Mexico City’s Camino Verde – A Truly Mexican Gay Experience

South of Mexico City is an enormous campus of a great university, UNAM. A highway passes alongside of the campus.

There is a area of land in between the highway and the cultural campus that is unused. It is too close to the highway to be of any use to anybody. It gives a little space and natural buffer in between the highway and the cultural campus. 

The land is volcanic rock that has been overgrown by vegetation: Trees, grass, cactus and weeds. All of Mexico City used to be like this, piece by piece, the vegetation and volcanic rock were smoothed over to create symphony halls,  theaters, Art museums, and restaurants. But some spaces were forgotten. 

One day, I walked into one of these forgotten spaces. I had heard of it from other friends. They mentioned it from time to time. I had seen people post pictures of what goes on there. 

Most recently I had attended a zoom meeting with a group of gay men to discuss a movie. It was called ‘Stranger by the Lake’. It was a French movie about a gay cruising site in France. The conversation was focused mostly on Camino Verde. 

I entered by following a path on my left side, opposite the highway. I walked down an empty field and patchwork of grass, cactus and trees. The path ran along a gully. Soon I noticed a group of young guys gathered sitting on a horizontal tree trunk that had fallen long ago and had become overgrown. 

They were sitting underneath a dome of trees, and enjoying the shade. 

One of them had a small cooler that he carried on his shoulder. He was selling basket tacos. Another stuck out to me because he had his shirt off. He was a Twink. The sun peaked through the trees and created golden shapes of light on his soft Mexican skin. He had a friend who was skinny, just like him, but his friend was an older Twink. He had his shirt unbuttoned. He was playing a guitar. It appeared they were spending the entire day there. 

The twink quickly ran off with another guy. I decided to follow them. The twink lead the way and the other guy followed him down into the gully. The gully was actually bigger than it looked from when I first saw it, more like a small valley. And while I thought it was a steep cliff, there were actually dozens of paths that lead down into the lower area. The paths were a combination of dirt and volcanic rock, they were dotted by cactus and bright red flowering succulents that were characteristic of the season. 

The rainy season had ended a few months ago and these succulents were beginning to bloom in the dry sun that carpeted the region every day. 

The twinks weaved through vines and branches that hung down into the gully. They found a platform of rock to stand on, they took off their backpacks and sat them down on a rock formation. The twink was looking into the eyes of his friend and unbuttoning his baggy trousers. They were kissing.

I saw the twink pulling on his friend’s penis. He held it in his small hands and it looked big. The twink was smiling and treating the entire situation like he was having genuine fun.

A few others had followed them into the gully and they had not been as discreet as I had. The twinks were not exhibitionists and quickly put their penises back into their pants and continued along the volcanic rock. This time going back to their group of friends. 

Their admirers fondled them as they passed them by, and they continued along as if nothing unusual was happening. 

I continued along and begun to climb up the other side of the valley. Upon reaching the top I immediately noticed what must have been twenty men standing dispersed among the trees. Standing, hunting with their eyes, many of them with their hand grasping their penesis between their legs, keeping them half excited and ready, or maybe just because they liked the way it felt. 

They blended into the forest in the same way that the animals did. But they stood out starkly. I was not used to a scene like this. While I always thought of the woods or the forest as a place where animals hunted each other, I normally thought of this hunting as a way to get food. 

Here, seeing a different type of animal, who I new nourished himself in restaurants and in homes kitchens, hunting for something entirely different. 

The world I live in does not allow me to view what the men are doing here as natural. But I’m also not confused at what is happening. As a gay man I understand the desire that brought all of us men to this forest.

I remembered running through the forest in my neighborhood in suburban Washington DC. There was a stream and me and my two friends stopped by the stream to go to the bathroom. We all pulled our penis’ out and to my embarrassment, mine was much larger, and rock hard. 

Streams of urine began to flow from my friends small wrinkled penises and mine stood there, unable to urinate like the rest of them. The enormous pink ball seemed to have a mind of its own. 

I would think of that moment many times all throughout my childhood. I was mesmerized by it. I wanted to repeat it. But I also avoided being in that same situation ever again for fear that once again they would discover my unusual penis, and its connection to my desire. 

I kept walking pased many of the stationary men who all spoke with their eyes. Some of our eyes connected, some made obvious efforts to avoid my gaze. Eventually I saw a group of about 5. They each had their cocks out. They had not bothered to go down into the gulley, but they were in a dense area of trees and free to do what they pleased in privacy. Not from the cruisers, but from the real world. 

It wasn’t lost on us that we were in a small forest in the middle of a highway, a campus street where a campus bus passes very regularly along with cars, and underneath a pedestrian overpass. Many parts of camino verde are in plain sight, so you had to always be sure that you were in one of the majority of the parts that were hidden by either branches, or borders, or down in the gully. 

I’ve talked to guys about the risk of being caught here. Do the police ever come? They told me about the concept of Autonomy. In Latin America, many of the public universities are propaganda machines for military dictatorships or what ever corrupt public official had stolen the most recent election. 

In Mexico they have something called autonomy of the university. They university exists completely independent from the federal and state government. 

In the US, any autonomous organization would have its own militarized police force or something of the sort, but in Mexico, at UNAM, an army of rentacops with no real authority gets the job done just fine. 

You see the rent a cops parked around the campus, and camino verde is no exception, but the cruisers pass by the cops discreetly and try their best to carry on unnoticed. 

There is no sign of the we’re here we’re queer part of the LGBT movement in Camino verde. The part of the movement focused on visibility never talks about camino verde. It doesn’t fit into the narrative. 

I inched my way up to the 5 person circle jerk and began to talk to one of the guys with my eyes. Somebody else was sucking his cock and he was looking at me as if he wanted me to suck him off next. 

We were kind of far apart and I think by now we had both experienced the worst embarassment of crossing over an entire orgy, in plain sight of everyone, only to be politely shewed away. So we kept speaking with our eyes and waiting for the dynamic to change and accommodate a spontaneous encounter. 

When the mutual desire exists, it never takes long for the spontaneity to arrive. Before long I had his beautiful fat cock in my mouth and his untrimmed pubic hairs were touching my forehead. I licked his balls and kept sucking him off until he indicated that he wanted to fuck me. 

I wanted to be high first. 

I pulled a joint from out of my backpack, lit it up, and began passing it around. The joint made things more social and more sexual. People began talking and it became obvious that three of the 5 men already knew each other. They told us that they had begun a polyamorous relationship about 1 month ago. 

They were fun and care free and completely open to discussing the details, but it was also apparent that there weren’t many details to share other than an accounting of other encounters they had collectively accumulated over he past month around Mexico City. They had been invited to some private orgies, gone to some sex clubs, and today they were discovering camino verde. 

If I had to guess their age I would say 30. 

What I admired about them is that they all seemed to be going through the thing together. There was no leader or sugar boy. They were three peers being gay together. 

They represented a dynamic that I desperately needed as a child, confused at how come my penis was erect and my heterosexual friends were able to pee freely in each others company.

After the joint had loosened us all up a bit the guy began fucking me. His cock was remarkably hard for how thick it was. This allowed him the luxury of poking me with it ever so slightly, inching it in bit by bit. This process would make many other guys loose their erection. Giving them an urgency to just shove it in. 

While some guys can take that, I am not one of them. I’m always nervous they are going to do this to me. I wish there were some way to discern this ahead of time, possibly with the eye game. But so far I haven’t found it yet. 

I was so happy at this moment. His cock felt so good and now that I determined that he wasn’t gong to hurt me, I was able to enjoy the way it felt inside of me. I looked up into the blue Mexican sky, the white Mexican clouds, through the branches of the Mexican trees and felt him inside of me. 

I listened to how they were talking about the other guys who drifted in and out of their month long sexual fantasy and I realized I was going to be included in future stories. The grinigo who one of them fucked in Camino verde. 

Nobody else actually penetrated anybody. The oral continued as well as the talking. Some of them talked to me in a sexy seductive way as I was getting fucked, and others talked to me as if I wan’t getting fucked. 

One of them offered me some poppers. They were really strong and they sent me to another world all together. 

When I came back he was fucking me really super hard. He wanted to come but he just wasn’t there yet. He fucked me as long as he could and then had to take some rest. He pulled his dick out and commented at how clean it came out. 

At this point I confided in them that I had just douched before. 

I always carry an anal douche in my backpack. I carry it wrapped up in a plastic grocery bag. There is a spot I always go to on the other, less crowded, side. I take out the plastic bag, remove the douche, open a bottle of water, and fill up the big black ball two times. Then I pull down my pants, squat down, insert the douche, squeeze the black ball and empty the water inside of myself. 

I stand up and let the water loosen things up. Then I squat down again and push the water out onto the ground. The spot I like has an ever so small drop off into a small ravine. I think it was a stream of lava long ago.

The water bursts out until, all of a sudden, a turd pops out with the flow. 

It is an amazing feeling and it is so fun. Immediately the smell of the turd wafts up in the air and then off to where it will not bother anybody. 

I repeat the process a few times and sometimes another turd will pop out. Afterwords I know that I’m ready to get fucked by whatever cock I can find and I won’t make a mess. 

I find mexican guys to be very forgiving when it comes to getting shit on their dick. Sex is a daily thing for them and you’re bound it run into it if you do it so often and so spontaneously. 

But I hate the way it feels when I’m being fucked and I have something inside me other than a cock. For me, this preparation is worth it. 

Somehow I only manage to do it in camino verde. Or in my house. But it’s so much more fun in camino verde, seeing the stream of water, and the turd pop out, is more fascinating then I ever could have imagined. 

They laughed at my story. It was all something we could relate to. I’m confident that many of them now carry anal douche’s with them on my advice. 

Thanks to my weed, and the trust we had all developed, we began to talk with our mouths instead of our eyes. This is how I like to interact with guys. You can’t really do this in gay bars. I find in gay bars you never get passed the staring phase and if you do, you leave with one guy and the part about being in a group of friends ends right away. 

Here the sex is front and center, and nobody has to pretend otherwise. 

We were becoming loud at this point and I started to get self conscious. The top had finally come inside me so I was free so waddle my way around the camino verde and look for the next thing. I said my goodbyes and gave my number to the guy who fucked me. I am disappointed not to have ever heard from him again. I would have loved to have head about how the threesome is going. 

I went back to the group of twinks who were sitting down near the entrance. They were packing up their things and starting to leave. I asked the guitar player about his music. He told me that he studied music at the university and he invited me to join them and watch the symphony. It was Thursday and students got in for 30 pesos. I paid $150. 

We walked out of camino verde and said goodbye to the rest of their crew. The kid with the basket tacos couldn’t join us, and the others wanted to stay and see what happened at night. 

We walked under the pedestrian bridge and past the MUAC. I told them about the threesome and they told me they had seen them too. I told them about the guy with the big cock who had fucked me and they each shared some anecdotes of their day. 

The older twink, the guitar player, was 37. He had been studying music at UNAM for twenty years. He still hadn’t graduated. He had played in bands, lived with his parents, traveled Mexico and Latin America, and was a very interesting person. 

We approached Sala Nezahualcóyotl, where the symphony orchestra of UNAM plays. We bought our tickets and then went back outside to enjoy a street coffee. We smoked another joint discreetly and stood outside together until it was time to enter. 

The weed helped, but I had never head music so beautiful. They played the Brahms symphonies. My mind drifted from the music, to the events of this afternoon, to the guys sitting on either side of me. They watched the music. No touching, no sex. There was a place for that and this was not it. 

But it was still with us. Maybe they were dreaming about it. 

Afterwords the guitar player left us to talk to his millions of friends. I had already asked for his number and he told me that he didn’t have a phone. I knew he was telling the truth and I kicked myself for even asking. As exotic as this guy was, he was kind of a stereotype. I had met others like him before, but only in Mexico. The young twink was prepared to wait for him. He was his sidekick. 

He asked me if I was going to go back to camino verde. 

“Isn’t it dangerous at night,” I asked. 

“Yes. But that is when the chacales come.”

He told me about how this area got crowded with guys from all over the city who had wives and children. But they liked gay sex in Camino Verde. There were lots of them and they were very handsome.

I decided I would go. I said goodbye to the twink. He was the first guy I saw at the beginning of the day. I wanted to fuck him so badly. But the combination of fucking so many other guys, becoming friends with the twink, and even going to the symphony with him and his friend, made up for not being able to fuck him.

There was a connection to the entire gay scene that I craved just as much as the sex, and maybe more.

 It was starting to get dark. I walked back into the forest through the same path. It was light enough because of the moon, and street lights of the highway, and the illumination of the city reflecting off the clouds. Nearby there was another alcove of trees and a path that lead through it. Standing in the middle was a chacal, one guy was sucking him off, and two were watching. I joined and began to watch. 

The chacal was dark skinned, very young, tall, and he had a plain face, and the characteristic baseball cap. His cock was extraordinary. It was long, thick and extremely ugly. The guy sucking him off had not gotten him fully excited yet. It wasn’t pointed up yet. But it pointed out, and I mean way out. His head peaked through the ugly foreskin. 

The guy sucking him off stopped. Others tried to follow and he politely refused. He lifted the cock up to display his two huge dark brown balls. The enormous egg shaped ovals were two distinct sponges of wrinkles, thick creviced wrinkles, like the volcanic lava that he was standing on. Huge black hairs covered them but obscured nothing. 

He suddenly released his cock and it fell down over the balls. He lifted it up again. He did it in a very sensual way. He was playing around. But he was also very selective with what he wanted. He only allowed the one guy to return to his jewels and start sucking his balls. The rest of us waited, got bored, and walked off. Leaving the chacal by himself. I found a place away from him where I could watch everything that happened. 

I watched guys walk down the path. Many of them passed him by without paying attention.

He decided to move somewhere more visible and ended up in a clearing where there were no trees. In the day, this area is too visible for any sexual activity, but at night I noticed that there were dozens of chacales standing among the tall grass, and many of them had guys below them sucking them off.

Now that my eyes had adjusted to the dark I could see everything more clearly. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

I decided to walk down into the gully.

There is a quote, by Salvador Dali, that gets repeated often in Mexico. Dali said something along the lines of

‘Mexico is more surreal than my paintings.’

Dali didn’t mention exactly what he was talking about, but it resonates with many people who know Mexico, both foreign and Mexican.

This image that I saw, walking through camino verde in the darkness, dozens of chacales standing in the tall grass and along winding paths up and down the gully, will always stick out in my mind as one of the images that represents my Mexico.

How many of these men had faced confusion in the presence of their childhood peers about their sexuality. And how many of them came to this place to be exactly who they were driven to be.

There was a common choreography that we all seemed to be following. As if we all knew exactly what each other were looking for and had everything necessary to pass it around freely.

I didn’t have sex with anybody that night. I just walked around for what seemed to be hours. The Metrobus stops running at midnight so I knew I had to leave before then. I stayed as long as I could, and I can’t wait to go back.