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TECHNIQUES OF PLEASURE

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Chapter One

According to BDSM community legend, the very first munch took place in Palo Alto in April 1992. STella, a Stanford University student, posted an invitation to the Usenet newsgroup alt.sex.bondage: she would be at the outdoor patio area of Kirk's Steakburgers later that evening, and anyone who wanted to socialize offline should join her. This "burger munch" became the model for the munch: a social event usually involving food, held in a public place, open to newcomers, and with regular meeting times. During my fieldwork, there were over twenty regular munches, held not only in the cities of San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland, but also in small towns, suburbs, exurbs, and newly created small cities across the Bay.

The largest munch, the Janus/San Francisco munch, attracted between fifty and a hundred people to a popular tapas restaurant on the second Saturday of each month. One of the smallest, the Mahogany Munch, a munch for "people of color and the people who like them," usually drew between eight and twelve people to a Mexican restaurant in Oakland on Saturday evenings. There are munches across the United States, in small towns and big cities, and in other countries like Canada, England, Scotland, and Israel. All munches are social events held on weekday evenings or weekend afternoons in public places, most often a restaurant. They are held weekly, biweekly, or monthly, and involve lunch, brunch, dinner, or drinks. They are publicized via e-mail lists and online calendars. And they are designed to be friendly, open, and welcoming to newcomers: SM play, fetish outfits, and nudity are prohibited.

The direct descendant of STella's original "burger munch" was held every Wednesday and Thursday night at 8:00 p.m., in a cafe in downtown Palo Alto. One night I arrived early and, seated with a few students working on their laptops, I watched as the cafe staff pushed large tables together and put out "Reserved for Munch" folded signs on each table. Around 8:00 people began to trickle in and sit at the tables; by 9:30 there were more than forty people, taking up most of the cafe. Sitting at one of the bigger tables, I looked around me. Most people who attend the Palo Alto munch live and work in the South Bay or Peninsula, so the people I saw there were middle-aged techies wearing khakis and T-shirts with dot-com logos. Everyone at the Palo Alto munches I went to was white; many were heterosexual and married.

The munch epitomizes the new guard pansexual BDSM community. This chapter explores the change from Folsom Street to Palo Alto, from the old guard to the new, providing a cultural history of this new scene and its practitioners in relation to the socioeconomic contours of the Bay Area. Developing Miranda Joseph's argument that communities are "complicit with capitalism" (2002, xxxiii), I show how the new BDSM community developed in relationship with—not just in the context of—economic changes in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. The rise of the Internet and Internet connectivity, the spread of informational capitalism and the development of Silicon Valley, new housing and settlement patterns across the wider Bay Area, and neoliberal city policies were crucial to the development of the new scene. At the same time, San Francisco remains the symbolic center of leather and SM: a queer homeland and a "wide-open town" (Boyd 2003). This symbolic meaning persisted even after the demise of the old guard scene, as San Francisco turned into a postcard city that few—and ever fewer of its queer, working-class, and nonwhite residents—could afford. This chapter shows how the production of this image is tied to material changes, such as escalating costs of living, redevelopment and gentrification projects, and racial housing segregation. As economic production moved from the city of San Francisco to the South Bay, the exurbs and suburbs outside the city grew, and tourism became San Francisco's primary economy. Tourism in the city (as elsewhere) relies on the spectacular display of difference, often racialized and sexualized difference. Thus, these material changes have produced an urban space that reproduces and solidifies class and racial exclusions through policies designed to make the city more "tourist friendly" (friendly to the flow of capital) and the display of—yet lack of support for—difference.

This is the material underpinning of the new pansexual community. The "fall of the Folsom" did not signal the end of BDSM in the Bay Area (Rubin 1997, 107; 1998, 259). Rather, these socioeconomic changes have transformed the SM scene. As I will describe, the new scene is networked and online, located in nebulous, diffuse, often suburban spaces: burger restaurants, cafes, online chat rooms, and e-mail lists. The new spaces of BDSM are less territorially defined than the Folsom leather and SM neighborhood. At the same time, BDSM organizations have transitioned from predominantly gay to predominantly heterosexual: new practitioners are more likely to be heterosexual or bisexual, middle-aged, white professionals than urban leather daddies and boys who populated the Folsom neighborhood. Of course, there are still leather daddies in San Francisco, and my interviewees included practitioners who are primarily identified with queer or more alternative scenes. However, the shifts of the 1980s and 1990s produced a flourishing new guard scene; and this scene, with its more normative practitioners, has become the organizational center of Bay Area SM.

In tracing this history, I show how, as Joseph puts it, "capitalism and, more generally, modernity depend on and generate the discourse of community to legitimate social hierarchies" (2002, viii). Reading the cultural history of the new pansexual scene reveals that the scene is compelling to its practitioners in part because it enables a particularly "neoliberal rationality" of privacy and privatization, personal responsibility, free choice, and individual agency and autonomy (Brown 2005). These discursive constructions, based as they are on material conditions, legitimate the social hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality, and class within capitalist social relations that form the subject of this ethnography. In brief, this chapter shows not only that the new SM scene is a community dependent on economic changes in a postindustrial Bay Area (just as this economy needs communities like BDSM), but also that this scene—as well as its practitioners—perpetuates race and class inequality as it fosters social belonging.

THE DEMISE AND REDEVELOPMENT OF FOLSOM STREET LEATHER

The history of SM in the Bay Area is epitomized by the story of the rise, fall, and redevelopment of the Folsom neighborhood. This neighborhood, known as Folsom, South of Market (Street), or South of the Slot, was the geographic home of the old guard leathermen. The old guard—the leather scene of the 1950s through the 1970s—describes a community of men who returned to the United States after the Second World War and settled in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. In the 1950s, these men created the first social space devoted to leather sexuality in San Francisco. Leathermen, as Gayle Rubin argues, had their own sexual and cultural style: a kind of butch masculinity, a fashion based on black leather and denim, and a sexuality that featured rough, often kinky sex (1997; see also Kamel 1995). Many belonged to motorcycle clubs, and the myriad bike runs and social events that the clubs organized formed the first backbone of the gay leather social world.

Throughout the 1960s, bars and clubs devoted to leathersex opened in the South of Market neighborhood. The Tool Box, the first leather bar in the neighborhood, opened in 1962. The bar was "wildly popular" with leathermen and even attracted national media: the mural inside the Tool Box was the two-page opening photograph in Life's 1964 "Homosexuality in America" cover story (Rubin 1998, 258). It was followed in 1966 by Febe's (a gay biker bar), a Taste of Leather (a leather and sex toy store), and the Stud (a leather-turned-gay hippie bar). In 1968, the Ritch Street Baths and the Ramrod, a bathhouse and a leather bar, respectively, opened. These bars and clubs were followed by others in the neighborhood: the Barracks, the Red Star, the Slot and the Ambush all opened between 1966 and the mid-1970s on Folsom Street; all were between Sixth and Eleventh Streets (Brent 1997; Rubin 1997 and 1998; see also Brodsky 1995 for details about similar clubs in New York). South of Market was a dense network of gay leather bars, stores, bathhouses, sex clubs, and cruising spots that lined Folsom Street—a leather "capital" (Rubin 1998, 258). By the mid- or late-1970s, the Folsom area (sometimes called "the Valley of the Kings") was one of San Francisco's largest and most prominent gay neighborhoods.

First targeted for redevelopment in the 1960s, the neighborhood came under sustained attack by the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (spur) in the 1980s when it was labeled a "skid row neighborhood" and an "industrial wasteland" (quoted in Wolfe 1999, 708; see also Hartman 2002). In 1981, spur observed that Folsom Street had "a city-wide and national reputation of a particular segment of the gay population": the leathermen (quoted in Wolfe 1999, 718). As they wrote in 1985: "The oddest assortment of business activities share space, are neighbors, and do business with one another. It is not uncommon for artists, metal fabricators, restaurants, wholesale beauty supplies, bakeries and musical instrument repair shops to share the same building space. Neon artists, food processors, pawn shops, tourist hotels, auto repair shops and jazz and gay 'leather' clubs are oftentimes neighbors on the same block, particularly along the Folsom Street corridor" (quoted in Wolfe 1999, 722). This "blighted" neighborhood was the center of San Francisco's leather community, but it was also populated by Filipinos, senior citizens, Latinos, artists, and casual laborers who worked and lived in the mixed-use neighborhood. This is the historical context in which Mayor Dianne Feinstein, appointed after the 1978 murders of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, advocated the redevelopment of the area in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Following on the heels of the redevelopment of Hunter's Point, the Western Addition, and the waterfront, this redevelopment was met with protest. Resident and neighborhood coalitions in South of Market fought against forced displacement, inadequate housing subsidies, and the lack of low-income housing available in the city (where public housing had a waiting list of thousands, many of whom had been displaced in previous redevelopment schemes). Yet in spite of this activism, several thousand residences were razed for the construction of the Moscone and Yerba Buena Convention Centers, displacing approximately four thousand households in the area. The Moscone Center opened in 1981 as a convention center. The plan for Yerba Buena was more elaborate; it included hotels, restaurants, high-end shops, plazas, museums, a sports arena, apartment buildings, parking lots, and office buildings. Located on top of the underground Moscone Center, Yerba Buena opened in 1993 with gardens, an arts center, children's play area, skating rink, food courts, and a Sony Metreon theater. For these two large projects, the city tore down residential hotels, eateries, bars, shops, light industries, warehouses, and artists' studios between Third, Fourth, Market, and Folsom Streets.

Several other factors combined with this urban redevelopment to destroy the Folsom leather scene by the mid-1980s. In 1981, a large neighborhood fire ravaged many leather spaces. Throughout the early 1980s, HIV/AIDS devastated this generation of leathermen (Rubin 1997) and public hysteria over HIV/AIDS forced the closure of all of San Francisco's bathhouses in 1984 (Bérubé 1996). Losing the sex clubs, including SM and fisting clubs like the Catacombs (in 1983), meant losing one of the most visible outposts of San Francisco's leathersex culture, along with the bars and clubs that supported the old guard leathermen's community. The combination of neoliberal urban development policies with misguided public health crusades (sex panics) made a potent and deadly combination—at least for public, street-level sexual culture. The golden age of Folsom came to an end by the early to mid-1980s (Baldwin 1998; Brent 1997; Rubin 1998).

As this short history makes clear, the demise of Folsom must be seen in relation to the economic transformation of San Francisco: the allocation of resources to tourism, downtown development, and office and residential high-rises, and away from art culture, local neighborhoods, and lofts and other spaces for low-income housing, work, and industry. This neighborhood, like New York City's Times Square before its redevelopment, was a diversified zone of sexualized contact across races and classes. As Samuel Delany observes, the redevelopment of Times Square for middle-class tourists demolished the porn theaters that had provided spatial support for rich social exchanges, amounting to a "violent suppression of urban social structures"—"economic, social and sexual" (1999, 153; see also Berlant and Warner 1998). And, as Martin Manalansan argues, such projects are neoliberal; they "seek to delimit governmental intervention, increase privatization, and remove the safeguards of welfare services, creating a virtual free-for-all arena for economic market competition" (2005, 141). Privatizing public spaces has the greatest impact on the marginalized: poor, nonwhite, and queer residents and their less institutionalized communities, which become targets of anticrime and "quality of life" campaigns. Such projects, in other words, actively produce the city's citizenry as business owners and tourists, not renters or people who use the city's streets and dwindling public spaces.

In the 1990s, South of Market, now called soma, faced a new round of redevelopment in the form of the promotion of Multimedia Gulch, an area south of Folsom Street between Second and Seventh Streets, centered on the small city park called South Park. The buzz around Multimedia Gulch heralded new forms of labor in an increasingly information-based economy; the city promoted Internet services, publishing, and marketing along with interactive media such as graphic and computer arts, virtual communities, digital entertainment, and film postproduction. This sector accounted for 40 percent of San Francisco's new jobs in 1998. As George Raine notes in a San Francisco Examiner article, however, "the price of all this wealth, of course, is prohibitively expensive home prices for many, along with traffic congestion that saps energy and productivity and erodes the environmental quality that made the area desirable in the first place" (1999). Indeed, according to the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, commercial rents increased from $6 to $60 a square foot during the 1990s (Borden 2000). Over one thousand "live/work lofts" with median sale prices of $270,000 were constructed in the neighborhood, driving out the few remaining low-income artists and blue-collar workers. New restaurants, the Museum of Modern Art (opened in 1995), and new luxury hotels also appeared, along with large numbers of media and it businesses, including Wired magazine and Macromedia.

Although the end of the dot-com boom in the early 2000s gutted many of these Internet companies, soma bears the mark of this development. The area is known primarily for Yerba Buena Gardens, the Moscone Convention Center, and the Museum of Modern Art. Newly constructed high-rise "luxury lofts" and condos in soma and Mission Bay—such as Arterra, "San Francisco's first LEED-certified, green high-rise building," or the Infinity, two high-rise towers at Folsom and Main Streets—have been largely successful in wooing new residents "despite the sagging economy," as Judy Richter writes in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2009. In a NewGeography.com article, Adam Mayer notes that if South of Market seems "impervious" to the economic crisis of 2008, "part of this can be attributed to the continuing popularity of the city as a tourist destination for foreigners. Also keeping the local economy afloat is the investment in luxury real estate from those with disposable wealth purchasing second homes in this geographically desirable locale. Unfortunately, this does not spell good news for the city in terms of middle class aspiration and sustainable socio-economic diversity." Current redevelopment plans for the area promise further privatization and rezoning, a continuation of neoliberal redistribution projects from the 1970s through the first decade of the 2000s.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from TECHNIQUES OF PLEASURE by Margot Weiss Copyright © 2011 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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