As space becomes scarcer and pricier, she said, artists are “thinking of places to site works outside the boundaries of the city, and looking at community and local history” to inspire experimentation. “We thought it was an important time and an important way to talk about the shifts that are going on in San Francisco in this really celebratory, poetic way,” said Valerie Imus, its exhibitions director. The show was sponsored by Southern Exposure, a nonprofit known for supporting alternative art. “There’s no space for us on land? O.K., fine, we’re going to go play on the water.” “There is this culture of sex in San Francisco that’s still very unique,” even as its denizens are being pushed out, she said. Hockaday, 32, decided to highlight the outré scene that remained, taking it to the water, where fewer rules apply. Coupled with a recent ban on public nudity, the closings have left some residents worrying that San Francisco is losing the anything-goes vibe that made the city a boho mecca. The show was conceived by the artist Constance Hockaday as a commentary on the forces of technification and gentrification roiling this city and, especially, as a response to the demise of two beloved sex clubs: the Lusty Lady, a worker-owned and unionized strip club, which closed last year, and Esta Noche (translation: Tonight), an infamous Latino gay bar and performance space, which had its final show in March. “Thank you, stripper boats!” one visitor called, grinning and waving into the night as he was motored back to land.
T-shirt, with a backpack full of sex toys men in wigs and feathers and one woman inflating, and then raunchily deflating, balloons. Behind doors with peepholes, they watched a mermaid playing the ukulele, netting covering her breasts a stripper in a schoolgirl skirt and A.F.L.-C.I.O. On Sunday night, more than 100 visitors were transported from the shore to a nautical - and somewhat naughty - version of a red-light district created onboard gently bobbing boats. Or, as its organizers preferred to call it, a floating peep show. It was the opening of “All These Darlings and Now Us,” a waterborne installation combining performance art, urban resistance and a sex-positive philosophy. At sunset, Persia came up on deck and straddled a boom, wriggling in her nautical boy shorts as onlookers waved dollar bills.
Climbing aboard, she found a cabin where her breath steamed up a porthole as she danced, topless save for the rhinestones twinkling across her chest.
She was motoring out to four sailboats anchored together within sight of the Bay Bridge here. SAN FRANCISCO - The drag queen Persia, in full bejeweled regalia, went out on one of the first rafts, sloping down the launch ramp in thigh-high red stiletto boots.