Gays Under the Cuban Revolution

This book is dated. It was published years before Alice Walker wrestled with Cuba's homophobia. It came out before Cubans dealt with gays in "Fresa y Chocolate" and before Americans filmed Renaldo Arenas' "Before Night Falls." Still, it is wonderful to see that gay studies books were being published in the early 1980s; especially before the first cases of AIDS were found one year later. This book mentions that gay American organizations helped gay Cuban refugees. I didn't know that and love the gay solidarity that it illustrates. This book puts gayness in context. Many gay activists and everyday gay folk have said, "My sexuality is just one aspect of my identity." Just as Fidel and his rebels despised gay American sex tourists coming to their island, they did not like straight Americans doing the same thing either. Not only were gay Cubans sent to concentration camps, so were any person that did not behave according to the average man or woman. On the other hand, Allen Young said criminalizing homosexuality was purely a Soviet import. We see a similar hypocrisy as Britain abandons legalized homophobia, but some of its former colonies (for example, India and Malaysia) still embrace it. The information on Cuban gays here is scant. Young gleans information from where he can. He cites "The Men with the Pink Triangle," a book on gays persecuted by Nazis, but that book went into specific detail about what happened in European concentration camps. This book says close to nothing about the day to day of detainees on the island. Really, this book is more about American leftists who always have some excuse for forgiving Cuban homophobia. The more things change, the more they stay the same. In this book, Young says Cuban Communists claim to want to include blacks and feminists, but then they get upset when those groups want to express independent pride or criticize the party. Leftists, in the US and elsewhere, to this day have a problem with any oppressed person talking about issues that are not about socioeconomic class. Though the author does not expand upon it, this book deals a lot with the longings for a utopia. Here he says leftists first could not critique the Stalinist Soviet Union and then Castro's Cuba because they so wanted a successful communist country to exist. African-American scholars have noted that before the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, many Black Americans wished to move to Brazil. David Murray, in his book "Opacity," stated that many gay Martiniquais dream of moving to Montreal. Again, the more things change, the more they stay the same. This book helps to document what I heard: Che Guevara was a vicious, nasty homophobe. This book uses the word homophobia though its wide usage did not come about until the 1990s; it's prescient. Allen Young fails to mention Allen Ginsberg, the gay leftist poet who was critical of Cuban homophobia from the start.