Intimacy with Strangers

Book Talk with Manuel Betancourt: people watching, cruising, Before Sunrise

“What could we envision if we remained in the meet-cute? If we didn’t let go of the many possibilities inherent in such meetings? If we let ourselves inhabit that moment of longing where everything and perhaps nothing is possible?”

These are questions central to critic Manuel Betancourt’s latest book, Hello Stranger: Musings on Modern Intimacy. In these essays, Betancourt is an astute and conversational Virgil on a journey through books and films like Before Sunrise, Titanic, Cruising, and the work of Frank O’Hara to examine the intimate relationships we carry on with strangers.

Manuel is a cultural critic based in Los Angeles. We spoke about his last book, The Male Gazed, for Esquire. We caught up ahead of the publication of Hello Stranger and talked about meeting strangers, research for nonfiction, and 2024 in film.

Photo credit: Jack Manning

How did Hello Stranger feel differently to you from The Male Gazed?

I started thinking about Hello Stranger while I was still putting final touches on The Male Gazed. I knew that for my own sanity I wanted to have another project in the works when Male Gazed came out, so that regardless of what happened with that book, I could have another goal.

The original pitch for Hello Stranger was a lot smaller; I really just wanted to write a book about Closer. For 20 years, I've been thinking about that movie and play. With some help from my agent and my editor, they both got me to think bigger.

The Male Gazed was truly anchored by things that had formed me. Hello Stranger was closer to the grad school work that I used to do—I would just go to library and hop from works cited to works cited. I'd be reading about Peter Hujar, and that would lead me to David Wojnarowicz, and then that would lead me to Nan Goldin. It was very associative, which is a lot more fun because I ended up reading texts that I hadn't thought about or encountered. I did the audiobook, and as I was rereading it, I thought, oh yeah, there was a lot of stuff that I read and watched and listened to and created this constellation of texts that was really fun to live in.

I'd love to ask you about the audiobook. What was it like to read it?

It is terrifying, but it's funny—I used to teach writing as a grad student, and the thing that I always told my students was, read your work out loud. This is the easiest way of proofreading. The sentence and the words will tell you where you're stumbling.

I think I'm really good at that, but I also know that I love really long sentences, a lot of clauses, and parentheticals. There's nothing I love more than a parenthetical comma. Sometimes that reads really beautifully on the page, and it requires quite the strain when you're trying to read it out loud.

I found the voice to be so finely tuned. It feels like you have this really great research guide as you're sifting through these texts.

Good, that's what I like to think. It's a guided tour through these texts and ideas.

As you brought such kaleidoscopic attention to strangers, how did that transform your understanding of how you relate to strangers?

At first, I thought I should read everything that anyone has ever written about strangers. I started with Camus and read The Stranger, even though I read it in high school, and then realized this wasn’t what I need. I realized it’s the intimacy with strangers, this sense of fleeting connections and intimacies.

Hello Stranger, Catapult, 2025

What also was very helpful was trying to think through both queer texts and non queer texts. I didn't want this to just be a book about queer relationships, but I wanted it to be structured around ideas of queerness that could help us think through something as straight as Closer.

One of the things that I kept bringing to the book came from my life in New York. In New York, I was always surrounded by strangers. You’re on the subway, you're on the street, you're in the theater, there’s no way of avoiding them, and it's one of the joys. People watching is my favorite thing to do in the world. I've been living in LA for five years now, so it was fascinating to be writing an entire book about strangers and that friction. I realized that I missed that; I've been trying to find those intimacies and connections in a city that's not really designed to do that. Waving at someone from the car across the highway doesn't quite do the same work as winking at someone at the subway.

Part of it was wanting to be more generous toward the other and toward the stranger, which, now that I'm releasing this in January 2025, feels weighted with a different kind of valence, where we should be more empathetic, generous, and open. That, to me, felt utopian, fun, playful, and sort of sexy when I was writing it. I actually framed it as a post pandemic book. What do these intimacies look like after we've not been able to connect with others except through these tiny screens? We might be wanting more closeness with others. And then, of course, because of the political environment, the push toward the other, the stranger, has a very different value to it.

Situating it between these two moments is really fascinating. One of the core ideas I feel you return to is the temporality of the meet cute and of flirting. Flirting can be this insistence upon the present. I think about COVID, where people couldn't access that same presentness. How do you see that?

I was trying to explain the book to someone at a holiday party a few weeks ago, and I was telling him I like flashes of moments, living in the present, the ephemerality. And he was like, no, that needs to lead to something. And I said, yeah, that's usually how we're conditioned, and culturally we like to tell stories. I was telling him about how the book imagines what if we don't live in a story but in a poem, or in a photo, or in a painting. It requires a different kind of temporality and approach to how we think of ourselves, the world, family, and our lives.

I'm the kind of person that doesn't read for the plot. I love vibes, I love mood, I love the stream of consciousness, and I like staying in a kind of presentness that can be hazy and disorienting, but that can be really fruitful, rather than trying to see what comes next.

You mentioned bringing queer and non-queer texts into dialogue. I loved your discussion of Before Sunrise. You bring the transience of Jesse and Celine’s affair into discussion with often clandestine queer meet cutes. That felt like a lightning strike to me. As you researched and wrote, did you find examining those areas of collision to be generative?

Before Sunrise felt like a movie that I had to include. It’s the text that makes the book very legible to other people. This is a movie that’s been written about for decades. The idea of putting it in conversation with these queer movies that I've also been obsessed with was exciting.

The other thing I kept finding when I would pick up these “straight pieces” is that the stories would almost disappear if the characters were queerer. Closer wouldn't happen if they were open and poly. Before Sunrise is the same. But then I realized, no, there have been queer folks that have been trying to use that template. It becomes more interesting to be like, well, there is that meet cute and moment of transience, but it's weighted. I’m thinking of Paris 05:59 Theo and Hugo—that transience gets tinged by this danger of AIDS and HIV, which creates a temporal urgency that Jesse and Celine don't have to worry about.

What does it feel like to give rigorous, intellectual attention to sexting and cruising?

That’s always been my sweet spot—trying to find the academic rigor in things that are not written about in academia and straddle the line so that it doesn't feel like I'm lecturing you. That was the voice in the back of my head: don't make it dry, don't make it academic, don't make it jargony. I think that was the challenge.

This is what I’ve always been fascinated with. In undergrad, I was writing a thesis about John Rechy, The Sexual Outlaw, and cruising. I think then it was purely academic, abstract, and intellectual. I feel I now have the ability to shuttle between the two. When you're writing about cruising, I don't want it to feel like we're in a classroom, but I do want the kind of rigor that comes with discussing cruising within a classroom setting. That was the challenge, and it was a lot of fun. I used to say in grad school that I wanted to write things that my friends could read. I want to live in the middle.

That’s one of the things I love about reading your work—you give academic attention to topics that are fun to read about. It feels like you’re talking with friends.

I was also compelled by movies last year that explored different shades of intimacy. Did you have any favorites?

The one movie that just came out that I could have written about and it would have been perfect was Babygirl. It is a cheating narrative, but the lesson that Romy, Nicole Kidman's character, learns is not, oh, I just need to go back to playing a housewife. It's actually a little bit more radical. And also, the entire movie hinges on what a stranger can tell you about yourself. I was watching and thought, this is the thesis of my book come to life.

My other favorite film of the year was Femme. It's an erotic thriller that follows a Black drag queen in London who gets gay bashed one night by someone who she thought she was flirting with. Weeks later, when they're out of drag at a bathhouse, they encounter their attacker and decide to seduce him. It splinters into this Hitchcockian cat-and-mouse: are they falling for one another, or is this a revenge plot? In terms of these ideas of intimacy and the performances we put on for one another when we're trying to get close to one another, I was in awe.

Lightning Round

Favorite TV show this year:

Probably One Hundred Years of Solitude—it's my favorite novel of all time. I read it when I was 15 or 16 because it was required reading for all of us Colombians. I really thought they were going to botch it, but it's so beautiful.

Favorite movie:

Femme, and if I were to add another one, I'm Still Here.

Favorite book:

Small Rain—at the level of the sentence, it's just so beautiful.

Favorite gay bar in LA:

It's not a gay bar, but it's a party called Hot Dog at El Cid, which is my favorite sort of gay space.

Favorite spot in LA:

I love Runyon. It feels so basic to say that, but I live nearby so I can hike it often. You really can't beat the view once you get on the top.

Per the book—best pickup line:

It's hard because the best pickup lines are designed to not feel like pickup lines. “Hello stranger” feels like the pickup line that I should use.

Order Hello Stranger and read more of Manuel’s work here.

Reference Section

• Currently reading: Brown Women Have Everything by Sayantani Dasgupta—these essays are quick, thoughtful, and make me really miss Wilmington.

• I just watched Eyes Wide Shut for the first time, and it also has a powerful resonance with the ideas we discussed. What power do strangers have in our lives?

• In my latest for Decor Maine, I wrote about this beautiful house in the woods of Kennebunkport.

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