on Thursday, August 18-some 561 city officials, including several hundred armed police officers, turned up on República de Cuba, entered six area bars, including Oasis and Viena, slammed down their metal curtains and stamped them with big white seals that read Suspension of Activities. On an ordinary weekend night, the bars of Cuba and Garibaldi are, as a drag queen called Madonna told me, un licuado-“a smoothie”-a heterogeneous blend of ingredients whipped to a sweet, frothy frenzy.Ī few days later-at 8 p.m. For a century, the hemisphere’s largest city has been a magnet for political dissidents and exiles (Leon Trotsky and Roberto Bolaño both lived here), for refugees and asylum seekers and for queer people from across the country and region looking for liberation and opportunity. The queer worlds of Mexico City are impressive in their diversity, but the bars on Cuba and Garibaldi are singular in their openness, not just to city kids, but to rancheros in town for an anonymous weekend, and older men enjoying freedoms they never thought possible.Īs some of the oldest queer spaces in the city, the bars on República de Cuba are also an important part of Mexico City’s (mostly well-deserved) reputation for progressivism in a conservative region. “Now, even just in the normal shops you find people in the back chupando,” says Marcos Belloso, who runs Oasis along with his two brothers, using a colloquialism for ‘imbibing’ that translates literally as ‘sucking.’ “I mean drinking,” he adds, then chuckles and shrugs: “And sometimes the other thing.”Įlsewhere in Mexico City, there are pop-up parties like Traición, Mami Slut and Gomora, patronized by a mixed crowd of the young, cool and artsy there’s Club Roshell, favored by the trans community there’s Punto Gozadera, a lesbian-feminist coffee shop and event space at the southern end of the Centro. Starting around 3 a.m., they head toward after-hours spots like Teatro Garibaldi on the nearby plaza and, my favorite, a place called La Malagueña, set in a soaring 17th-century cloister behind a boot-and-hat shop-a place favored by genuine provincial cowboys and the city guys who dress like them.Īnd those are just the official bars. They wander under the harsh fluorescent glare of streetlights, through banks of smoke rising off taco stands, and duck into dingy cubby-holes like Citrus and upstairs dives like Wowiez. Later, as the night wears on, they pour onto the street and around the corner onto the Eje Central, one of the city’s busiest avenues.
Paunchy bureaucrats and middle-aged office workers push through the swinging cantina doors at 60-year-old Bar Viena, while next door, at Oasis, the block’s other decades-old standard-bearer, nattily dressed gentlemen and weekenders from the campo and the occasional posh kid from the city’s richer quarters dance salsa and cumbia with envy-inducing grace.
Twenty-somethings of every gender line up around the block outside El Marrakech and La Purísima, a pair of nightclubs that face each other across the narrow, construction-chewed street like Scylla and Charybdis (if Scylla and Charybdis were really good at voguing). At midnight on a recent Saturday-any Saturday, really-Avenida República de Cuba, near the sketchy northern edge of Mexico City’s Centro Historico, practically seethes with people.