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I heard about the gay beach the way I hear about all the good gay things: Through a lover, an ex-lover, my ex-lover’s new love. A warm mouth pressed against my ear on the dance floor, a dropped pin, an Instagram D.M. The murmurs were about a queer nude beach nestled along the coast of Oaxaca. It took a full day and a half to get there, flying first into Mexico City and then catching a shorter flight toward the Pacific.
When I landed, I got into a taxi with a few other folks heading to the beach. The driver looked at me sideways.
“Esta es tu primera vez?”
“Sí,” I replied.
“Por qué Zipolite?”
I hadn’t quite figured that part out yet, not enough to explain it. I shrugged. He shook his head and drove with his knees so he could use both hands to pantomime hordes of tourists attacking the dry countryside. Behind his miming, the windshield of the car was cracked in the shape of a tuning fork.
The other riders — a giddy couple — asked if I was meeting up with friends at the beach. Some might come for the weekend, I said, but I wasn’t sure. Surprise registered on their faces, and a few indecipherable giggles floated from the back seat. I was traveling by myself because at this moment in my life I am moving through it by myself. Unpartnered, without children, a juncture that feels temporary or, perhaps, a preview of the chapters ahead. It’s mostly a comfortable place; in the last few years, I’ve been refining the distinction between loneliness and solitude, between self-pity and being at ease — delighting, even — in my own company. Even so, their shock rattled me a bit. Maybe the beach would be packed with groups and lovers, making it hard to meet new people and fill the hours in the day.
Forty minutes or so later, the landscape grew thicker and greener, everything fattened by proximity to water. The air tasted as if it had been finished with Maldon. Bursts of color appeared. Walls of hot pink bougainvillea, white and purple trumpet flowers. As if summoned, a wedge of blue appeared. The sea. Everyone started clapping.
After throwing my bags in my room, I ran to the beach. I hadn’t looked at any photos of Zipolite before arriving and didn’t know what to expect. Pushing my way through trees and brambles, I came around a bend and caught the breathtaking vista of a wide, flat beach, dotted with mountainous outcroppings that perforated the blues of the sky and the blues of the water. I spread out my blanket and flopped down, taking it in. It was Sunday, and the vibe felt languid, luxury fed by the surplus of hours left in the day.
All around me, people were strolling hand in hand, reading books, playing volleyball, eating — completely naked. In planning my trip, I’d thought more about the queer aspect of the beach than the nude element, and I hesitated before joining in. The only times I’ve gotten naked in public, I’ve been busted, or harassed: on a rugged lake in Austin, Texas, where I felt so leered at by older men that I re-robed as quickly as I disrobed; and in the dunes of Provincetown, Mass., where a girlfriend and I tried covertly to have sex, several times, only to have a park ranger chase us away, several times, with the increasing exasperation of someone trying to clear a road of errant livestock. This was different, but I’d also arrived in Mexico with my winter body, which mere weeks before I described to a friend as loose mashed potatoes tied up in a burlap sack.
I decided to start slowly. After a few minutes, I stood up and pulled my sports bra over my head and tossed it to the sand. The flicker of heads turning toward me gave me a boost. I started jogging toward the water, gold chains bouncing on my bare chest, enjoying the attention. Along this particular stretch of coastline, the tide takes its time undulating onto the sand. Walking into the water cannot be rushed: the perfect stage for cruising. I made my way out there and dunked under the waves a few times. An earth song, a body song, as Langston Hughes wrote.
Satisfied, I sprawled on my beach towel to bake. Serotonin coursed through me, sparked by the delight at arriving in a new place, drunk on sun and sand and beauty. As my skin began to heat back up, I leaned back on my elbows and surveyed the scene.
The longer I sat there in my swimwear, surrounded by so many unencumbered people, the more I became aware of my own clad body. My entire life, clothes felt like a necessary protective layer between me and the world; on this beach, they felt like the leaden bibs you wear to get dental X-rays.
Emboldened, I decided to take the next step: full nudity. I lifted my hips up and began sliding my nylon shorts off. Almost immediately I felt the whoosh of displaced air, created by a mouth in motion near my ears. AGUA DE COCO? I froze. It felt as if my entire body yelped. The gentleman who materialized on my left, holding a machete and a coconut, simply trying to sell me a refreshing beverage, looked as alarmed as I did. He dropped to a knee to introduce himself. He offered me his hand to shake it, and I accepted it gratefully with the hand that wasn’t gripping my shorts. He told me he has a lot of respect for my people. Who were my people? Nudists, gays, Black people? I’ll never know. Heart still racing, I wrested my shorts back up and settled back onto my blanket.
In popular culture, waterways have long been the site and backdrop of queer and trans self-discovery. Chiron and Kevin on the beach in “Moonlight,” sand clenched in a hand as intimate as any act we are allowed to witness. The stream that Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar camp alongside in “Brokeback Mountain,” flowing as freely as they feel on its banks; the rough ocean forming the backdrop of Calum’s emotional turbulence in “Aftersun”; Yellow Mary — whose name bears the trace of Yemaya, the Yoruba goddess of the sea — traversing as many bodies of water as it takes to find freedom with her Trula in “Daughters of the Dust.” In “High Art,” a leaky bathtub creates a flood between floors, drawing Syd into Lucy’s upstairs artist den. For Ho Po-Wing and Lai Yiu-Fai, the lovers in “Happy Together,” the inability to reach Iguazu Falls reflects their undoing.
Chemically speaking water is a near-universal solvent; its arrangement of oxygen and hydrogen atoms allows the molecule to dissolve more substances than any other liquid found in nature. The sheer strength of water itself can disrupt another molecule’s electrostatic charges entirely. Water, then, has the power to absolutely transform, to take one material and turn it into something else. What’s queerer than that? Being made and unmade by a force greater than yourself? If queerness can be understood as a longing, a technology that allows us to glimpse something new that we sense before we can see it, a dowsing rod, a black light, then water might be the catalyst that dissolves our attachment to whatever is keeping us from it, from ourselves.
In gay watery enclaves, water also functions as a protective force: Spits of land cocooned or barricaded by water, that take hours to reach by car or ferry, are made for distance from gossip and prying eyes and sheltering from convention.
Often, the histories of these enclaves don’t start with a real-time record; rather, the record emerges because someone felt urgent or safe enough to start one. Why here seems less important than why now. Esther Newton, an anthropologist who has documented Fire Island, wrote that Cherry Grove emerged as a safe haven for white middle-class gay people to escape the moral panic of McCarthyism; Alvin Baltrop’s photographs of the Hudson River piers reflected a defiant culture of sexuality amid the anxiety and uncertainty of the 1970s and early 1980s; Audre Lorde wrote of the stability of the gay beaches in New York when the bars disappeared almost as often as they were raided.
I was going to Jacob Riis Park in Queens for years before I realized I tended to camp just a few yards east of the gay section the beach. This mirrored my entire queer experience. It was never about learning where to look, but how to look. How to identify what I needed and ask for it. There were never any signs or easily Googled guides: only maps held in minds, new ways of being passed through stories and links of relationships.
Last year, after word got around that the crumbling buildings that guarded the queer section of Riis were set for demolition and the Jacob Riis bathhouse nearby would be renovated to include a hotel, restaurants and a pool, it paralleled a broader catastrophe facing queer and trans communities right now. There were more anti-L.G.B.T.Q. laws introduced in the United States in the first quarter of 2023 than in each of the previous five years. They include bans on drag performances and gender-affirming care for anyone under age 26 and bills that push back against changing your pronouns, giving rise to a precarious, violent environment that is hostile toward expansive expressions of gender identity. The situation is made even more perilous by the threats against the remaining spaces where those expressions can fully be uninhibited.
I take comfort in something that Tourmaline, a filmmaker and friend, always reminds me of: that queerness is also about an ability to shape-shift. And that our legacies might not look like traditional inheritances. Instead, they might be a sense of self-regard, belonging, blueprints of resistance. Part of the reality of searching for queer respites is that they are fleeting, ever-evolving, a question without a resolved answer. Even Riis accreted itself into being: Tidal rolls shaped by the moon dragged rocks and bits of silt to land until the beach emerged, drawn into being by the ancient will of nature itself.
But freedom and unfreedom are sometimes knotted together tightly. A few weeks earlier, I sat in a cafe with Ignacio Rubio Carriquiriborde, a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico who has spent a lot of time researching Zipolite, as well as the impact of tourism on the coast of Oaxaca. Rubio, handsome with salt-and-pepper curly hair, drank a carajillo, espresso with a shot of liquor, while we talked. Since the 1970s, the beach town has largely been shaped by Europeans and North Americans who were first drawn there by a solar eclipse, stayed and eventually began building the first hotels and restaurants. It is a gay-dominated geography, but also a foreigner-dominated one. They encouraged the nudity, the casual attitudes, the drug use, he told me, shaping a culture also enjoyed by wealthier Mexicans but distinct from the rest of the towns around it. “It’s neither good nor bad. It is happening. It is growing exponentially.”
As of right now, Zipolite is less accessible than other popular Mexican beach destinations — than, say, the three-ring circus that has subsumed Cancún. But the government is nearing completion of a highway from the city center of Oaxaca to the coast. The new highway will supposedly cut the travel time by as much as four hours. The very act of creating the beach is also destroying what made it special in the first place.
As we parted ways, Rubio’s boyfriend walked up. I asked him if he’d ever been to the beach. He told me that he frequented it years ago, pausing as the memory of those trips seemed to flood him with pleasure. Those days are over, he told me, shaking his head: Too many white men.
On my first night in town, I fantasized about an adult do-over of all the spring breaks, club nights and beach trips of my clumsy youth, when I would stuff myself into tube dresses and red lipstick, trying to find an approximation of belonging by seeking the attention of cishet men even though deep down, that felt like an incomplete thought or unpunctuated sentence.
Zipolite is known for big, boisterous parties on the beach, announcing their presence with brightly colored laser beams that sweep across the sky and ocean, which I initially mistook for bioluminescence. And at the farthest eastern end, another kind of party: a cruisy cove called Playa del Amor, where I imagined I’d linger after sunset, losing myself in the shadows that came out at night along with the stars. I thought I might seek out a collective of lesbians I’d met who live between the jungle and the beach and regularly hosted ecstatic dance sessions, sauna nights and self-defense classes.
Instead, found myself under the strobe lights in a club, alone with a suero (a club soda with copious amounts of lime juice and a salted rim), shoulder-dancing, watching everyone else find their own rapture. Some men clambered on top of a wooden platform, slipped out of their shorts and resumed dancing naked to a wave of cheers. When I went to get a refill, I asked one of the bartenders in Spanish, “Dónde están las lesbianas y trans?” The look she gave me was filled with extreme pity, tinged with regret. “Son todos hombres,” she replied, gesturing past us toward the men crowding the sand that doubled as the dance floor.
I realized this trip would be different from what I imagined; that I’d be operating outside the erotic economies of this particular beach. I ended up back at the edge of the sea, watching it curl over itself, seeming to lick its own lips in satisfaction. Maybe those lips, on me, would be enough. I spent years of my life thinking that the best version of myself only emerged when I released it with substances like alcohol or psychedelics, or when I was in a relationship, or when I wore new, brand-name clothing or had a fresh undercut. I thought packaging myself perfectly would reveal my truest self; of course, the opposite was the case.
As a child, I went through a period where I only went into the pool or ocean in an oversize T-shirt. I perceived my preteen body as chubby and therefore ugly and unacceptable, deserving to be hidden. That the cotton became transparent, clingy, redundant in water did not matter to me. It was a mental shield between me and the world, a negotiation between what I wanted — the sublime pleasure of buoyancy — and what I feared: ridicule and judgment. It has been a long time since I was that age, when I was imprinted by the culture with the notion that my core being was inherently flawed. Since then, I’ve spent countless hours trying to root out that toxic idea, to monitor the soil for any errant offshoots left behind. But all of my former selves are telescoped inside of me, ready to be activated at any moment, sleeper cells of past trauma and repressed emotions.
My most favorite magic trick in the presence of shame, vulnerability and discomfort is to disappear myself, entirely. I can flip a cognitive switch that ejects my mind from my body with complete and total efficiency. But you can’t dissociate in the sea. Not without risking your life. The first lesson the ocean taught me is to never turn my back on it unless I wanted to chance embarrassment, injury or worse. It was especially important in Zipolite, which is said to mean “beach of the dead” in a lost Indigenous language. Some say it got its name because people offered bodies to the sea there; others say it is because of the number of deaths that occurred in the forceful currents.
All the scholars I admire who study the sociocultural and political importance of blue spaces say, in one way or another, that water has perfect memory. I have always been of the water. An oracle once looked me dead in the face and told me I crawled here from the ocean floor. Her metaphor is chilling. I don’t know who in my lineage came from the water, but in a way, they all did. Another spirit worker told me I was a child of Oshun, goddess of sweet water, and to make offerings to each body of water I visited.
One afternoon, watching the waves break along the sand, moving according to their own mysterious math, I realized something else the water could teach me: how to trust my own inner logic. Or, how to find acceptance of my body, and by extension my life at this moment, trusting that it is propelled by an energy that makes sense, even if I can’t always grasp it.
Because for all the things the trip wasn’t turning out to be — a raucous rager, a wild adventure with steamy pools and lesbians in the jungle — I realized that the anonymity and relative safety of the beach could be a place to practice setting down that shame, to see what it felt like for a few moments, if I could leave it behind entirely.
The next morning, which happened to be Valentine’s Day, I woke up and posted all the requisite things: self-love affirmations, Angela Bassett and the flaming car from “Waiting to Exhale,” an exuberant Britney Spears in a shirt that cheered DUMP HIM, which she wore after her breakup with Justin Timberlake. I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror in the bedroom, lying in a perfect patch of sun, birds trilling outside, trees swollen with fruit visible through the windows. Yet here I was, tapping out independence mantras onto a screen, hundreds of miles away from any of the people I believed I was supporting, rather than living them myself. I gathered myself and walked down to the beach. In the early morning light, the water gleamed silver, punctuated by some ecstatic dogs and a few fishermen casting nets.
When I got down to the beach, I walked purposefully toward a pile of rocks. Quickly, before my brain could organize any thoughts into legible protest, I pulled off my top and shorts and hung them on a boulder. I waded into the water, gasping at the coolness as it met my thighs and then flowed between them. A wave came, and I dove under it. In an instant, all thoughts became feelings, a rush of delicious inputs normally blunted by elastane and polyester.
In “An Immense World,” the science journalist Ed Yong details the sensory experiences of other animals. Catfish, he reports, have taste buds all over their bodies, including their whiskers. If you were to lick one, he observes, you’d simultaneously taste each other. Swimming nude in broad daylight felt like that, hundreds of mouths, all over, all at once, taking in these external stimuli and translating them into pleasure, joy and what in that moment felt like total, uncut freedom. In those first few seconds, the full-frontal presence that the ocean demands released me into blissful embodiment.
The queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz defined “straight time” as a mind-set obsessed with productivity and reproduction. “There is no future but the here and now of our everyday life,” he lamented in “Cruising Utopia.” Straight time is not limited to straight people. Rather, it reflects a society that tries to herd all people toward notions of productivity organized around traditional work and family structures, shaming those who opt out with higher costs of living and lower cultural worth. Straight time doesn’t value falling asleep in the sun, the floaty euphoria of bobbing in the water near strangers long enough to catch eyes and strike up a conversation.
Queer time is a sensate way of life, the kind treasured by people who perhaps understand with crackling urgency how circumstances can change in a moment, and the importance of pleasures that even in small doses can sustain you for weeks, months, years after the moment has passed. Alternating between land and sea becomes its own sundial, a rare escape from straight time, which is perhaps why I seek it out so often. I took another dip. I released the leash of time — but not myself — as I dropped to my knees in the sand and allowed myself to be drenched by the waves.
At this hour, the ocean glittered. That’s the official, scientific name for it: ocean glitter. Specular reflection is caused by rippling waves scattering the sun in a vast geometry, creating the little glints that turn the majesty of the sea into a crystal-embellished piece of bodywear. I came out of the water dressed only in a suit of a thousand tiny suns, every pore on my body lapping up drops of water and swallowing, exuberance radiating off my entire being.
Here, the ubiquity of nudity mellowed into mundanity, like watering the lawn or paying an electric bill. This total immersion of my body into water, repeatedly, without fear, allowed for a total surrender of the illusion of separation between self and the natural world, the universe, whatever you want to call it. If you don’t believe in god, say ocean. Diving nude into the ocean in broad daylight, without fear of reproach, opened a portal to a higher consciousness. Ordinary, and then extraordinary. To be near the sea is to be humbled by its magnitude, to watch your priorities be reordered to its scale. What are self-consciousness, fear of the future, existential worries, to the ocean?
Maybe this was the offering the spirit worker had referred to: the complete and total submission to this experience. Each time I allowed myself to be enveloped, something is remembered for me: a place, a feeling, a fluency. I can’t always name it, but it’s too powerful to deny. It’s almost as if the parts of myself that have gone missing are recollected in water. I retrieve them, accreting myself back into myself. If ocean were a verb, it would mean to open, to release, to gather, to find. To know, to forget, to remember.
Dumebi Malaika Menakaya is a Nigerian-American film and digital photographer. Her work focuses on human connection, identity and self-discovery.
https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiUWh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lm55dGltZXMuY29tLzIwMjMvMDMvMjIvbWFnYXppbmUvcGxheWEtemlwb2xpdGUtbnVkZS1iZWFjaC1tZXhpY28uaHRtbNIBVWh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lm55dGltZXMuY29tLzIwMjMvMDMvMjIvbWFnYXppbmUvcGxheWEtemlwb2xpdGUtbnVkZS1iZWFjaC1tZXhpY28uYW1wLmh0bWw?oc=5
2023-03-22 09:00:29Z
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