How Weird Street Faire brings leather, fur and bass to SF streets

It’s 5 p.m. on a Saturday and there are no cars on 2nd Street in San Francisco. But the road isn’t exactly empty, either. 

A stage is planted squarely over the street’s double yellow lines, framed by stacks of speakers and subwoofers. The surrounding crowd is peppered with colored wigs, bug-eyed glasses, roller blades and cat ears. The DJ transitions from a hard techno track to a harder one, locking in on the four-on-the-floor beat. Two people wearing TVs on their heads dance in the bike lane. 

Off to the side, a naked man wearing Crocs leans against a store’s concrete facade, his body half-shaded by the surrounding buildings. If you look up, you can see the Salesforce Tower hanging over the scene. 

At the back of the crowd of dancers, someone holds up a picket sign: “What do we want? Time travel. When do we want it? It’s irrelevant!”

How Weird Street Faire, which bills itself as “the longest-running dance festival on the West Coast,” is an annual event in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood. On the day of the event, organizers shut down the blocks surrounding 2nd and Howard streets, and from noon to after sunset more than half a dozen stages play techno, house and drum ‘n’ bass on streets. DJs tower over crowds in Burning Man-style art cars. In between the stages artists and vendors set up tents, where they sell prints, food, gifts and festival wear.

How Weird is like a cross between Folsom Street Fair and Burning Man. The event draws fur suits, leather daddy caps, animal print fuzzy coats and bucket hats. This year’s How Weird was 1990s-themed, although festival goers interpreted the theme loosely with their costumes, if at all. (To be fair, it’s hard to distinguish ‘90s-themed costumes from standard ravewear, since the dominant rave style is steeped in ‘90s and early 2000s nostalgia: baggy jeans, chunky sneakers, sport sunglasses and so on). 

Even if the event’s outfits don’t belong to the ‘90s, its undercurrent of optimism does. How Weird emerged at the turn of the millennium, at a time when techno-optimists were reviving ‘60s ideas of transformations in consciousness and applying them to new technologies and the rave movement. The event is organized by a group called the World Peace Through Technology Organization, whose stated mission is to “inspire peace through the benevolent uses of technology, and to raise human consciousness to the level of peace and understanding.”

Being weird isn’t just meant to be fun. It’s also meant to be transformative.

I asked six or seven people what How Weird was all about, and they all said variations of the same thing: How Weird is an event where you can be your true self. 

Cat Baxter, 32, has been going to the street fair since she was 7 years old. She told SFGATE that How Weird is about “letting your freak flag fly.” 

“Come be yourself, come be who you want to be,” she said. “That’s what How Weird is.”