About this Event
Join us for an event with queer Colombian culture writer and film critic Manuel Betancourt discussing his latest book Hello Stranger: Musings on Modern Intimacies. Joining Manuel in conversation is award-winning writer Mathew Rodriguez. This event will be hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.
Can’t make the event?
ACCESSIBILITY:
Strand Book Store is an ADA compliant venue. The event space is accessible via elevator.
ASL interpretation is available for this event by request only. Please reach out to our events team at [email protected] by January 9 to request.
Please ask a Strand employee upon arrival for directions to accessible seating if preferred.
For further information on accessibility in this space, or to make a request, please contact [email protected]
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Witty and winkingly playful, Manuel Betancourt’s Hello Stranger explores modern queer romance and the expansive possibilities of ephemeral intimacies
“Hello stranger.” As an opening line, you really can’t ask for better.
Hello Stranger is a book about chance encounters—at a bar, through social media, in a bathhouse—and what a stranger can reveal about who we are and who we could still yet be. A stranger, after all, is a site of endless possibilities.
As Manuel Betancourt looks back on his past relationships, he turns to characters and narratives that helped him question notions of what monogamy and coupledom (and relationships and marriage) can and should look like. From films like Before Sunrise and Cruising to the poetry of Frank O’Hara and the musicals of Stephen Sondheim, Betancourt uses pop culture to make sense of the alluring prospect of forging intimacies with strangers—even, or especially, the strangers within ourselves.
At once a personal excavation and a broad cultural critique, Betancourt grapples with everything from online sexting and real-life cruising to divorces and throuples. Hello Stranger examines the intimacies we crave, value, and oftentimes destroy with rote familiarity.
Photo credit: Jack Manning
Manuel Betancourt is a queer Colombian culture writer and film critic. His work has been featured in The New York Times, BuzzFeed Reader, Los Angeles Times, Film Quarterly, Los Angeles Review of Books and GQ Style, among others. Manuel is the author of The Male Gazed (Catapult, 2023), Judy Garland's Judy at Carnegie Hall (Bloomsbury Press, 2020), and a contributing writer to the Eisner Award-nominated graphic novel series, The Cardboard Kingdom (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2018 & 2021).
Mathew Rodriguez is an award-winning writer living in Brooklyn. He is a former senior editor at The Atlantic, Them, and The Body, an HIV/AIDS news website. His work has been featured in The Nation, The Village Voice, The Daily Beast, Out, Mic, INTO, and more. He is currently a student in the Biography and Memoir program at CUNY Graduate Center and is working on a memoir, Tough Guy, forthcoming from Abrams Books.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Strand Book Store, 828 Broadway, New York, United States
USD 7.81 to USD 36.83