It was a dream come true for some Folsom, California youth who got to watch Steph Curry show up for a pickup basketball game, but a nightmare for the poor amateur guy who was tasked with guarding him.

Golden State Warriors superstar point guard Steph Curry will be playing in the Olympics at the end of next month, so you figure he’s off at the estate of LeBron James or Kevin Durant, sharpening his game. You would not expect him to be playing pickup basketball with amateurs at some Sacramento County gym. And yet.

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As KRON4 reports, Curry surprised members of Folsom’s Life Time Fitness Center by showing up for a pickup basketball game Saturday night. Joining Curry was former Warrior Kent Bazemore, who played for the Warriors in the 2020-21 season before signing with the Lakers.

Sacramento’s KXTV notes the above video (which is the second frame of the Instrgram embed) “was taken by Jessica Brogan, but the game was set up by her child's basketball trainer, Coach Marcus.”

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This Coach Marcus is Marcus Kirkland, founder of a youth sports organization called Strive Above Others.  

According to KPIX, Curry was also seen in Placer County’s Roseville this weekend, attending a volleyball tournament in which one of his daughters was participating.

Related: Steph Curry Just Bought a Building in Dogpatch That Will Serve as His Business Headquarters [SFist]

Image: OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA - SEPTEMBER 06: (L-R) Ayesha Curry and Stephen Curry attend the launch of Stephen & Ayesha Curry's Eat. Learn. Play. New Movement while visiting Lockwood STEAM Academy on September 06, 2023 in Oakland, California. (Photo by Noah Graham/Getty Images for Eat. Learn. Play.)

For Folsom Street Fair's 39th year celebrating sex positivity and all things leather, tens of thousands of festival attendees crowd SF’s Leather and LGBTQ Cultural District Sunday for what felt like the first typical Folsom celebration since the pandemic began.

The parade of humanity that moved up and down Folsom Street between 8th and 13th streets during this past Sunday's Folsom Street Fair 2022 was a welcome sight. While the crowd at last year's rebranded "Megahood2021" event was a bit leaner — 40,000 people attended the 2021 event that was named to pay homage to Folsom Street Fair's original roots — fetishists and fetish tourists alike gathered at the Folsom Street Fair for this year's sunny festivities in more typical large numbers.

According to the Chronicle, an estimated 100,000 kinksters thronged the over 13 city blocks closed off for the festival. Over 200 vendors were onsite from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday selling all kinds of leather goods, accessories, novelty pins, and foodstuffs.

Also among the booths yesterday was a pop-up vaccination site hosted by SFDPH. Those looking to receive either their first or second monkeypox vaccine from the Danish pharmaceutical company Jynneos could do so — with little to no wait.

For the first time since these vaccine units became available in San Francisco, out-of-towners could also receive a monkeypox vaccine from the city health department; non-residents wanting to get inoculated needed to fill out a questionnaire and confirm that this was either their first or second monkeypox vaccine dose; second doses were made available to those who were at least 28 days out from their last shot.

Sunday’s celebration felt like an experience punctuated by releases— literally and figuratively speaking. The sense of joy that against all odds, the largest leather festival in the world managed to navigate the pandemic and return in true form was palpable.

In case you didn’t get a chance to bump harnesses with others at Folsom this past weekend, here are some of our favorite (obviously NSFW) moments posted on Twitter and Instagram.

Related: NSFW Photos: 'Megahood2021' Was a Return to True Folsom Form and IRL Kink

Top photo by Matt Charnock/SFist

Today marks the 49th anniversary of the recording of the live album intended to revive the then flagging career of Johnny Cash, At Folsom Prison, which took place on January 13, 1968.

As the New York Times notes at the bottom of their California Today column, "Executives at Mr. Cash’s record label, Columbia Records, saw him as so unreliable that they kept the planning of the Folsom show a secret from the press," and this was because Cash had been struggling with an amphetamine habit since the 1950s, which had also all but destroyed his career. But from his opening number, "Folsom Prison Blues," written in 1955, Cash proved he had still had all the same pathos and star power that made him famous over a decade earlier, and that this crowd of inmates was as ideal an audience as any.

Robert Hilburn, author of Johnny Cash: The Life, attended the show after hearing about it from a DJ friend, says Cash "was incredible. It was like he sensed this was a moment."

Cash would later become an advocate for the rights of prisoners, but only after the huge success of At Folsom Prison, and the follow-up album, At San Quentin.

Fun fact: The Folsom album was actually recorded over two performances, in the morning and afternoon of that same day, to ensure a good recording.

The Up Your Alley Fair, informally known as the Dore Alley Fair, celebrates its 30-year anniversary with this Sunday’s bare-chested, manly iteration. To mark the occasion, the SF Leathermen’s Discussion Group brought in noted LGBT cultural historian Dr. Gayle Rubin for a History of the Up Your Alley Fair lecture Wednesday night at the LGBT Center. SFist was onhand to get vintage flyer pictures and the full historical roundup, and Dr. Rubin’s complete, two-hour lecture can be found at the bottom of this article.

The Up Your Alley Fair wasn’t originally on Dore Alley, and it wasn’t originally “Folsom Street Fair’s dirty little brother”. In fact, the two fairs were originally completely unrelated to one another. The first Folsom Street Fairs were celebrations of SoMA’s neighborhood diversity whereas Up Your Alley was a celebration specifically of the gay leather community.

The Pre-Up Your Alley Era

South of Market was traditionally a gay leather hotbed, with its first leather bar The Toolbox established in 1962 (it’s now a Whole Foods). At its early 80s peak, SoMA had 16 leather bars with names like The Ramrod and The Brig, 10 bathhouses and sex clubs and 8 leather retail establishments. Of these original Folsom “Miracle Mile” leather establishments, only Stompers Boots, Mr. S and Blow Buddies (NSFW, obviously) remain today. Most fell victim to the “urban renewal” push of the early 1980s and City Hall harassment over fears of the spread of AIDS.

Up Your Alley was founded in by International Mr. Leather 1985 Patrick Toner and Jerry Vallaire specifically as a fundraiser for charities benefiting the increasingly persecuted gay and AIDS communities.

1985: First Up Your Alley Fair

Image: Torbakhopper

The first Up Your Alley Fair was held on August 25, 1985. It was technically called Up Your Alley, but was more commonly referred to as the “Ringold Alley Fair” or the “Leather Block Party”. Billed as a “block party and t-dance”, the fair took place on Ringold Alley, known as a notorious late-night cruising spot. “There were a lot of blowjobs on the alcoves of the alley,” Dr. Rubin said, noting that vans operated as fully equipped S&M dungeons. “The street became an outdoor late night sex carnival.” Up Your Alley brought these activities into the daylight for one day.

An event planned specifically in response to the AIDS crisis, Up Your Alley’s first beneficiaries were the SF AIDS Fund, the Gay Games and Community United Against Violence. It was essentially a daytime outdoor cruising party and beer bust with kissing booths, pie-throwing contests and “dunk-a-hunk” booths being operated to benefit those charity causes.

1986: Conflict in the Community

Here we see a poster from the 1986 Up Your Alley Fair, also on Ringold. The second Up Your Alley was slightly more gender inclusive. “There were women,” Dr. Rubin said. “I was one of them.”

At the time, Up Your Alley had a strict policy of no independent vending or craft booths. All booths were run by the Fair or by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. “One could throw a pie or dunk a hunk, but you couldn’t buy a cockring,” Dr. Rubin pointed out. Local artist Scott Taylor did a performance art piece in protest of Prop. 64, a Lyndon LaRouche-backed ballot measure that would have effectively quarantined the HIV-positive. Taylor mummified himself and his friends chained him to a fence and put a “Quarantine” sign on him. Furious that someone was attempting an unsanctioned Fair attraction, Toner demanded the performers leave and even threatened to have them removed by police.

1987: Up Your Alley moves to Dore Alley

For reasons that are uncertain, Up You Alley had to leave Ringold for the 1987 event. “I’m told it was a protest by the residents,” Dr. Rubin said. The fair took on the Dore Alley location where it still remains today.

1990: Folsom and Up Your Alley Converge

Image: Joe Kukura

By 1990, Toner and other event organizers were being lost to the rampant AIDS epidemic (Toner died in 1993). With a serious loss in leadership, both fairs were merged into the same non-profit management structure called SMMILE (South of Market Merchants and Individuals Lifestyle Events). This is when Up Your Alley came of age as a “warm-up event” for Folsom, one which drew fewer tourists and remained a niche event for the gay leather community.

In 1991, independent leather vendors were allowed for the first time. “It was then, I think, that Up Your Alley finally assumed the character it maintains to this day, which is the Folsom fair’s easygoing local sibling,” Dr. Rubin said, calling it “a temporary leather takeover of its old [SoMA] heartland.”

1995-Present: SoMA Gentrification Backlash

Image: Ed Biernan

The fair had a near death experience in the mid-1990s, but expanded its paid staff and promotions. The new non-volunteer arrangement allowed Up Your Alley to enjoy a growth trajectory even as the SoMA leather scene declined. “The leather communities needed these fairs so much so that they kept them going and continually revitalized them, and kept them their own in ways the founders would have understood even if they never would have anticipated,” Dr. Rubin said. “On those days, the streets of South of Market belong to the leather folk.”

In 2003, SMMILE reincorporated as the Folsom Street Events organization that it still is today. In 2008, I did an NFSW photoset for SFist that got picked up by Fleshbot. This was a big deal at the time! Brock Keeling and I were high-fiving each other all week.

In its dirty 30-year lifespan, the Up Your Alley Fair has always been a smaller niche event, more local and named after obscure little alleys instead of a major street like Folsom. “If you know about it, you know about it,” said Folsom Street Events executive director Demitri Moshoyannis. “If not, we don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The 30th Up Your Alley Fair is this Sunday, July 26 from 11 a.m.-6:30 p.m. on Dore Alley between Howard and Folsom. Dr. Gayle Rubin’s lecture “Up Your Alley Fair: History and Transitions” is presented in its entirety below courtesy the SF Leathermen’s Discussion Group.

At around 5 p.m. Wednesday, a 40-year-old female cyclist was hit by a tow truck driver. The incident happened at Seventh and Folsom Streets. According to reports, the cyclist was going the wrong way on Folsom, a oneway street.

KTVU notes:

SFPD Sergeant John Bragagnolo said the bicyclist was going the wrong way on Folsom Street and rode right into the intersection at 7th Street.

"The light was green for north bound traffic going up 7th street. She would be unable to determine what her light was because the light's don't show that way," he told KTVU.

In addition to suffering a broken bike, the victim sustained "possible broken bones and a concussion."

Video report:

[KTVU]
[SF Appeal]

Bob Horowitz snapped this show of Luther at Dore Alley. Not content at sporting S&M masks on special occasion, this DC-based duo look like this whenever they perform. Delightful.

Bondage fans, leather queens, bears, chubs, otters, doms, subs, nudists, and good handful of gawkers descended upon San Francisco's SOMA district on Sunday to take part in the city's Folsom Street Fair. The abnormally sunny weather provided lots of skin and randy behavior at the annual ode to sex and fetish. Here are just a few shockingly safe for work images from yesterday's titillating festivities. Enjoy.

Dore Alley (Up Your Alley) is that time of year when the gays close away their Liza With a Z windows, eschew that spritz of Tom Ford's Statutory Rape (or whatever it's called), and get all frisky and sweaty and fleshy for the Dore Alley, the other annual leather and exposed penis fair in SoMa. (Women like it too!) Here are a few NSFW imagery from last Sunday's sex fetish festival. We came across many more photos, but they weren't suitable to share with you fine, decent folks. Anyway, enjoy.

Word has it Curtis Kimball's Crème Brûlée (which can currently be found in both mobile and cart forms) will get a semi-permanent home on Folsom. Proving that once again the Mission is not the only place to go in the city for good food.(Still tops for unabashed navel-gazing, though!) Glorious! Anyway, Eater's Tamara Palmer has more: "Previously occupied by cookie maven Goody Goodie Cream & Sugar, this latest venture is located at SoMa coffee spot Vega (1246 Folsom). The menu will rotate through the existing repertoire of flavors and include specials that Kimball calls 'too complicated to do elsewhere.' "

Hours are scheduled to be 8 p.m. Sundays - Thursdays and noon - 1 a.m. Fridays and Saturdays.

On Saturday night, Joe Payne captured this shot of a fire hydrant geyser shooting water into the air like it just didn't care. Wee! The scene happened on Folsom and 20th in the Mission District. Mission Mission has some choice shots of the blast as well. Oh, and check out video footage, shot and edited by Michael Gondry, below.

"Brainwash Cafe Tuesday Morning" by Demetrios Lyras.

In a storyline ripped from a rejected Desperate Housewives spec, Laurie Ann Martinez, a psychologist at Folsom Prison, was charged with faking her own rape in order to get her stubborn husband to move the couple to a better neighborhood. Reasonable, right? No, that is not reasonable. That is terrible. Also, she was in cahoots with a friend during this faux rape/robbery ordeal.

Sacramento Bee reports: "Investigators said Friday that she ripped open her blouse, split her own lip, scraped her knuckles with sandpaper and had her friend punch her with boxing gloves." Police responded to the the Martinez home on Norgard Court last April where they "found Laurie Ann Martinez lying on the floor, crying hysterically."

The fuzz says "it was all a ploy to get her husband to agree to move to a more desirable neighborhood." But now? The couple is divorcing.

Released Monday on $50,000 bail, Martinez faces two counts of conspiracy and, quite possibly, a lifetime of spinsterhood.

Today at around 1:50 pm, there was a manhole cover explosion on Folsom Street at Harriet Street. Alert SF notes: "Folsom Street is closed between 6th and 7th Streets. Harriet Street is closed between Howard and Harrison Streets. Please avoid the area."

Power in the area has also been affected, with outages hitting Sixth and Seventh Streets between Harrison and Howard.

Update: Power has since been restored. CBS 5 reports that firefighter, "fought the blaze by applying carbon dioxide, which essentially “smothers” the fire without damaging the underground electrical equipment."

Please post your finest "manhole-SoMa" jokes in the comments.

What with the (somewhat benign yet very popular) Folsom Street Fair approaching this Sunday, it's not shocking that Treasure Island Media [NSFW], a local porn company that specializes in bareback (i.e., condom-free) adult entertainment, has been 86'd from Sunday's festivities. In fact, they've been banned for several years now. No, not for distributing films with such titles as Plantin’ Seed (Folsom Underground) or Dawson's 20-Load Weekend, but for having had actual sex acts inside their booths at past Folsom Street Fair. (It might come as a shock to some, but live sex acts are verboten at SOMA's annual slap-and-tickle street fair. Why? Because the city frowns upon sex and such public acts could affect the fair's annual revenue.)

The Bay Area Reporter notes:

Folsom Street Events Executive Director Demetri Moshoyannis was clearly annoyed when asked about the ban, telling the Bay Area Reporter that covering the 86′ing is “lame” and “I don’t think it’s news.”

“They haven’t been allowed back to the fair for several years now, because they refuse to follow our exhibitor guidelines,” Moshoyannis said. “It’s as simple as that.” He estimated the porn company’s been banned for at least three years.

He said the blacklisting has “nothing to do with the fact they’re a bareback porn company,” and explained that exhibitors aren’t supposed to allow sex in their booth spaces.

Moshoyannis angrily went on to tell the BAR, "You’re writing a story about nothing, and they got you to write a story about nothing." Which: sigh. Business owners and civic leaders love to explain to reporters that they're "writing a story about nothing" when said story doesn't shine a retina-scorching light on their interests. Grain of salt here, folks. We get that FSS raises loads of money for charity. And that's super. However, as San Francisco turns into a haven for right-brained tech ilk who do creative on the weekends, "microtrend" blathering yokels, and cupcake-bacon-food-truck-Bi Rite-line-waiting zealots, it's noteworthy to point out how the city's increasingly puritanical bent and quarantined gay culture has affected some, if not most, of its racier texture. (OK, we're not quite there yet, but still.)

For their part, Treasure Island isn't losing any hot loads over the ban. Turning lemons into golden showers, they've capitalized on the non-drama by having this sign (pictured here) in front of their Ninth Street offices as well as hosting parties around SOMA during the Folsom Street Fair season.

[BAR]

Wednesday night's three-alarm fire that ravaged Park Hotel on Folsom Street left over 75 San Franciscans homeless. The Red Cross set up shelters to cover the displaced for the night, and will continue tonight. While investigators have yet to determine how it started -- SF Weekly debunked rumors that the fire was sparked by an indoor barbecue -- the Chronicle reports that the blaze "gutted the apartment house and spread to three other buildings, causing significant damage to a six-unit apartment behind it and minor to moderate damage to adjacent structures."

Residents had little to no time to collect their belongings before evacuating. "I heard the fire engines, and my girlfriend opened the door and smelled smoke," Tanith Nichols, 33, told the Chron. "I do computer repair work and had 10 computers in there, all my clothes, tools, some money. This is a disaster."

SF Weekly reports that "six people, including four firefighters, were injured in the blaze at the Park Hotel."

No word yet if a much-needed benefit for the displaced residents is in the planning stages. (Bloodhound could make a great spot for a fundraiser!) If you recall, benefits for residents of Castro and Mission fires in February and April, respectively, proved advantageous for the comparatively fewer victims in those cases.