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‘The Male Gazed’ dives deep into masculinity, Ricky Martin, & more queer heartthrobs
"It's such a central question to queer coming-of-age... What do you want for yourself and what do you want for the man next to you in your bed?"
Writer Manuel Betancourt was fascinated with the idea of masculinity long before he had the words for how he felt about it—enough words, that is, to fill his new book, The Male Gazed: On Hunks, Heartthrobs, and What Pop Culture Taught Me About (Desiring) Men, out this week.
It’s a memoir-in-essays tackling topics of masculinity—Betancourt’s self-perception, the social pressures he faced coming of age in Bogotá, Colombia, and how the pop culture he grew up with influenced and expanded his view of what could be possible. And even erotic.
Packed with a fascinating combination of personal stories and queer theory, The Male Gazed offers a fresh take on masculinity through a queer lens, from Ricky Martin to Antonio Banderas to drag queens, telenovelas, queer cinema, and more.
We caught up with Manuel to learn more about the inspiration behind The Male Gazed, and the pop culture that made him who he is.
QUEERTY: Hi Manuel! Thanks for being here.
In The Male Gazed, you write about the question, “Do I want him, or do I want to be him?” How does that echo into how we experience pop culture, especially in an erotic sense?
BETANCOURT: That was always the central question for me while watching pop culture… because you’re always encouraged to look for role models. And I was like, “Oh, but all of these male role models I keep finding, I don’t know if I want to really be them.” Some of them, I just wanted to have them, and that felt sort of transgressive and weird and fun and titillating. Though when you’re a kid, or especially when you’re a teenager, that was not particularly well nurtured; I didn’t particularly feel comfortable sharing all of that. So it was tinged with a little bit of shame, and it’s only through time and a lot of work on myself that I can write about it.
To me, that was always the question of the heart of the pop culture that I was consuming and watching because those were the only two ways that I kept relating to men on screen. [I was] encouraged to want to be them, to have those attitudes or that body or that strength or that stamina or those looks. And then realizing that everything that I wanted, I also wanted for myself and that I wanted in whoever I was with. It’s such a central question to queer coming of age and just queer desire that there seems to be such a thin line between those two things, and that sometimes it’s hard to disentangle the two, what do you want for yourself and what do you want for the man next to you in your bed.
You describe yourself as a movie-made gay in the book, which I really loved. Can you tell us what that means and what are some of those movies that you’re referring to?
Well, the original pitch for this book was called “Movie-Made Gay.” And I had, for the longest time, wanted that to be the title of book. Over time, it was just clear that I’m not a big enough name to sell a book like that… so that’s why I ended up having this more specific piece of masculinity as the framework of the book. But that book proposal that I’d written for something called “Movie-Made Gay,” I turned into a column for Catapult.
The movie that I keep saying is the “film to get to know me,” which is both a compliment and a read, is Closer by Mike Nichols, because I’m obsessed with it and I feel very seen in a very vulnerable way by it. But as I write in the book, those early Disney films like Beauty and the Beast … I think I wore out that VHS tape that we had at home.
And My Best Friend’s Wedding with Julia Roberts. It was only later that I realized, oh, I was obsessed with this romcom about a critic who wants to destroy a marriage. And that seems very queer and very fun and also really revealing about where I was as a teenager.
And then any and all Pedro Almodóvar films, they’re now my go-to. And I keep saying that everything you want to learn about life, you can learn from watching All About My Mother, and I stand by that still.
You write about Ricky Martin pretty extensively in The Male Gazed. Can you tell us more about your history with him as a queer figure? How did he ultimately influence you and certain themes in the book?
I’ve never lived in the world without Ricky being a star. He joined Menudo the same year that I was born. So he’s always been a superstar for me just in general. I remember when I was a kid, my aunt who was in college at the time was obsessed with Menudo, and he had just become a soloist. She had giant posters of Ricky. So for me, he was always this mythic beautiful god who had this long luscious hair, and he was in this music group that was in this telenovela, and they wore these crazy ‘eighties ’80s outfits. I just thought he was the coolest thing in the world. I always knew him as this beautiful heartthrob. He sang these gorgeous ballads in Spanish, and he was a crooner, and he was always brooding in his music videos. It just made you swoon.
I was swooning for him when I was a teenager, and I always loved that it was couched in this softness. That he was the artistic, soulful, sensitive guy who would sing to you and was heartbroken because you left him. I think over time, I’m trying to remember when whispers of his gayness came into the ether, but it was around when I was in high school. And of course he was always very reticent about talking about any of that. And he had all these beautiful hot models that he dated. And as he talks about in his memoir, he truly dated them, he really was in love with them. There was never any sort of pretense.
So I watched him then cross over, and “Livin’ La Vida Loca” had felt like such a 180 from everything that I knew. Then he was even sexier and hotter and showing more of himself. So I’ve always been fascinated by him. And then, eventually, he came out, and now he has his beautiful husband and the two of them post these beautiful, gorgeous thirst traps all the time.
As I say in the book, if I were to tell my teenage self the kinds of pictures that Ricky posts on his Instagram, I would be blushing and would have to close myself up in a room for a long time. So he was one of those figures that, because I’d known him for so long, it felt like we were growing up together – he’s obviously a lot older than I am, but I was growing up alongside him, and I saw him come out, and I saw him navigate that.
There’s a section in the book that’s really striking about language, and you include this quote from James Baldwin about how identities and labels are something you put on, and that underneath it you just have your self, two words. Can you talk a little bit more about that, and how it ties into the rest of the book?
“Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self, in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which robes one’s nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one’s nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one’s robes.” James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work
One of the fascinating things about writing this book was that it was always going to be in English. I was born and raised in Columbia. I learned English really early on. I went to a British private school and I was having classes in English from when I was 12, if not younger. And I’ve now lived abroad longer than I lived in Columbia. So most of my professional life and most of my intellectual life has been in English. I went to school, and I went to grad school, and it was all in English, and so my language in English is very sophisticated. As I keep finding, whenever I try to talk about this book in Spanish, I find myself at a loss. I knew that that had to be part of the book, in that the kind of language I have to talk about my queerness, to talk about masculinity, to talk about desire, is in a language that’s not my own. And I don’t have an accented English. I keep being told… that I don’t “sound” Colombian, and that I sound like I’m from the States.
And I love that Baldwin quote because I think it speaks to the way, when you’re learning a foreign language, it can feel like putting on different kind of clothing.. and you actually see tangibly how language is made and crafted, and that it has a texture. And sometimes you don’t notice it in your own language because you’re living in it.. if you’re in water or if you’re in air you don’t see it. But as soon as you need to arm yourself with a different language, I love that sense of, what is it that you’re “putting on?” How can you use labels to shield yourself or to protect yourself, but also to announce yourself. And so to me, that’s always been fascinating about labels and identity and language.
And I do like to think of it as very fluid and textured and tangible, but that often, at the heart of it, there is a nakedness underneath.
There’s a really great chapter where you talk about futurity as a privilege. Can you talk more about that and how you found that to resonate through a queer lens?
I’ve struggled with projecting myself into the future because the present always felt very tenuous and fragile. And in my teenage years, it was because as a queer person I was bombarded with anti-gay rhetoric and also a lot of HIV stigma, and the two of them so often being conflated, it sort of led me to believe that queer men could not have a future. And then moving to Canada, then to the States as an immigrant, there are moments when you can’t project yourself into the future because you will only be able to be here until that visa expires. So the future for me was always very immediate.
And I feel like just now is when I’m finally being able to sort imagine and project myself into the future. And being the academic that I am, reading José Esteban Muñoz’s book on queer futurity was central to how I then started to think about the possibilities of the future, and actually trying to think of that as a refuge, and that it is a privilege and that it can be a fabulous way of having hope in oneself and in the community to really imagine that there can be a future.
And especially right now, when it does feel like there are so many forces, political and cultural that are trying to keep us focused on the present, one of the radical things that we can do is actually keep thinking about the future and keep believing that there will be a future, and that a future will be and will always have been queer. So, that to me has always been an idea that I return to time and time again. And it made sense that in the book I would end – it’s the second to last chapter – gesturing to that, because I didn’t want to get stuck in my past and my childhood, and I didn’t want to just stay in the present. I just wanted a little bit of hopeful projection.
What do you ultimately hope readers take from The Male Gazed?
I would want us to expand and explode what we can think of as masculinity in a really positive way. And just really try to not corner ourselves into thinking that masculinity is inherently toxic, it’s inherently bad, it’s inherently violent, it’s inherently dangerous—the list goes on and on. That we can not just reimagine it, but actually enrich it. And that in itself can be a radical act, and it wouldn’t just be about reclaiming masculinity, but all of those things have already been there.
And sometimes culture tells us that these things are not real, but we see it all over the world, that there is a softness, and there can be a tenderness, and there can be a kindness, and there can be all of these things wrapped up in a really positive way.
The Male Gazed is available everywhere now.
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