Folsom Street East is the largest outdoor fetish/leather/kink festival on the East Coast, in America.

The sex-positive event forms part of Pride Month and celebrates a range of fetish and kink play including “puppy” playpens, whipping parlours, women in sundresses bound by ropes, and lots of paddling.

You know, the usual.

VICE spoke to photographer Matt Van Anderson, who has been documenting Folsom Street East and his changing relationship to kink, for the last three years.

As a gay man who was raised in a relatively sheltered household and moved to New York City 8 years ago, I’ve often struggled to find my identity in the LGBTQ+ world, particularly when it comes to my own sexual awakening. As such, my own relationship to this festival has evolved over the past several years. I initially felt lost, like a child who had lost his mother in a department store. (A very sex-positive department store.)

But over the last few years, I’ve found myself drawn to documenting the trust and vulnerability both essential to the kink/fetish communities and inherent to events like Folsom East. With my photos, I aim to showcase the tender underbelly of the community that lives and thrives underneath the latex and puppy masks.

Let’s get a look at some of the pics he snapped at this year’s event:

Happy Pride month, folks.

[source:vice]