ERK- Before Night Falls

In this movie, we see Reinaldo Arenas as a victim of a paranoid society. He is at first caught up in the spirit of revolution, but later realizes how misguided the revolution has become as the government begins to censor his work. For being a poet and a homosexual, he is portrayed as a counterrevolutionary and essentially victimized for no reason. Arenas struggles to find his place as a homosexual in a society where the idea of public homosexuality and the gay lifestyle are only just becoming an issue. Arenas is clearly a very courageous man as we can see by his experiences with the police and his imprisonment in el Moro. He could have easily told the police whatever they wanted to hear and left prison as a "rehabilitated" straight man. The movie gives us the impression that Arenas is in a small group of academics who see the hypocracy of society's behavior toward homosexuals. Even army officers and police seem to have homosexual tendencies; one army officer even kissed arenas. Thus, it appears that the new government has a policy based on fear of the unknown that almost everyone knows is ridiculous and nobody chooses to speak up and advocate change.