The Clit Party is back again, with DJ May Crown spinning playful and sexy techno for the ladies to dance to this Thursday in the Condesa.

The party offers itself as an alternative to Lipstick, but caters to a similar crowd: twenty and thirty-somethings, middle class, femme-of-center. Being in the Condesa, however, expect a slightly more hipster vibe than at Lipstick. I’m sure electronic music aficionados can identify with much greater accuracy the sub-genres of techno that May Crown spins, but I’ll just describe it as pure ponchis-ponchis, the onomatopoeic descriptor used frequently in Mexico to describe any electronic dance beat.

Perhaps the best way to capture the feel of this scene is to leave you with the following footage from a recent Clit Party that the promoters published on youtube:

Clit Party: Electro Pop Love; Thursday, January 21st, 9pm; Nuevo Leon 67, Colonia Condesa

No joke. Ladies get 40% off everything on the menu twice a week.

Almost three years ago, on my second night in Mexico City, I was invited by a fabulous group of machas to attend one of their birthday parties at “Lesbian Sushi.” I had some reservations about the name of this event, recalling an exceedingly awkward “queer sushi” event I attended at Barnard College, at which uncomfortable first-year GLBT students tried to roll their own vegetarian maki and flirt with each other. (We were equally unsuccessful at both.)

But here I had no reason to cringe; lesbian sushi was no formal event. Rather, the “ladies’ night” discount at a sushi restaurant in the Condesa, which kicks 40% off the bill for women on Mondays and Thursdays (that’s right, 40% off the bill) had attracted dykes looking for discounts, as ladies’ nights often do. What better place to invite friends for dinner than a restaurant where you only have to pay slightly more than half off the bill?

Two years later, “lesbian sushi” at the Musuko sushi restaurant is still going strong, though, to be fair, you are just as likely to see groups of Sex and the City-inspired straight girlfriends or fresa mother/daughter pairs gossiping over their tempura as you are to see machas. Still, this is a great place to plan a first date or a dinner outing for a group of queer gals.

tempura mixto

For those that have never had sushi in Mexico, it is a very different experience than eating sushi in the United States (which, I suspect, is also very different than eating sushi in Japan). Be warned, almost all of the maki rolls on the menu at Musuko list cream cheese (queso) as one of the ingredients. Although at first I was fairly adamant about ordering my rolls sin queso–I just couldn’t seem to get over the idea that cream cheese should be eaten with a bagel, plus, it makes each roll a considerably heavier dish–I’ve since warmed up to it, at least on certain rolls.

My favorites on the menu now tend to be the rollos that are least like what I would find on menus in the United States. For example, the Inari roll comes breaded and friend, tempura style, the cream cheese deliciously melted along with the fish. (I never thought I’d admit to liking that particular combination.) The Taigarai roll is both delicious and visually interesting, with each piece topped with a dollop of spicy crab salad and a miniature slice of lime. For a bit of tropical fusion, the Plátano Rollo comes with friend banana slices wrapped around the inside and kampyo (Japanase pickle) on the inside. For more traditional fare, I enjoy the Futomaki A, which is one of the few rollos that are offered without cream cheese. All the rollos range between 60 and 90 pesos, but that’s before the discount!

a macha enjoying her postre

Other items worth noting include the savory sopa de hongos (mushroom soup), the tempura mixto (95 pesos), which is large and good for sharing, and the kushiage salmón (25 pesos), a sort of deconstructed and deep fried bagel-free cream cheese and lox combination. I’ve never actually tried this, but I know several machas who swear by it. The large menu also offers a range of appetizers, ramen noodle soups, as well as rich, french-style desserts.

Be warned, service can be a little slow, especially on Thursdays when the place tends to be more crowded. Although Musuko is a chain, the location in the Condesa is the only one that offers this particular discounts to women on Mondays and Thursdays. (The same discount is offered to men on Fridays.) As a great seeker of discounts, I can’t stress how nice it is to receive the check after lesbian sushi, since it shows your original total, the amount you saved, and your new, reduced bill.

Musuko (El hijo del sol naciente); Nuevo León 160, on the corner of Campeche, Colonia Condesa; Tel. 5553-1443; Open Mon-Sat from 1pm until 11:30, Sun until 11

One of my favorite lesbian venues in Mexico City, Cabaretito VIP, has reopened after a long closure, bring back their lesbian night on Thursdays for us machas. Cabaretito VIP holds a special place in my heart; it was the location of the first dyke party I went to in Mexico City and was the home of Second Annual Festival Lesbico in November of 2006, my first broad exposure to the growing DF lesbian culture.

Caberetito VIP was closed for over a year, one of the many clubs in Tito Vasconcelos’ “Cabaretito” chain to end up with a CLAUSURADO sticker posted across the door. Walking down Londres, in the heart of the Zona Rosa, it was sad to walk by the gated patio in front of the club, the hedges the ran from the street to the club dry and dead from neglect. In the walk-way, which two years before was filled with festival-goers and tables from local GLBT organizations, was dark and littered with garbage thrown in from the street. With such contrasting memories of the place, I’m pleased to report that VIP has reopened. My sources tell me there have been parties there since mid-March.

The crowd at “Jueves Lesbico” at VIP is one of the few placed in Mexico City where I’ve seen a more visible butch/femme culture, although it certainly doesn’t dominate the space, which hosts a mix of women of all gender expressions. There are passing-butches, their go-go dancing high femme girlfriends, and plenty of young women with jeans, ponytails, and baseball caps. The crowd is generally younger and more middle/working-class than the ladies at Lipstick, with a little less snobbery and a few more bar fights too. Watch out if you dance with someone’s girlfriend by accident; these machas don’t fuck around!

Cover is free and the space reflects a low-cost decor. The music is a mix of faggy house music, remixed English and Spanish pop hits, and occasional grupero songs sprinkled in. Beers are cheap, but other drinks are small and disproportionately expensive. Expect a crowded dance floor on a good night, lots of young tipsy women, and no toilet paper in the bathroom. I recommend Caberetito VIP as a low-pressure place to go people watching or dancing with a group of friends.

Tonight, promoter Martha Cuevas has brought in aerial dancer Draco Art and is billing the event as a circus themed night. I saw this female aerial dancer perform at the Festival Lesbico and recommend checking her out as she flips and spins suspended above a crowd of spellbound machas.

Cabaretito VIP; Londres 104, Zona Rosa, Insurgentes Metro and Metrobus station. No cover.

Anahí and I have been remiss in not publicizing this weekly event sooner. We went to the opening night the first Thursday after the pride march, and there are only two more Thursdays in July to check out this free party. But, based on the scene we saw on the night we went two weeks ago, it is well worth showing up. The Marrakech seems to be the hip young gay bar right now, thanks, in part, to events like this.

Kumbia Knights is the combined efforts of three movers and shakers in DF’s queer nightlife scene, DJ Guagüis, lead singer of both the iconic Mexico City queer punk band Las Ultrasonicas and the all-female queer neo-Kumbia band the Kumbia Queers, Sonido Islandia, one of the founders of the Meras Efímeras dyke social events collective and current Burlesquímera, and Pollymiller, a dynamic duo of fags specializing in tropical and live electronic music. These four take turns spinning neo-Kumbia (in the metaphorical sense, since all the music they import is stored electronically), which keeps the crowd of mostly young, hipster queers on their feet, dancing and having fun.

Cumbia is a style of latin music that originated in Colombia but developed popularity in other countries like Mexico, where it developed its own unique sound. It is slower than salsa, more tropical than ranchero, and is unintimidating to dance to due to its relaxed pace. The songs played at the Marrakech are mostly not the oldies from the golden age of cumbia, but are newer creations, with electronic keyboards clearly heard on most of the tracks.

Islandia and Guagüis, good friends of ours, know how to throw a party. When DJ Guagüis wasn’t playing music, she was winding her way through the crowd, striking a güiro in time with whatever song was on. Islandia was in prime form as well, adding a touch of glamour to the intentionally (dare I say self-consciously) casual hipster crowd with a fabulous outfit composed of clashing leopard print patterns.

The crowd was a mix of queers and queer-friendly bugas, and I was suprised by how many dykes there were in this predominantly gay male bar. Everyone seemed to be between 20 and 35 (a very different scene from the Oasis, another gay bar, down the street), but instead of the too-cool-for-school attitude one expects from the hipsters of, say, Williamsburg in New York City, these kids were dancing their asses off, laughing and having a blast.

Check out this party if you are in Mexico City this July. Who knows, maybe the bar will extend the party further into the summer months…

Marrakech Salón, República de Cuba no. 18, (a block from Eje Central), Col. Centro. No cover.

The trick to ladies’ night at Lipstick is arriving between ten and eleven pm, during which women don’t have to pay the obscene $100 cover. Visitors should be sure to bring ID and leave enough time to wait in the long line that often stretches down the street while the not-so-friendly staff processes the patrons filing in before the clock strikes eleven.

My friends had told me that Lipstick was the party where the most “beautiful” (read: femme) lesbians and bisexual women–including closeted celebrities from Televisa–go to rendezvous, so I set off for the Zona Rosa hoping to encounter a scene reminiscent of the glamorous, imaginary bars patronized by the characters on The L Word. Not necessarily my kind of place, but definitely worth seeing.

The space itself was quite elegant, with a well dressed, if unnecessarily curt, staff. From the grand entrance on the ground floor, you climb through two stories worth of sultrily lit salons, cool almost to the point of sterility. The seating in any of these antechambers is reserved for those ordering alcohol from the waiters, so be prepared to spend some money if you want to perch on one of the low sofas. Beers are $35 and well drinks were around $50 or $60.

The best part about the space is the longest wall of the main dance floor, which is all windows. This allows you to stand at the sidelines of the dance floor without feeling like a wall flower. Instead, if you want to sit one out, you are not hovering on the margins of the party, but rather straddling the distinct energies you feel from the party in front of you and the lively Zona Rosa foot-traffic on Amberes two stories below.

Unfortunately, this view and the sort of presentness in the city that it might inspire is overshadowed by the large video screen that dominates the far wall of the dance floor. Each pop song that plays is accompanied by its music video (or a visually remixed version) looming above the crowd. At first I found this charming, something to look at while the place was filling up, but eventually I came to realize that, for me at least, these screens were too easy to stare at. I imagine for a lot of women it’s more comfortable to stare at Rhianna gyrating to “Umbrella” (which played twice in as many hours) than it is to make eyes at another woman.

The L Word it was not, but there was something decidedly “Southern California” about what I found upstairs that Thursday at Lipstick. First off, excluding the male bouncers and one half of the couple I was there with, everyone in the place had long hair, a phenomenon I had only otherwise experienced at Club Bombay in San Diego circa 1999. The dominant look among the ladies present was jeans and ponytails; it reminded me of the crowd at The Cafe in San Francisco or Henrietta Hudson’s in New York, minus the ubiquitous baseball caps. This was not a working class scene, nor was there the ironic mimicry of working class aesthetics (trucker hats, anyone?) that you might find at a hipster venue in the Condessa. The women I saw at Lipstick sent out a vibe that was decidedly, almost defensively, middle-class, and most appeared able to pass as straight if they needed or chose to in their lives outside Lipstick.

The other thing that struck me about the scene at Lipstick was how decidedly unfriendly it seemed. I was very grateful to have gone with a date and a small group of friends, and I imagined that this would be a difficult bar to go to as a single woman, hoping to meet someone friendly. The music was too loud for much talking to take place, and there was the constant distraction of the video screens as a convenient way of avoiding eye-contact.

Lipstick was getting quite crowded by the time we arrived, and people were drinking and dancing modestly in little pockets. Unfortunately, the patch of floor that my friends and I had claimed for ourselves was so sticky that it was actually interfering with our dancing. We crowded our way onto an elevated portion of the dance floor, just as the music was starting to break from the incessant pop into a more eclectic mix, including an oldies medley and a medley of songs from Grease (still very little latin music). The floor was lit up from below, which delighted me, and at around 1am, perhaps at this greater distance from the siren call of the video screen, I really started to enjoy myself. Maybe it was because people were a little bit drunker at this hour, but I felt like more of my attempts at friendly, non-lascivious smiles were getting returned.

Even still, I remember one woman at the edge of the dance floor who appeared to be there by herself. She seemed simultaneously intrigued and intimidated by the crowd, and I wish the scene had been a little warmer, so that she could have felt comfortable enough to talk or even dance with someone. As it was, the patrons of Lipstick more of less remained as cool and aloof as the lighting and decor might have promised, albeit without the ultra-chicness one might expect to accompany such an attitude.

If you like dancing to pop music and won’t be bothered by the absence of butch eye-candy, Lipstick could be a fun place to go dancing with a group of friends, or for the brave soltera contented to watch Rhianna or the action on the dance floor from the sidelines. Kudos to those who actually meet girls here.