I can’t pretend to have journalistic objectivity on this subject. For the past two years, Wicked Grounds has been central to my social life in the city. When it opened, I wrote it up for CarnalNation, the website where I worked at the time, and when it looked like it would close, I participated in the fundraisers to keep it open. A lot of my writing has been done sitting at one of its tables while people openly practiced bondage knots a few feet away. My main response to its closing is a profound sense of grief and loss.
Those feelings are even more acute because the story of Wicked Grounds says so much about the state of San Francisco’s sexual subculture. Just getting the café’s doors open in 2009 was a community effort. Before the first coffee was poured, people volunteered their help to get the space into shape. Co-owner Ryan Galiotto (who was joined by his wife Rose White) acknowledges that they probably wouldn’t have been able to open without that assistance.
But as much as that says something about the fundamental decency of our local pervs, the closing of Wicked Grounds also shows a real problem: Kinksters are fighting tooth and nail to keep community spaces. It’s not just one coffeehouse. “Things have been really bad,” Galiotto says. “When we opened, we had Stormy Leather, A Taste of Leather, as well as Mister S and Leather Etc.”
The first two of those four retailers are gone.
” S.F. Loses a BDSM Community Hub with the Closing of Wicked Grounds Coffeehouse