Folsom Europe: a beast of its own!
Story by: Will Stone
Photography by: Mike Miksche
October 2, 2019
On a gorgeous Saturday afternoon in mid-September, I placed a 10€ bill into a donation can, and entered the leather Valhalla, aka Berlin’s annual Folsom Europe street fair. The Folsom Europe bacchanal begins on a Wednesday, and in the days leading up to its Saturday fair, you can feast on an endless buffet of gear-shopping, dinners with friends, boat cruises, cigar parties, a fetish classical concert, backroom cruising, and uninhibited sex, German-style. Over the course of the week, tens of thousands of fetish guys from around the world congregate onto the leafy Fuggerstraße (think Folsom Street in San Francisco but without the tech start-ups taking over). This fair-cum-multi-day festival is a beast all of its own, which is why an international cast of horny fuckers gather in Berlin every fall, some eschewing the original Folsom in favor of this Teutonic variant.
Unlike many big leather and kink events, you don’t get sequestered into one or two host hotels for the weekend. When you come to Folsom Europe, you and your fellow gearheads take over Schöneberg, Berlin’s historic gay district, for five fetish-packed days when kinksters fill neighborhood bars, restaurants, and shops. At the posh department store nearby, KaDeWe, not an eyelid will flutter when you’re browsing in head-to-toe leather, rubber, or whatever gets you off. You hardly need to leave Schöneberg for anything, except maybe for one of the all-night parties, if that’s your thing. Your tricks’ hotels are likely just a block or two from yours, so your boots become your main mode of transport for the week.
“There’s an array of fetish archetypes you don’t see much of in North America.”
Folsom Europe is a testosterone-driven affair, with many of the events and cruising bars in Schöneberg being strictly men-only (a rarity in the United States!). At the street fair itself, I’d guess that men make up well over 99% of the crowd too. Most of these guys are in leather and many are in full B.L.U.F. (The Breeches and Leather Uniform Fanclub) gear, which is hugely popular in Europe. You’ll also see plenty of rubber guys, pups, hi-vis construction workers, scally lads in Adidas, and “skins” in bleachers, braces, Doc Martens, and Alpha Industries jackets — there’s an array of fetish archetypes you don’t see much of in North America.
But it’s not just the different variety of fetish gear that makes Folsom Europe special. There’s the German attitude towards cruising. Forget endless pursuit and awkward small talk. When you catch another guy’s eye in a bar, you just walk up to him and start swapping spit. If you’re a bottom like me, you might soon drop to your knees, but you had better be ready when he bends you over to breed you. Fortunately, it doesn’t take long for this streamlined approach to man-on-man sex to permeate guys who are visiting the city. For several days in September, we all become Germans. Ich bin ein Berliner, indeed!
It’s this attitude that had me strutting my fully leathered-up self at the fair, hoping that I’d run into the guys I had hooked up with over the past several days. I promptly ran into the sexy leatherman from New York with a shaved head, who had mercilessly fucked my face at fetish cruise bar, New Action, Thursday evening. Minutes later, I crossed paths with the British bloke with the huge cock who rewarded me with a tasty load at the end of a role-play scene at cruise club Mutchmann’s that same night. After that, I bumped into the hard-bodied leather top from London that shot two loads up my ass Friday night at Testosterone, a party for daddies. It’s great seeing your new fuck buds in natural lighting.
Folsom Europe doesn’t end Saturday afternoon at the fair. PiG, Folsom Europe’s official party, takes place Saturday night. Like Berlin’s best parties, it’s held in a vast repurposed structure in old East Berlin. Like Folsom Europe’s best parties, guys come to fuck. Sure, there are several DJs named on the poster, and there are dance floors in small rooms with low ceilings. But mostly, there are innumerable poorly-lit rooms, heavy with the scent of sweat, poppers, and lube, teeming with all-male debauchery.
Although Sunday is more subdued, the parties continue with the Fetish Boat cruise in the late afternoon and the official closing party of Folsom Europe, MENtabolism, at night. Schöneberg’s cruise bars are in full swing too.
Yup, Folsom Europe is the kind of event you return home from with the primary intention of making your friends insanely jealous. The gear. The camaraderie. The connections. The cock. I couldn’t resist booking a room for next year even before I left the city. The total immersive experience of Folsom Europe had me hooked!
