Reinaldo Arenas was born in Cuba in 1943.Arenas studied at Havana University and later worked in the National Library. Due to his opposition to the political regime and his open homosexuality in 1980, he along with 120,000 Cubans who arrived in the United States on the Mariel boatlift. Arenas settled in New York where he lived until his death from AIDS ten years later. His fiction includes his autobiography Before Night Falls and Farewell to the Sea.

• Before Night Falls: A Memoir, (Dolores M. Koch, Translator), 1994
• Farewell to the Sea: A Novel of Cuba, (Andrew Hurley, Translator), 1987 
• Singing from the Well, 1990
• The Doorman, (Dolores M. Koch, Translator), 1994

Reinaldo Arenas at QueerTheory.com
http://www.queerstudies.com/histories/a/arenas_reinaldo.htm