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"One of the Best New Books to Read in 2023." —Today
"Betancourt's essays are thought-provoking, finely crafted, and hilarious." —BuzzFeed, A Most Anticipated Book of the Year
"A searing exploration of queer intimacy, masculinity, and homoeroticism . . . . Manuel Betancourt faces us with difficult truths and sharply honest storytelling about coming of age as queer people." —Tiernan Bertrand-Essington, Queerty
"Manuel Betancourt crafts a style all his own in The Male Gazed: On Hunks, Heartthrobs, and What Pop Culture Taught Me About (Desiring) Men, a singular blend of cultural criticism, history, humor, and personal essays that sing, traversing continents, disciplines, and time—past, present, and future. Fascinating deep dives into carnal Almodóvar films, the iconic wrestling singlet, Ricky Martin thirst traps, and cartoon crushes are framed amid an unfolding coming-of-age narrative navigating queer and gender identity in Colombia and the United States. These pages sparkle with inherited pangs of pop culture nostalgia." —Emilly Prado, author of Funeral for Flaca
"In this sharp, sexy, and sparkling collection of essays, Manuel Betancourt leaves no rock-hard stomach unturned as he investigates how the most popular televised and filmic images of idealized masculinity are constructed, disseminated, and devoured by queer men, himself included. The Male Gazed is both history and his story: Betancourt deftly oscillates his critic's eye between the screen and the self too, reflecting on an upbringing in Colombia colored by swooning telenovelas and Disney's G-rated hunks, twinks, and twunks; on an adulthood in North America studded with friends turned lovers and lovers turned friends; on queer futures being made manifest in the present. Betancourt is a dream critic—as in, a fabulous scholar of dreams, of the desirous imagination." —Matt Ortile, author of The Groom Will Keep His Name
"A warm, personal dive into masculinity as it appears to us through pop culture. When Betancourt unpacks what it's meant to him to be a man, you can't help but trust every word." —Rax King, author of Tacky
"The Male Gazed goes deep on the perennial queer dilemma: Do I want to be them, or bang them? Grounded in film criticism, queer theory, and his childhood in Bogotá, Colombia, Betancourt dissects the heart-framed names in your grade school diary, from Hercules to A.C. Slater to Ricky Martin. In ten fascinating essays, Betancourt scrutinizes the unrealistic gender-based expectations embedded in nineties pop culture that millennials are still unpacking in therapy today. If Y2K-adjacent media ever made you feel weird about having a body—show of hands, please—you’ll learn a thing or two about yourself from The Male Gazed." —Grace Perry, author of The 2000s Made Me Gay
“Manuel Betancourt’s The Male Gazed is everything I want an essay collection to be: smart, funny, incisive, honest, and often very sexy, a bold and unabashed exploration of masculinity and queer desire through the lens of pop culture and obsession. From Disney movies, Ricky Martin, A.C. Slater and nineties fashion to Colombian telenovelas, anime, Almodóvar, and RuPaul’s Drag Race, Betancourt examines sexuality, selfhood, performance, and the body, asking what it means to see and be seen, and how we often first find ourselves in movies and TV—in seeing our lives and desires projected onscreen. Through a deft combination of personal narrative and cultural criticism, Betancourt looks to the past to imagine possibilities of queer future, his essays serving as both confession and battle cry: that we might see masculinity in more expansive ways, ‘to embrace the many multitudes it has always contained.’ As a fellow queer kid of the nineties, obsessed with Disney and desiring of a masculinity I didn’t know how to obtain, let alone name, I saw myself in this book. I’ll be re-reading and teaching and passing it along for years to come.” —Melissa Faliveno, author of TOMBOYLAND: ESSAYS
03/01/2023
In this collection of 10 essays, Betancourt (Judy Garland's "Judy at Carnegie Hall") brings a Colombian perspective to the concept of masculinity in his native country, the larger Latin American world, and U.S. pop culture. Betancourt, with his witty, erudite, and self-revealing writing, goes back to his childhood memories and the masculinist system he knew growing up in Colombia. He also reflects on the complex interaction of pop culture with the development of his sexual identity. He traces his earliest memories to attractions to male Disney characters and male imagery in telenovelas. Watching the 1970 film Myra Breckinridge, in which the lead character undergoes gender-confirmation surgery, was a pivotal moment for him, as was his TV viewing of the famous Puerto Rican astrologer Walter Mercado, who was also known for being gender-nonconforming. These moments made Betancourt see that there's a need for society to refrain from gender stereotypes and reframe narrow-minded perspectives. VERDICT Readers seeking an honest portrayal of one gay man's voyage in the masculine imaginary will find a rich source of companionship.—David Azzolina
2023-05-01
A queer journalist ponders how pop culture has informed his views of masculinity.
In this absorbing fusion of memoir and cultural analysis, media critic Betancourt examines his boyhood in Colombia. He was obsessed with Disney films like Sleeping Beauty and Hercules, identifying with the female roles while staring desirously at the “bulging pecs and towering torsos” of the male heroes. These movies, he writes, offered “glimmers of possibility about what kind of man I wanted. And what kind of man I wanted to be.” Since Betancourt’s mother ran an animation studio in Bogotá, his access to animated media became an integral part of his youth, informing how he thought about himself then and now as a 30-something gay man. The ways men were portrayed in film and TV were integral to his teenage years, when Betancourt “daydreamed about the way men’s bodies on screens made me feel.” The feelings continued in college as he relished books by John Rechy and James Baldwin. Enrolled in a private school known for its bilingual educational program, Betancourt learned about American high school customs by watching childhood favorites like Saved by the Bell. As a teenager of divorced parents, he became enthralled with telenovelas and the “decidedly modern provocation” of Hombres. The author recognized early on that homosexuality and masculinity were intertwined and greatly scrutinized, as the “visibility of one came at the expense of the other.” Writing throughout with an affable, conversational tone, Betancourt explores the power of the cape, as evidenced in a fond profile of flamboyant Puerto Rican astrologer Walter Mercado, and discusses the smoldering allure of Ricky Martin. Male physical fetishization in visual media further pushed the boundaries of his sexual identity, and the author candidly reveals a coming-of-age period in which he finally embraced the power of his own voice.
A witty, educated, and entertaining analysis of the development of a writer’s queer desire.