The Male Gazed
On Hunks, Heartthrobs, and What Pop Culture Taught Me About (Desiring) Men
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
NPR, A Best Book of the Year
Time, A Best Book of the Year
A queer film critic takes you on a “riotous trip through media memory lane” in essays on thirst traps, drag queens, and Antonio Banderas—encouraging us “to rethink our ideas about masculinity,” intimacy, and gender (People).
Manuel Betancourt has long lustfully coveted masculinity—in part because he so lacked it. As a child in Bogotá, Colombia, he grew up with the social pressure to appear strong, manly, and, ultimately, straight. And yet in the films and television he avidly watched, Betancourt saw glimmers of different possibilities. From the stars of telenovelas and the princes of Disney films to pop sensation Ricky Martin and teen heartthrobs in shows like Saved By the Bell, he continually found himself asking: Do I want him or do I want to be him?
The Male Gazed grapples with the thrall of masculinity, examining its frailty and its attendant anxieties even as it focuses on its erotic potential. Masculinity, Betancourt suggests, isn’t suddenly ripe for deconstruction—or even outright destruction—amid so much talk about its inherent toxicity. Looking back over decades’ worth of pop culture’s attempts to codify and reframe what men can be, wear, do, and desire, this book establishes that to gaze at men is still a subversive act.
Written in the spirit of Hanif Abdurraqib and Olivia Laing, The Male Gazed mingles personal anecdotes with cultural criticism to offer an exploration of intimacy, homoeroticism, and the danger of internalizing too many toxic ideas about masculinity as a gay man.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In these smart and probing essays, film critic Betancourt (Judy Garland's Judy at Carnegie Hall) reflects on his relationship with masculinity through the lens of the heartthrobs of his youth. He recounts grappling with his sexuality as an awkward boy growing up in Colombia in the 1990s and shares how his attraction to the outlandishly masculine Disney characters Gaston and Hercules made him envious of the former's swagger and the latter's "pecs," while at the same time they provided "guidance on what kind of man I wanted to become." In "Walk Like a Loaded Man," the author contends that Ricky Martin's evolution from the smoldering, straight-performing pop star behind "Livin' la Vida Loca" to the purveyor of Instagram "thirst traps" featuring his husband represents an overdue expansion of the "Latin lover" persona. Betancourt's verve and wit elevate the prose, and the more personal entries are intimate and affecting, such as "Of Capes and Men," in which Betancourt considers the showy garb of Puerto Rican TV astrologer Walter Mercado in light of Betancourt's own efforts as a teenager to suppress mannerisms he feared would expose him as queer. Readers won't want to put this one down.
