Mexicans have not only become experts at the furtive fulfillment of desire, they have also perfected public sex. Dancehalls host all-night orgies where tropical rhythms cause groins to rub against each other unto stained jeans. The neo-primitives came late to the game: for centuries, Mexico City, as well as every provincial town and cowtown, has greeted the sun hungover and satiated –with most everyone still fully clothed.

But not all sex is so safe. Central to Mexican sex are two masks: the puta and the puto, the whore and the fag, the most desired of all sexual personae. It is on the street, in the hotel room or at the burdel that the fiercest manifestation of Mexico's sexual contradictions takes place.

It is the most desperate, the most lonely of fucks, sometimes accompanied by a violence that is the ultimate, terrible denial of what is a mythic void become physical, in which the tortured spirit seeks its salvation through burning flesh.

This is not the kind of transubstantiation that Catholic theologians preach about, but then again, I've always thought that communion was suspiciously similar to oral sex.

There is a darkness inherent in the wearing of masks, and at times that darkness escapes the rote of the bedroom and runs dangerously on the streets. During the early 90s in Mexico City, several dozen gay men were killed in a serial spree. The predators were police officers, the most macho of machos and, in Mexico's twisted sexual psyche, the most puto of putos. The cops were attempting to kill off in themselves that which they thought resided only in their victims.

But the game of the masks, both its light and dark sides, is changing in Mexico, and changing rapidly. Since December of 1994, Mexico has undergone its most severe crisis since the Revolution of 1910. There's been an Indian uprising in the south, a narco-war in the north, a peso devaluation that devastated the economies of both the capital and the provinces, a terrifying country-wide crime wave, and an overall sense of identity crisis owing to the fact that millions of Mexicans have followed the migrant route to the United States.