-
For the Love of Kink
- Dissent
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Volume 61, Number 2, Spring 2014
- pp. 51-55
- 10.1353/dss.2014.0028
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
When the old San Francisco Armory was sold to the Internet porn production company Kink.com in 2006, they paid $14.5 million. The long-abandoned property, which is said to resemble a “Moorish castle,” once housed the National Guard, stationed there to quash the city’s 1934 general strike. The armory stands at the corner of Mission and 14th Street, a few blocks from the lone fire hydrant that saved the neighborhood from the flames of the 1906 quake just six years before the armory was built, and also a few blocks from the salvaged-wood cafes and velvet-roped dive bars that herald, for many, a new form of siege. It’s Kink’s flags that fly now from the top of one of the armory’s brick turrets, with the company’s URL visible even on Google Street View.