Cartoon Superman never amounted to more than that for most people. But for a select group, early encounters with the Man of Steel wearing a molded bodysuit, knee boots and a shiny cape helped set the course of an erotic life. "Batman and Robin and Superman were all really exciting," said John Weis, the chairman of the Folsom Street East street fair, an annual event that kicked off Gay Pride Week in New York on June 18. "Batman was always tied up or in some peril, and I thought that was really great."
On the 10th anniversary of the fair, Folsom Street East brought together thousands of men and women (and men who formerly were women) for the sort of gathering that, once upon a time, rarely took place in the full light of day.
There was a time when people whose erotic rituals ran to whips and chains and latex and highly complex protocols of dominance and submission were confined to the cultural shadows. But that was before Madonna turned bondage into a concert party trick, before the Gap ran ads with a tongue-in-cheek SM tagline ("Everybody in leather!"), before Altoids and Svedka vodka purloined imagery from "Venus in Furs" for their ad campaigns and well before Victoria's Secret mainstreamed the bondage pinup queen Bettie Page.
Fashion designers were the early adopters of this kinky style: talents as unalike as Vivienne Westwood, Jean Paul Gaultier, Alexander McQueen and Versace have nipped into the fetish closet for inspiration.
"The whole leather fetish look has been around since at least the 1920s," said Valerie Steele, the director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. "But from the moment it started to come out of the closet following the sexual and gay liberation movements, it was already influencing popular culture, with guys walking down Castro Street in leather and people wearing it in friendly little swingers clubs in suburbia."
It was at one point in the 1970s, Steele said, that clothes resembling fetish wear began being merchandised even by mainstream retailers like Montgomery Ward. When, more recently, the French designer Thierry Mugler was called on to create costumes for Cirque du Soleil's naughty but family-friendly Las Vegas show, Zumanity, his first design was for a cross-dressing MC tricked out in dominatrix leather and vertiginous bondage shoes. It almost goes without saying that Mugler was only going where comic book artists had been before.
"So much of this world used to be swept into dark corners or alleys or basements," Weis said. Images and acts, he added, that might once have been shocking now barely merit a yawn.
Remember Condoleezza Rice in that long black coat and black high-heeled boots? he asked. "What is that but the secretary of state dressed like a pro dominatrix?" (Lest anyone imagine that the point has been missed, Simon & Schuster plans to publish a book titled The Corporate Dominatrix: Role Play Your Way to the Board Room next year.)
But for the 90-degree heat, Rice would have looked at home stalking along 28th Street in her black coat and heels. In fact, the one fairgoer who stood out on Sunday was a man in flip-flops, Madras trousers and a jaunty straw hat. For the rest of the crowd, the uniform code was indeed, often literally, uniform, with at least one man dressed as an officer of the California Highway Patrol and many others looking a lot like the Springtime for Hitler chorus line from The Producers.
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