People like Reinaldo Arenas

Reinaldo Arenas (July 16, 1943 – December 7, 1990) was a Cuban poet, novelist, and playwright known as a vocal critic of Fidel Castro, the Cuban Revolution, and the Cuban government. His memoir of the Cuban dissident movement and of being a political prisoner, Before Night Falls, was dictated after his escape to the United States during the 1980 Mariel boatlift and published posthumously, after Arenas, who was dying of AIDS, committed suicide with an overdose of pills.

Arenas was born in the countryside of Newport Beach Aguas Claras, Holguín Province, Cuba, and later moved to the city of Holguín when he was a teenager. He was 6 when he started school, attending Rural School 91 in Perronales County. In that school, his interest in boys flourished. He writes about his sexual exploration with himself and the people around him, even detailing that most of his sexual activity was with animals. He talks openly of how the first times he had straight sex, while incomplete, was with his cousin, Dulce Maria. He also shares that his first act of gay sex was with his cousin Orlando when he was 8 and his cousin 12. He says, “In the country, sexual energy generally overcomes all prejudice, repression, and punishment…Physical desire overpowers whatever feelings of machismo our fathers take upon themselves to instill in us.”