You’ll be thrilled to know that despite economic uncertainty and panic over the failed bailout, San Francisco’s infamous Folsom Street Fair went off over the weekend without a hitch. Or rather, with plenty of hitches. And the whitewashers at the San Francisco Chronicle lapped it all up:

S.F. kinky naked romp a spanking success

They held the world’s biggest celebration of leather, bondage and sexual fetish in San Francisco on Sunday, and due to the event’s interactive nature, many people are now walking gingerly.

“Enough is enough,” said Lowell Clark, pulling up his blue jeans after emerging from one of dozens of spanking booths at the 25th Folsom Street Fair.

Clark, a 30-year-old San Francisco waiter, conceded he was a novice at the booths, where men and women in search of stimulation were struck with whips, paddles or bare hands. Clark was last spanked at the age of 6 at the hands of his mother in Oklahoma. A stolen pack of chewing gum was involved.

“I still don’t think I’ll steal anything,” Clark said. Still, he called the spanking a “stinging pleasure” that he would try “maybe once a year.”

It was just another scene from the city’s most unabashed bash – a public display of all things kinky that covered 13 blocks in the South of Market neighborhood and drew hundreds of thousands of people, many of them not wearing leather in key places.

There were naked people selling bondage gear and naked people seeking support for measures on the Nov. 4 ballot. There were naked people with cameras, taking pictures of other naked people.

One man wore only an 11-foot Burmese albino python, which curled around his waist. The arrangement seemed risky.

The fair is fun but also important, said Al Waddell, a 58-year-old entrepreneur from Oregon whose Paddle Daddy flogging implements were available in mahogany, hickory and walnut.

“It brings kink out of the closet,” he said as he tried to coax visitors a step further – onto his $645 leather sex sling, complete with metal frame and stirrups.