San fracisco leather gay bars

Historical Essays. This is the city's backyard. An early morning walk will take a visitor past dozens of small businesses manufacturing necessities; metal benders, plastic molders, even casket makers can all be seen plying their trades. At five they set down their tools and return to the suburbs.

A few hours later, men in black leather. Separate realities that seldom touch and, on the surface at least, have few qualms about each other. Gay male leather communities have been markedly territorial gay major U. In San Francisco, leather has been most closely associated with the South of Market neighborhood since Earlier, in the s, leathermen had mostly patronized the waterfront bars, such as Jacks on the Waterfront, the Sea Cow, and the Castaways.

The first dedicated leather bar in San Francisco was the Why Notwhich opened briefly in the Tenderloin in When the Tool Box opened later that year on the corner of Fourth Street and Harrison, it was the first leather bar located in the South of Market. The Tool Fracisco was a bar. It was wildly popular and even attracted nationwide media notice.

Which prompted a relieved message from Harold Call. Rubble of the Tool Box at 4th and HarrisonChuck Arnett's notorious mural stood mutely over the ruins for almost two years. The most celebrated element of the Tool Box was a huge mural painted by Chuck Arnett, a local artist who worked at the bar and whose paintings and leathers were also featured at such later bars as the Red Star Saloon and the Ambush.

The mural was a massive black-and-white painting that depicted a variety of tough-looking, masculine men. Sanwhen Life magazine did a story on homosexuality in America, a photograph of the Tool Box was spread across the two opening pages. In it we see the mural and some of the bar patrons, including Arnett and several others who would play significant roles in San Francisco's early leather history, as the managers, bartenders, bouncers, and above all, the artists and decorators of local leather establishments.

Standing next to Arnett is Bill Tellman, another artist who has contributed a great deal to the local iconography. He designed the poster for the Slot, one of the earliest leather-oriented bathhouses. He also did graphic design for the Ambush, and a made a backlit stained-glass depiction of fistfucking that eventually adorned the Catacombs.

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Jack H. Later he was a co-owner of Febe's, one of the first leather bars to open on Folsom Street. Jack also later opened the Slot, and some stories even credit him with having invented fistfucking at a party in his basement in Mike Caffee, another artist, is there, too. Caffee worked in and did graphic design for many leather businesses.

Inhe designed the logo for Febe's and created a statue that came to symbolize the bar. He modified a small plaster reproduction of Michelangelo's David, making him into a classic s gay biker: "I broke off the raised left arm and lowered it so his thumb could go in his pants pocket, giving him cruiser body language.