In Search of Sex and Languages in Tijuana

I'm running low on Alan stories, but I hate to let him go. so here's the story of me, Alan, and the bathhouse in Tijuana.

Tijuana, August 1987

It's a sedate cultural center now, but in the 1980s, it was synonymous with sleaze.

Watch your wallet.
Drink only bottled water
Be careful of the bathrooms.
Don't walk too close to alleys.

"We should go," Alan the Pentecostal Porn Star said one day in 1987.  "You speak Spanish, so you can impress all the locals.  And the bathhouses are still open.  Have you been to one?"

"Just once, four years ago in Chicago.  My friend Viju took me.  I didn't like it."

"They're great!" Alan exclaimed.  "Darn homophobic Department of Health closed them down here, thinking we're all having unsafe sex and getting AIDS in them, but you can have unsafe sex anywhere.  You just have to be careful, stick to French.  That won't be a problem for us, right?"

Alan rarely topped anyone, and I never knew him to bottom.  Interfemoral, oral, and sometimes 69, although he was a little too big to do that comfortably.

"Sex with strangers?"  I said, dubious.  Even casual hookups were frowned upon in West Hollywood.

"It's a foreign country.  Our rules don't apply.  And we're both single, right?"  He paused.  "Besides, I know a place where you can meet Indios."

Mexico is a racially segregated society.  The elites are white, of Spanish ancestry only.  The middle class is usually Mestizo, of mixed Spanish and Indian ancestry.  And the working class and poor are primarily Indio, from about 60 different language groups:

Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, like nothing else I have ever seen:
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year: Cualli netlācatilizpan īhuān yancuic xihuitl

Mayan, the language of the ancient Mayan civilization of the Yucatan, nothing like Nahuatl:
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year: Ki'imak Navidad yéetel ki'imak ja'aba' túumben

Mixtec, Zapotec, Otomi, Mazatec, Tlapenec

The prospect of hearing Indio languages convinced me.

So one Saturday in the summer of 1987, we drove down to Tijuana, skipped over the usual tourist haunts, and drove directly to a crazy galleria on the south side of town, where, Alan told me, the Banos Vica catered to Indios.

Talk about sleazy!  You undressed, dumped your clothes in a bag, and went upstairs through a dirty shower room, then wandered through creaking corridors, dimly lit by bare bulbs, paint chipping on the walls, trash on the floors, sleazy looking naked guys in the shadows.

There were steam rooms and showers, but mostly you just did things right there in the shadows.


"Oh, boy," I thought.  "Indios!  I'm going to meet some Nahuatl and Mayan speakers!"

The only question was, how did I actually meet them?

Alan stood in the shadows.  He only had to wait a few moments before a slim, smooth guy with a bubble butt knelt to go down on his porn star-sized Kielbasa.

I could hardly say "Hola!  Hablas Nahuatl o Mayan?"

I waited.  Another slim, smooth guy with a thin moustache went down on my smaller but still respectable Bratwurst+.

After a few moments, I drew him to his feet and tried to kiss him, but he turned his face away.  "Quenin timotōcā?" I said, one of the Nahuatl phrases I memorized.

He shrugged and moved on.

Idiot! I told myself.  There are 60 native languages.  He could speak any of them, or none!


I went down on another guy, short, with a round face,  a sly smile, and an uncut Bratwurst.  After a few minutes, someone else roughly pushed me out of the way to go down on him, so I stood and drew him into a kiss.  The on-his-knees guy worked on both of us for a few moments, then stood and left.

"Hablas Nahuatl?" I asked.

He didn't answer.

The third guy was dark, muscular, with average beneath the belt gifts.  I went down on him until he finished with a moan.

"Hablas algo lengua India?" I asked. Do you speak any Indian language?

"Como?"

Frustrated, I said loudly, "Hay alguien que hablan una lengua Indio?"  The men standing in shadows glared at me.

I sought out Alan, and we shared a light-skinned, curly-haired guy.  He went down on Alan while I went down on him.

Afterwards, I had almost given up, but I still managed to ask, "Hablas Mayan o Nahuatl?"

"Are you the one who was yelling earlier?" he asked in English.

"I wasn't yelling, I was just talking loudly."

He laughed.  "Got a Indio thing, huh?  Sorry to burst your bubble, but I'm from San Antonio."

We left after a couple of hours.

"Well, that was fruitless," I said.

"You were with about five guys," Alan said. "How is that fruitless?"

"I didn't meet anyone who spoke any Indian languages."

"Were you there for sex or languages?"

"Well, languages, mainly," I admitted sheepishly.

"Why didn't you say so?  No one talks in a bathhouse.  But I know a place we can go."

On the way out of town, we stopped at the Club Habanero, a gay bar on the Calle Benito Juarez that specialized in Indios.  We met Alejandro, a slim guy from Veracruz who spoke no English, just Spanish -- and Nahuatl!

By the way, the Nahuatl word for penis is huiloti, or "dove," but when it is aroused, it's a moquauhquetza.

Alan wasn't happy with my ability to monopolize the conversation.

And even less happy when I failed to seal the deal and get an invitation back to Alejandro's apartment.

Apparently you can learn the Nahuatl word for penis, or you can go down on a Nahuatl penis, but you can't do both.

See also: My First Bathhouse; In Search of Sex and Languages in South Africa

Will the Bondage Boy Hooks Up with Peter Fonda

West Hollywood, April 1993

Every year Lane's mother Rosa hosted a huge Passover seder.  Her house on Crescent Heights was packed with relatives from New York, friends from Temple Beth El, employees, neighbors, and minor celebrities.  I went twice as Lane's roommate or boyfriend (depending on who asked).

Rosa died last year, so Lane has the responsibility of hosting.  Fifty people will never fit into our small two-bedroom apartment, so he's paring down last year's guest list, deleting Rosa's old housekeeper, the great-uncle that he only saw once a year, crotchety neighbors, and the elderly ladies from the Hadassah League.

"What do you think?" Lane asks.  "Should we keep Jane and Peter Fonda?"

I look over his shoulder at the guest list: Jane Fonda and Ted Turner. Peter and Portia Fonda.  "Rosa knew them?"

"Sure. They met when Jane's husband Tom Hayden was running for Senate. She's been to seder several times, [Her brother] Peter only once that I can remember, but Mom invited them every year."

The 1960s counterculture heroes sitting down to Passover dinner with Lane's elderly, kugel-baking mother?   It seemed bizarre.  But, I remembered, Rosa's politics were very liberal.  When she was younger, she wrote for a radical Zionist newspaper.

"Should I continue the tradition?  It means four table settings, and they probably won't come.

"Go for it.  I'd like to meet them."

A few days later, at lunch with Will the Bondage Boy, I mention the Jane and Peter Fonda guest list.

"Can I get an invitation?" he asks.  "It would be fun to see Peter Fonda again.  I wonder if he remembers our trick."  [Trick was our word for a hookup.]

"You tricked with the star of Easy Rider?  Why haven't you told this story before?  You always tell about Keanu Reeves."

He shrugs.  "Nothing to tell.  We tricked, the end.  A jealous-lover bondage fantasy with Keanu Reeves is much more interesting."

"I'll be the judge of that."

Tijuana, April 1978

Will was 20 years old, a sophomore at Occidental College, a Cute Young Thing ready for action.  This was before the fear of AIDS shut down all the bathhouses in Los Angeles, but he was afraid to go to them, lest someone from school see him and have him expelled.  So one weekend he and a friend went to a bathhouse in Tijuana, a seedy affair with musty showers, damp corridors, and leering drug-addled downlow men.

Will recognized Peter Fonda immediately.  He didn't find him particularly attractive: pushing 40, tall and thin, with a receding hairline, a long face, and a Tom Selleck moustache.  But who would turn down the chance to trick with Captain America of Easy Rider, whose homoerotic buddy-bonding gave the 11-year old Will his first glimpse of gay potential?

They went back to his room and collapsed onto the seedy, stained mattress, fondling but not kissing.  Peter went down on Will, but he was too star-struck and couldn't concentrate enough to get aroused.  After awhile, he gave up and moved to go down on Peter.



 Peter was enormous beneath the belt, a good 9", and thick as a beer can.  Will could only manage to get his mouth around the head; the shaft took two hands.  Still, Peter was impressed, groaning, whispering "Oh, yeah, that's great!  Feels great!"

He finished with a monumental spurt and, sweating and out of breath, drew Will into a hug -- still no kissing.  "That was outta sight!  Do you live in L.A.? If you have a place where we could crash, we could make this a regular thing."

"Sure, I have a place," Will said, thinking of his dorm room.  He could put a tie on the door handle to signal to his roommate that he was having a "girl" over.

"But don't tell your friends about me, ok?  I have a reputation of being a macho action hero, and I don't need any rumors ruining it."

"Ok."

Peter wrote his telephone number on a piece of paper and handed it to Will, then dressed and left.

West Hollywood, April 1993

"I felt like I should call, just because he was such a big star," Will says.  "But he wasn't that cute, and he wasn't that good in bed, so I gave it a miss.  I'm probably the only guy in history to dump a celebrity after the first date."

"No, I've done that, too,"  I say.

"See?  Not nearly as interesting as Keanu Reeves.  The only interesting part was his 9", and I've been with bigger guys since."

Will gets his invitation to the Passover seder.  The Fondas don't come, but Lane gives him Peter's address and telephone number from Rosa's address book.   I don't know what happened after that.

Was Will telling the truth?

1. Most celebrity dating and hookup stories make the the celebrity gorgeous, and the sex energetic and passionate.  Making Peter unattractive and the sex mediocre gives Will's story a ring of truth.

2. But being starstruck over Peter Fonda rings false.  He's not a big star.  During the 1970s and 1980s he starred mostly in car-chase actioners like Race with the Devil and The Cannonball Run.  In 1978 his only movie role was High Ballin', a Canadian attempt to cash in on the trucker craze, with Peter driving, brawling, and picking up a girl conveniently named Pickup.

3. Peter has been married to women three times, and has two children, Justin and Bridget.  He was with his second wife, Portia, from 1975 to 2011.

4. He's a gay ally.  He claims that he chose a black motorcycle jacket for Easy Rider to become an icon in the gay community.

See also: Will and Scott Have a Wild Night with Keanu Reeves; 21 Surprising Facts About Lane