The Nonstop Gay Sex Party on the Mexico City Subway
December 03, 2024 at 06:54PMI’ve visited Mexico City once and took the subway everywhere, always riding in the first two cars, which are women-and-children only, and with no idea that the last car was a hub for queer life in the DF—a safe(ish) space for sex, meeting people, or just being unapologetically queer. A.W. Strouse spent time riding in the último vagón, the last car, talking to the men who seek refuge underground, and learning the ins and outs of finding release on the rails.
Each line, Elias told me, has its own personality. “On the line that goes to Metro University,” he said, “the last car has more college students.” Other lines suit other tastes: “The coffee-colored line passes through the sports center, so the last car on that line has more jocks.” According to a recent study by the sociologist Andrés Alvarez Elizalde, the sexual activity is especially common during peak hours (when the last car is extremely crowded) and late at night (when the last car is almost empty).
When I asked Elias about the curious scene I had witnessed—the worker anally fingering a student, in full view of people who pretended not to notice—he told me to read the Nobel laureate Octavio Paz. “The last car,” Elias said, “is like what Paz called the Mexican ‘labyrinth of solitude.’” Paz claimed that Mexican national culture is characterized by hypocrisy and loneliness, as people hide their true selves while joining together in public rituals and celebrations. Like many other guys I would meet, Elias said the last car emerged out of what he called the doble moralidad, or “double standards,” of Mexican culture. The last car provides gay men like him with a space of freedom. Elias explained that he had very little money and no privacy at home and that the last car provided a refuge from his judgmental parents.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/12/03/the-nonstop-gay-sex-party-on-the-mexico-city-subway/
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