Crisis-sex cannot affirm anything; it can only negate, for better or worse. I hadn't gone to Mexico searching for this kind of existential anonymity, but it is what the crisis bequeathed me.

Mexico's crisis became my own. I was dimly aware that I was walking through a fire that generations of Mexican men (the female experience of crisis-sex is, of course, altogether distinct) had passed through, including my father, who, though he's never "outed" his own sexual secrets with me, experienced, I intuit, something similar when he lived in Mexico City as a teen in the 1950s.

But crisis-sex is something even darker, and sadder, and more frightening, than the sex Mexicans had long experienced behind their masks. For what is occurring in Mexico today is precisely the burning of all the masks. Mexico is coming out.