Mark I. Chester: slide show and gallery tour

[NSFW]: ALL links in this post are NOT safe for work.

I had the distinct privilege of spending my Wednesday evening with Kemi and Michelle at an invite-only exhibition of Mark Chester's fine art sexual photography. Mark treated us to a slideshow of his work, while narrating stories of the gay counterculture movement of the 1980s. He gave his first-hand account of the Folsom Street Fire of 1981 that left his half-burned bedroom open to the street and ransacked by police and firefighters. He talked of the friends and lovers he lost to the AIDS epidemic, showing pictures of many. Powerful stories.

All of his exhibited photographs were erotic, but the most striking of these combined eroticism with displays of intense human weakness and vulnerability. A man with AIDS, covered in lesions, a few months before his death. Another man whose right hand was necrotized from a blood clot. Both with hard dicks, smiling for the camera, intensely human. Powerful pictures.

I bought each of us a signed hardcover of his last book, Diary of a Thought Criminal.

While on Folsom Street, we stopped by Wicked Grounds, a newly-opened kinky coffee shop. I met the owners at a party several months ago, where they talked excited about their plans to open the store. I was thrilled to see that store is open, and business seems to be booming. Where else, but San Francisco?