HELLO STRANGER: Reflections on fashionable intimaciesby Manuel Betancourt
About midway via his new ebook, Whats up Stranger, Manuel Betancourt recounts his expertise in a school course studying John Recci’s 1977 manifesto. “The Sexual Outlaw”. A stirring and uncooked “documentary” about sexuality within the seedy underworld of Los Angeles, the ebook set the tone for the form of radically outraged literature that emerged from centuries of gay oppression and later from the AIDS disaster. Of Reshi’s insatiable urge for food for intercourse, the younger Bettencourt had put ahead an admittedly fast interpretation. Maybe, he steered to his professor, Recci merely harbored a worry of intimacy, and his spectacular physique was proof of his incapability for emotional attachment. However Bettencourt’s classmates discovered his strategy prudish and unsophisticated. “The roar of laughter that greeted my all-too-sincere inquiry haunts me to today,” Bettencourt wrote.
To see informal intercourse as anathema to actual, human connection is to bolster a somewhat provincial notion of intimacy, the type often extolled by rom-coms. However heat and good feeling, Bettencourt finds, can flourish simply as simply in loos or beneath piers, on iPhone screens or within the light gaze of a nude portraitist.
This realization offers one thing of a street map for Whats up Stranger, a group of essays and critiques on “fashionable intimacy”—creating the terribly extensive opening via which Bettencourt explores “the exhilarating thrills of strangers.” And whereas homosexual readers will likely be conversant in this elation, Bettencourt seeks to make a broader case towards the tyranny of normative sexuality, insisting all through that friendship and flirtation will be as spiritually affirming as monogamy.
To do that, Bettencourt attracts on case research from movie, literature, and queer media, or media which may in any other case be analyzed for indicators of queerness. Mike Nichols’ 2004 movie “Nearer,” for instance, illustrates “how familiarity can breed a satisfaction that does not take away masks however as an alternative calcifies them.” Analyzing Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Swimming Pool Library, the creator insists on cruising as an “equalizing” and even “utopian” apply depending on a largely unstated pact between strangers. Pakistani American artist Salman Toor’s work, through which the our bodies and belongings of homosexual males are depicted in blissful piles of paraphernalia, provides “playful concepts about companionship and friendship.”
