LavenderRed_Cubabook

Cuba and homosexuality
Change apparent in still photos
and motion pictures
In 1987, two years into the AIDS epidemic and on the eve of the overturning of
the Soviet Union—Cuba’s primary trading partner—and the East European bloc
of workers’ states, the Cuban Revolution continued to make great gains in the battle
against old, obstinate prejudice against same-sex love.
Qualitative developments of great import took place in Cuba in the late 1980s.
Hechavarría and Hatch wrote that in 1987, the police were “forbidden to harass
people because of appearance or clothing, largely benefiting gays.”
A year later, another important change in Cuban law occurred. Pre-revolutionary legislation
against “flaunting homosexuality” in public was rescinded. That edict had threatened
feminine males and masculine females of all sexualities since its imposition under
U.S. neo-colonial rule in the 1930s.
Punishment for homosexual acts had already been formally removed from Cuban law,
back in 1979—almost a quarter of a century before the U.S. decriminalized same-sex
love.
Arguelles and Rich noted, though, that the 1979 legal code had “failed to legalize
manifestations of homosexual behavior in the public sphere and left intact anti-gay laws
dating to the Cuban Social Defense Code of 1939.”
Arguelles and Rich, summarizing their research in Cuba in the mid-1980s, made a
very important point about the difference between private and public spheres in a society
building socialism that might not be readily apparent to anyone living in a capitalist
system.
They explained, “As delineated in a Latin American socialist setting, private space is
far wider than in the United States, encompassing virtually all behavior outside the purview
of official sanction or attention, while approved policy, published texts, and official
stances compose the public sphere.”
They added that “within the private sphere, there are a clear latitude and range of possibilities
for lesbians and gay men that surprise the critical observer.”
Canadian activist Ian Lumsden quoted a gay émigré living in Toronto, who stated in
regard to gay men that “homosexuals in Cuba find it much easier to be open and free
about conveying sexual desire in the street than they would in Canada.”
Change apparent in still photos and motion pictures 61