The competition was stiff — very stiff.
A couple hundred people gathered at the Eagle Tavern on Saturday afternoon for the annual Golden Dildeaux awards, a ceremony acknowledging the city’s kinkiest kinksters hosted by San Francisco’s Leather and LGBTQ+ Cultural District. Essentially the Oscars for the raunchier elements of local queer community, the Golden Dildeauxs — or Woodies, as it were — are both a fundraiser for the district and an excuse for leatherfolk, rubber fetishists, and a smattering of drag performers to get geared (or dolled) up.
The cigar smoke was thick on the patio of the Eagle Tavern as emcees Dolan Wolf and Matthew Beld bestowed awards to winners in 24 categories like Best Bootblack, Fiercest Femme, Golden Shower Lover, and Queerest of the Queer. One notable nominee was Supervisor Matt Dorsey, who is gay and represents District 6 — which includes SoMa, historically the home of the city’s leather and BDSM community.
Dorsey was nominated for “Best Impact Player – Bottom.” Impact play is a broad category, covering spanking, flogging, paddling — and, well, basically anything that hurts. By his own admission, the supervisor waged a “Timothée Chalamet-caliber campaign” to win, but it was a feverishly contested award, with seven other contenders (no other category could boast as many aspirants).
“After years of my work in this category going unnoticed and unheralded, it was an honor just to be nominated,” Dorsey said. “Did I win? No. Am I bitter? A little.” As the winner, one Julian Castillo, was announced, the supervisor vowed to work as hard as necessary to emerge victorious next year — even though, by his own admission, he’s pretty vanilla and only learned about his nomination from one of his legislative aides.
Dating to 1974, the Golden Dildeaux Awards are both a campy exercise and a major event for a community that has grappled with displacement since the 1980s, when dozens of leather bars dotted Western SoMa. The voting process is decidedly peculiar. Nominations are free and may be undertaken to support one’s friends or razz one’s frenemies, but once the nominees are announced, votes are $1 each. Consequently, ballot-stuffing is openly encouraged.
Leather & LGBTQ+ Cultural District executive director Bob Goldfarb said this year’s fundraising haul set a record: $17,800. That figure, of course, means he had to oversee the counting of 17,800 ballots. He attributed this burst of enthusiasm to a strong social media campaign, but also to the flurry of anti-LGBTQ+ executive orders and other grim news out of Washington, D.C.
“A lot of people in the current environment feel the need to support the Leather District,” Goldfarb said, adding that the funds will go to the eventual purchase of a community center. And while he had a strong personal interest in the Best Power-Fisting Bottom category, he’s the only person ineligible to shove fistfuls of cash into a ballot box. “We have to have free, safe, and fair elections,” he said.
While categories and nominees may change from year to year, the Golden Dildeaux awards are about recognizing local folk heroes. Calder Storm, a trans man and activist who was instrumental in pushing back against two local spas for their retrograde gender policies, was another Impact Bottom nominee. He was up for Best Novice, too. “It’s my first rodeo,” he said.
But of course, it’s fun to win. Dandy Buckley, a butch lesbian who The Standard profiled in 2024 as part of a look into daddy culture in San Francisco, was last year’s Favorite Silver Fox winner. This year, Buckley brought a prop, an enormous, blue-and-purple sex toy with a horsehead tip. (It matched this reporter’s nails exactly.)
“I was nominated for Horse Hung Stud, and I brought one with me,” Buckley said. She won.
