The Exotic Erotic Ball—often just The Ball, or Perry Mann’s Exotic Erotic Ball—was an annual public, adult-themed event held on a weekend, usually before Halloween, in the San Francisco Bay Area from 1979 to 2009. Over three decades nearly half a million people attended the indoor spectacle. Attendance grew almost every year until 2010, when organizers canceled over poor ticket sales and cost overruns; no 2011 ball was planned. The City of San Francisco issued three proclamations for “Exotic Erotic Ball Day”—twice under Mayor Willie Brown (1999, 2001) and once under Mayor Gavin Newsom (2004)—a civic wink at how large the party had become.
What the Night Actually Was
Many guests arrived in elaborate Halloween costumes to compete for “Best Costume,” which in later years paid prize money and merchandise in the roughly US$10,000 range. Organizers, media, and regulars rarely forced the Ball into a single genre box. With multiple stages and a mix of conventional and fringe entertainment, it functioned as a hybrid: adult Halloween festival, music festival, burlesque show, lingerie party, masquerade ball, fetish club energy, swingers party, and adult-industry trade show stacked into one ticketed weekend.
Origins: From Nudist Apartment to California Hall
In 1978, a precursor called The Nudist Ball packed a few hundred people into Perry Mann’s Tenderloin apartment in San Francisco. In 1979, Mann organized the first Exotic Erotic Ball at California Hall, drawing about 800–900 people at $10 a head. The fundraiser backed his business partner and best friend Louis Abolafia, who ran for President of the United States under the Nudist Party with the slogan “I have nothing to hide.” Abolafia is also credited with popularizing “Make love, not war!”; New York press once crowned him “The Love King” for legendary Greenwich Village love-ins. He had already run in 1968 under the Cosmic Love Party with a similar “What have I got to hide?” line.
Venues, Book, and the Expo Era
The Concourse Exhibition Center at 635 8th Street, San Francisco, was a long-time home. Around 1999 the event 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, organizers expanded the weekend into the Exotic Erotic Expo: a two-day adult expo held the day before and the day of the Ball. Programming mixed First Amendment panels with adult performers and media, wine tastings with porn stars, a “spiritual oasis” of psychic readings and massage, body painting, classic adult cinema, and a human petting zoo—plus a commercial floor of exotic fashion, erotic art, toys, games, sites, and novelties. In 2008, Snoop Dogg headlined a first-ever Friday night concert attached to Ball and Expo. That year’s Treasure Island combined event drew 26,341 people. In 2009, Art Mann Presents covered the 30th-anniversary Ball with Mistress Harley.
Collapse in Richmond and Aftermath
In 2010, expo and ball left the Cow Palace for Craneway Pavilion in Richmond, California. Capacity shrank from roughly 20,000 toward 14,000 over two days; organizers hoped for about 7,500. They canceled the day before, citing weak ticket sales and cost overruns. Many longtime fans refused the trip to Richmond—about 25 miles northeast of San Francisco—an industrial city then widely associated with violent crime (its own police had described a multi-decade problem; in 2010 it ranked among the most dangerous U.S. cities). In 2011, Howard Mark Mauskopf, 53, owner of Perry Mann Productions (Beverly Hills), which had produced the 2009 Cow Palace Ball, faced felony charges alleging at least $10,000 in bad checks and a fraudulent credit card used for event expenses.
In 2011–2012, similar but unrelated events—Masquerotica and the XO Ball & Expo—filled some of the vacuum. In September 2011 Mann said the team was pursuing an international opportunity and editing a 30-year documentary, not producing a Ball; they recommended Masquerotica (22 October 2011 at The Concourse) with no formal affiliation. September 2012 brought the XO Ball and Expo back at Cow Palace.
New Year’s Ball and Charity
For several years Mann also ran an Exotic Erotic New Year’s Eve Ball, discontinued in 1995. Community ties were real money, not only branding: over the years the Ball routed hundreds of thousands of dollars to causes including disaster relief, AIDS, homelessness, domestic violence, and child abuse, while framing free speech and First Amendment rights as part of the mission. An annual blood drive with Blood Centers of the Pacific offered free tickets to donors.
Related topics: San Francisco fetish and adult events, Halloween kink culture, Perry Mann / Louis Abolafia nudist politics, adult expos, and the post-2010 Bay Area successors that tried to replace The Ball.
