Arts
Queer Classics
 | Queer Classics Reinaldo Arenas's "Before Night Falls" |
by Ernie McLeod
Reinaldo Arenas refused to shut up. He began his autobiography, Before Night Falls, while a fugitive in the woods in Cuba, able to write only until darkness fell, hence the book’s title. He completed it as an exile in New York, dictating his life-story onto tapes, rushing against his final darkness, AIDS. Too ill to continue writing, he committed suicide in 1990, knowing the book would appear only after his death.
The English translation (by Dolores Koch) of Before Night Falls was published to acclaim in 1993 and named one of the year’s Best Books by The New York Times. Julian Schnabel’s 2000 film of the memoir (featuring Javier Bardem’s beautiful Oscar-nominated performance) brought renewed interest in Arenas’s life and works. And renewed controversy: “Old rubbish in a new bin,” declared those who dismiss Arenas as a narcissistic slanderer of Castro’s Revolution.
The literary, the political, and the sexual are intertwined both in Arenas’s writings and in people’s reactions to them.
Reinaldo Arenas was born in 1943 and raised in Holgu’n, Cuba in a house full of women abandoned by men. His childhood was, he writes, a time of “absolute poverty but also absolute freedom Ö a world of pure creativity.”
Creativity and sex emerged early on as primary forces in his life. Because he grew up poor in the country, sex was everywhere displayed; books were not. At the age of six he discovered his interest in men while watching local boys bathing nude in the river. Despite a complete lack of literary influences, he began writing novels while still a young teen.
In 1958 Arenas joined the rebels fighting against the Batista dictatorship. The success of the Revolution brought Fidel Castro to power in 1959 and allowed Reinaldo a scholarship to study agricultural accounting, a subject in which he had no interest. Shortly thereafter he visited Havana for the first time. In 1963 he won a storytelling competition, which resulted, to his delight, in a job at the National Library. There, he began his first novel, Singing from the Well. It earned honorable mention in a national novel competition and was published in Cuba and abroad. (Later works had to be smuggled out of the country or rewritten in exile and are still not officially allowed in Cuba.)
If Arenas’s literary career seemed to be blossoming, his sexuality was already in full bloom. He learned the fine art of cruising and had encounters galore, many of which are described in abundant, loving detail. His faith in the Revolution withered, however, with the realization that his greatest passions – free expression and sex with men – were precisely what the powers that be could not tolerate.
By the mid-sixties persecution of homosexuals had escalated to the point where men were being sent to UMAP (Military Units for Aid to Production) concentration camps. Behaviors considered “anti-social” – homosexuality chief among them – were increasingly prohibited. Writings with homosexual themes were deemed counterrevolutionary.
Ironically, but not surprisingly, efforts to restrict sexuality inspired lots of unrestricted sex. Arenas writes: “I think ... there was never more fucking going on than in those years, the decade of the sixties, which was precisely when all the new laws against homosexuals came into being, ·when the sexual act became taboo while the ‘new man’ was being proclaimed and masculinity exalted.”
While Reinaldo was the antithesis of the revolutionary “new man,” his view of gay life was undeniably shaped by the machismo of his environment. He divided gay men into four amusingly delineated categories: dog collar gay, common gay, closet gay, and royal gay, the latter “a species unique to communist countries.” Later, in exile, he viewed U.S. model queer-on-queer relationships as generally “tedious.” “What we are really looking for is our opposite,” he believed – in other words, a “straight” top.
Arenas wasn’t detained in the UMAP camps (which remained active until 1969) but was arrested on bogus corruption of minors charges in 1973. He attempted to escape Cuba via inner tube and, when that failed, via suicide. He survived, but the charges against him led to a spirit-deadening stay at the squalid El Morro prison. Defeated, he eventually signed a confession, promising to forsake homosexuality and write in favor of the Revolution. He finally left Cuba for the U.S. in the 1980 Mariel “riffraff” boat lift.
Harrowing as Arenas’s life history was, Before Night Falls is more than a memoir of woe and repression. Like much of his more postmodern fiction, it’s filled with humor, camp absurdities, moments of wonder, and, above all, sexuality.
Those who dismiss Arenas tend to use his blatant outrageousness and unapologetic promiscuity as evidence against his claims of persecution. But even some sympathizers wish he’d kept a lid on the explicit chronicle of his sexcapades. Personally, his rub-your-face-in-it attitude was one of the things I liked best about Before Night Falls. Sex was his joy and his finest revenge.
Even after he came to the U.S., Arenas refused to be anyone’s well-mannered oppressed darling. The Cuban-exile community in Miami disapproved of his homosexuality (that and the fact he died of AIDS were left out of several obituaries); he, in turn, had no use for their bourgeois conformity. He also alienated, in his words, the “festive and fascist left.”
A local (and stunningly blond) Cuban literary scholar confirms that within academia Arenas was often trashed as a sell-out, his combative fervor and virulent anti-Castro stance at odds with standard leftist ideology. More recently, the scholar notes, the resistance on both ends of the ideological spectrum has softened, due – in large part – to recognition of Arenas’s importance by the world gay community. Many now seek to claim him as their own.
Shortly after leaving Cuba, Arenas remarked that both the communist and capitalist systems “give you a kick in the ass.” The difference is that “in the communist system you have to applaud, while in the capitalist system you can scream. And I came here to scream.”
Ultimately, Arenas’s legacy may have less to do with capitalist versus communist ideology than with his unique ability to articulate and fiercely demand that which was most essential to his humanity.
Ernie McLeod is a native Vermonter rubbing his face in the diversity of Montreal gay life. Reach him at mcleod@middlebury.edu.