*Update: The passage below comes to us from writer, professor, photographer, and historian Jack Fritscher. Look at the comment section for his links.*

Ken Vulsion aka Ken Woodard forwarded us a bit of blast from the past concerning our new venue for Honey at the Paradise Lounge:

1966, July 25: FeBe’s opens on Folsom in San Francisco and quickly becomes one of the leading leather bars, particularly for members of motorcycle clubs. The bar’s “leather David” logo (the original a plaster sculpture by Mike Caffee) becomes a leather icon. A Taste of Leather, upstairs at FeBe’s, opens in 1967 as one of the first in-bar leather shops.

San Francisco’s South of Market district, or SoMa, was long a mixed-use, working-class neighborhood of warehouses, service businesses, and residential hotels, populated by seamen, longshore workers, bohemian artists, and immigrant families. By the 1960s it was home to some of the city’s earliest LGBT institutions, including the country’s first gay community center (opened by the Society for Individual Rights in 1966) and the office of the Daughters of Bilitis.

The area’s cheap rents and deserted nighttime streets also attracted a burgeoning gay male leather community, whose members eschewed stereotypical queer effeminacy for a more masculine style. The first SoMa leather bar, the Tool Box, opened in 1962; it gained renown when a photo of the bar, with its mural by Chuck Arnett, appeared in a 1964 Life magazine article entitled “Homosexuality in America.”

For the next two decades, leather bars and bathhouses proliferated around Folsom Street, while the neighborhood’s narrow alleys proved ideal for cruising. Among the most popular haunts were the Ambush (which boasted its own brand of poppers), the Barracks (described by author and former Drummer editor Jack Fritscher as “a four-story maze of fantasy sex”), the Brig, Febe’s (with its trademark mascot, Michelangelo’s David dressed as a leatherman), and the Slot.

During this golden age, according to Fritscher, “peace, love, and granola would mix with hard leather, hard drugs, and hard sex,” and the streets of SoMa hummed with sexual excitement and camaraderie.