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En route from my LAX connection to Benito Juarez International Airport in Mexico City, I sat next to a young man of indeterminate age, though certainly well within the range favored by evolution. He could have been 22. He could have been 18. It was an occasion, since I never get to sit next to the sexy ones when I fly. It's always some dad with a salt-and-pepper beard and a baseball cap who has to call the grown daughter he's visiting before takeoff and after landing, who is always flipping through some magazine I don't want to read over his shoulder. It's a good thing too, since I don't concentrate too well when the sexies are so close we're swapping electrons. It's a compulsion: whenever he's near, whoever he might be, every action or pose I take is for his sake, his education. Oh, so this is how life can be, he thinks to himself as he observes me. When it's apparent that the empty seat next to me is his, I quickly put the Sky Mall catalogue back next to the puke bag and take out the literary review I'd ambitiously brought with me. I become part of a series of window displays over the next few hours, with such titles as "Intellectual Jason Digesting Words and Phrases You Might Not Have Even Heard Of" and "Mournful Jason Looking Out the Window at the Things He Must Leave Behind." It's very hard work and leaves me no opportunity to do anything else, like actually read the magazine.

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But he was just as compulsive as I was obsessive. For the first half-hour of the flight he turned around several times to look behind him, presumably to see what his girlfriend a couple of rows back was up to. He did it constantly, like a toddler. Okay, so he definitely wasn't 22. Maybe 19.

I spoke with him, briefly, three times during the flight. Twice to make some bad joke, and the third time to ask, finally, why he was traveling to Mexico City.

"To build a church just outside of town with my youth group."

He was 16, and I was a pedophile.

The latter was old news, so the former didn't phase me. And, still, I was disquieted. Some other bit of new information from that one little sentence fragment made me uneasy. What was it? Something to do with his purpose in going to Mexico. No, that he had a purpose. That's what got me, made me feel suddenly much less like the subject of a perfect window installation and more like that purchaser of a one way ticket to a foreign city who was afraid to click "submit." The 16-year-old beside me was on this plane because he was going to build something. He was going to take brick in hand-- potentially without a shirt on-- and begin something he and his friends would soon finish.

I've been asked why I was moving alone to Mexico City probably as many times as the number of Hail Marys my young row mate will no longer have to say because he's built a church. The obvious, most boring, and truest answer is that I wanted, after years of casual studies, to force-feed my brain the Spanish language. I'm not even sure why I want to be fluent exactly. Maybe I just don't want to think of those many hundreds of study hours as a waste. There were other reasons, of course, for leaving a well-rounded life in San Francisco with lots of sunlight and exercise, but they are many and only slightly more interesting to the casual reader than bilingual aspirations. In any case, I'd made the decision to come and I'm not leaving until I can tell my landlady-- in her own language, flawlessly and without the slightest hesitation-- that it's been delightful living under her roof, and I hope she can find another tenant as neat and well-behaved. And who knows? I might even like the place and want to stay.

My reasons for moving were primarily academic, but my preoccupations lay elsewhere. All I could think of before the trip was my future queer life, and the love life that would spring from it. How would it look? Was it a delusion to expect that it would look like anything? And if so, was that Mexico City's fault or mine?

The reason, I realize, that language immersion was not my primary anxiety is because I was taking the Spanish language for granted. I wasn't planning to leave until it was in my skull, and I had no doubt of its eventual permanent residence. I never take my love life for granted.

Whenever I move someplace new and therefore terrifying, my feelings of doubt and loneliness always take form in some strange, not-quite-right way. Always some fixation that doesn't really have anything to do with my surroundings, or is at best a perversion of those surroundings.

On my first night in Madrid as an exchange student, so hungry that I had to keep drinking water from the sink to fill my stomach, I cried for an hour. I was hungry because it was very late and nothing was open, other than the gay bar across the street. It was framed in my window, just the way it would be in a movie about coming out. A dark beer at the bar would have been a much more effective way to fill me up, but I didn't have the courage to go downstairs. I wasn't closeted. I was heavy, and I didn't feel attractive enough to play the part of the mysterious foreigner. So I stayed in my room and cried. But I wasn't crying for either food or companionship. Amazingly, I was crying for my mother who had died years before. This may seem reasonable until you know that I very rarely cry for dead family members. Not even at the funeral. I have never been able to figure out why, but I just don't. So when I cried that night for my mother, I knew it was just the most easily packaged pain my psyche could call up in service of my vulnerability.

When I moved to San Francisco four years ago, those same old feelings now took the form of a phone call I made to a friend who lived in a suburb 30 miles away, begging her to come get "I don't know, ice cream or something" with me. I'd met my new roommate a couple of hours before and he'd just confided to me that he, a 26-year-old, was told during the 1906 earthquake to write a book about fire. I was suddenly living in an unfamiliar town on a strange mattress with the strangest man alive and I needed ice cream, because ice cream was something I was previously aware of, something that, like my friend, was a familiar experience that could keep me pinned to reality. The very concept of ice cream was such a comfort at that moment, seemed like the answer to any and all of my problems. My friend wasn't interested in driving 30 miles to get ice cream, though. I've always been a little pissed about that.

This time, on this big move, I knew it would happen. I knew I would be visited with some fixation and I knew there was nothing I could do but brace for it. I'd even become sort of cavalier about it, because I was certain I knew exactly how it would go down. I would once again be crying over some sadness in my life, like I had done in Spain, since I had two strong candidates waiting in the middle of my chest, poised for eruption: (1) unrequited love and (2) a recently deceased father. A real toss-up. The more recent pain was the unrequited love, but the remarkable similarity in quality of loss between the dead father and the subject of my Spanish breakdown was nothing to be dismissed. It was a real contender.

But if there's a lesson here, it's that one should never get too cocky with one's inner workings, because they will do everything they can to wipe that satisfied look right off your face. "To Hell with the unrequited love!" my inner workings said to me as I lay in bed at the hostel. "The distance will be a blessing." And then, "To hell with the deceased father! You're older now and not so willing to let your anxieties pimp your dead parents for emotional release." And then they came to the point. "No, this time we're gonna shift the focus. This time you're the problem. Your inability to get out there and connect, to be precise. We're gonna take that gay bar in Madrid and expand it. We're gonna convince you that you'll never connect with anybody ever again. And not because you're heavy, because that's no longer true. Simply because you're not equipped."

And suddenly I was overwhelmed by an odd kind of paranoia, where I wasn't thinking that everyone was out to get me, but rather that no one was, that the 50 or so international travelers I could hear in the cafe downstairs, speaking poor Spanish in dozens of accents, were all having the times of their lives without me. It was like the UN wasn't recognizing me as a sovereign state.

Later on that first night, Saturday night, from the window of my room on the second floor, I saw two young gay men walking out of the hostel toward the Metro. I stood there and watched them, feeling deserted. As if a devil had whispered in his ear, one of them looked behind him suddenly, directly at me. He laughed, then indicated to his friend to look at the guy pining from his window. My first impulse was to wave. I hid instead.

I went downstairs and had a beer. I had to share a table with other people and I felt like an intruder. I began to really want something then. A real yen. It wasn't mom and dad, it wasn't requited love, and it wasn't ice cream. I wanted to build something. I wanted to take the formless pieces of this new city and build a life here, but I was too frightened to do it in the manner I'd settled upon before leaving, which was to just wing it. I wanted to be sponsored by a church. I wanted to be 16 and know that my spiritual leader was supporting me and that my girlfriend was just three rows behind me in the airplane, that we would soon be building something together, surrounded by friends with the same purpose.

Did I take into account that I'd been traveling all night and was too exhausted to take on a new city just yet, that I had to find a place to live before I could do any real living? Of course not. That was what hindsight was for.

All of the things I craved at that point-- things I thought other people had and I could never have-- were, of course, in my possession not two days before. In San Francisco. I had left it all behind because it wasn't doing it for me anymore. And it wasn't like I had lost any of those relationships. Now they would just take the form of 10 point Arial font on a glowing screen. But even with all the facts in hand it was hard to shake the temptation to pack up and go home. To start smaller. Six weeks in Fresno, perhaps.

After all, the biggest variable-- a valid concern this time-- was still to be faced: the potential threat of an overwhelmingly macho society that would all but bury me. If I went back to the airport immediately and didn't speak to anyone along the way, it was still possible to avoid finding out how the city really felt about me. I didn't go back to the airport, of course. In fact, shameful as it is to admit, the vision of Mexico City as a land of unrelenting disapproval partly served as a comfort to me, a way to keep going. If this place really was as bad as could be feared, then the blame could be shifted. When I finally took a look around and saw all the fags running around like it was their birthday, my heart actually sank before it rose, because it meant there was no excuse, this wasn't the hopelessly repressive society I thought it might be. The gold was there if I was willing to swing the pick.

I'm going to make a confession that might bring us closer but may just as easily keep us apart: I don't like dance clubs. I generally don't like the music they play, and I don't particularly like dancing. So I was hoping to find a nice bar here with queer kids in comfortable pants sitting around listening to whatever critically acclaimed album had just come out of Scotland. Purely a matter of preference.

As of writing these words, I have yet to find such a place. I know it exists. Twenty million people, I tell myself. Whenever I want something to exist here and can't find proof of it, I reassure myself: There's 20 million people here. At least 30 of them have to be congregated in such a way as I have arranged them in my head, talking about the things I want them to talk about, and wanting to have sex with the gender I want them to want to have sex with. I've looked in all the local publications. The magazine DF (the city is also known as "Distrito Federal"), has a healthy list of gay bars in its "Vida Nocturna" section, but I read them disappointedly. The profusion is spiriting, but they are all of a feather.

And if its scandalous exclusion of my particular bar (the one that exists in my head; I even have the furniture picked out) weren't already worthy of a nasty letter to the editor, its guide later served to rub in my every early mistake. I'd been searching previously for gay spots in Ser Gay, a small, black-and-white print publication that serves the whole country. Its list of bars and clubs provides little information beyond how to get there. How to get out was your own problem. I was eager to go to the bars listed that were close to my house in the Centro Historico, since I'm a big fan of being able to walk home after a night on the town. The closest place, a five minute walk, was Alebri-G, a bar I have since been admonished was a little bit questionable by both DF and a guy who was giving me a blow job in a bathroom stall a kilometer away.

Having already been there twice, I had to agree with them.

Despite the addition of "Historico" in the 1970s to boost tourism, the Centro Historico remains very real and very genuinely beautiful, a pleasure to walk through late at night (though this essay officially advises against such a walk) to whatever bar is next on the list. There is often grumbling in the newspapers about the apparent neglect of the district, but I fear the day the city really starts to pay attention to it, as it could only mean the same thing it meant to an unsuspecting Times Square in the mid-90s. The Spanish colonial architecture that dominates is incredible enough, but it serves, in my humble and uneducated opinion, almost as a frame for the truly remarkable Aztec-influenced art-deco buildings that stand alongside them. Alebri-G rests on just such a street, adjacent to the Alameda Central, a famous park which also has a reputation for hosting late-night cruising. Inside Alebri-G the ambience seemed cut to my specifications. The main area was a rectangle the size of a suburban swimming pool, with a tiny bar secreted away in the far-right corner. It was very dark and the walls, which had the dull gleam of gradual mineral deposits, were painted with large horizontal stripes of black and white that should have been distracting but were just the right touch. There were angular seats of dark leather all along its perimeter with tables in front of them, the simplicity of which were perfectly complemented by the darkness of the room. The place was nearly deserted, which gave an eerie feel to the gay 80s dance videos of non-American origin playing on a big screen at the far wall, videos to songs that weren't the ones blaring from the speakers. I'd come relatively early and so decided to wait for things to start happening. Sitting alone, with a beer and the videos to keep me company, I was approached by the man who would be my reason for leaving in half an hour's time. He seemed to appear from nowhere, though actually he'd come from upstairs, territory I hadn't at that point been aware of. He'd engaged me in conversation before I was aware of his intentions, and I learned that he sold shoes in Tepito, a neighborhood not too far north of the club and my home, an area that hotel employees draw a circle around on tourist maps so that it's certain to be avoided. Though I hadn't given him any reason to defend his neighborhood, he was quick to reassure me that his business was on the level, and that Tepito wasn't really all that bad. There were some incredible things to be seen there, in fact. There were incredible things all over the city that the nonresident doesn't see. "Such as?" I asked, removing his hand from my shoulder. The details of this unknown and magical Mexico City escaped him at the moment, it seemed, but he must've been very confident that his memory would soon return because he was eager to take me out sometime and show me. At this point a very attractive young man sat down across from us. He looked very straight and I imagined that he was very straight most hours of the day. With all my attentions now directed toward him and his fleeting homosexuality, I tried to escape somehow from the man whose hand I was then extracting from my hair like bubble gum. (His hands, incidentally, were doing nothing so objectionable as what his eyes were up to. If looks could lick nipples.) You'd think his touchy-feeliness would be the perfect reason to switch couches, and generations, but I felt obligated to stay at least until I'd finished the beer he'd insisted on buying me. And, really, in an empty room, how exactly do you go about deserting one guy while simultaneously trying to insinuate yourself into the gentle arms of the only other guy present? It was a maneuver I didn't feel skillful enough to execute.

The attractive young man was straight again 15 minutes later, on his way back home. I wanted to stay and wait for more straight boys to show up but the breath of the Adidas peddler from Tepito was giving me a heat rash, so I went home as well.

On to the following night, and two more bars, ten minutes' walk away.

I hate that there is often no way to tell from the outside what sort of clientele patronize a bar, or how full of such clientele the place is, especially if a doorman is standing there to make sure you feel weird about peeking. A picture should be taken every 15 minutes of the interior and posted on the outside wall. As it was on this particular Thursday night, I had to make the commitment and walk on in before learning anything. El Oasis and El Viena are two watering holes I want to go back to when I'm 30 years older and, as a general rule, need to sit down. The bars sat nearly side by side on the quiet Calle Republica de Cuba, like the elderly couple Zeus transformed into twin oaks. On the short walk over from my apartment, I was full of hope that one of these bars (I wasn't greedy) was to be the place I would spend the rest of what would be referred to by my biographers as "The Mexico City Years," convening daily with the sexiest, most creative, most sexually uninhibited homos this side of the Rio Bravo. I would achieve fluency in three months just by having to repeat phrases like "One at a time, fellas," and "How do you find time to make such fine films when you have such a large penis to care for?" The men I found in these bars may have been creative and sexually uninhibited, I don't know. And they may very well have been, at some point in their lives, some sexy pieces of ass, but this was not that time in their lives. In both places I did the same thing: buy a beer, ignore confused looks in my direction on the faces of men who remember when Mexico had an emperor, read the names of the liquor bottles behind the bar, and leave a half empty-- definitely not half full-- bottle on the bar. The only difference between the two micro-experiences was the presence of the gentleman sitting two stools down from me in the second bar, sensually lip-synching to his reflection in the mirror.

The next night. Friday night.

Why did I return to Alebri-G? For the ambience, for the unfamiliar music videos, to see what was upstairs, to see if the place was more happening when it wasn't a dead Tuesday night. And, finally, because I could walk home from there.

So now I know what the place looks like on a dead Friday night. I now wonder at the sexy young thing who was gay there for 15 minutes on Tuesday, because on Friday there were no more than a dozen men milling about who looked like they'd just come from the bars on Calle Republica de Cuba and were ready to fuck.

They kept going upstairs and coming back down, going up, coming down. So I went up to see what all the fuss was about. Like the scale model of the ground floor, this smaller version was darker still and playing porn on a tiny screen instead of music videos. Counting the two screwing on the screen, there were still fewer men in the room than I had seen go up there. The reason, of course, was an even darker room in the way back. I walked back there myself to see if there was anybody worth being in a dark back room with. I didn't, of course, find what I was looking for. But I really wanted to go back there, so I waited patiently downstairs for that attractive straight boy or a similar make and model to come through the door. I waited for an hour while a woman cried on the shoulder of her gay friend, an hour of men looking at me wondering why I didn't just give up. On the short walk back home, a huge lit-up sign proclaiming "HOT FLEM" dominated the black sky ahead of me. A couple more paces revealed it to be the Hotel Fleming, but I took the message well enough. I've brought up stuff from the back of my throat more worthy of my time than the Alebri-G and I would do well to take my business elsewhere. (Okay, I might try once or twice more. I mean, public sex with virtually no commute!)

Not long after, I found an old issue of DF and, dummy that I am, got excited when I saw the listing of four places in the Centro I hadn't heard of before! I guess I was hoping that the magazine didn't list everything in every issue, that maybe space was a problem. I went in search of these four bars and, of course, three of them were gutted and boarded up, while one of them was now a men-only rooming house. In one of the gutted buildings two men were standing in two large second-floor windows that no longer had glass in them, like the men were up for grabs, a cruel joke about the bar's glory days. When I finally got around to checking the date on the magazine it wasn't even two years old.

Judging from what I've since read, it appears as though I live in the city's Closet Queen District, made up of the three different establishments whose pros and cons I've related above. If I wanted unabashed, ubiquitous queerness, I would have to return to the Zona Rosa, an area of town just southwest of the Centro Historico. There are bars and clubs all over the city, but in the Zona Rosa (which means "The Pink Zone," though the name apparently predates its current associations) one is guaranteed to cleanse the palate of the taste of failure. Success, however, comes at a cost. To enter the Zona Rosa's commercial center is, for me, a Faustian bargain. Soullessly devoid of any other distinguishing feature but the numbing primary colors of "Gay Neighborhood, USA," to go to the Zona Rosa is nonetheless to gain vast amounts of knowledge, carnal and otherwise.

The district seems very much indebted to metropolitan gay districts of its golden-paved neighbor to the north in its "Mall of America" approach to gay life. It's the type of place I would normally steer clear of. But, much in the same way as my first big excursion in Mexico City was to the supermarket to obtain certain products my sanity requires, I went first to the place I knew I could be gay as quickly and efficiently as possible. Otherwise, my opinionated subconscious informed me, my new surroundings would have irreparably compromised my grasp on my identity. It's the same tune whenever I move somewhere new. So, to avoid becoming straight, I went to the gay supermarket as soon as I'd secured a room I could bring somebody back to.

Alone and slightly terrified, I walked along Calle Londres in search of a bar or club and, upon finding one, immediately ducked into the hotel next door. Clean, (semi)public restrooms next to gay nightspots are my security blanket. Not only do I prefer, as a neurotic, to be as little weighed down as can be expeditiously accomplished before entering a bar, I also need the time to prepare.

I don't really like meeting people. Like eating greasy foods, I'm always compelled to do it, but it invariably hurts my stomach. I require a safe point of embarkation, a place where a self-administered pep talk can either not be heard by anyone else or at least cannot be seen behind a closed stall door. So I wasn't in the best state to receive hotel staff at such a door, insistently and repeatedly knocking, wanting to know if I was a guest.

I'm a hardcore urinator from way back and I am not shy about turning a not-so-public restroom into a public one. I practically strut across an empty restaurant and back without buying a thing. It's probably the closest thing to a personal cause that I have, making sure proprietors feel bad for not wanting you to pee in their establishments. I was very excited to attend a meeting of People in Search of Safer Restrooms (PISSR), a group in the Bay Area trying to secure unisex restrooms for the transgender community, and even bought a shirt. I am unnaturally attached to the idea of funnels that allow women to pee easily in the woods or in an alley. I often ask my female friends why they don't acquire such a device. And I certainly have no patience for anyone banging on a stall door to interrogate its occupant. Unimpressed with his approach, and at the command of an effectively worthless amount of Spanish vocabulary and syntax, I must have given him the least satisfying answer he could've possibly hoped for. I don't even think my snide reply was in response to the right question. I'm sure he had to deal with party boys from next door all the time, and I guess I could've been more understanding, but I have no patience for anyone who messes with my precarious equilibrium.

Thus shaken, it was no surprise to me that I settled for the first guy who showed the slightest interest at the club. The place was filled with nothing but pretty boys, so that's what he was, but he just wasn't for me. This would be continuously reconfirmed over the next couple of dates.

A quick tour of the club before we leave it for a more pleasant and foliaged scene: young, sexy guys, many occasionally engaged in a choreographed dance to a popular American or Latin pop song. Just as young-- probably as close to 18 as the law of infinite fractions will allow-- employees unconvincingly addressing me as "mi amor." A second floor mezzanine with young men making out carnivorously on couches and not keeping their hands to themselves (whose ranks I joined for an unmemorable handful of minutes). A tiny bathroom where my exposed penis was very clumsily observed and noted by a man who was the exception that proved the young and sexy rule. And, finally, a woman in her 50s seated in front of the bathroom door selling gum, candy, flowers, etc. to people who have just looked at other people's penises at the urinals. Other than the enterprising woman, "it ain't nothin'," as my P.E. coach used to say, "you haven't seen before."

So now to Xochimilco, a smaller urban area just south of the city proper, where a certain young gentleman from a certain Zona Rosa bar had invited me to visit him at work, which happened to be in one of the open-air shops in the largest flower market in Mexico. It's the kind of romantic setting that really makes you wish you liked the person you're with. I was feeling screamingly unromantic, had other things on my mind. Namely, the remarkable indifference of the other vendors to my young suitor's orientation. A rainbow flag hung proudly outside his lot, and he flitted about amidst his aromatic wares-- faux-hawk, tight jeans, et al.-- like a little sprite in an enchanted garden. I had to shower when I got home for all the pixie dust. Our occasional little kisses between flower sales were met with little more than good-natured smirks.

I stayed only as long as it usually takes me to remember that I don't really like nature, but I returned on his day off so that he could treat me to a boat ride along the Lago Xochimilco. It would certainly mean sex I didn't want, but I was really keen on the boat idea, and I am more than willing to barter.

Equal parts Venice canal-way, Louisiana bayou, and Orange County "It's a Small World After All," the Lago Xochimilco is a nice enough way to spend a couple of hours. My escort knew the "gondolier," so they chatted it up while I played with the water and asked dumb questions.

When we docked again, my end of the bargain was to be fulfilled under a corrugated tin roof and above a cement floor, with a bathroom outside in a decidedly trashed courtyard, yet every available space in his rented room was adorned with the products of an elaborately groomed fag.

The liberal sprinkling of English words or phrases into Mexican daily life, as in that of many other countries, is thought rather hip by a not negligible percentage of the population, especially by those tasked with naming an expensive restaurant or a friend's new band. The "hip" to which I refer, of course, is the infirm, dislocated kind of hip. The same hip that is tattooed with Chinese characters of dubious personal significance in the States. Certainly there's a lot of English that's been borrowed for the purposes of accuracy or cultural indebtedness-- terms like "rock and roll" and "skyline"-- just as we have our fair share of italicized migrants from when someone else said it first or better. But the compulsion to uproot shreds of another language willy-nilly in order to take advantage of some distorted sense of its cultural currency, especially if that particular language's ego could use a little break, is a fetish I can't support. The Zona Rosa is only too eager a perpetrator, with such poetic triumphs as BGayBProud gracing its streets. There is, it seems to me, something doubly asinine in the use of not just English but English word play, and bad word play at that. How many people, in a city that speaks less English statistically than most other popular Mexican destinations, could appreciate "BGayBProud"? And, if anyone ever tries to decode it, who would possibly be glad they'd figured it out? (At least Pussy Bar down the road is something to strive for.)

I was thus bullying the poor Zona Rosa again while, again, walking its streets, looking to at least barter for informal Spanish lessons. Actually, I thought I was in the Roma, a part of town I'd been told might be closer to what I was looking for. I got off at the right metro stop for a particular Roma bar and walked for less than five minutes before discovering I was back where I'd started in the good old Zona Rosa. It's like the Bermuda Pink Triangle. Apparently the Roma was a lot closer to the Zona Rosa than I'd thought, and though the bar I was looking for was technically within the borders of this last bastion of culture and taste, it was, undoubtedly, only geographically so. At heart it was a Zona Rosa bar. It was at that point that I was grumbling about the idiomatic offences all around me, with more ire than was really deserved, when I was smiled at. Yes, on the street. The guide book said this might happen and, by golly, it happened. I snagged me a spicy preppy kid right there on the sidewalk. I wouldn't have to subject myself to any bar that night. I was able to achieve that rush of meeting somebody new without having to put in any work.

On our first proper date, a few days after we'd met, we joined up under the giant Mexican flag in the Zocalo, the famous public square that happened to be the halfway point between our two apartments. We couldn't agree on a place to go from there, but-- a man after my own heart-- he had to use the restroom, so I led him to the nearest place I knew wouldn't knock on his stall door, my cold and indifferent hostel. We were tired of the "Where do you want to go?" game, so we just stayed and had coffee in its cafe. It felt quite good, actually, to return here with breathing proof that I was doing all right, that they were all shamefully misguided in their low estimations of me. I began to wonder, in fact, if I hadn't brought him here on purpose, as a trophy.

It turned out that we had absolutely nothing in common, and we had nothing to say to one another. Or rather, he had too much nonsense to say to me and I had nothing to offer in return. And the worst of it was, the nonsense was in English. He spoke far too much of it for my taste. If he was going to make me listen to his subject-deficient psychological sob story for two hours, I wanted to be given something to do. A boring conversation in Spanish is like being able to secretly do a crossword puzzle under the table. (He never emailed me again after that first date. Now I know why I was subjected to so much of his jibber-jabber in one evening: he was working under a deadline).

After years in the classroom and what ended up being a very American experience in Spain, dating in Mexico City seems my best shot at really, finally learning this chingada language. I've noticed that it's a more nurturing learning environment than just going about your daily business here. Those who want to have sex with you are going to be a lot more patient with the seemingly systematic dismantling of their beloved mother-tongue than those who just want you to order something already.

Genuine friendships, of course, would rank right up there with sexual relationships as a good way to practice the language. But I am now at this strange new point in my life where friendship is harder to find than sex, and I think the reserves of patience in friendships are anyway less dependable. It's a scarier thing, too, securing friendship, because suddenly it's your personality that's important, not your body, and I effectively don't have a personality in the Spanish language. I use words like interesante and cultura and me gusta ("I like") and cosa ("thing") as if they were the names of my grandchildren, sprinkled liberally with whatever 50-centavo word I had, out of sheer synaptic luck, happened to retain from earlier in the day. The only native speaker so far who's interested in platonic conversation of such limited dimensions is my roommate, and he couldn't be more boring if he pissed algebra.

One might imagine that all the academics would exacerbate an already potent sexual insecurity, that I would tap a potential looker on the shoulder from behind to find that he has the face of Mrs. Hernandez from ninth grade, that red correction ink would rush and slosh through the corridors of my brain like pig's blood. But I've discovered that, on the contrary, I've been able to draw courage from my limitations. Language, to me, is so fundamentally linked to reality that my ineptitude has proven a sort of screen, not unlike the effect of an intoxicant. Plus, it's been a great ice breaker, a reason for folks to relent, to be kinder to me, a reason for me to be justifiably nervous.

Of course it's frustrating and mentally exhausting, but it's invigorating as well. It's a bit of a game and it makes the relationships more exciting. Boring old sex becomes a linguistic adventure. I have learned, for instance, that venir ("to come") carries the same secondary meaning as it does in English:

· I came to Larry's house = Yo víne a casa de Larry

· I came on Larry's face = Yo me víne en casa de Larry

Perhaps when I meet my soulmate I will tear my hair out trying to communicate my true self to him, but for now, with casual relationships, it's not such a tragedy if I don't catch what so-and-so's favorite food is or what he wants to do with the rest of his life. The guy from the bathroom stall (which belonged to Butterflies, by the way, a club not too far from me with shitty music but a very good drag show) uses the phrase de repente constantly and I can never remember what it means. I look it up each time to find "suddenly." How many things in his life could possibly happen "suddenly?" It fascinates me. And I don't know exactly what como ves means (it's not in my dictionary) but I know I don't like it, because everyone I've been out with so far has said it at some point in the evening and always after an awkward lull in the conversation.

On more sensitive idiomatic terrain, I still don't know how to ask a guy tactfully if he'd like to be fucked, and have on several occasions now-- God forgive me-- used the verb entrar. I assure you, to my great shame, the word has an English cognate.

It's funny, though. My sentence-structure is certainly abysmal, but I get complimented on my accent all the time. Evidently I speak like someone who, though surely isn't from Mexico, could very likely be from some Spanish-speaking country. I've been told I'm head-and-shoulders above your average foreigner who tries to speak like a native, even if I speak like a native who's just been lobotomized. This may have something to do with the fact that I was born in LA and have been around spoken Spanish the majority of my life, but I think, actually, it has more to do with the fact that I'm good at impressions. I've realized that I'm not achieving a Spanish accent, I'm doing a Spanish accent, just like I can do a mean Neil Diamond.

I've yet to find exactly what I'm looking for in Mexico City, but neither I nor the city is to blame. It's just too early. Before the big move, I worried constantly about the availability of a fulfilling gay life, one that would meet my particular wants. Now that I'm down here, I take such a life as for granted as I take my eventual ability to speak the language. It's hard not to think this way, really, just looking around. And I'm not referring only to the concentrations in certain neighborhoods. We're everywhere. At the food stands, in the offices, in the hearts of one another, and especially in the internet cafes. If there were any concern that the boys running around town just appeared to be homos, a simple click of a URL bar's site history in any given cafe, at least in the center of town, immediately dissolves all doubt. Every third one is a veritable Christmas list of gay desire. On more than one occasion have I opened a coyly titled file-folder to behold a bevy of nude beefcakes. On more than a dozen occasions have I sat next to a man chatting on some gay site.

Though the men are present and accounted for, I wish I could say the same for the ladies. There may very well be a thriving community that I haven't yet happened upon, but it certainly isn't immediately evident. The nightlife listings agree with me: a "Ladies Only" night here, a "Ladies Welcome" bone there. One listed dyke bar. Little more.

Though the sheer number of queer men in town cannot be overstated, the city's comfort with its varied sexuality can be, and I want to be careful not to give the wrong impression. In a bookstore downtown, busy with Sunday shoppers, a young man passed me several times with that special look in his eye before I asked him about the book he was about to buy. It was a biography of Baryshnikov and so I asked him the lamest possible question: "Are you a dancer?" I'd just bought a copy of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly on the street but that didn't make me a cowboy. He was a dancer, though, of some accomplishment. I know for a fact that he was good because he was on his way to make a copy of a recorded ballet he was in and the cover of the DVD case was fancy. Following him out the door to get his phone number, I told him the curious coincidence (for someone who's never even been to the ballet) that I had very briefly dated a ballet dancer a couple of years ago. The word for "ballet dancer" in Spanish requires a specification of gender, a responsibility I met, and I was shushed for it. By a ballet dancer! I was, perhaps naively, genuinely shocked. Maybe things weren't so wonderful here after all.

I asked my suitor in Xochimilco how he would characterize the city's relationship with the gay community and he was decidedly dismissive of my preoccupation. "We just had a gay pride parade here," he responded, as if its half-naked men in ostrich feathers had stamped out all homophobia with citywide knocks-on-the-door in one long night of terror. I asked him about his parents. "They love me for who I am," he said with a look that assured me it was lunatic to think otherwise. His freakish optimism was heartening, but I was hardly convinced.

I have since asked other gay men, all in their 20s, and have gotten answers more aligned with my own researched impressions and unfounded suspicions. One guy, 20 years old, gave me the same sort of answer you'd expect in many American cities: "Eh, it's homophobic but it isn't." He is out to his parents, who still love him, but we couldn't go back to his place because his teenaged sister was visiting. The guy from Butterflies, 22, gave a similar answer about the city, with rosy prospects for the future. And there is at least resounding agreement that, when I'm walking home from a bar late at night, anybody looking for trouble is going to be more concerned with what's in my wallet than what's in my memoirs.

But when I grasped for words I didn't have, and asked the same butterfly how to say "straight" in Spanish, he looked at me with confusion and answered, "normal." While the Spanish word normal can also have the connotation "standard," the look on his face did not suggest "standard." He went on to explain that we are a rarity in the city, well to the west of what is generally accepted and understood. With all due respect to a Mexico City native, born and raised, I haven't been here a full season and still I can say with confidence that I don't agree. (Besides, at the end of our "relationship" he stood me up twice, so we don't like him or his stupid opinions.) We are a fact of this city, no doubt about it. My sampling of straight Mexican residents-- that is, my roommate-- supports me on this. The opinion of this unexciting young citizen on the subject of hot man-on-man action is, happily, equally unexciting. As with apparently everything else in this world, he couldn't care less. And he certainly doesn't think we're a rarity. Perhaps it even takes an outsider's perspective to see that this place is carpeted with homos, that if all the normal people went on vacation you'd still have a hard time finding a seat on the metro.

Of course my perspective is just as skewed, having unjustly expected gay heads on pikes at the gates of the city. But I think the fact that I came from San Francisco, the gay empire, narrows the margin of error a bit. I know what a well represented city looks like. I would know if I were drowning in a sea of normal, and I'm just not.

I've been here a month and a half now and I have more of a love life than I have a command of the Spanish language. But, for better or worse, I believe it's a matter of the tortoise and the hare. My hyperactivity on the romantic front has been, obviously, the result of my terror at being hypoactive. The thing is, my attraction to sex is often not really sexual. I'm just as drawn to the hunt as anybody else, but not for release, rather to curb the feeling that the party is happening without me. The fact is I'm generally happier these days coming home with pirated pornography from Eje Central. The experience is usually better and there's no post-coyotl regret (a little canine sex-humor for all you Nahuatl speakers out there).

Now that I've proven I can be a slut just as easily in Mexico City as anywhere else, things might peter out soon. And what will I have left? Not much, really, except confidence. In myself and in the city. We'll make a pretty good team when the time is right, when I slowly move from being a tourist to someone who has finally earned his accent.

The kid on the plane-- with his eager, church-building hands-- is now safely back at home in the suburbs of LA. His work is done here and he is satisfied with what he's accomplished. He's starting school again now, and his homework assignment on what he did this summer is about that building on the perimeter of Mexico City. He might've even attached a picture, thrown in a few names of people he'd met.

I prefer him there in LA, to be honest with you. If he were still chugging away, putting up that church, he certainly wouldn't be as much of a threat to me as he was back when our lives intersected for those few hours, but I still don't like the competition. He's done building. Now I can continue in peace with my own slower work.

Jason Shamai (jasonshamai@gmail.com) is the author of The Black Crayon, to be published later this year by Cantarabooks. His erotic short story appears in this month's issue of Velvet Mafia. He lives in Mexico City and is working on his second novel.