The Masculine Mystique: Manuel Betancourt’s The Male Gazed

Masculinity as a subject isn’t always framed kindly in narratives documenting the early exploration and discovery of the queer self. After all, its aspirational qualities for closeted boys are too often complicated by the threats associated with not having it. Yet the failed attempt at masculine performance can sometimes recast our desire to be different kind of men into an appetite for looking at them instead, and in his essay collection The Male Gazed: On Hunks, Heartthrobs, and What Pop Culture Taught Me About (Desiring) Men, culture writer and critic Manuel Betancourt explores the development of his queer male gaze through candid and wide-ranging reflections on the pop-cultural influences that formed his early education in how to want and how to be.

Betancourt begins with a meditation on his early fascination with the male form specifically as represented in the Disney films of his childhood, as his reluctance to look too closely at Prince Phillip’s “slim, alluring body” in Sleeping Beauty is “the first of many instances in which the silvery images on-screen kindled a growing realization that maybe I wasn’t like other boys.” He recognizes how Phillip’s uncomplicated masculinity had turned Betancourt into a spectator of something he intuitively understands that he will never become himself—identifying most often instead with these films’ female heroines—and this discomfort with the expectation of being a certain kind of man becomes a through line guiding the reader through the rest of this personal history of a cautiously wandering gaze.

Betancourt employs a wide-ranging mélange of associated texts to paint a broad picture of how what we look at can determine what we become. Incisive without being too academic about the scholarly theory undergirding his subject, he draws connections that feel both organic and surprising as he guides readers through his pantheon of influences and demonstrates how cultural production inevitably creates space for fantasy and desire to take new forms.

For example, Betancourt uses recent Instagram thirst traps posted by Ricky Martin as a case study in the gulf between audience and the self, marveling at Martin’s negotiation of the costs of self-expression throughout his long career. He uses the narrative and visual forms of anime and the telenovelas of his Colombian childhood to impart valuable lessons about what our bodies say to the world about who we are. And he explores the “queered masculinity” of Jean Paul Gaultier’s designs and the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder (among others) to make claims about the radical possibility of “uncoupling effeminacy from homosexuality.”

A ranging rumination on Pedro Almodóvar’s Law of Desire, in the context of Antonio Banderas’s performance as a queer man driven to kill for love, continues Betancourt’s unpacking of the link between desire and danger when it comes to masculine signifiers. This includes a roving intellectual analysis of gay porn tropes in an essay about the allure of the wrestling singlet, specifically as worn by Mario Lopez in Saved by the Bell, which probes at the effects of “glamorizing men who could easily turn us into punchlines if not outright into punching bags.” He even describes his own violent adolescent rage as “a suit of armor” that felt empowering at the time because it offered him a way to “adhere to the tenets of masculinity that were expected of me,” referring to a cultural understanding that “masculinity itself is inherently violent and aggressive—precisely what patriarchal societies would like us to believe.”

From a young age, Betancourt understood that how we adorn our bodies—whether with a wrestling singlet, a superhero cape, or even more transformative ingredients of self-making—affects how it will be received by the world. This line of thinking leads him to the collection’s logical conclusion with an inversion of the performance of masculinity in a savvy reading of drag culture and performance that ultimately focuses on lessons learned from RuPaul’s Drag Race.

Betancourt dissects the conventions of the reality competition show, noting how often the contestants are shot while in the process of preparing for their performances, and thus between their everyday and drag selves, to make a case for new ways of being a man—not the kind of man he once thought he’d have to be, but the authentic and vulnerable kind that doesn’t bend to binaries. And he marvels at how RuPaul Andre Charles as showrunner negotiates the space between male bodies and female personas, encouraging us “to break masculinity apart.”

And so, too, does Betancourt break up our conceptions of masculinity into its component parts to show us just how messily it’s been constructed. An intimate personal and family history is woven into these essays, and the brief nods toward autobiography throughout focus the frame and the context of Betancourt’s observations in an intricate display of how specificity of detail can make individual experience into something universally felt. His writerly voice is both authoritative and conversational, and The Male Gazed is a necessary and compulsively readable dissection of how pop culture both reflects and creates the world around us.

Manuel Betancourt’s The Male Gazed is now available from Catapult.