"Do Say “Gay”: Manuel Betancourt Queers Pop Culture Masculinities in The Male Gazed" by R.J. Lambert

by RJ Lambert

May 30, 2023

RJ Lambert is a queer writer and author of the debut poetry collection, Mind Lit in Neon (FLP, 2022). He was selected by Kaveh Akbar to receive the Patricia Cleary Miller Award for Poetry from New Letters and nominated for a Pushcart Prize by The Worcester Review. R.J. teaches writing at the Medical University of South Carolina and is online at rj-lambert.com.

The Male Gazed: On Hunks, Heartthrobs, and What Pop Culture Taught Me About (Desiring) Men by Manuel Betancourt ; Catapult ; 208 pgs.; $26.00

Manuel Betancourt’s The Male Gazed: On Hunks, Heartthrobs, and What Pop Culture Taught Me About (Desiring) Men anachronistically follows the author’s biographical touchpoints as he gazes upon and his own queer identity in relation to widely known representations of masculinity. By appropriating “the male gaze,” or the way in which female characters and their bodies have historically been sexualized or idealized for male viewers, Betancourt sets out to show how male performers and their performed manhood are consumed by media audiences. His ten chapters of eclectically curated examples from literature, television, film, music, and other media show how archetypal masculinities in pop culture and entertainment invite more nuanced readings, particularly in the context of a queer boy’s lived experiences.

Betancourt likely could not have anticipated the synchronicity of releasing his introspective, outspoken, unapologetically queer-positive pop culture autobiography at this time of America’s increasing transphobia and homophobia, including the state of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” restrictions on public educators and very public dispute and ensuing legal battle with Disney over gay rights, representation, and allyship. Perhaps it is therefore fitting that his new book starts with a chapter on Disney’s animated heroes and the power of movies to both reify and call into question traditional gender and sexual roles. Betancourt’s nuanced treatment of Disney animations in the first chapter honors the openly gay artists and creatives behind some of the most recognizable (and most masculine) heroes in Disney’s canon, including the creative decision-making process and “choices, about how big Gaston’s biceps should be or how long Herc’s neck needed to be”—in short, attempts to quantify what it means to embody masculinity. By extension, this chapter also establishes pop culture’s audiences as active meaning-makers who interpret on-screen performances much like pop culture “data” modeling who we can be and how we can act.

Raised in Bogotá, Colombia, Betancourt came to Disney from the perspective of a Latin-American child learning about both American culture and traditional gender performance through pop culture and media. In contrast to Disney, the hallmark of American pop culture, the chapter titled, “Hombres,” engages the melodramatic performance of relationships and masculinities in Spanish-language telenovelas, thereby joining the list scholars and commentators who have elevated the telenovela as worthy of critical attention for its cultural reach and amplification of longstanding narratives and archetypes. Betancourt brings bell hooks’s “patriarchal masculinity” to bear on the angry, abusive male characters to highlight how boys are taught to be fighters rather than to feel their feelings. Like others whose parents divorced or were considered latchkey kids of the 80s and beyond, he “had to seek in popular culture the love stories” and “male role models… because they were so absent at home.” Even so, this chapter is perhaps most compelling for the ways it conveys the author’s relationship with his mom and for his description of the impact his family’s “intricately woven tales” had on him as a young child, showing the way that narratives run through not just media, but also our most intimate identities with family.

Betancourt also shows the ways that Latin-American masculinity and the queer male gaze have evolved in the age of the internet and the social media. Chapter 6, “Walk Like a Loaded Man,” starts with the author cataloging Ricky Martin’s “playful forays into thirst-trap territory” in photos from Twitter and Instagram. By outlining Martin’s evolving public persona from a boy group superstar before finding mainstream English-language success as a mature performer from the perspective of an interested young fanboy, Betancourt shows how the gaze of audiences who essentially grew up alongside Martin has come closer into reach and feels more intimate through networked social media performances of masculine sexuality.

Given the ways popular culture hides, exposes, and idealizes the male physique, several of the chapters describe the personal implications and cultural impact of popular men’s fashion, clothing, uniforms, and styles. Chapter 2, “Wrestling Heartthrobs,” focuses on the masculine icon of the wrestler, including its characteristically sexualized and fetishized singlet. His discussion of the wrester’s body-tight uniform brings to mind the sexually charged wrestler cover model of queer author Doug Paul Case’s 2015 poetry chapbook College Town, a perfect example of the gaze that athletic icons of masculinity invite. Betancourt juxtaposes his own childhood distaste for PE class with the eroticization of the “ultimate test of manhood,” wrestling, in films like Channing Tatum’s Foxcatcher, novels like Stephen Florida and In One Person, and even TV’s Saved by the Bell, featuring the wrestling jock Slater. By extension, wrestling serves as a particularly useful metaphor of the author’s attempts to navigate pop culture influences while coming to terms with his desires and attractions.

Furthering his discussion of the ways male actors are intentionally clothed to shape their masculinity for film audiences, he later describes how Jean Paul Gaultier’s costume design for The Sixth Element had a way of “accentuating biceps, thighs, and backs in surprisingly transgressive ways,” calling back to Disney animators’ decisions to accentuate heroic proportions and features. The fifth chapter, “Of Capes and Men,” investigates the flip side of hypermasculine superheroes and cartoons—the “special kind of magic in a cape.” Like his earlier exploration of the wrestler’s singlet, what’s interesting here is the fashionable extension of the masculine character through their uniform: “swishy capes that coded them as both strong and imposing as well as flouncy and effeminate.” Similarly, Betancourt gives the reader a close look at advertising featuring nearly nude men in underwear, all while elevating briefs over boxers, jockstraps, and even wrestling singlets. The distance between fantasy and reality is palpable in Betancourt’s descriptions of the sexual fantasy of white brief-wearing Calvin Klein models or Antonio Banderas in Almodóvar’s early film La ley del deseo (Law of Desire), on the one hand, and his own insecure teenage forays into online erotic literature and the self-conscious changing of clothes in a gym locker room. Even as the following chapter, “Balls Out,” describes the appeal of stripper scenes in Magic Mike, Betancourt reveals the deeper meaning behind character-driven stripper costumes—not “merely something to be dispensed with. It invokes characters and archetypes that enrich the performance.”

Ultimately, this autobiography about the power of narrative and representation closes with a love letter to drag. Following earlier references to bell hooks and other mainstream feminist and gender theorists, it is not surprising that Judith Butler invoked to frame drag as a quintessentially gendered performance. While much of the closing chapter focuses on the image journey of the family friendly emblem of mainstream drag, RuPaul, Betancourt’s bigger takeaway might be the power of drag to resist seemingly contradictory gender stereotypes by serving as an example of “both/and”—both masculine and feminine, both strong and vulnerable, both authentic and performative. Put simply by the author, “at its core was a lesson I’m still working to unlearn: that you can’t be a man if you are a maricon.”

Taken together, these seemingly playful case studies of one queer boy’s obsession with popular culture and appreciation of the male form constitute powerful political acts. Betancourt’s evolving curiosity about gender performances and sexual identities will be relatable to any reader who reflects on pop culture’s steady presence during adolescence and influence on their sexual maturation. But to queer readers and their allies, gender identity, sexual attraction, and the light stuff of popular performance are often matters of respect, freedom, and even safety.

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Do Say “Gay”: Manuel Betancourt Queers Pop Culture Masculinities in The Male Gazed

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