About halfway through his new book, “Hello Stranger,” Manuel Betancourt recounts his experience in a college course reading John Rechy’s 1977 manifesto “The Sexual Outlaw.” A titillating and raw “documentary” of sexuality in the sleazy underbelly of Los Angeles, the book set the tone for the kind of radically indignant literature that arose from centuries of homosexual oppression and, later, the AIDS crisis. Of Rechy’s insatiable appetite for sex, the young Betancourt had put forth an admittedly glib interpretation. Perhaps, he suggested to his professor, Rechy was simply nursing a fear of intimacy, his impressive body count a testament to his inaptitude for emotional attachment. But Betancourt’s classmates found his take prudish and unsophisticated. “The thundering laughter that greeted my all-too-earnest inquiry haunts me to this day,” Betancourt writes.
To understand casual sex as anathema to genuine, human connection is to reinforce a rather provincial notion of intimacy, the kind typically extolled by rom-coms. But warmth and good feeling, Betancourt comes to discover, can flourish just as easily in bathhouses or under the piers, on iPhone screens or in the affectionate gaze of a nude portraitist.
This realization provides something of a road map for “Hello Stranger,” a collection of essays and criticism about “modern intimacies” — setting up the overwhelmingly wide aperture through which Betancourt examines “the exhilarating thrills of strangers.” And while gay readers will be well acquainted with those exhilarations, Betancourt looks to mount a more sweeping argument against the tyrannies of normative sexuality, insisting throughout that friendship and flirtation might be as spiritually affirmative as monogamy.
To do so, Betancourt brings in case studies from film, literature and queer media, or media that might otherwise be parsed for signs of queerness. Mike Nichols’s 2004 film “Closer,” for instance, illustrates “how familiarity can breed a contentment that doesn’t will away masks but calcifies them instead.” Surveying Alan Hollinghurst’s novel “The Swimming-Pool Library,” the author insists on cruising as an “equalizing” or even “utopian” practice, contingent on a mostly unspoken pact between strangers. The work of the Pakistani American painter Salman Toor, in which the bodies and belongings of gay men are rendered in beatific mounds of paraphernalia, suggests “playful ideas of company and companionship.”
All of this amounts to a persuasive and well-researched disquisition on the edifying and seductive potential of those we don’t yet know, and how “brief encounters can be sites of endless possibilities.”
But Betancourt’s approach feels leaden with reference and citation, too often leaning on a catalog of cultural properties to advance an argument that is, at its heart, empirical. The book’s chapter titles — “Meet-Cute,” “On Sexting,” “Close Friends” — prime us for something reckless and confessional, but the author’s reliance on scholarship blunts the force of his arguments, leaving the reader with a litany of secondary texts to consult.
“Hello Stranger,” then, is more compelling when its author defers not to W.H. Auden or Roland Barthes but to that old chestnut: the personal. When he’s writing about the dissolution of his marriage, or his experiences on hookup apps, Betancourt’s prose becomes playful and unencumbered, like the subjects he wishes to elucidate. Posing naked, like Kate Winslet in “Titanic,” for a sketch artist, Betancourt remembers “the pool of sweat gathering in the nape of my neck” and the “fluttering sense of recognition” upon seeing himself rendered in watercolor.
Later, the author admits to “reaching for euphemisms and metaphors, for obscure historical concepts and far-flung artistic avatars” to avoid writing too diaristic a book. But it is, ultimately, in the book’s fleeting moments of confession and candor that the reader begins to better understand the ways a stranger, wholly and ecstatically oblivious to one’s shame and imperfection, might, in turn, behold us more truthfully than anyone.
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