The King’s Toilet: Cruising Literary History in Reinaldo Arenas’ Before Night Falls
This chapter revisits Reinaldo Arenas’s Antes que anochezca on the 20th anniversary of its publication in order show why boilerplate political monikers do not stick to this polemical autobiography. Lima proposes that Arenas’ autobiography has been too narrowly subjected to left and right readerly expectations that have failed to see the text as Arenas’ attempt to fashion his own literary history in relation to the Cuban and the Latin American literature canon. This chapter, further, argues that cruising and “the arts of cruising” for Arenas conforms to a broader history of anti-authoritarian “libertinaje mental” initially posited by Jorge Manach.