Comparative Lessons from the Pariah’s Text

This chapter explores Reinaldo Arenas’s biography and writing as a marginalized, activist engaged in an intertextual, pedagogical, and personal dialogue with fellow pariah, Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo (1931-2017). While Goytisolo abandoned Franco’s totalitarian Spain for self-imposed exile, a disillusioned and persecuted Arenas fled Cuba in the Mariel Boatlift. Besides being political exiles using their queer narratives for advocacy, the pair also shares striking characteristics as writers reveling in Barthes’s “pleasures of the text” and eschatology. Focusing on Goytisolo’s Juan sin tierra (1975) [Juan the Landless] and Arenas’s El color del verano (1991) [The Color of Summer], this section examines how the narratives of the pair intersect. Additionally, it sheds new light on the personal relationship between the pair, which has generally been ignored by critics.