Stephen O. Murray: Stephen O. Murray is the author of Latin American Male Homosexualities, American Gay, and ten other books.
Before Night Falls illustrates and analyzes the cultural roots of Cuban sexual politics. Long before these memoirs, which he dictated in 1990 as he was dying of AIDS in New York City, were written, Arenas had exhausted any sympathy for the macho dictatorship that drove him and his friends to early graves. His rage against the regime that made their lives horrendous is palpable, without ever becoming hysterical. He matter-of-factly documents his suffering and the despair . His account of his imprisonment is one of the most compelling records ever written of prison dehumanization (including the continuous rape of young men). Before Night Falls is an important and very vivid document of life, letters, and repression in Cuba, and of the homosexual aspects of each. Along with his novella Arturo, it is necessary reading for anyone interested in what it was like to try to live as a “known homosexual” under the domination of the machista “revolutionary” regime. He tells what it was like for a nonconformist male to live, love, and get fucked in Cuba of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.
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