XXX Glory Holes on Ejercito Central - Benefits of Increased LGBT+ Acceptance and Visibility Find Their Way to the Gritty Parts of Mexico City
The Opening of Two Innovative Gay Male XXX Glory Holes
As a Gay American, living in Mexico, Las Cabinas have been some of the most interesting places I've found in the gay cruising scene. The contrast between Las Cabinas in Mexico and Las in The United States is HUGE and the difference speaks to the difference in attitudes towards gay sex in both countries.
What are Las Cabinas?
Las Cabinas is Spanish for 'The Cabins.'
In the gay community they specifically refer to booths, usually in the back of sex stores, where gay cruising takes place. Las cabinas are often called glory holes in English because . . . well, you know why.
As an American, who has been living in Mexico City for 5 years, I often use cabinas and gay bookstores and glory hole interchangeably. So with this in mind, you should be able to follow along easily.
To learn why I do this you really have to come to Mexico City and discover Las Cabinas. While the actual facilities may have similar characteristics, the spirit of the places is entirely different in Mexico, from in the United States.
Gay Glory Holes XXX in The United States
As an American who likes anonymous gay cruising, I was so excited by the promise of the gay bookstores that I would hear about. But so often, I would go and find them to be relics of a past that no longer existed.
Usually manned by a grumpy old queen and attended by the same, these places were usually a big disappointment.
Whenever there was a hot guy, he was always Latino. Why was this?
Las Cabinas Gay en Mexico City
While Glory Holes in the United States are relics to a past that does not exist, awaiting being torn down so that they can build an expensive condo building, Las Cabinas en Mexico are bursting with sexuality, community, desire, and just a plain old good time.
Eje Central
Eje Central is an avenue that traverses Mexico City from North to South. This is a big thoroughfare of cabinas in Mexico City. It's also a very gritty and interesting part of town. I was so interested in it that I made it the focus of my Mexico City Gay Male Tourist Walking Tour. Follow my tour for an afternoon filled with Art, Plazas, Tacos, Delicious Food, and Gay Cruising. Stay here for a one by one description of the glory holes on the tour.
Funny Sex Shop
I mention Funny Sex Shop first because it was the first cabina that breathed new life into this corridor.
Before Funny, Las Cabinas on Eje Central were run down and dirty, like in the United States.
But unlike in the United States, las cabinas in Mexico have never been empty.
But Funny Sex Shop leveraged three things when they opened up, and that same dynamic has happened in all the ones which have followed.
The gay community was lonely during the covid-19 pandemic and was looking to underground establishments for community, because all the others had been shut down.
Twitter was becoming the primary destination for amateur porn, and the number of creators uploading videos for free was exploding.
Lots of underground sex establishments had closed their doors and were not planning to return to business. The market was wide open.
So one day in September of 2020, Funny Sex Shop Opened for business. Their hours were restricted from Noon to 7:00 PM.
At that time, downtown Mexico City was not permitted to do business after 7:00 PM.
Funny Sex Shop was located on the 2nd floor of a mid rise office building in Downtown Mexico City. It consisted of a dark maze, dark room, a fully stocked porn store, and on the corner was a sitting area with windows looking out over Eje Central.
The sitting area had a counter where an employee manned a fully stocked refrigerator with Beers, waters and energy drinks.
The halls of the glory hole maze stayed packed with hot guys of all ages. Young curious guys beginning to explore their sexuality, and older mature men there to fuck and get fucked.
As hot as the maze was, the most novel part to me was the sitting area. Admission to the entire place was $80MX, and it has recently risen to $100MX. One beer is included with admission.
The beer loosened everybody up and most would buy another.
The dynamic at Funny was exactly the same as nearby VIP Cyber Isabella Catholica. This club also was a cabina with sitting area, right across the street from Universidad Ciudad de Mexico (UACM), the college guys were delicioso and plentiful!!
But as Funny was getting better and better, VIP Cyber was deteriorating and getting worse and worse.
VIP Cyber also had a dark room in addition to the glory hole maze, but for unknown reasons something happened in the dark room and, instead of fixing it, they just nailed a piece of plywood in front of the door and suddenly they no longer had a dark room.
The Bathroom at VIP Cyber was always hideously smelly, unstocked with toilet paper or paper towels, and, usually, there was not a trash can so the floor was covered with trash.
Conversely the bathroom at Funny was bright, clean, and the urinals were the very first in Mexico City to be equipped with spray hoses, the kind that you would find beside a kitchen sink, to accommodate some necessary after sex washing that everybody has to do, but nobody likes to talk about or admit.
While wonderfully convenient and considerate, these spray hoses, for me, are evidence that the widespread mainstream acceptance and increased visibility of gay peoples, a global phenomenon, was expressing itself through la puteria gay in Mexico City in 2020.
This stands in contrast to countries such as The United States, where I am from. In the United States there really are no more cabinas, and the few that are hanging on, are just the same old tired places they were 10 or even 20 years ago. All the gains from the mainstream acceptance of gay peoples are non-sexual and seem to focus on the ability to live a heteronormative life, get married to one partner, adopt and raise heterosexual children, join the rat race.
As promiscuous gay sex in Mexico was becoming elevated and more dignified in Mexico, it was becoming obsolete in The United States.
Politics and How to Judge if a Destination is Gay Friendly
One of my goals for this site and for my writing is to elevate the consciousness of the global gay community by presenting gay communities in other parts of the world that function differently and expose other ways to be gay that we may not have considered in and of ourselves.
One of the problems that I see with the current gay travel journalism is the tendency to reduce whether or not a destination is gay friendly by summarizing the status of the fight for marriage equality. Looking at gay visibility through this narrow lens is like looking through a keyhole of contemporary American culture.
There is so much to learn about how other people of the world are gay but you can't learn these things if you're only staying for a week. That is why I think the future of gay travel writing we be by expats and not digital nomads.
If you are a gay man living in another country who has something to say about foreign gay ways of life, or know somebody who fits this description, I'd love to collaborate with you and begin to add destinations beyond Mexico.
Funny Sex Shop, Social Media, and the Sex Twitero
Funny Sex shop elevated Mexican Gay Sexuality in two ways. One was material. They raised the standards of cleanliness and hygiene of their own space to accommodate a clean and convenient experience for their clients. This step was usually overlooked in similar establishments in the past.
Funny also changed the way places like this did social media.
Before Funny, clubs del encuentro did daily promotions on twitter and in private what's app groups. They would typically upload a flyer with the price, address, and theme of the day/night. There would usually be a picture of a handsome man on the flyer.
Every day I could count on seeing each place I follow upload a flyer and it normally didn't change week to week.
It was also common for the sex clubs to upload sexy nudes from the internet to entice people to come.
During the pandemic, when most of these clubs closed, the announcements stopped coming. The accounts went silent. But gay twitter was just getting started.
Amateur porn creators all over Mexico City began posting videos of themselves having sex in public, all over the city. At the beginning, many tagged the silent accounts of the sex clubs that they knew everybody was already following in order to increase their distribution.
Funny Sex Shop was the first account that began retweeting local sex twiteros all day. To this day, any Mexican gay porn that is uploaded to twitter has @funny_MXXX tagged.
Funny Sex Shop had taken what what was a boring repetitative twitter feed, and turned it into something very exciting. It also connected two worlds of amateur gay porn and real gay cruising.
Click here to follow Funny Sex Shop on Twitter
While funny was playing around and thinking outside the box, others were watching. Soon a new club would be opening right down the street, taking the new puteria gay that Funny Sex Shop was creating and putting their own mark on it.
Sexto Piso
October 2022: Mexico City was finally moving at full steam and had returned to business as usual after 2 years of COVID hysteria, regulations, openings and closings. New businesses were opening up in every sector of the economy. And along Eje Central, another underground gay sex concept was taking shape in the spirit of the new puteria created by Funny Sex Shop.
Around this time gay twitter began to see publications of new space called Sexto Piso. It was billed as an Urban Park for gay men.
Photos of the facility began to make their way into the community and soon it was becoming obvious that Sexto Piso would be something truly different.
The Space was a glory hole maze, designed by a professional theater set designer in the Mexico City theater community. The space was actively seeking out some of the most successful local amatur porn creators and offering them the space to make some high quality videos.
The inauguration was the first sex club to have a inauguration with a guest list of the top sex twitteros in Mexico City. The event was so successful that it became a monthly event where sex twiteteros film videos for twitter and only fans as the rest of the party cruises around them.
Now the gay community had two brand new cruising venues that were clean, and palaced anonymous gay sex on the front page, and not in a dark room or basement afterthought.
Cine Savoy
I can't talk about cruising on Eje Central without mentioning the legendary Cine Savoy. I write a full review of this place where I talk about gay cruising theaters. It is also the first cruising stop on my gay male walking tour of Downtown Mexico City.
Cine Savoy has stood the test of time. It is an old school establishment. While I believe the gay community is growing up and maturing in places like funny sex shop and Sexto Piso, Cine Savoy remains a landmark for those who like it the way it used to be.
This is a dark theater where men roam around between the isles and havre anyonomous sex wherever they please.
There are two halls. The larger one, on the first floor plays straight porn to accommodate heteroflexible men who like to see women getting ficked while the gay men Line up to suck them off.
Upstairs there is a smaller theater where gay porn is played.
I love spending time at Cine Savoy. It's a great place to stop by and do a quick lap or Vuelta, just to see what happens.
While it is important to try new things and improve areas that are lacking, sometimes you risk throwing something good out with the bad. Cine Savoy is a shining altar to gay cruising's past, and it remains very popular 7 days a week.
Live Sex Shows
Just before Sexto Piso Opened, somebody else, perhaps inspired by Funny and perhaps not, made another connection between real life gay male cruising and the world of amateur porn. They idea was a weekly show, on Sunday nights, of live sex between local amateur porn stars in Mexico City.
Click here to follow this live sex show event on twitter
The event was held at a zona rosa bar/club called El Taller. Each week it would be announced which sex twitters would be performing and their fans would flock to the bar to see the action.
I went a few times and found the entire thing to be very well done.
But if you ask me, Funny Sex Shop found a way to do it better.
It's not so much that they did it better, but they realized that their space was better suited to host this event than El Taller.
The bet was that the people going to these live sex shows were really there to do cruising themselves. El taller was a bar and club. It was not a sex club. They had a great stage and it accommodated the show splendidly. But the cruising not so much. There was a small dark room next to the bathrooms of El Taller. The dark room got so crowded that nobody could move. People were forced to hang out on the dance floor or in the bar area, nursing a drink, all waiting for the show to start.
Funny began doing live sex shows on the same night. Funny had no stage. I wondered where the live sex show would take place. It turns out that they did the live sex show all over the maze of cabinas.
The stars of the sex show would do a scene in the sitting area, followed by another in the halls, then another in the dark room, and maybe a few more.
Click here to follow Funny Sex Shop’s Twitter dedicated to this event
It turns out that funny, with its huge maze of cabinas, was much better suited to host a live sex event, and the fact that there was no stage, they turned into a plus.
Both shows are still going strong in their respective places as of the publication of this article.
That sounds so amazing for the gay community in CDMX, it sounds like the community is accepted & respected.
Your Substack continually reminds me of the unfathomable amount of stories that are in any given corner, at any given day of my favorite Metropolis in the world.
Another fascinating read. I love the openness of Mexico City. I love that it is a place of innovation in the way LGBTQ+ people can live their lives, especially their sexual lives, in an ever more open way while the US regresses.