Reinaldo Arenas wrote five books on toilet paper smuggled out of Castro's prisons, fled in the 1980 Mariel boatlift, and finished Before Night Falls in a New York apartment as he died of AIDS in 1990 at 47. Tony Kushner gave the AIDS crisis its most ambitious theatrical engagement in Angels in America (1991). Jewelle Gomez wrote The Gilda Stories (1991) — Black lesbian vampires who refused to be killed politely, because survival in this country has always required speaking the violence aloud before the violence wrote the obituary. The thread is the same: people too small to be expected to matter, who insisted on mattering anyway.
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