Before Night Falls: a radical theory of sex

As I read Before Night Falls, I was disgusted by some of the sex scenes. After the descriptions of bestiality in the first few pages, I tried to keep an open mind. A few scenes still got under my skin, however – namely incest with his cousin, being molested by his uncle, and his estimate of 5,000 sexual partners by 1968. Despite my aversion to these scenes, I was disappointed that none of them appeared in Julian Schnabel’s film. I think that this feeling of disappointment relates to Gayle Rubin’s “Thinking Sex.” Gayle Rubin claims that there is a small window of socially acceptable sexual behaviors, and all other sexual behaviors are seen as sexually deviant. As homosexuality becomes increasingly more socially acceptable, the line between socially praised and socially condemned sexual behaviors is increasingly blurred. Rubin argues that monogamous, long-term homosexual relationships are acceptable. Bestiality, promiscuous gay sex, fetishes, incest, man-boy love/ cross-generational love, and transsexuality are all deviant behaviors.

Arenas’s memoir certainly crosses this line into “deviant behaviors.” Arenas does not pass negative judgment on these scenes – he says that most young boys from the countryside participate in bestiality, he was turned on by his uncle, and the interactions with his cousin were just childhood games. After his first lover, he doesn’t mention being in any other monogamous relationship, and having sex with thousands of men doubles as thousands of acts of rebellion against Fidel Castro’s repressive regime. Most of this is conspicuously absent from the film version. One particular part of the novel that I found striking was where Arenas discusses his refusal to have sex in prison. “Making love with a free man was very different from making love with an enslaved body behind bars…. There was no beauty in the act, it would have been a degradation” (179). This point - a point that directly connects Arenas’s feelings about free love as antirevolutionary – is also missing from the movie.

The film version certainly includes some naked men and portrays one sex scene (in Arenas’s explanation of the four types of gay men in Cuba); it doesn’t completely ignore sex. I think that Schnabel’s decision to exclude the more graphic images of sex from the movie has both positive and negative effects on viewers. Viewers are much more likely to sympathize with an Arenas who doesn’t engage in what Rubin categorizes as unacceptable sex. Because they aren’t turned off by graphic scenes of incest, bestiality, and promiscuity, they can tune into the “real” linkage between sex and rebellion. (By omitting Arenas’s refusal to sleep with men in prison from the movie, however, Schnabel misses out on a golden opportunity to make this linkage.) On the other hand, omitting these scenes waters down the viewers’ experience of Arenas’s life. These sexually-charged childhood scenes are formative scenes in Arenas’s life. The movie excludes large chunks of Arenas’s memoir, but because the author’s political views are radical and his views about love certainly fit into Rubin’s radical theory of sexuality, the movie isn’t as radical as it should be. By toning down the sex, the film fails to portray many of Arenas’s truths.