Kink Factory San Francisco
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Kink Factory San Francisco
The secrets tucked away in the San Francisco Armory, as told by its former Kink-y tenants
May 28, 2021 Updated: July 26, 2021 1:58 p.m.
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The exterior of the Armory, with the kink flag flying.
The San Francisco Armory is a Rorschach test.
The castle, taking up more than 200,000 square feet and two city blocks of the Mission, is a beloved imposition in the city — a filigreed, menacing vestige of San Francisco’s many, many past lives.
For history and war buffs, there’s its stint as a National Guard base, right down to its pivotal role in the 1934 West Coast Longshoremen's Strike ; nerds of another persuasion will probably appreciate that George Lucas filmed a couple “Star Wars” scenes within the Moorish Revival-style premises; music buffs probably have stepped foot inside the Drill Court, a converted event venue within the castle, for a couple of shows.
But a large swath of people — including many folks who have never taken BART or the Bay Bridge into San Francisco — will probably tell you that the castle invokes furtive, often scorned desires reserved for secret dungeons and bedrooms.
For enthusiasts of kink and BDSM, an acronym for a whole range of sexual practices that include bondage, discipline, domination and submission, the building is hallowed territory — a photo of the Armory, with a BDSM flag proudly hoisted on top, featured prominently in videos created by Kink.com for their decade-long ownership of the castle.
In many ways, it’s since become an in-joke among kink enthusiasts and even casual porn watchers, with memes and TikToks dedicated to celebrating the “Kink Castle.”
Mike Stabile, a spokesman for Kink.com, says that the image of the Armory as this almost-secret code feels akin to the hanky code or another secret, sexual lingua franca.
“We recognize it because you've seen it online, you know, we've seen it on a tube site or we've seen it somewhere else. We live in a culture that really shames sexuality, adult sexuality. Porn consumption is something we’re embarrassed about as a culture … and so I think that, like, it serves as a wink and a nod to people who, you know, to be like, I know what that is, like, it's dirty.”
And its inclusion in videos was largely intentional, he said.
“I have to imagine that the decision to put the building on the intro of the videos was sort of a no-brainer,” he said. “You know, here was a building that symbolizes everything that we were. … The trope of a castle goes deep in BDSM culture, right, like you have, the power dynamics of like a king and his servants. There's always these BDSM, dom-sub elements to a castle.”
Before its kinky reputation, the San Francisco Armory was an arsenal for the National Guard when it was first built in 1912 — a replacement for the armory destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire. It was once deemed the “Madison Square Garden of the West” when it held boxing matches in the 1920s. But for years after the National Guard relocated in the '70s, it was largely abandoned, a dilapidated structure with loads of potential but a lack of investment to see anything through.
A boxing ring set up in the Armory's Drill Court.
Now, the Armory’s place in kink is just another quirky part of San Francisco’s lore: The Armory was bought in 2006 for just over $14 million by Kink.com proprietor Peter Acworth to be the company’s headquarters and shoot sites. The purchase was not announced for months as part of an NDA with the previous owner.
When the building once deemed to be “cursed forever” by this very publication would be revived, it seemed as if the aesthetic blight of the largely-abandoned Armory was replaced with moral panic over Kink’s tenancy.
City Planning Commission meetings filled up with detractors concerned about the building’s proximity to nearby schools and a women’s shelter owned by the nonprofit Las Casas de las Madres. (The shelter later relocated, citing the Armory’s new owners as the key reason.)
Others claimed that the Armory could have been used for affordable housing — a development that some critics said was likely untenable for the building.
Valerie Tulier, then a community activist with the Mission Armory Community Collective, told the Guardian at the time, "What's bothersome is the arrogance of being able to think you can plop down this kind of business amidst a poor community of color that has vulnerable families and people who are in recovery programs.”
Even then-Mayor Gavin Newsom issued a statement regarding the purchase. “While not wanting to be prudish,” he said, “the fact that kink.com will be located in the proximity to a number of schools gives us pause.”
Stabile told SFGATE that protests outside the building were persistent in the first few months of its ownership.
The reasons were myriad: The production of explicit pornography that was misunderstood to be violent and nonconsensual, the so-called desecration of this historic building, fears of the building contributing to further gentrification of the Mission and the concerns of what the sex filmed inside would bring to the community.
But Stabile said that the unspoken concern was really just that Kink.com — and by extension, kinky erotica — was taking up so much space in the heart of San Francisco.
“I think that a lot of what people were angry about was that it was such a physical manifestation of a taboo sexuality,” he told SFGATE. “It wasn't quiet. It wasn't secretive.”
It couldn’t just be tucked away into incognito tabs on internet browsers; its presence was large and felt.
Before they moved to the Armory, Stabile said, Kink.com occupied a building in SoMa that looked nondescript from the outside — but had an imposing Gothic interior for its offices and studios. There was little furor over their presence in the area.
There was also a lot of stigma and a lack of information about BDSM in San Francisco, he said, despite the city's relatively radical sexual politics. "Yes, we had Folsom, but it was really this sort of thing that that appeared and disappeared like, it shows up one day and then it sort of disappears again."
For Stabile, a veteran of San Francisco's gay porn industry before he joined the site, the scrutiny came at a time of multiple cultural anxieties. The LGBT community was in the midst of a yearslong fight over gay marriage and positioning queer and other marginalized sexual identities as respectable. Porn had just become widely available and distributed online, and niche kinks were finding new audiences, while concerns over violence in pornography reached another audience.
Even Stabile, who had worked at gay pornography sites before he joined Kink, had his concerns about the production of BDSM videos by sites like Kink.
“I had come from the gay side of the industry and had real suspect feelings about, you know, the straight side, and how they treated women,” he said. “I had my own stigma about kink and a lot of it was, in some ways, sexist looking back … about women's agency and women's sexuality.”
The idea that a deviant sexuality would exist in plain sight was anathema to the growing movement for queer respectability. (This debate has been revived in recent weeks, as conversations persist about the presence of kink in Pride events.)
“When [kink] proceeds gradually online, there's not a lot to rally around, but if somebody is taking over a building, and they're going to be stringing women and who knows what else in there and there are going to be whips and they're mysterious to us, that's something that you can really protest,” he said.
But the protests died down; the hand-wringing over its goings-on made way for curiosity.
Come 2008, the now-revived Armory hosted the Mission Bazaar “craft and performance expo” — the first of many decidedly family-friendly events that would occupy the space alongside its NSFW shoots.
“This was, you know, a community space and that, you know, no matter what was happening on the other side of the doors in terms of, you know, sex and porn … that was contained,” Stabile said.
More than “50 Shades,” which mainstreamed practices scorned by kink practitioners , Kink.com helped to introduce the idea that BDSM and kinky sex is valuable, even normal, to the mainstream.
And crucial to that was the Armory. Acworth, in 2007, told the New York Times that the legitimacy of the company — and the building, in some small way — was vital to showing people that BDSM was not so strange, “that there’s a big world of people that are into this stuff and that it can be done in a safe and respectful way.”
The tours held by Kink.com, Stabile told SFGATE, were vital to taking the heat off the site — the idea being that guests could be able to see behind the curtain, right down to the safety and ethical practices imposed, such as permitting performers to stop the shoot at any time and sending models home who were not fully aware of what they had signed up for.
“It was not perfect, you know, there were always things that could have been done better and, and things that Kink learned from,” he said, likely in reference to exposés of mistreatment against the company and the company's involvement with disgraced actor James Deen over its tenure in the Armory. “But it still is a standard-bearer in the industry.”
They fought a battle of respectability — and largely won.
“It was real people walking around shooting,” he said. “You didn't see, you know, people crying and scared. It is a normal place. It’s sometimes going to be a boring place depending on when the tour is happening, you're like, ‘Oh, there's the marketing department.’”
And for enthusiasts, said Dusty Wallace, “it was like the adult Disneyland, like fetish Disneyland.”
Wallace, better known as Dusty J, is a former camgirl in one of Kink’s subsidiary sites and now manager of community relations at Kink. The transition may be peculiar, but, for her, it was an easy shift. She recalled being asked to lead tours around the Armory because of her ability to keep her cam viewers entertained.
“It was something I thought that I would never do, but I did it, and I loved it, and I definitely love being the center of attention,” she said. “So I can admit to that.”
Wallace said that many of the guests on her tours would come to the Armory — and to San Francisco specifically — to get a glimpse inside, or attend a workshop or “ultimate surrender viewing,” a live recording of sex wrestling shows.
“People would make whole trips out of it.”
And even a good portion of those unfamiliar with the building’s erotic ownership were curious enough to continue the tour. (Some, of course, objected — probably expecting a family-friendly, Medieval Nights-type experience.)
Up until the Armory’s last Kink-led tours, the intention was to celebrate the building’s many, many lives and to demystify the practice of BDSM.
On very rare occasions, guests could walk into a shoot, consent from directors and actors permitting, and witness it for themselves.
“Oh my god, people loved it, like they loved being a part of the action, they loved being a part of the sexiness,” she said. “I mean, all of the senses were engaged — sight, smell. So it was always a really cool experience, and the sets were always super hot, like literally and with all the lighting and stuff.”
But it wasn’t just sex. Part of Acworth’s adoration of the building, he told the New York Times, was a reverence for its historical qualities. Tours would sometimes go through the basement of the Armory, which, prior to Kink’s renovation, was flooded with water from the creek that flowed underneath. (It is believed to be a part of Mission Creek, but that has been contested by some.)
The space was used as an old National Guard shooting range, and as Wallace tells it, “you could still see the little cutouts or cubbies whatever we would call it, where they would do their rifle practice shooting.” In fact, you could still see little bullets at the opposite end.
But Wallace’s favorite story to tell on tours is the tale of the old whisky bottle.
Essentially, the story goes that early in the building’s renovations, Acworth had planned to knock down some walls.
“They wanted to take down some of the walls on the upper floor to start designing it and making it that really beautiful, sort of Victorian-era, loungey, sexy vibe,” she said.
“And as they were knocking down some of the walls, I believe they found a bottle of Scotch whisky from the early 1900s, or whenever the Armory was being built or remodeled at that time.”
The bottle was even signed, too, by the builders — who listed the year the whisky was finished. Acworth still has the bottle.
But as the city, awash in tech and VC money, changed, so, too, did Kink.com. Once demonized as a symbol of a disreputable San Francisco, it had become a casualty of tech’s encroachment into the city’s culture of sexual progressivism and LGBT acceptance.
As San Francisco real estate prices ballooned, free porn began its domination and the porn industry in the city began dying down — Kink was, by that point, one of the last large adult filmmakers left, Stabile said — it made sense financially for Kink to give up its hallowed haunt and sell it. Shortly before Kink sold the building, the company stopped doing its tours, instead deferring to a separate third party to do largely historical tours.
The building was purchased in 2018 by a Nashville real estate firm for nearly quadruple the price Acworth bought it and repurposed for office space without any controversy. But by the time these new owners move out, Stabile suspects that the memory of Kink’s affiliation with the Armory will be lost.
Already, the Armory no longer figures into the company’s videos. Kink’s most famous piece of iconography has been replaced, as of its most recent clips.
But Stabile says that change is just part of existing in a city, even if the Armory will live on as the “Kink Castle” through memes and porn sites.
“Just because cities evolve or buildings evolve doesn't mean that it becomes something else entirely,” he said. “In some ways, you know, the Armory is as much a symbol of a certain time in San Francisco as it is a certain type of sexuality. … Before it was the Kink Castle, it was a military installation. It's almost like it carries all these things with it.”
Joshua Bote is an assistant news editor for SFGATE. He grew up in the Los Angeles area, went to UC Berkeley and has previously worked as a reporter at USA Today and a music writer at NPR. Email: joshua.bote@sfgate.com
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article's lead section may be too short to adequately summarize the key points . Please consider expanding the lead to provide an accessible overview of all important aspects of the article. ( August 2019 )
The San Francisco Armory at the corner of Mission and 14th Streets
^ "SF Armory Window Restoration Project In Full Swing" , BehindKink (website), November 16, 2007. Archived May 5, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
^ "As of Monday, Kink Can Officially Call its Castle 'Home'" , BehindKink (website), December 18, 2007. Archived April 18, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
^ "National Register Information System" . National Register of Historic Places . National Park Service . July 9, 2010.
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