An annual San Francisco festival designed to celebrate kinky gay sex has gone ahead, despite the city declaring the spread of monkeypox in the LGBT community a health emergency.
The Up Your Alley festival, colloquially known to locals as Dore Alley, went on this weekend. A “leather and fetish fair,” the event was expected to bring thousands of people to Folsom Street area of San Francisco “for a day of kink demonstrations, dancing, and shopping.”
However, a number of previous attendees are furious at the lack of care for public health at the festival, given that San Francisco had declared the spread of monkeypox, which is seen almost exclusively to be transmitting within the gay community, as a health emergency.
“The same population that’s being most affected by the disease is the same population that attends these events, most exclusively,” said David Harris, a 29-year-old San Francisco resident, who did not attend the festival this year. He attacked the organisers, Folsom Street, for refusing to address “the elephant in the room.”
Harris said that while “scanning the posts” of the organisers, they had yet to “say a single word even mentioning the word ‘monkeypox’,” slamming the decision as “utterly irresponsible.”
UCSF Infectious Disease Specialist Dr Peter Chin-Hong argued that the risk of catching monkepox increases during “intimate interactions,” such as gay sex parties. Chin-Hong told the SF Chronicle that he expected “a lot of activity” in monkeypox alerts this week after the festival.
Angel Adeyoha, the executive director at Folsom Street, claimed that they were working together with the San Francisco Department of Public Health to “provide on-site outreach” during the events, and they were trying to keep their reactions to the spread of monkeypox “proportional and in balance, and constantly balancing two conflicting needs.”
A lot went into the decision not to cancel Dore Alley, the weekend of kink and leather festivities that has had a lot of people worried about monkeypox.
Read more:https://t.co/aiagIkyEl5
— annie vainshtein (@annievain) July 30, 2022
Despite the monkeypox health alert, officials from the San Francisco health department said in a statement that events like Dore Alley were an “integral party” of the city’s culture.
“Monkeypox is not confined to those activities and communities and cannot be contained simply by telling people not to participate in those activities,” the statement argued. “And those activities and the communities that host and participate in them must not be stigmatized.”
The statement from the health authorities mimicked that of Joe Hawkins, the director of the Oakland LGBT Community Center, who said that while there was a “very, very high risk possibility to be a spreader” of monkeypox at the event, they had specifically not tried to dissuade people from attending.
“You can tell people ‘do not do this,’ and I just think that here in this country, people have a problem with that,” Hawkins said. “We’re really trying to meet people where they are and just educate them about what’s really factual about this monkeypox and its spread.”
John Davis, a professor of medicine at UCSF, who is gay, also claimed that the event should not be shut down in order not to associate “gay and bisexual men and monkeypox,” as there would be a “stigma” as a result. “This is an infectious disease that does not discriminate,” he added.
Matt Dorsey, the supervisor for San Francisco District Six, the only openly HIV-positive Board of Supervisors member, compared the attitude that the city has to monkeypox to that of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, where instead they shut down “gay bathhouses” believed to be areas where the disease would spread.
“There is nothing prohibitive in the public health order that argues to cancel Dore Alley, and I think doing so would deny the community the benefit of a community-based partner,” he argued.
The most egregious “advice” came from the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, who hyped up the festival as being a place for people to get their “fill of hot hairy daddies, hungry pigs, BDSM babes and kinks of all kinds.”
Instead of telling people not to have anonymous gay sex, they recommended that people “dress from top to bottom in latex or leather,” as “keeping your skin covered is a sure-fire way to prevent exposures to monkeypox.”
For those people who had a suspicious bump that they suspected to be monkeypox, they should not stay home, but simply “cover it up with a bandaid or clothing before you go out.”
The San Francisco Aids Foundation (@SFAIDSFound) has released a guide to having sex ahead of the #DoreAlley gay sex festival. The guide says if you have bumps on your skin & don’t know what they are, to cover them up & go have sex anyway. #Monkeypox https://t.co/fMlOaeMdC2 pic.twitter.com/8DXT6KS1SW
— Andy Ngô 🏳️🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) July 30, 2022
Ironically, all festival goers were required to be vaccinated for COVID-19 before attending.
Nick1
August 3, 2022 at 5:56 am
Fine, then no free vaccines for them. Let them pay for them, not the taxpayers. Their bodies, their choice.
Shemp Hawking
August 3, 2022 at 12:35 pm
Lot’s of Keester Cowboys in one place. Giddy-up!
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Mike
August 4, 2022 at 1:34 pm
Nancy’s dumpster-fire city.