In Mexico City, sex clubs that once were underground operations now line Insurgentes Boulevard, the city's main north-south artery, gaudily announcing flesh in Vegas-style neon. At these clubs, table dancing is only the tamest of the entertainment.

Live sex shows are increasingly common, and it's not of the "vanilla" variety –there's something for virtually every proclivity: bisexual threesomes, S&M scenarios, and toys, toys, toys. Gay clubs are above-ground now as well. Some eighty are said to exist in the downtown Cuahutémoc district of Mexico City alone. I have even seen gay couples –men and women holding hands, walking along the street in broad daylight.

Sex radicals would find much to celebrate in this very public reenactment of a John Rechy novel. But the crisis, economically and culturally, spiritually and sexually, has just begun. Rightwing Catholic and Pentecostal leaders are now mounting an assault on the "immoral" plague.

And then there is private toll of this private contradiction gone public. I lived in Mexico City for two years, during a time that la crisis was already in high gear. Perhaps I should say that Mexico City lived me. The sex that I describe here is something I know of because I myself indulged. I was swept up by what I experienced, initially, as the incredible eroticism of having all that's hidden and forbidden suddenly laid out before you, every secret desire and temptation.

On more occasions than I'd care to count, I greeted the dawn under the influence of ever-more volatile combinations of drugs and alcohol, my body tangled up in the body of another, in the bodies of others, my own gender and orientation as interchangeable as theirs.

It was a territory where impulse reigned, where God-knows what existential and historical echoes took the form of flesh. But, ironically, in the very instant of consummation, I felt as if my body itself was being destroyed. I would crawl back to my apartment feeling like a ghost: a bodiless, terribly lonely spirit.