For generations, San Francisco has been home to the rest of the country’s misfits, whether free-loving hippies or leather-daddy gay men. San Francisco could be counted on to welcome the "freaks," the sexual deviants. The city told them, “Don’t pay attention to what the rest of them say. Here is where you belong.”

But almost half a decade into the tech boom, San Francisco is wearing a different outfit. She has long since shed her hippie garb and her leather fetish wear; even her custom corset is starting to look a little ragged around the edges.

The question the weirdos are asking: Is San Francisco still our home? Is there room for all of us, or is it time to move on to stranger pastures?

See also: 8 ways you never knew you could masturbate

No one is struggling harder with those questions than the misplaced dolls, dandies and deviants of Mission Control. The long-running nonprofit community is famous for its artsy sex parties but mostly for creating a non-judgmental space for people to safely experiment with pleasure, a core tenet of a sex positivity movement that's gaining steam.

For 10 years, 2519 Mission Street belonged to this very San Franciscan tribe. Behind an unassuming gated metal door and up an equally nondescript staircase was an art palace for weirdos, each room crammed with art, oddities and plenty of space for people to get intimate.

Image: Mission Control

The club’s queen was Polly Whittaker — also known as Polly Pandemonium or, later, Polly Superstar — a latex fashion designer from London who transformed the former office space into a fantasyland for her friends to play in. Mission Control was ground zero for a certain kind of sex-positive sex party that Polly has deemed “100% San Fransexual,” by which she means all genders and sexualities are welcome.

One "sexual liberation" party in particular, Kinky Salon, is known for its “come as you are, as long as you’re in costume” mindset.

Zev Hoffman, Mission Control member Image: Mission Control

For long-time member Zev Hoffman, a typical Kinky Salon night at 2519 Mission Street started as early as mid-afternoon. On the day of the Intergalactic Disco party, Zev pulled skintight black and white striped pants over his thighs, checked the fit in his full-length mirror and blew himself a kiss over his shoulder.

Satisfied, he topped it with a flared, tight-waisted blazer with an exaggerated peplum that softened his masculine figure. The lace on his shoulders stood up around his face to create a uniform fit for Ziggy Stardust. He topped it with military accessories: a 1940s bomber-style hat and goggles. Over everything, he strapped a leather harness and giant, jeweled Star of David. A hair stylist and fetish wear designer who is no stranger to exaggerated makeup, Zev took his time layering on the white pancake base, creating a Kabuki mask to paint over. He highlighted his cheeks and eyes with bright blue, drew in dark purple lips and deep eyeshadow up to the brow.

The party started around 10 p.m., when members lined up outside with buddies, which Kinky Salon dubs "pervy activity liaisons." Everyone waited their turn to hear the Kinky Salon rules before entering Mission Control: no photographs, no cellphones, no getting wasted, no sexual aggressiveness, no lingering in play spaces without a partner and “never stick your finger up someone’s butt without asking first.”

Basically: Be polite, ask first and don’t be a creep.

Mission Control lobby Image: Mission Control

Mission Control disco room Image: Mission Control

Then, members made their way to the bar to catch up with friends underneath Tibetan prayer flags, Mexican painted skulls and vintage pinups. They danced the night away in the Mission Control ballroom under a fabric-draped ceiling, sparkly stage curtain, and disco ball reflecting pink light onto a chair shaped like a giant stiletto.

While some nights conclude with nothing more than a quick makeout session or two, on nights that Zev ran into someone compelling enough, he retired to one of the back rooms. He might find himself with a girl in a lavender wig (and not much else) on one of a row of beds in the Bordello, or taking part in a public whipping over the red velvet couch in the Dungeon.

Each room had a theme and by the end of every party, they’d all seen some action.

But the pink lights dimmed for a final time on 2519 Mission Street in October 2013. Mission Control was evicted.

Today, the space is a startup office. The realtor's listing reads like a perky brochure: “A kitchen provides an ideal break area for tenants and employees, as well as a great spot for that midday pick-me-up or morning coffee. The hallway is decked in a black-and-white checkerboard tile.”

That tile is the only thing that remains from Mission Control days. That hallway is where partygoers would rub up against each other between rooms. Now there isn’t a spot of lavender or a tiki head to be seen. Everything has been packed into trucks and temporary storage.

Zev was speechless when he saw the realtor listing.

“That hallway was bright pink. We used to call it ‘the alien cervix,'" he groaned with longing. We just put so much work into that. We got the entire community together and invested a crapload of our savings into making this look wonderful — and then we got evicted.”

More than a year and a half since they were kicked out, Mission Control is still searching for a permanent home amidst spiking rents that only continue to rise (San Francisco's median rent was reported in June to be $4,225 per month) — and their prospects are starting to look dire. These children of weird San Francisco want nothing more than a place to permanently recreate their playgrounds.

Meanwhile, the bigger tech companies and their employees are moving in not only to the space that Mission Control vacated but, it seems, the whole city.

In 2011, Facebook moved its Palo Alto offices to its current “tech campus” in Menlo Park, completing its transformation from little startup social network to serious corporation. As the company grew, it attracted more ambitious, tech-savvy college grads who preferred urban living over suburban homes where many were raised. Young, hip and with plenty of disposable income, they turned to that freaky oasis up north: San Francisco. Facebook, Google and others even provided the now infamous buses that shuttle workers from the city to such suburban campuses, making the decision to live far from work that much easier.

In 2012, Twitter moved into its massive building on Market Street, taking advantage of the tax breaks the city began offering for companies willing to move into the undesirable neighborhood. Smaller successful tech companies like Yelp and Square followed, until the SOMA neighborhood had transformed from empty warehouses and leather bars into the tech startup capital of the world.

Bordered on three sides by water and measuring only seven by seven miles, the city has struggled to absorb this new population. Census data shows the population rose by 32,000 since the start of the tech boom in 2010, until May 2014. However, only 4,200 new housing units were added during that time period. SF Curbed estimates that with an average household size of 2.3, at this time last year, there were 22,000 new people in San Francisco who didn’t have new housing to match.

Image: Mission Control

The irony is Mission Control has always welcomed people who work in tech, and continues to do so. Board member Mark*, who has himself worked in tech for over 20 years, says the people who frequent his parties come from all walks of life.

“The Mission Control community is just as diverse as the Bay Area community itself,” Mark said. “At my parties we have bankers, bartenders, bike activists, camgirls, wedding photographers, hairstylists, Apple Watch designers, construction tradespeople of all genders, doctors and nurses, and people who like to dress up as doctors and nurses.”

Polly believes tech's love for disruption and trying new things means San Francisco’s newest tech workers fit right into her community — and that their survival in the city depends on it. “What tech does for business, we’re doing with morality. We’re taking the old ways and challenging them and turning them on their heads.”

In her ideal future San Francisco, the weirdos and techies play on the same playground, symbiotically helping each other grow and supporting each other’s endeavors to create a San Francisco that continues to welcome iconoclasts of all kinds.

An example of that kind of collaboration can be seen in KōTango, a social network for polyamorous people that Polly helped found with Bay Area programmer Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Ryan, Ph.D., an author of human sexuality book Sex at Dawn. KōTango's focus is to help poly people connect with each other digitally, just like Polly did physically at 2519 Mission Street.

Image: Mission Control

But while some see an ideological fit, others in the sex-positive community aren't so optimistic.

Carol Queen runs the Center for Sex and Culture one block from the Twitter building. The center’s mission is to promote sex positivity both through classes and extensive sex-focused archives.

She thinks the newest tech workers are a different breed from any she’s seen before. When people new to the neighborhood or from new businesses inquire about the center, Queen sees skepticism in their reactions. It's a conservatism she feels is conspicuously absent in older, more established tech workers.

Previous people came to San Francisco for "the cultural difference from much of the rest of the country," she says. "It’s not totally clear to me that that’s front and center in the newcomers' minds.”

“San Francisco just seems less weird,” sighs Bay Area native and Mission Control member Jane.* “You used to see freaky fucks of all kinds, and I feel like I’m just not seeing that as much. It saddens me — I feel like the freak flag is flying at half mast."

Like many Mission Control members, Jane and Zev are now in Oakland, unable to afford apartments in San Francisco’s current rental market.

But Polly isn’t convinced the East Bay is the right alternative for their community.

“The sexual revolution is not in Oakland,” Polly says time and time again. “Oakland is lovely and there’s a lot of cool stuff going on in Oakland — but the sexual revolution belongs in San Francisco.”

She has a point: San Francisco has traditionally been a very untraditional city when it comes to sex. While the 1967 Summer of Love is undoubtedly the city’s most famous sexual revolution, San Francisco has been busting old-fashioned ideas since she was born.

During the Gold Rush of the 1850s, when women were few and far between in a brand new city chock-full of randy miners, high end French courtesans influenced the city's fashion; some of those same sex workers even loaned their names to streets downtown. The city was the first to effectively legalize pornography when it made explicit depictions of penetration legal in 1969, and the ‘70s and ‘80s saw an influx of men into what would become the gay mecca of the world.

More recent years have seen the opening (and closing, in 2013) of the country’s only dancer-owned co-op strip club, The Lusty Lady.

Mission Control voodoo lounge Image: Mission Control

Mission Control harem lounge Image: Mission Control

The city is a beacon for people who have been persecuted in other parts of the country for generations. It’s a city where costumes are not only welcome but expected; you might see a man wearing a sparkly sequined cock sock, shoes, a hat and nothing else on your way to work. It's a city where people introduce themselves as “pansexual,” along with their polyamorous triad that includes three different genders. No one will bat an eye.

Polly worries that Oakland’s political environment makes it less welcoming to radical “sex culture revolutionaries” than San Francisco, which up until recently had Steven Lee — the owner of the infamous gay bar Trocadero Transfer — as entertainment commissioner. While Oakland has been a major player in other revolutions (the Civil Rights movement chief among them), welcoming sexual difference has never been what the city was known for.

Polly’s stubborn determination to stay in the city and welcome this latest round of tech workers means Mission Control is still searching for a San Francisco home. They’re well past her self-imposed one-year deadline.

Image: Mission Control

As lead after lead falls through, rents continue to rise and commercial vacancies are at an all time low, Mission Control is considering teaming up with other sex-positive groups in order to afford a larger space to house them all. Like so many others in San Francisco right now, they need roommates. In the meantime, they’ve found a temporary place to store furniture and host their parties: a communal work/living artist space in SOMA.

That workspace (which has chosen to stay anonymous regarding their involvement with Mission Control), is also facing eviction later this year.

The city has set up the Nonprofit Displacement Mitigation fund to help provide some cushion for displaced organizations. The government knows its tourist dollars rely on a certain image, which includes art and pageantry and, yes, sex radicals.

Mission Control has not received this city support.

Many are starting to accept the idea that the sexual revolution may, in fact, be in Oakland — whether it's in their control or not.

“Certainly quite a large part of our community lives in East Bay now,” Mark explains. “For me it’s more about finding a good physical space than where that space is located.”

As long as their new space is conducive to the interactions that make Mission Control special. He misses the long, checked hallway and small rooms of 2519 Mission Street that helped shaped what the Mission Control community is today. For him, that’s the important part, not whether or not they stay within the seven by seven miles of the city limits.

Everyone acknowledges the mythos of San Francisco, that attraction for people who are different from the rest. It’s that feeling of belonging that called to Zev when he was a 14-year-old femme boy in New Mexico; the draw that pulled Polly across an entire ocean and continent to a city where she could strut her latex costumes in the street. It’s a reputation that has taken years to build, but the simple reality is San Francisco just might not be big enough to fit everyone who loves her.

*Names have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.