fringe subculture it once was.

Because when NYC Pride Day, the main event of Gay Pride Week, takes over the city this weekend with over a million attendees, it will look very different from this Leather Pride bacchanal. NYC Pride Day, like many other pride parades across the country, has become more and more respectable with each passing year. Bud Light, Skyy vodka, Delta, Continental, Kiehl’s, Whole Foods, and JP Morgan Chase all have floats in this year’s parade. A representative of NYC Pride recently boasted that if one were to categorize the more than 300 groups participating, church groups would have the largest presence.

View as Single Page