The curators of the Cruising Pavilion included the full sweep of cruising’s past, comparing the exhibition’s recent works to historical instances of cruising. It departs from the Biennale’s mainstream in both subject and format; critics have said as much, describing it as a world apart from presentations in the Giardini and a provocative — but not frivolous — take on a once-taboo topic.

As it happens, the pavilion’s exhibition space is not far from one of Venice’s most notorious historical hookup spots: a 19th-century garden on the east side of Giudecca.

“It’s literally the Garden of Eden,” Mr. Teyssou said, referring to the garden’s onetime owner, the English aristocrat Frederic Eden. In its heyday, the spot was visited by the likes of Rainer Maria Rilke, Henry James, Marcel Proust and a young Jean Cocteau, whose recollections of the garden are captured in a 1909 poem dedicated to his lover Langhorn Whistler, the nephew of Oscar Wilde.

The curators were able to briefly reopen the garden, which has been shuttered for decades, on the first day of the exhibition.

“This,” Mr. Perrault said of the garden, “is where these gay heroes were going.”