A culture that’s ready for a different kind of closeup

Book Review
Hello Stranger: Musings on Modern Intimacies
By Manuel Betancourt
Catapult: 240 pages, $27
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Itโs telling that Manuel Betancourtโs new book, โHello Stranger: Musings on Modern Intimacies,โ grounded in queer theory and abolition, takes its title from a line from the 2004 film โCloser,โ about two messed-up straight couples.

The choice of โCloser,โ โa bruising piece about the rotting roteness of long-term intimacy,โ as Betancourt puts it, is an experience familiar to many. 2024 was a year in which marriage, specifically heterosexual marriage, was taken to task. Miranda Julyโs most recent novel, โAll Foursโ; Sarah Mangusoโs scathing novel โLiarsโ; nonfiction accounts such as Lyz Lenzโs โThis American Ex-Wifeโ; Amanda Monteiโs โTouched Outโ; and even the late entry of Halina Reijnโs film โBabygirlโ all show that, at the very least, women are unsatisfied with heterosexual marriage, and that some are being destroyed by it.
The straight male experience of sexual promiscuity and adventure is nothing new. It has been well trod in novels by writers such as John Updike and Philip Roth and more recently, Michel Houellebecq. In cinema there are erotic thrillers โ think โBasic Instinct,โ โFatal Attraction,โ โEyes Wide Shutโ โ in which men are the playboys and women the collateral damage. Betancourt tells us that โHello Strangerโ begins in โa place where Iโve long purloined many of my most head-spinning obsessions: the movies.โ But this book isnโt interested in gender, or heterosexuality. Itโs an embrace of what makes us human, and the ways in which we avoid โmaking contact.โ Betancourt wants to show that the way we relate to others often tells us โmore cruciallyโ how we relate โto ourselves.โ
Through chapters focused on cinematic tropes such as the โmeet cuteโ (โA stranger is always a beginning. A potential beginning,โ Betancourt writes) and investigations of sexting, cruising, friendship, and coupling and throupling, โHello Strangerโ is a confident compendium of queer theory through the lens of pop culture, navigating these issues through the work of writers and artists including Frank OโHara, Michel Foucault and David Wojnarowicz, with stories from Betancourtโs own personal experience.
In a discussion of the discretion needed for long-term relationships, Betancourt reflects: โOne is about privacy. The other is about secrecy. The former feels necessary within any healthy relationship; the latter cannot help but chip away at the trust needed for a solid foundation.โ In the chapter on cruising, he explores how a practice associated with pursuit of sex can be a model for life outside the structure of heteropatriarchy: โMaking a queer world has required the development of kinds of intimacy that bear no necessary relation to domestic space, to kinship, to the couple form, to property, or to the nation.โ
The chapters on cruising and on friendship (โClose Friendsโ) are the strongest of the book, though โNaked Friendsโ includes a delightful revisitation of Roseโs erotic awakening in โTitanic.โ Betancourt uses the history of the friendship, and its โqueer elasticityโ using Foucaultโs imagining of friendship between two men (โWhat would allow them to communicate? They face each other without terms or convenient words, with nothing to assure them about the meaning of the movement that carries them toward each other.โ) to delve into Hanya Yanagiharaโs wildly successful novel, โA Little Life.โ He quotes Yanagihara, who echoes Foucault when she says that โher interest in male friendships had to do with the limited emotional vocabulary men (regardless of their race, cultural affiliations, religion, or sexualityโand her protagonists do run the gamut in these regards) have.โ
Betancourt thinks about the suffocating reality of monogamy through Richard Yatesโ devastating novel of domestic tragedy โRevolutionary Roadโ (and Sam Mendesโ later film adaptation), pointing out that marriage โforces you to live with an ever-present witness.โ In writing about infidelity, he explores Stephen Sondheimโs musical โCompanyโ and quotes Mary Steichen Calderone, former head of Sex Information and Education Council of the United States, in her research on adults who engage in extramarital affairs: โThey are rebelling against the loneliness of the urban nuclear family, in which a mother, a father and a few children have only one another for emotional support. Perhaps society is trying to reorganize itself to satisfy these yearnings.โ These revelations are crucial to Betancourtโs argument โ one of abolition and freedom โ that call to mind the work of queer theorists like the late Lauren Berlant and Josรฉ Esteban Muรฑoz.
Betancourt ultimately comes to the conclusion popularized by the writer Bell Hooks, which is that amid any discussion of identity comes the undeniable: our humanity. He quotes Hooksโ quotation of the writer Frank Browning on eroticism: โBy erotic, I mean all the powerful attractions we might have: for mentoring and being mentored, for unrealizable flirtation, for intellectual tripping, for sweaty mateship at play or at work, for spiritual ecstasy, for being held in silent grief, for explosive rage at a common enemy, for the sublime love of friendship.โ Thereโs a whole world outside the rigid structures weโve come to take as requirements for living.
โHello Strangerโ is a lively and intelligent addition to an essential discourse on how not only accessing our desires but also being open about them can make us more human, and perhaps, make for a better world. โThere could possibly be a way to fold those urges into their own relationship,โ Betancourt writes. โThey could build a different kind of two that would allow them to find a wholeness within and outside themselves without resorting to such betrayals, such lies, such affairs.โ Itโs the embrace of that complexity that, Betancourt suggests, gives people another way to live.
When asked how he could write with such honesty about the risk of promiscuity during the AIDS epidemic, the writer Douglas Crimp responded: โBecause I am human.โ โHello Strangerโ proves that art, as Crimp said, โchallenges not only our sense of the world, but of who we are in relation to the world โฆ and of who we are in relation to ourselves.โ
Jessica Ferri is the owner of Womb House Books and the author, most recently, of โSilent Cities San Francisco.โ