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.
PHOTO: AP AND NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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.
"It's really just fashion, no different from shopping in Barneys or Bergdorf's," said Gregory Bunch, a salesman at the Chelsea fetish shop, the Noose.
The key pieces this summer, Bunch said, are leather shorts and a harness. Actually, those are the key pieces every year. "It's too hot now for chaps," said Bunch, who bears a tattoo on his right bicep that reads SLAVE. "If shorts are too hot, you can always wear a studded leather codpiece jock."
Of course you can. Or you can wear, as many did, a latex singlet or bleach-mottled skinhead denims or neoprene jerkins reminiscent of Nicolas Ghesquiere's designs for Balenciaga, or close-cropped mohawks or abraded jeans left half-open or dog collars and leather hoods with zippered mouth and eyeholes and with little puppy ears attached.
"Its a way to express the feelings and emotions of your inner canine," explained Steve Birko, who calls himself Puppy Diesel when dabbling in the burgeoning sphere of what in kink circles is called human animal training, an elaborate form of role play in which the end point is basically sit and stay.
"It's pure feeling, nothing else is allowed to exist but your instincts," said Robert Davis, who together with Birko was being walked by a man called Harding, a gay skinhead whose goatee is groomed into diabolical points and who has not, he claimed, used a surname in years.
One could hardly keep count of the pierced nipples on display at the Folsom Street fair, often adorned with what look like door knockers, and yet worn with nothing more suggestive of a kinky lifestyle than a pair of Old Navy cargo shorts. "Just because somebody's in cargo shorts and flip-flops doesn't mean they don't have a dungeon in their basement," Weis pointed out.
Making assumptions about other people's libidos is typically futile, but at Folsom Street East there was little guessing required. "I'm Dutch, so I'm very liberal," said Rob Tiller, a leather man from Amsterdam, who pointed out that each of the many decisions that went into his elaborate wardrobe (gray leather signi-fying an interest in bondage, for one thing, and an armband worn on the left-hand side to indicate the dominant role) was a code easily deciphered by an initiate. The Pulitzer-winning composer David Del Tredici ambled along in a tank top bearing the unambiguous legend MASTER.
If there was a single dominant (pardon the term) fashion theme of the day, it was takeoffs on the traditional Scottish form of masculine dress; dozens of the men and women (and men who formerly were women) chose to wear kilts to the fair. Among them was a buff shirtless man who wears an altogether different kind of gear for his day job as a Protestant cleric.
"It's fun," and not a lifestyle decision, the man explained, referring to the belted leather kilt manufactured by Stormy Leather. "It only comes out of the closet twice a year."
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