Porno Mexicano
THE MEN BEHIND MEXICAN PORN COMPANY MECOS HAVE BEEN IN BUSINESS SINCE THEY WERE 14
Like many places in the world, most gay porn available in Mexico is imported from the US. There is only one local company that produces gay porn: Mecos Films. A good friend of mine had told me about them because they use a lot of very Mexican-specific clichés in their movies, like wrestling, mariachi, corruption, and Aztec folklore. So during a recent trip to Mexico City I watched some of Mecos’ films from my friend’s collection and was totally fascinated. I wanted to know more about them and emailed them under their online open talent call (I knew they had a pussy role in one of their movies, so maybe they’d even be interested in casting me?). They almost immediately wrote back and we set up an interview for the next day.
I arrived a little early and was surprised to find that the address was a fancy townhouse in one of the more expensive parts of the city. Gerardo Delgado, Mecos’ founder, greeted me warmly at the door. After walking past many rooms, all with computers in each of them and red carpet everywhere, I was told to sit in a waiting room downstairs and asked to be discrete about the reason I was there. Apparently there were very important clients upstairs who were unaware of the fact that these were also the offices of a porn company. As I waited a white Labrador came up to me and started dry-humping everything in sight: the edge of the couch, a pillow, the table, my leg. This dog was horny! It eventually started raping my toes when, after what seemed like an eternity, Gerardo finally came out of the meeting room. The interview could begin.
Yasmine: What’s going on with this dog?
Gerardo: Oh, that’s Hector, the official Mecos dog. He hangs out here all day, which is why he sometimes gets a little over-sexed.
When did you start Mecos?
Three years ago. At the time I was a chef at a very successful restaurant in La Condesa, a kind of upscale area of Mexico City. It was my first experience in a restaurant but after a year and a half I was just tired of making the same food over and over again. And everything had to always be super fast. It was too intense, so I said, ‘No more for me.’ I was a bit depressed, because I didn’t know what to do next. And during one night of complete drunkenness, a very good friend asked me ‘What would you like to do most?’ and I was like, ‘Porn. Making porn is my biggest dream of all time.’ Actually, my first business ever was porn — at 14!
What?
Well, a friend of mine and I, we bought a straight Super 8 porn movie in Tepito, the black market in Mexico City. We invited all of our friends and neighbors over and made them pay to see it. We were making a lot of money until one of the mothers found out. She just showed up one day and caught us, so we had to stop. But still, it was my first business. My friend knew about all this, so he said ‘Just do it! I’ll help you set up a porn company!’ So I started to gather all my friends and we put the money and talent together and we immediately started working.
Was it your idea to do Mexican porn with all the clichés of Mexican culture?
Yeah. I wanted everything in it: Luchadores, mariachis, the works!
How did you come up with the name?
Mecos means ‘cum’ in Spanish…I liked that.
And what was the first movie?
La Putiza. It was a very big movie for a first production, so I said from the start, ‘I don’t have the talent or the knowledge to make something like that.’ So we hired a screenwriter and I was the producer and the assistant director instead. The director was yet another friend. So we were seven friends doing porn in six days. It was incredible!
Could you give me a brief synopsis of La Putiza?
It’s about a very bad young wrestler who loses match after match. After the last one he lost he gets very depressed. While he is taking a shower a mysterious woman appears and tells him that her master wants to see him. ‘Don’t ask anything, just follow me,’ she says. They arrive in a labyrinthine mansion to see the master, who is wearing a mask that belongs to the great sexual wrestler called Aztec Dick. The mask has special powers but only if worn by someone with a good heart, like the young wrestler. The master wants to use the mask’s powers, but he can’t because he is the bad guy. So tells the wrestler, ‘If you want this mask you have to pass all these tests.’
Oooh, what kind of tests?
Basically he has to pass the test by fucking all these guys: the luchadores, the slaves, the mariachis….Have you ever heard of El Santo? He was a very famous Mexican wrestler in the ’60s. His movies were totally kitsch and crazy, like Santo Against the Vampire Women, or something. They were our main inspiration for La Putiza.
So La Putiza was a success?
Yes! It won two prices at the Barcelona Gay Film Festival. We won Best Screenplay and Best Gay Movie 2004. The only other ones were Bel Ami and Falcon, basically the biggest companies in the world. And we got two awards!
And how was the response in Mexico?
Oh, people loved it! People are used to hearing porn in English, or French or Hungarian or Czechoslovakian, you know, but it’s always more exciting to see porn in your own language, with your own slang. Even porn from Spain is not the same because the slang is different from how Mexicans speak. And the majority of the Latino porn from the US has an American flavor to it. What we do at Mecos is one hundred percent Mexican.
Is that why you made Selección Mexicana, which is an all-Mexican casting session?
Well, after La Putiza the question for us was, ‘How can we start the industry in a country like Mexico that is completely new to porn?’ So we decided to do a big casting, just guys fucking, with no costumes, no policemen, no wrestling, nothing. And none of the guys were porn actors. We had one pianist, one architect, one painter, another one had a rock band. Very cool guys, smart guys, you know? I’d start to interview them about sex, about their first time and everything and then I’d say, ‘Let’s start to fuck!’ You can actually hear my voice in the background, giving instructions, kind of playing the master. Sometimes the cameraman would get hard and one of the models would say ‘Wow, you’re hard! Can I suck your dick?’ So the cameraman continued filming while getting sucked. It was all very spontaneous and people loved that — it was like a reality show. The name Selección Mexicana is also a play on words, because it’s also the name of the national soccer team in Mexico.
I love the story with the cameraman. Do you have any other anecdotes?
I think the one story we’ll always remember was that guy who told us his that first time was when he was eleven years old, and the second time was with his uncle, his father’s brother, at 14. It’s in Selección Mexicana 3.
Wow! Where did you film all this?
Selección Mexicana 1, 2 and 3 were filmed here in this studio…
Oh, I actually recognize this red couch I am sitting on.
…and for La Putiza and La Verganza, we filmed in different locations, even outside, in the street. You don’t really need a permit to do that here, only if you stop the traffic or if you are using the sidewalk with a lot of cameras. But we are always very discrete and only use two cameras.
So what else is going in this building? You seemed to want me to keep the porn thing a bit hush-hush earlier.
Well, it’s because I started another company this year, together with a friend of mine, who is a theater producer. We are working on a high school theater play sponsored by the Minister of Education in Mexico. And they don’t know that we also do porn…
Is the play about sexual education?
No, no, no. It doesn’t have anything to do with sex. It’s just a great play. There used to be a lot of amazing theaters in Mexico, but people have been going less and less in the past twenty years. So this is supposed to encourage students to go to the theater again. I love the theater, I even studied it.
You wear many different hats!
Yes, I was also an actor at some point. And I still sometimes do catering, too, but mostly for friends.
You know, this is my first time in Mexico and I’m really surprised. I thought this country was very Catholic and conservative, but it’s actually one of the most sexually depraved places I have ever been to. Sex seems to be much more free here.
(Laughs) I think we have two faces. One is very Catholic and another one is very perverse, nasty, sexual, funny.
For example I just discovered the last car of each subway line here in Mexico City is a total cruising spot. When I went the other day there were like 50 guys all in one car, touching each other, cruising, making out.
Yeah. People even make videos of it with their cell phones and put them on X-Tube. It’s a big thing now. But it’s more oral sex, not so much anal.
Is that going to end up in one of your next films?
Well, right now we’re working on a movie called Corrupción Mexicana. As the name says, it’s all about corruption. There are four episodes, and the first one is with two guys in a car driving all around Mexico City. At first you see the guy alone in his car and then the sunroof opens and you understand the guy is not alone, he’s actually getting a blowjob. Then they buy marijuana from a drug dealer but a policeman sees them. The cop starts searching them, but he doesn’t find anything. But then he realizes that the car’s license is expired, so he’s like, ‘Hmmm, you have to come with me and I’m gonna give you a ticket.’ So the guy is like ‘No, no, no, policeman pleeeease! Come on, it’s not a big deal.’ But the policeman insists. So the guy offers him 70 pesos, but the policeman is like, ‘No, no, no. It’s not enough. You have to give me more much more. Suck this dick!’ So he starts sucking the cop in the street. Once the cop comes he leaves the two guys alone and they start smoking pot and the whole thing ends in a big stoner fuck scene. The second episode is about a kidnapping.
Oh shit!
Yeah. The son of a corrupted politician is being kidnapped. The kidnappers call the father and start to blackmail him, ‘We know you did this and that, we know you gave money to this union rather than to that one because so and so, we know with which money you paid your house in Cancún. If you want to see your son, you have to give us x amount of money.’ And then they start raping the son, and the father hears it all over the phone.
Does it turn him on?
Yeah. Not in an obvious way, but you can guess from the expression on his face that he is turned on by the whole situation.
So where can we buy these movies?
Here in our studio, in Erotica Sex Shops, which is a chain in Mexico…or on our website. We also have a distributor in the US and in Japan, but not in Europe. We actually couldn’t find a distributor in the US for the first two movies because there is a law that you can’t have a rape scene with a mask, which is why both La Putiza and its follow-up, La Verganza, were considered illegal for that reason.
Isn’t it kind of twisted that the government would have even thought about a law like that?
Well, porn is a huge industry in the US so there are a lot of laws. But we didn’t really care because both movies were a big, big success in Japan. Lucha libre is a big thing in Japan. They love it for some reason.
And what about Europe?
I don’t know, I approached several different distributors in Europe, but they all wanted bareback porn so we couldn’t sell it. We actually only have two bareback scenes in Selección Mexicana but they were boyfriends.
And what about Tepito market? Can you find them there?
Yes, our movies are definitely available on the black market.
Well, that’s better than any distributor in the world!