Violence at Pink Saturday in the Castro

Police Called in as Kink.com Protests Outside Armory Grow Violent

Kink.com’s headquarters in the Armory Building at 14th and
       Mission streets routinely flies the LGBT rainbow flag from its roof.
     The adult entertainment company is well-known in the areas    
bondage and dungeon porn.

By Ted Andersen

On the 45th anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York, a number of local protestors found themselves at the painful end of police batons after demonstrating against a high-profile prison-themed party near the Castro.

The incident happened the Saturday night of Pride weekend when fetish porn purveyor Kink.com hosted a “Prison of Love” party at its headquarters in the historic Armory building on 14th and Mission streets. In response, two direct action groups, LAGAI-Queer Insurrection and Gay Shame San Francisco, organized a march of close to 100 people to crash the party, from the outside.

The demonstration, which did not have official City permits, began as a vocal march that culminated in speeches and the projection of digital images spliced with criminal justice facts on the brick walls of the Armory Building to protest the party’s “fetishizing of the prison-industrial complex.” But then the crowd swelled, traffic was stopped and the police responded to a call to the scene, according to SFPD’s Public Information Officer Albie Esparza.

“Two of the security guards were struck by two demonstrators. One demonstrator threw a metal object that struck a security guard. Another one threw an egg and spit on a security guard. And that group left for the 16th Street BART plaza. Police were called,” he said.

Esparza said that when the police arrived at the 16th Street BART plaza, the victim security guard approached them and identified the demonstrators who had perpetrated the assault. “When we have a crime occurring, we are going to go where the suspects are,” he said.

“When you have demonstrators charging the police attempting to take back prisoners, you’re going to be guaranteed that we are going to respond with additional resources,” Esparza said. “We are San Francisco Police and we have dealt with many protests over the years. But when people become violent, that’s unacceptable, and we’re going to deal with that appropriately.”

But not all feel the police action was so appropriate. Gay Shame member Lacey Johnson, who witnessed the arrests but was not detained herself, gave a quite different account. She said that dozens of police descended on protestors and began using force immediately.

“They didn’t speak to us. Everyone was confused. All of a sudden I heard screaming and looked around and saw a group of police throwing somebody on the ground,” she said.

In all, three people were arrested and held on charges ranging from lynching a prisoner (attempting to pull a detained suspect away from police custody) to assault with a deadly weapon, while three others were cited, according to Esparza. While some misdemeanor charges still loom, all felony counts have been dismissed by the District Attorney George Gascon’s office pending an investigation.

In response to the incident, approximately 50 people gathered for a rally at the 16th Street BART station on July 2 urging the SF District Attorney’s Office to drop all charges against the three protestors who had been released earlier that day.

Rebecca Ruiz-Lichter, a 32-year-old Oakland resident who was one of the three released from SF County Jail that day, spoke at the rally.

“Kink is a huge capitalist organization that’s basically exploiting the criminalization of people of color to make even more money,” she said. “I think it’s very telling that people can pay hundreds of dollars to go to this party where they are fictitiously arrested for playful fun while the trans-Latinas who are literally around the two block radius of Kink.com are constantly criminalized.”

Kink.com had sold approximately 3,000 tickets for the event before receiving an open letter from the activist groups threatening of the protest. Kink.com Founder and CEO Peter Acworth responded on Youtube by releasing a video characterizing the party as a celebration but attesting that he sympathized with the protestors’ message. However, Acworth, who was himself arrested for possession of cocaine last year, goes on in the video to defend his decision not to call it off because too many tickets had already been sold.

Gay Shame’s Johnson doesn’t buy it.

“There was an open letter going around. He had time to respond. He had time to call off the party. He chose to do neither of these things,” she said. “So he’s avoiding responsibility for the issue.”

Article from Castro Courier, July 2014
http://www.castrocourier.com/kink.html