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Early in The Male Gazed, Manuel Betancourt’s new work of cultural criticism, the L.A.-based author discusses his childhood love for Disney films like Snow White and Sleeping Beauty while growing up in Colombia. “I’ve been haunted by what these fairy tales taught me,” Betancourt writes, “and how I, in time, have had to unlearn and reshape myself in their wake.” In the margins of my copy, I jotted down a note about the Jay Brannan song “Ever After Happily.” In the 2008 ballad, the openly gay Brannan sings, “Well that’s the way the fairy tale goes / Boy meets girl and they wed with roses / But that’s not the way it seems to be / And I’m pissed that they lied to me.”
I swear I’m not being random. One of the joys of Betancourt’s expansive writing is how it invites readers to make their own connections, to slot their associations into the frameworks he presents as he fluidly examines a wide array media. In the opening chapter, for instance, Betancourt explores not just Disney movies, but early film criticism, a Gore Vidal novel, and the animation work of gay German American Andreas Deja. Each chapter begins with a pop culture artifact — say Walter Mercado’s flamboyance or Ricky Martin’s thirst traps — and then splits off into a multitude of paths, interpretations, and questions that sit alongside Betancourt’s own specific interactions with those artifacts. Both criticism and memoir, the book holds no straightforward answers but insists that uncertainty and ambiguity are, in fact, the point.
Throughout The Male Gazed (the wordplay: chef’s kiss!) Betancourt asks what pop culture can teach us about masculinity, both its narrow constraints and exciting potentialities. Shortly before the book’s publication, Betancourt spoke with Them about his process, the need for nuance, bilingualism, and more.
How did you start writing this book and what were your guiding questions?
In 2019, I had been working as a film and TV critic and entertainment journalist and I was craving a bigger project. I found myself thinking in tweets or thinking in 800-word articles, and that seemed terrifying. I wanted something more expansive. The original idea was to write about masculinity in TV and film.
When the pandemic hit, I had a lot of free time, and I went back and realized I needed a structure for the book. I couldn’t just talk about masculinity and pop culture; that seems so broad. I found myself restricting it to the pop culture I’d grown up with, which meant that these wouldn’t just be criticism essays — which is what I normally do, what I love doing — there would need to be a personal element.
When Alicia [Kroell, my editor at Catapult] and I talked about it, the guiding question was “do I want him or do I want to be him?” Which was a really generative question about the kinds of characters that I encountered growing up and the hindsight of looking back to see what that meant to me as a kid, as a teenager, [and] as a twentysomething who had come out. So I reluctantly ended up writing a little bit of a memoir that happens to be about criticism.
You describe how much of the media you consumed as a young person was imported and how part of the allure of the characters you saw on screen was how “they were so foreign to [your] own experience.” What about this foreignness was appealing?
I wouldn’t say that it was appealing to me, but thinking about these foreign imports — whether they were coming from Japan or Mexico or Spain or the U.S. — gave me a sense of perspective. I think that was also what was helpful in figuring out the book [in which] my positionality is constantly changing: I was living in Colombia and watching all this Hollywood stuff, and then I was in Vancouver looking at stuff in the U.S., and then I’m here.
That sense of foreignness and alienation can sometimes be very distancing. It allows me a broader overview of the things that I’m watching or learning or reading or thinking about. Being foreign is good in that sense. It really puts everything in perspective when you’re not at the center, right? I was just talking to my sister about this — we grew up in a household where we were watching all of this Hollywood stuff where the United States was the center, but we were not part of the center, and we didn’t grow up in a country that told us we are the best, and all of that imperialist language. That tension was particularly generative when I started thinking broadly about the book as well.
Toward the end of the book, you present what seems like your methodology by writing: “The moments I’ve most felt in tune with movie characters is when I’ve been forced to read against the grain, finding likeness in difference.” Can you tell me more about this notion of reading against the grain, of queering the way a piece of media is ostensibly meant to be read?
I was watching Hollywood films or Japanese anime or telenovelas that were ostensibly made for a hetero audience, a “mainstream” audience. I always had to read against the grain.
While I value and I really enjoy and am supportive of the queer content that we’ve been seeing, I don’t want us to ever lose the kind of critical thinking that [comes from] reading and empathizing with people who are unlike us. I think that’s what we would want the straight community to do: to actually watch queer content and find in that difference something that they see in themselves.
I think that more is understood when we find a photo negative of ourselves, rather than something that looks so like us that a lot of us bristle and cringe and tear down the little things that [representation] gets wrong. I was constantly reading and watching stuff that was unlike me, but I was able to pull things from those pieces and those characters and those films that helped me fashion myself.
When discussing a photograph of two young wrestlers by Collier Schorr, you write that “to only ever understand such candid (and near-naked) vulnerability as intrinsically erotic is to deprive young men (regardless of their sexuality) of a kind of bonding and a kind of openness that needs to be nurtured. But to explicitly deny the sexual pull such images can have … is to feed into a toxicity that refused to let men be unwittingly desired (by other men).”
This question has been discoursed to hell and back online when discussing close male friendships in media as potentially queer. What do you make of this tension? What do you think we should do with it?
Yeah, I was especially thinking about those moments, say in Star Wars, where we see Poe and Finn and we’re like, “Obviously they’re a couple!” And then a segment of the Star Wars fandom got very angry given the mere suggestion [of queerness, using the] the argument of “Can’t they just be friends?” I don’t want to fall on either side. I don’t ever want to find myself closing off readings. Reading is a very personal thing; the entire project [of the book] is about how I interact with these texts, whether it’s a movie, an anime, a telenovela.
To me, reading and interpretation is a very site-specific practice. Some things can be very obvious to me because of my background and experience, because I’m reading certain cues — such as, you know, [Finn and Poe] are obviously into each other, we’ve all seen how they stare at each other. But I also know that if I didn’t have those cues and experience and all I saw was a friendship, it can feel very invalidating for someone else to come in and say that’s not a [correct] reading. I’m always more interested in multiplying the level of interpretation and making sure that all of them are valid so long as there’s something in the text that feeds [them].
I love close reading because I love teasing out those possibilities. I think I used to drive my teachers in college and grad school a little nuts; they were like, “Manuel, you need a thesis, you need to fall on one side.” I would always hedge my arguments because I’m always second guessing myself, but also because I don’t ever want to close off interpretation. I don’t think a text will ever be “solved,” it won’t ever be closed.
As a bilingual person myself, I was really struck by how you wrote that “languages have a way of cleaving you in half.” I wonder whether they also have a way of expanding us, giving us multiple contexts, bringing forth new linguistic nuances. Has bilingualism helped your writing and thought process?
I went to a private British school in Colombia. We were taking [English-]immersive classes from fifth grade on. So English has always been a second language, but also a first language. And even more so now that I’ve lived abroad longer than I lived in Colombia, and have spoken English full-time longer than I ever spoke Spanish full-time.
One of the things that I noticed when I first moved to Canada and was writing papers was how clinical everyone else’s essays were, in the sense that everything was very clear. There was a sense that the value in your writing came from its clarity. Whereas I think because of my Spanish roots, or specifically the kind of Spanish teachers that I had, or even just the classes that I took as a kid and as a teenager, I loved flowery language. I’ve always attributed this to loving A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. Something that Spanish and Latin American fiction taught me was that there is a texture to language. I think that’s why I love words and playing with them in my hands and seeing how they disintegrate and how I can build them back together. I love the tactility of language.
Do you have another long-form project on the horizon?
So I’m writing another book for Catapult called Hello Stranger. It focuses on queer intimacies and the intimacies that we create with strangers. The inspiration for the book is Mike Nichols’s film Closer, about cheating and marital affairs. What I want to think about through the book is the stranger as a site of possibility. What is it about strangers that allows us to imagine new versions of ourselves and to then question the person that we are or could be?
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
The Male Gazed: On Hunks, Heartthrobs, and What Pop Culture Taught Me About (Desiring) Men is available now via Catapult.
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