In a study of Oppiano Licario, Benito Pelegrín provides a close reading of Fronesis's sensual and dream presented in Chapter 3, in which he finally is able to accept Foción's (homosexual) friendship: "The reality of the dream was to show [Fronesis] the secret closeness and sensuality of his friendship with Foción" (my translation).

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In Oppiano Licario, according to Pelegrín, "we no longer have the good heterosexual in opposition to the depraved homosexual, a Paradiso opposed to an Inferno, but rather the homosexual object is split in pairs of opposites between the friend and the enemy, the good and the bad, the individual that can be accepted and the individual that should be rejected" (my translation).

The modern reader should not be quick to judge Lezama's portrayal of homosexuality harshly. In both Paradiso and Oppiano Licario, homosexual interludes occupy a considerable portion of the texts.

The mere fact that the author dared to express detailed sexual relations between men, at a time when such expressions were generally looked down on in Latin-American literature and severely censored by the Cuban revolutionary establishment, represents an important turning point in Latin-American letters that paved the way for a greater representation of homosexual desire.

Although one cannot speak of a gay community in Cuba, one can speak of a homoerotic environment for meeting and socializing in Havana that is constantly moving and reshaping itself.

Although Latin Americans have produced many works that have homoerotic themes or gay and lesbian characters, their sensibilities are largely different from those of North American and European writers.