Manuel Betancourt on the word ‘throuple’ & the questionable value of friends with benefits
The Male Gazed: What Hunks, Heartthrobs and Pop Culture Taught Me About (Desiring) Men). Betancourt’s latest work, Hello Stranger: Musings on Modern Intimacy (January 14, 2025, Catapult Books), continues his quest to dismantle our ideas around masculinity, intimacy, and the impact of culture and social media on our deepest relationships.
A regular contributor to outlets like Variety and the Los Angeles Times, Betancourt’s vast film knowledge appears throughout the essay collection, with timely references spanning queercentric and entangled works of intimacy from Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret and William Friedkin’s 1980 film Cruising to Ira Sachs’ French drama Passages (2023), who Betancourt notes has spent most of his directing career “examining the grueling demands of long-term companionship.”In discussing his previous book with Variety, Betancourt said, “We find ways of creating ourselves from what we have around us.
I ended up finding the thing that was the easiest to access because I had a television and cable, and I could watch Hollywood films and Venezuelan soap operas and Italian music videos.
I had such a plethora of things at my disposal. That’s where I ended up finding myself.”Betancourt leans into that deep knowledge as accessible source material that will send readers down a rabbit hole of YouTube videos and late-night streaming binges to piece together the richness of his observations.
