How to Be a Man—According to Pop Culture

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What do Saved by the Bell and Pedro Almodóvar films have in common? Or Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge and television personality and astrologer Walter Mercado?

These various programs and personalities constituted writer Manuel Betancourt’s education in pop culture. Born in Colombia, Betancourt grew up hungry for stories, and as an elementary school cinephile, he became a discerning student of alternate models of masculinity. His family coalesced around their television. The media he consumed—from Bayside High to Hercules—presented men’s lives differently from what he was seeing in the city or in the British international school he attended. For him, “Television was home. TV shows were digestible windows into plausible lives lived next door.”

Betancourt is a historicizing critic. He thinks about the context in which something—whether a telenovela or sexy Adidas ad—is created, examining the positionality between the text and himself as a consumer. For him, media isn’t a mirror, but something more fluid. He thinks of it as ripples in a pond, or light reflecting off a disco ball. At turns funny and sexy, thirsty for intellectual engagement (and men too), his new book, The Male Gazed: On Hunks, Heartthrobs, and What Pop Culture Taught Me About (Desiring) Men, untangles the simultaneous threads of desire to be a beautiful man, or to be with beautiful men, then unravels the implications of all of it to understand how those threads form the self.

Betancourt is a preeminent thinker, a “movie-made gay” man. Given that sexuality in media has become so high stakes, there’s no better time to hear from someone who brings true intellectual rigor to his analysis of contemporary media. Betancourt spoke with Esquire about hunks, men’s body image, queerbaiting, and the realities of American soft power overseas. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

ESQUIRE: This book is, in large part, about hunks and heartthrobs. What attracts you to them intellectually?

Manuel Betancourt: I think it's the fact that they're not taken seriously by their very nature, right? They're dumb, they're himbos, and they're supposed to just be eye candy. I love thinking about what it would mean to actually take them seriously, to think critically about what it is that they're doing, and to give them a kind of agency that comes from wanting to be gazed. Sometimes, when we think of feminist thought, there's a way in which if a woman is revealing herself, there's an agency over her body. I think sometimes we don't translate that when it comes to men. We think the patriarchal gaze is so set in stone that any man who wants to be looked at is feminized, and then, therefore, not worth our time or serious attention.

The other reason I was very interested in these hunks and these heartthrobs is because as a gay man, I’m obsessed with these hunks and these heartthrobs. Rather than disavow that and say, “Oh, that's just me being thirsty,” what would it mean to think about thirst as a way of orienting ourselves around the male body? What does it do? What is it playing on? What are some of the things it inspires? What are the cultural scripts we keep repeating when we think of this one kind of male body that we exalt? I thought there was a lot of fertile ground there to play with.

You speak a lot in this book about the male body: nudity, masculinity, body anxieties, thirst traps. What power does media give men over their bodies, and how does it exacerbate body anxieties?

In the ‘90s, we were having a lot of these discussions about women and women's bodies: what happens when women are taking ownership, they’re career women, and they want to have it all. We have Ally McBeal and Sex and the City. They're doing this without giving up their “femininity.” They can be sexual and sexualized, and they can be making that choice. Of course, that came up in terms of body shaming and rethinking the kind of female bodies that the ‘90s was exalting—this very thin body that requires so much attention and work. Men were starting to see that in the beginning of the 2000s with conversations about metrosexuality and what was required of men that had always been required of women.

I think it's tricky territory. The male body still has a kind of power and demands that kind of gaze, so that anxiety becomes a trap. That's why I think thirst traps are so fascinating; as soon as you're trying to own that, and understand the anxiety and the power dynamics, as a gay man, you're always caught in between. I live with this every single day. If I want muscles, do I want to embody that kind of man? Do I want to be that kind of man? Do I want to want that kind of man, because then what does that mean about my politics? What about my cultural identity? And what does it mean about what I'm not wanting on apps or in dating? It's something that I grapple with every day with myself, with my body, and with the things that I consume.

No matter your awareness, as soon as you post a thirst trap, you become stuck in it: you're creating something that will be gazed.

It’s letting the genie out of the bottle. Because you've clearly posted for other people. And what I love about that rhetoric is if you posted it for other people, then what other people do with that, or however they respond to that, that's clearly what you wanted. But obviously, issues of consent trickle into that conversation: people respond, but it's not the kind of people that I want responding to me, then I can't be angry, or maybe I can because I still want ownership.

You also talk about queerbaiting and gender presentation in your essay on Walter Mercado. Do you have thoughts on the discourse around famous queerbaiters today?

I go back and forth on this. Celebrities are so clearly managed and manicured; there’s a level of intent that you can't deny. There's a publicist involved, there's a stylist involved, there's an entire group of people who are creating that image. The cynical part of me wants to be like, “Oh, of course, they're queerbaiting, because they know that gathers clicks, or gets them covers on Vogue, and they're just doing this for clout.” And then the other part of me thinks, “20 years ago, that would still have been so mind-blowing.” The fact that we've come this far shows that there's a kind of progress.

There's also the idea that we can't expect sexualities will always be legible. The argument of queerbaiting begins with the assumption that the person we're talking about is 100% straight, and that they've always been straight and will always be straight. It becomes a very tenuous argument, when we don't actually know who Bad Bunny has been with or when we have someone like Diplo talking about how getting a blowjob, it's fine when you're not making eye contact. I think because we're living in an era where there's more sexual fluidity, and where labels are more elastic, accusing someone of queerbaiting requires a rigidity that I think we're trying to get away from. I think there's still room for critique. What does it mean that a person like Harry Styles gets this kind of press? Who's getting a cover—is it Harry Styles or Sam Smith? Or is it Sam Smith over Lil Nas X or Billy Porter? We should have the conversation about how the press manages those images, rather than me policing whether a male celebrity whose sexuality may not be legible to me is wearing a dress.

These essays are about you finding yourself in media in the ‘90s, often through coded presentation. At a time when overtly queer stories are under fire, what does it mean for coded narratives versus out stories?

To me, the answer has always been more of both. I've thought of the two not as mutually exclusive; they're mutually generative. The reason I can read queer-coded characteristics is because I know what queer characters or queer people are like. This ends up being a conversation not necessarily about representation, but about access and the kind of storytelling that we allow. It’s a conversation about what capitalists and producers can think about, and that's not quite the conversation I want to have. I want to have conversations with storytellers. Over the past decade, I've enjoyed seeing all those queer storytellers telling these authentic, beautiful, tender, hot, sexy, villainous, every kind of queer story that I could have ever imagined. They’re always two clicks away, whether it's on Netflix or in a book.

Those stories will still be told. I think it becomes a matter of where they will be found. They might not be found in libraries. They might not be found on certain streaming platforms, and we should talk about that. But at the level of who is telling those stories, I think we have such a robust generation of queer storytellers that I don't find myself worried. I worry about access and the profit and marketing machine that sometimes encourages queer-coding. I also love that queer-coding. There’s value in seeing yourself in not yourself. That’s the thing that I think we should also be demanding of straight audiences. There’s a way in which they should also be learning how to read coded meanings, because I think that's what makes queer critics and queer readers so fascinating. We ended up having to do a kind of reading that requires a lot of work, and that makes us very acute observers of the world. It fires up your empathy, how to think of yourself differently and walk in other people's shoes. There's nothing wrong with wanting other folks to do that kind of work.

What possibilities can media open in the formation of the self? What are its limitations?

One of the things I realized while writing this book is how much of myself I found and crafted out of pop culture. Part of it ends up being a really sad story in the sense that I didn't have that anywhere else. I didn't have other places to nurture myself or find myself as a gay man or queer man. The only way I could make those imaginative leaps, to project myself into a future where I would be a happy queer man, was the kind of imagination or play that watching a movie or TV show or reading a great book could do. I think the generations coming up have the opportunity to do that in the classroom, or at home, or with friends. I've given up on being envious about that. One of the things that I did enjoy was having to do that in my mind. It was actually quite great and quite safe, if isolating, if alienating, if kind of depressing when I think about it.

I think there’s also something to be said about being able to pick up pieces from around you and create yourself. For some people, it's fashion. For other people, it's writing, it's painting, or it's their job, or their family. We find ways of creating ourselves from what we have around us. I ended up finding the thing that was the easiest to access because I had a television and cable, and I could watch Hollywood films and Venezuelan soap operas and Italian music videos. I had such a plethora of things at my disposal. That's where I ended up finding myself.

Another thread of this book follows the power of U.S. pop culture through your childhood in Colombia. What’s your attitude towards the power of U.S. media in Colombia today?

As a kid, I venerated Hollywood. In my house, we lived in this tiny bubble. We were having a very American upbringing, but it was always filtered, and it was never our experience. I was watching Saved by the Bell, but that was not at all my high school. I would watch Friends and Seinfeld and I was like, “That's not quite how this works.” I grew up with Fresh Prince and Family Matters. There was a pervasiveness to the kind of pop culture diet that I had, and it began with me loving it and taking it in very uncritically. Until I was in my mid-20s, I was consuming American pop culture from the outside. There was a foreignness and a sense that it was being exported to me.

I eventually came around to think critically about it. What did it mean, to my eight or ten-year-old self, that I was taking in so much American pop culture to the point where I was alienated from my own Colombian culture around me? I was that kind of snobbish kid. It was like, “No, I'd rather watch a Hollywood film than a Colombian film. I'd rather watch a sitcom than this telenovela.” Eventually, I came around to thinking about it in terms of imperial and colonial power, and the way that it's reinscribing and exporting a lot of troubling politics. I'm sad that Manuel missed out on so much Colombian and Latin American culture because he was so obsessed with the U.S.

It does feel like an aggressive kind of soft power, and I do think it's getting a bit more homogenous and a little bit more insidious. Sometimes I don't know what to do with that, because I'm left with this pop culture diet that made up my entire childhood and teenage years. I don't want to throw it out, but I also don't want to be in that position where I’m uplifting it. There are moments when I want to, with hindsight, look back and see how troubling some of that was. I think that's why I wanted to write a chapter on telenovelas and a chapter on Walter Mercado and on anime. I wanted those moments where what I took from the U.S. was coming into contact and friction with other things. It wasn't just the U.S., and it wasn't just Hollywood. I think it, in a way, helped soften their power, even though it was so much of my life.

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