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Fox Nation Goes Nirther

17
zombie5/28/2009 5:39:24 pm PDT

Glug.

Unbeknownst to me, my old “Up Your Alley Fair” report has been making serious waves this last week in San Francisco power circles, and has caused a police crackdown on the fair this year! People are furious at me! It’s even hit various news sites:

No More Public Sex at Up Your Alley Fair

Bad news for leather folks who wanted to get a blow job at this year’s Up Your Alley Fair: The event organizers and the police are teaming up to stamp your public lovin’ out.

A controversy has been simmering in the gay press and the city’s leather community ever since the Bay Area Reporter wrote that two people have lodged complaints with the Office of Citizens Complaints about the 14 police officers at last year’s festival for not enforcing public indecency laws. The Up Your Alley Fair, which is considered by leather folks to be the more local, less commercial cousin to the giant Folsom Street Fair in the fall, will be held on July 26 in SoMA’s Dore Alley.

At a hearing on street closures in April, police demanded that the festival organizers come up with a stricter security plan to ward off the public sex this year. They referenced photos of last year’s event posted anonymously on the Web site zombietime.com, depicting several men giving and receiving blow jobs, and another dude ejaculating from a second-story window onto the crowd below. Many of the photos show San Francisco police officers within view of the action.

Moshoyannis said he was blindsided at the April hearing when he was told their original security plan wasn’t going to cut it this year. …

So why were the police ignoring all the oral sex? Police Lieutenant Nicole Greely, who oversees special events, said that the cops hadn’t warned the festival organizers prior to the day of the festival: “We don’t like to just enforce laws without an education plan beforehand. At Bay to Breakers, if we’d just go out and tell everyone no kegs and took everyone’s kegs” it would make for bad public relations.

Moshoyannis said he’s seen the internet photos, and called the anonymous photographer “a homophobic coward. If you want to criticize someone or somebody’s community, at least attach your name to it … If you don’t identify as part of my community, you should be prepared for the expression of the leather community or don’t come.”

Yet even some members of the community are complaining as well. Michael Hughes of San Francisco wrote a letter to the editor of the B.A.R. identifying himself as “a Castro merchant for nearly five years, as well as a gay man who contributes financially to the causes” that the fair supports. He wrote that he’d lodged complaints with the mayor’s office, Supervisor Bevan Dufty, and Greely.

Then there’s this:

Police warn of coming crackdown on lewd behavior at San Francisco street fair

The San Francisco Police Department says it will no longer tolerate lewd behavior – including public sex acts and nudity – at a July street fair sponsored by Folsom Street Events…

The event in question, the Up Your Alley Fair, is scheduled for Sunday, July 26… Last year’s event resulted in multiple complaints to the Office of Citizen Complaints…

An anonymous photographer provided police with “photos of men performing oral sex, urinating in public, and masturbating from second floor windows overlooking the fair,” reported the Bay Area Reporter…
The photos were also posted on a web site, zombietime.com
.”The fair promoters are the ones who have to take charge; this is their event,” San Francisco Police Lt. Nicole M. Greely told the Reporter. “If they don’t run it properly, they will not be having it again.”