The Nation Looks at Human Right of Public Gay Sex on Mexico City Subway

I have nothing against gays. As I've said before, my next-door neighbors are a gay married couple and they're great friends. My late cousin was gay — after he died I volunteered to clean out his trailer and all the gay stuff in it. To paraphrase "Seinfeld," I'm steeped in gayness.

When you mention the subway in New York City, your mind automatically goes to stabbings and people being burned alive by illegal immigrants. But according to The Nation, in Mexico City's subway, the last car of the subway is for gay sex. If I'm ever in Mexico City, I won't be taking the last subway car.

A.W. Strouse writes:

Queer people the world over have found ways to create spaces where they can survive, and sometimes even thrive, in the unlikeliest contexts. But very few have managed to fashion a queer hub out of something that is mobile and woven into the municipal infrastructure. Mexico City’s gay underground has the distinction of being literally underground. The historian Alonso Hernández Victoria notes that gay men have used Mexico City’s subway for sex, romance, and other encounters since it opened in 1969. In the quintessential Mexican LGBTQ novel The Vampire of Colonia Roma, published in 1979, author Luis Zapata describes the subway as the axis of Mexico City’s gay world. For decades, certain stations served as hubs of gay community, and by the 1990s, the subway system had become what the geographers Álvaro Sánchez Crispín and Álvaro López-López called “one of the most popular and visited gay places…perhaps in the whole world.”

Strouse writes that other commuters pretended not to notice when they saw a man masturbating a young man anally. He adds that the podcast Ride It Good "describes a complex sexual ecosystem hiding in plain sight, its most intimate escapades on full display but its nuances legible only to those in the know."

Though the article is very long and scholarly, I agree with Liz Wolfe:

Call me crazy but I think the gay sex car of the Mexico City subway is actually a bad thing, and that public transit should not be a place for public sex. No amount of "our human rights are being violated" will change my mind. pic.twitter.com/K9oYnJmBef
— Liz Wolfe (@LizWolfeReason) January 8, 2025

Subways are not places for sex, smoking crack, sleeping, screaming profanities, or having mental episodes. The fact that we can't develop a consensus around this––and enforce accordingly, with consistency––boggles my mind.
— Liz Wolfe (@LizWolfeReason) January 8, 2025

I've been to New York City a few times but never had the pleasure of riding the subway. But yeah, I don't see the subway as a place for gay sex or beloved Michael Jackson impersonators or homicidal schizophrenics. I'd prefer to just get from Point A to Point B.

I increasingly believe cities are divided into two groups––those with children and those without––and those two groups have extremely different ideas of what we ought to tolerate vs. crack down on in public spaces.
— Liz Wolfe (@LizWolfeReason) January 8, 2025

(Mexico City attempts to get around this by having designated subway cars for women + children, which is good, but middle of subway contains mostly-male cars = lots of harassment if you're a woman there, and caboose = gay sexville)
— Liz Wolfe (@LizWolfeReason) January 8, 2025

Designated subway cars for women and children? That sounds transphobic.