Hello Stranger

November 1, 2024
Betancourt (The Male Gazed, 2023) is an established culture writer and a lover of art and media. His second book is a state of the union message on love, friendship, and intimacy through the lens of his own life since divorce. Betancourt explores all the facets and fallacies of modern intimacy, from coupledom to male friendship, domesticity, sexting, throuples, and more. He uses beloved and erudite cultural touchstones to dive deeper into the paradigms for each concept. He writes about Titanic when describing how it felt to be painted in the nude as a gift for his now exhusband. He re-examines Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life when analyzing the limited emotional vocabulary among male friends. Other books, like The Ethical Slut and Detransition, Baby, are employed as examples of individuals eschewing the repressive aspects of monogamous or domestic relationships. Betancourt is funny, warm, and brilliant. Reading this collection of essays is like sitting down with your most well-read friend, firing away with connections that show how much our experiences have in common across time and space.

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November 18, 2024
Betancourt (The Male Gazed) considers “new ways of redrawing how we conceive of closeness” in this seductive blend of memoir and cultural criticism. Drawing on his own relationships and a broad range of pop culture artifacts—films from Bringing Up Baby to Before Sunrise, literature from Madame Bovary to A Little Life—Betancourt reflects on the allure of the chance encounter and the opportunity flirting with strangers offers to “see ourselves anew.” He writes sharply about internalizing messages from his favorite films about the difficulties of monogamy and the liberation he felt while chatting with anonymous internet users as a sexually curious teenager (“They were the first instances where I could take labels like gay and queer out for a drive between slow-loading JPEGs and heavily pixelated MP4 downloads”). The chapters strike an exhilarating balance between steamy and cerebral, with casual analyses of Anna Karenina brushing up against frank assessments of Betancourt’s excitement at “getting a cute guy to send me a dick pic.” The result is an intoxicating invitation to push beyond one’s comfort zone in pursuit of pleasure. Agent: Michael Bourret, Dystel, Goderich & Bourret.

December 1, 2024
A film and queer culture critic ponders intimate encounters. Across 10 essays, Betancourt effectively examines the dynamic intercourse between strangers and the titillating potential that "transient intimacies" can harbor. The author celebrates the "winking knowingness" and the "lightning bolt moment of lucidity" exhibited during the act of flirtation and instant attraction and how first encounters across a crowded room elicit both an excited anticipation and an innate desire "to start a story that may have nothing but a beginning." In queer culture, for example, Betancourt relates to the desirous, intoxicating "pull" of online cruising and sexting with strangers, while elaborating on his own marriage evaporating due to spirited infidelity. He draws inspiration from plenty of referential material, which collectively and creatively supports his theme. Films likeCloser andSex, Lies, and Videotape; literary works by John Rechy, Georg Simmel, Garth Greenwell, and Alan Hollinghurst; and varied articles, essays, and even Sondheim musicals all scrutinize and romanticize the allure and the taboo of the ubiquitous stranger encounter. Betancourt self-reflectively brings his life and experience as a "shameless flirt" into view as well, equating his time spent in bars and airport lounges with the allure of flirtations and the pulse-pounding spark of meeting someone new. As evidenced in his earlier book, The Male Gazed (2023), Betancourt is a fluid stylist, demonstrating his intelligence in investigating subject matter that most readers--queer or otherwise--can relate to. As a witty, intuitive observer of human behavior, he validates rather than demonizes the delicious recklessness of meeting strangers and the intimate thrill of the anonymous encounter and perceptively elaborates on the "possibilities such figures can inspire in us." A rewarding and insightful exploration of risk, desire, and anonymity.

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January 31, 2025

Culture writer and film critic Betancourt (The Male Gazed: On Hunks, Heartthrobs, and What Pop Culture Taught Me About (Desiring) Men) reflects in this volume on chance interactions with strangers and the closeness that can arise from them. Meeting strangers can lead to infinite possibilities, he asserts, since people often present idealized versions of themselves to someone who does not know them well. Betancourt, who identifies as queer, uses his own experiences to examine encounters between strangers, particularly sexual encounters, including initial meetings, sexting, cruising, nudity, and polyamory, in settings as varied as bars, the internet, and bathhouses. He also analyzes media that features these encounters--books, movies, musicals, poetry, visual art. Betancourt muses on the nature of intimacy, the ways in which it can be created, and how intimates can become strangers when separated. Throughout the work, his frustration with categories and rigid relationship structures is readily apparent. He gives readers an honest assessment of his own intimacies and relationship hang-ups, all of which showcase his thesis that meetings between strangers can often be more honest than those between people who already know each other. VERDICT A forthright examination of intimacy, sex, and the possibilities of interacting with strangers that will interest and engage a wide range of general readers.--Rebekah Kati

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