BEFORE EBERT THINKS

“There must have been a lot of gay men in Cuba who didn’t make their lives as impossible as Arenas did. Consider the character of Diego in “Strawberry and Chocolate,” the 1995 movie by the great Cuban director Tomas Gutierrez Alea. The movie is set in 1979, Diego is clearly gay, and yet he lives more or less as he wants to, because he is clever and discreet. There is a little something of the spoiled masochist about Arenas. One would not say he seeks misery, but he wears it like a badge of honor, and we can see his mistakes approaching before he does. This is not a weakness in the film but one of its intriguing strengths: Arenas is not presented as a cliche, as the heroic gay artist crushed by totalitarian straightness, but as a man who might have been approximately as unhappy no matter where he was born.” This is hyper-liberal Roger Ebert reviewing “Before Night Falls.” Maybe he thinks there was a bit of a spoiled masochist in Solzhenitsen as well. And maybe Ebert thinks being locked up for being a gay writer is no big deal in Castro’s socialist paradise. You think he might enoy a tour of duty himself in one of Castro’s concentration camps? It’s all for the revolution, Roger. And only spoiled masochists complain about such things.