San Francisco gives cultural status to the city’s gay and leather district

The city of San Francisco, California will officially create and recognise a gay and leather cultural district, offering the community protection from gentrification, funding and future development opportunities.

The South of Market neighbourhood has been a vibrant LGBTQ area and home to the ‘leather’ subculture, where sexual practices and style revolve around leather garments, and is often associated with kink and BDSM communities. Though sexual preference can be wide-ranging, it is particularly visible with gay men. Folsom Street Fair, a popular event celebrating leather sexuality, has taken place there every year since 1984. It’s also home to iconic leather bar The Eagle, where the leather pride flag (a black, dark blue, and white striped flag with a large red heart) can be seen flying. 

The LGBTQ and Leather Cultural District comes after the formation of four other cultural quarters, established across the years to protect local cultural communities from developers and escalating housing prices, as the San Francisco Examiner reports.

“San Francisco’s South of Market has been a local and world capital for leather culture since the 1960s, as well as one of the city’s most significant and distinctive Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer neighbourhoods since the 1950s,” the resolution, put forward by local supervisor Jane Kim, stated. 

The city of San Francisco will now be obligated to develop a housing and economic sustainability strategy for the area, which will preserve it as a historical and cultural space. Plans must be set in motion in the next year. 

Other district applications have been put forward for the Castro LGBTQ cultural district – captured by photographer Daniel Nicoletta in the gallery above – and the Bayview African American cultural district to protect, cultivate, and help its most vulnerable spaces. 

San Francisco is well known for its vibrant LGBT community and movements, as well as being the home of Harvey Milk.