Manuel Betancourt’s Recommended Reading List
Photograph of Manuel Betancourt by John Lagucki
Manuel Betancourt, the author of the newly released Hello Stranger: Musings on Modern Intimacies and the author of The Male Gazed, Judy at Carnegie Hall, and one of the contributing writers of Chad Sell’s critically acclaimed, best-selling and Eisner Award-nominated graphic novel series The Cardboard Kingdom shares his recommended reading list as the constellation of texts which informed and influenced Hello Stranger.
To learn more about Manuel’s inspiring career, visit here.
“Barthes is a brilliant writer of and about culture. These "fragments" are his attempts at unpacking the very genre and structure of modern-day romance, with vignettes about "absence," "drama," "jealousy," "tenderness," and many other figures that make up the stories we tell about the loves we have, want and crave. Playful and witty, this is an academic study broken down into bite-sized nuggets relished in any kind of order. Barthes's approach to writing about culture (erudite and accessible in equal ways) has long served as a kind of lighthouse for my own projects—especially in Hello Stranger, where I aimed to tackle the concept of fleeting intimacies as something worthy of rigorous—but not for that any less playful—exploration.”
“This London-set novel is all about William, a spoiled young gay man who spends his days "cottaging" (aka cruising) the city he loves and lives in. A study in intergenerational queer history as well as a steamy and heady portrait of a man who refuses to learn anything, Hollinghurst's novel is an utter delight. But also, the joy in reading a Hollinghurst novel is relishing his silky prose which can be sexy and entrancing one moment, and lucid and literate the next. Line of Beauty may be his better known work but I find The Swimming Pool Library to be a perfect entrypoint into one of the best living queer novelists of the twentieth and twenty-first century.”
When We Were Three: The Travel Albums of George Platt Lynes, Monroe Wheeler, and Glenway Wescott, 1925-1935
“If you ever wanted to learn about what a throuple looked like at the start of the twentieth century, look no further than this photo compendium chronicling the travels of photographer George Platt Lynes, and novelists Monroe Wheeler and Glenway Wescott. At once a photo album of arguably one of the most famous "triads" of the early twentieth century, this book is also a chance to witness a kind of queer joy we so rarely associate with decades before Stonewall—not to mention a vision of artistic life as tethered and anchored by the complementary intimacies Platt Lynes, Wheeler and Wescott organized around one another.”
“Any and every Sondheim fan should have this book (as well as its follow-up Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981-2011)): not only do you get the lyrics to those groundbreaking musicals of his (including Company, Into the Woods and Passion, among others) but you get plenty of tidbits and histories about the mounting of those shows—including cut songs and tweaked lyrics. But above all, this is the closest Sondheim ever got to writing a memoir, as well as an artist manifesto.”
“My favorite poet. Someone whose words could conjure up entire moods and worlds with but a few lines—and often written in moments as fleeting as the ones he's sketching with his grounded, grounding language. (And yes, my favorite poem of his remains the aptly-named "Homosexuality"). This collection, in particular, makes for a great primer on his work and includes all the poems of his I write about in Hello Stranger, as well as letters to his friends and even his "Personism" manifesto which is as deliciously absurd as it sounds. All in all, O'Hara is a stylist of the casual, both in terms of style and in terms of subject matter: he makes what's ordinary feel extraordinary precisely because of its mundanity.”
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