SF Gate
By Michael Bodley
John Wynne and Angela Bonin looked distinctly out of place on the side of San Francisco’s Folsom Street early Sunday afternoon.
Why? Well, they were both fully clothed, for one.
In the city to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary, the couple from Massachusetts, sporting T-shirts and shorts, stuck out like a big, straight thumb amidst the hundreds of thousands of nude or near-naked passersby who hung leather whips from spiky necklaces and yanked one another around by G-strings at this year’s Folsom Street Fair.
A man with pointy devil horns, his shirtless chest glistening with sweat under a cloudless sky as temperatures eclipsed 90 degrees, rolled by on a motorized scooter. A group of naked middle-aged men, some modestly donning strategically placed beaded contraptions depicting a parrot or a dragon draped over a certain body part, followed close behind.
“It seems like the place to be,” Wynne said, tugging at his Ron Jon T-shirt as he took it all in from under the shade of his bucket hat. “I think, ‘Oh my God, it’s over the top,’ but I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s showtime …”
“But we’re not posting any pictures on Facebook,” Bonin interrupted.
“No, no, no,” Wynne said.
“I want my old-lady friends at the garden club to still like me when I get back,” Bonin said, laughing.
Organizers said more than 300,000 leather aficionados made it to the 33rd annual leather-loving, BDSM-loud-and-proud fair. Most stripped off their street clothes as soon as they passed through entrance gates scattered on Folsom Street between Eighth and 13th streets.
Organizers expected to raise more than $300,000 for nonprofit LGBT groups, including the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, said Edwin Morales, the president of the board of directors of the nonprofit that organizes the event.
Morales and his co-board members had staked out Folsom Street in the predawn darkness Sunday to oversee the setup of more than 200 vendors, along with more than 1,000 volunteers. …