Tracey Parker is a hookup aficionado around Mexico City and Greater Mexico; after sharing with Squirt.org members the steamy bathhouse potential of Baños Finisterre, a local sauna popular with gay and bisexual men in Mexico City; now Tracey takes us to Club-Sauna Spartacus, another popular bathhouse located in the beach community of Puerto Vallarta, more than 500 miles from Mexico City.

I walked into Sauna Spartacus around 4:30 in the afternoon. I paid the $300 MX cover with my credit card and happily paid the 15% markup in exchange for not using cash. Cash is hard to come by in Mexico, so many businesses are only cash. It’s an impossible situation that I still don’t 100% understand. With cash in hand and liberation in my soul, my afternoon visit to Spartacus was just starting, and I couldn’t wait.

Where is Spartacus Sauna?

Spartacus Sauna is a well-known Puerto Vallarta bathhouse in PV’s gay-friendly Zona Romantica area, steps away from Mr. Flamingo or the trendy Industry nightclub. The location makes it a perfect spot to go from the nightlife of PV to the sex and sleaze of a bathhouse visit after a good bar crawl. 

Puerto Vallarta is a major Mexican beach tourism destination which caters to foreign gay tourists. As much as they try to accommodate us, there are still a lot of cultural lessons you need to learn to function in another country; this applies to sex just as much as it does to foreign currency, language, and every other aspect of a culture. 

Sauna Spartacus is a gay bathhouse that I feel combines the sex culture of Mexico City and the customer service of the United States, creating an ideal environment to host an international gay clientele and foster an unforgettable experience for all. 

As I entered and paid with my credit card, the attendant returned my card and provided me with a soft towel and a complementary pair of sandals. I walked straight back to the locker room. It was dark and spotlessly clean, only sometimes a feature you see in a busy bathhouse or many bathhouses. While some saunas cater to the sleaze and filth that one may seek with a sexual escapade by barely taking a mop to the floor, Spartacus is a clean facility, something I prefer. I hurriedly changed my clothes out of anticipation of what lay ahead of me. 

As I was leaving the locker room and beginning my first lap around the entire place, a loud noise hit me from behind like a bullhorn. 

“Hi, American,” a campy voice shouted from the shower. 

Seriously, this is how you’re going to greet me? I thought. But as coy as I played the situation, the truth was that I was thrilled to see another queen from my country. Going abroad brings many advantages, and one underrated one is the ability to become friends with people you would never have talked to back home. One thing many people say about Puerto Vallarta is you’ll run into many people you know or could know in your home country but get a chance to speak to in the liberated realm of sand, sun and sex that PV can provide.

I hung up my towel and joined him in the showers. I learned that it was both of our first times in Puerto Vallarta. I told him I had been living in Mexico City for a few years, and he looked back at me, terrified, as if I had told him I was currently living in a warzone. I get this reaction from time to time. Mexico City is a major city that comes with pollution, traffic, the stigma of crime, and the danger of any metropolis. Compared to the laid-back, built-for-tourist “vibes” of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico City can be intimidating. I also learned his name: Bill.

After our showers, we moved on to a large, empty, and deliciously warm jacuzzi. The place began filling up, and men began to parade past us. Some dried off in plain view, and others let the water drip off their brown bodies as they passed us. 

“Nobody is going to look at me if I keep hanging out with a young guy like you,” Bill complained. 

“Are you talking about that guy who just passed us?”

“Yes,” he said, “he couldn’t take his eyes off you.”

“He wasn’t looking at me,” I responded, “he was looking at you.”

Bill dismissed me in a camp, know-it-all all manner that gays seem to adopt when we’re, like, 20 years old. 

It suddenly occurred to me that Bill had no idea what would happen. The Mexican guys were about to devour him. I began to tell him how many times Mexican men had ignored me, only for me to see them later with someone much older than me. 

I didn’t want to ruin his surprise, so I told him, 

“You’re in a different world. The rules you learned in the United States do not apply here. Our money, our language, and most relevant in this situation, our rules that we have taught each other about sex and who gets to have it, don’t apply here.”

Continuing Into Spartacus

It turned out that we were both right. The previous guy had been looking at me as I ran into him again, alone, and it became pretty clear that the “eye-fuck” look given before was indeed for me. 

I followed him into the wet sauna; Spartacus breaks their sauna into many individual benches, perfectly suited for sitting down with your legs spread open. As you watch the various men across from you in the sauna, with your legs wide open, towel pulled loose, you can watch your penis grow in anticipation as the next person who enters can see you and your hot cock and what you plan to do with them.

I followed this ritual with my new acquaintance; soon, he knew what I wanted. I started to suck him off until he began pushing my head down and gagging me with his cock. As his hard cock choked my tight throat, I felt the wet, hot air in and around me; with his delicious cock in my mouth and the many bodies perhaps watching me (and us) sucking him off, it’s moments like these that help me understand why gay and bisexual men gravitate to men saunas for release and relaxation.

Enter the Dry Sauna

After we finished, I left the wet sauna to continue into Spartacus. Next, I entered the dry sauna; compared to the steam room, the dry sauna had a much simpler design: a simple square room with a box of hot coals in the middle. 

About an hour later, I walked up to the second-floor darkroom and was greeted by Bill’s ankles floating in the air. He was being tag-teamed by a muscled Mexican man and two twinks. The four of them were inside of a rectangular alcove. You had to climb in and out of the short end, and it stretched back to a square window that looked out over the street.

The window near Bill and his “friends” was open, with protective bars over the windows. At this hour, light poured in from the outside. You could faintly hear mariachi music on the street mixed with American house music inside the walls of Spartacus. The guys fucking Bill talked to each other in Spanish as Bill spoke to them with his eyes. I thought he would have been a screamer, but Bill said nothing and looked straight into his top’s eyes. They were speaking fluently through their desire. 

The two twinks began to feel left out, and one started to fuck the other. Looking back, I wish I had jumped in between them, sucked one off as the other fucked me, but I held back out of respect for Bill. I didn’t want to mix sex with friendship. I think this is an American instinct, but I am learning that with sex and bathhouses, the innate primal desire should take over. Many males are at the bathhouse, but unlike those without a clue to say goodbye, I can always understand when to leave the table. After all, if five is a crowd, I am always good at taking a hint, but you never know until you try.

What is the Darkroom Like in Club-Sauna Spartacus?

I left the four of them to do their thing and returned to my anonymity in the dark room. Unlike some darkrooms I’ve seen in gay bathhouses in Europe and worldwide, Spartacus never gets too dark; red neon lights always illuminate things. Plus, the darkrooms include slings and glory holes, but most of these tend to get ignored in favor of gay group fucking on top of beds or tables with heavily padded gym mats on top of them.

The club was starting to fill up, so I walked up to the third floor, a brilliantly designed rooftop that combines a bar, lounge chairs, and a rectangular pool, all in a relatively small space. The music played at a volume that still allowed me to think about everything I had just seen happen. When the darkroom gets too dark, or the steam room too steamy, or the smell of sex in the air (even if you love the smell of it) gets too much, the Spartacus rooftop allows a bit of escape, at least for a while until you feel ready to return to the heat and moans below.

I spent the rest of the evening buzzing around from the rooftop to the dark room, to the wet sauna, and to the dry. I chatted with whoever I could, in English and Spanish and had a great time. Bill and I would cross paths from time to time. I looked at him nostalgically, seeing that Mexico had the same effect on him as it did on me in Mexico City a few years ago. Bill looked free, relaxed, enjoying himself in a way I could tell he couldn’t do so back home. 

On the rooftop pool, several Mexican males lounge by the pool, giving me a cool kids vibe I didn’t want to break through. In Mexico City, they would call this group La Communidad. In my experience, you usually don’t see or use a bathhouse pool in Mexico for socialization that involves keeping your dick in your swimsuit. Still, Sauna Spartacus is a mixing pot of cultures and subcultures inside and outside Mexico. 

If I were them, I would be on the Beach at Mantamar or lounging at a boutique hotel like Catedral Vallarta. I always wish for a bathhouse to be reserved as a space for sex and the type of community building that comes from sex; still, I was happy they were having a good time.

While I have problems with Puerto Vallarta and longed to be back in Mexico City, where I feel at home, I think Spartacus is a flawless gay bathhouse that accomplishes everything it sets out to do and much more. Mexican gay culture is one of the most sex-positive in the world, and this attitude is on full-frontal display in Sauna Spartacus. You can feel it. I promise.