Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Annelie Geissler
Categories
Sex & sexuality, social aspects

HELLO STRANGER

Manuel Betancourt

Musings on Modern Intimacies

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 encountersat a bar, through social media, in a bathhouseand 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 strangerseven, 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. MANUEL BETANCOURT is a queer Colombian culture writer and film critic. His work has been featured in The New York Times, BuzzFeed Reader, Los Angeles Times, Film Quarterly, Los Angeles Review of Books and GQ Style, among others. Manuel is the author of The Male Gazed (Catapult, 2023), Judy Garland's Judy at Carnegie Hall (Bloomsbury Press, 2020), and a contributing writer to the Eisner Award-nominated graphic novel series, The Cardboard Kingdom (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2018 & 2021).

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Book Published 2025-01-14 by Catapult Press

Comments

What fun! Betancourt encourages us to flirt with a stranger. Inside that interaction is the kernel of so much of queer culture. Strangers can help us to shed shame and rethink our self-image. They can teach us how to be a good neighbor and how to extend care and empathy to people we meet. In Hello Stranger, Betancourt uses film to pick apart comforting fantasies about how relationships are made and sustained, and in the process, he puts strangers in the spotlight, right where they belong.

Hello Stranger is a thoughtful and fearless exploration of the oft-overlook relationships that matter as much, if not more, than our romantic relationship with our 'better half.' With his brilliant examinations and keen observations, Betancourt illustrates what we might discover about ourselves (and others) when we start unpacking these intimate (and sometimes fleeting) relationships through an unfamiliar lens.

Betancourt is a fluid stylist, demonstrating his intelligence in investigating subject matter that most readersqueer or otherwisecan relate to. As a witty, intuitive observer of human behavior, he validates rather than demonizes the delicious recklessness of meeting strangers and the intimate thrill of the anonymous encounter . . . A rewarding and insightful exploration of risk, desire, and anonymity.

Betancourt beautifully captures the push and pull of intimacy, where love's contradictions can both comfort and confinea compelling exploration of connection and what's revealed about ourselves in pursuit of it.