The Exotic Erotic Ball, often just The Ball, or Perry Mann’s Exotic Erotic Ball, was a public adult-themed event held once a year in the San Francisco Bay Area for more than thirty years. From 1979 to 2009 it ran on a weekend, usually before Halloween, and nearly half a million adults came through. Attendance climbed year after year until 2010, when weak ticket sales and cost overruns killed it. No 2011 ball was planned. The City of San Francisco issued three proclamations for “Exotic Erotic Ball Day,” twice under Mayor Willie Brown (1999 and 2001) and once under Mayor Gavin Newsom (2004), a civic acknowledgment of how large the party had become.
From a Tenderloin apartment to a presidential slogan
The precursor was 1978’s The Nudist Ball, a few hundred people packed into Perry Mann’s apartment in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. In 1979 Mann held the first formal Exotic Erotic Ball at California Hall, about 800 to 900 people at $10 a head. The point was a fundraiser for his business partner and close friend Louis Abolafia. Abolafia ran for President of the United States under the Nudist Party with the slogan “I have nothing to hide.” He was known for pushing “Make love, not war!” New York papers once called him “The Love King” for gatherings in Greenwich Village. He had already run in 1968 under the Cosmic Love Party, with a line close to “What have I got to hide?”
What one ticket actually bought
The Ball was not one kind of night. Guests arrived in elaborate Halloween costumes and competed for Best Costume. In later years the prize was money and merchandise in the roughly $10,000 range. Organizers, the press, and regulars rarely forced it into a single category. Several stages ran conventional entertainment next to fringe acts: an adult Halloween festival, a music festival, burlesque, a lingerie party, a masquerade, fetish-club atmosphere, a swingers party, and an adult-industry trade show. For the adults who bought a ticket, it was one weekend.
Cow Palace, the book, and the expo
For a long stretch the home was the Concourse Exhibition Center at 635 8th Street, San Francisco. Around 1999 it moved to the Cow Palace in Daly City. In 2001 Mann published The Exotic Erotic Ball: Twenty Years of the World’s Sexiest Party (ISBN 156171917X). From 2004 through 2009 the weekend grew into the Exotic Erotic Expo, a two-day adult expo that took in the day before the ball. Programming included First Amendment panels, wine tastings with porn stars, a “spiritual oasis” of psychic readings and massage, body painting, classic adult films, and a human petting zoo. The commercial floor sold exotic fashion, erotic art, toys, games, websites, and novelties. In 2008 Snoop Dogg headlined a Friday-night concert at that year’s combined event on Treasure Island, which drew 26,341 people. In 2009 Art Mann Presents covered the 30th-anniversary ball, with Mistress Harley on site.
Richmond, then the fill-in parties
In 2010 the expo and the ball left the Cow Palace for Craneway Pavilion in Richmond, California, an industrial city about 25 miles northeast of San Francisco with a reputation for high violent crime. Capacity shrank from about 20,000 toward 14,000 across two days. Organizers hoped for about 7,500. They canceled the day before, citing weak sales and cost overruns. Many longtime fans refused the trip to Richmond. In 2011 and 2012, similar but separate events, Masquerotica and the XO Ball & Expo, filled some of the gap. In 2011 Howard Mark Mauskopf, 53, owner of Perry Mann Productions in Beverly Hills — the company that had produced the 2009 Cow Palace ball — faced felony charges over at least $10,000 in bad checks and a fraudulent credit card used for event expenses. That September Mann said the team was chasing an international opportunity and cutting a 30-year documentary, not producing a ball, and he pointed people to Masquerotica (October 22, 2011, at The Concourse) with no formal affiliation. In September 2012 the XO Ball and Expo returned to the Cow Palace.
New Year’s, blood drives, and the money that left the room
The Ball also moved real money into the city around it. Over the years it sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to causes including disaster relief, AIDS, homelessness, domestic violence, and child abuse, and it treated free speech and First Amendment rights as part of the job. Each year it ran a blood drive with Blood Centers of the Pacific and gave donors free tickets. For several years Mann also held an Exotic Erotic New Year’s Eve Ball, stopped in 1995. The same history sits next to San Francisco fetish culture, adult expos, and the Bay Area events that tried to take The Ball’s place after 2010.
