Hello Stranger
Musings on Modern Intimacies
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Jan 14, 2025
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Witty and winkingly playful, Manuel Betancourt’s Hello Stranger explores modern queer romance and the expansive possibilities of ephemeral intimacies
“Hello stranger.” As an opening line, you really can’t ask for better.
Hello Stranger is a book about chance encounters—at a bar, through social media, in a bathhouse—and what a stranger can reveal about who we are and who we could still yet be. A stranger, after all, is a site of endless possibilities.
As Manuel Betancourt looks back on his past relationships, he turns to characters and narratives that helped him question notions of what monogamy and coupledom (and relationships and marriage) can and should look like. From films like Before Sunrise and Cruising to the poetry of Frank O'Hara and the musicals of Stephen Sondheim, Betancourt uses pop culture to make sense of the alluring prospect of forging intimacies with strangers—even, or especially, the strangers within ourselves.
At once a personal excavation and a broad cultural critique, Betancourt grapples with everything from online sexting and real-life cruising to divorces and throuples. Hello Stranger examines the intimacies we crave, value, and oftentimes destroy with rote familiarity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Betancourt (The Male Gazed) considers "new ways of redrawing how we conceive of closeness" in this seductive blend of memoir and cultural criticism. Drawing on his own relationships and a broad range of pop culture artifacts—films from Bringing Up Baby to Before Sunrise, literature from Madame Bovary to A Little Life—Betancourt reflects on the allure of the chance encounter and the opportunity flirting with strangers offers to "see ourselves anew." He writes sharply about internalizing messages from his favorite films about the difficulties of monogamy and the liberation he felt while chatting with anonymous internet users as a sexually curious teenager ("They were the first instances where I could take labels like gay and queer out for a drive between slow-loading JPEGs and heavily pixelated MP4 downloads"). The chapters strike an exhilarating balance between steamy and cerebral, with casual analyses of Anna Karenina brushing up against frank assessments of Betancourt's excitement at "getting a cute guy to send me a dick pic." The result is an intoxicating invitation to push beyond one's comfort zone in pursuit of pleasure.
