Hello Stranger

Review

This review contains a lot of discussion of sex, cruising, and other “NSFW” stuff. I would encourage you to NOT read it if that makes you uncomfortable.

I suppose it’s my fault. I picked this book up hoping for something a little closer to smut than the navel-gazing that we so often receive from Betancourt in these pages. If nothing else, it has served as a splendid source for reading recommendations, there are dozens and dozens of references to books, essays, films. Several of the essays are more or less about (or use to great length as framing) films or works of art as a device by which the author can reflect on relationship and sex dynamics. Some are interesting. Some are quite boring and annoying.

The strongest essays come in a block just after the start of the book, On Sexting, On Cruising, and Naked Friends. The first starts out with the author mentioning his arousal at the act of sexting, displaying himself for strangers and being turned on by that. That’s all well and good, but thankfully it becomes more interesting around the time he starts reflecting on what it is to titillate and be titillated by perfect strangers. The theme strengthens in On Cruising, which he begins by documenting a cruising episode in a hotel bar. The tale turns into a discussion of Rechy’s works The Sexual Outlaw and City of Night, and eventually other works that explore cruising.

I appreciated Betancourt’s extension of cruising into the digital era, which I have not considered. I’ve thought of cruising as a person-to-person live event, and something I’ve never experienced. While it’s clear that Betancourt values it much less, he takes time to talk about sites like Grindr and Sniffies where cruising is all around. If you open up Sniffies in a populated city, you’re as likely as not to find dozens, maybe hundreds, of men looking for sex (or at least, window shopping). Usually, there are three or four “pump and dumps” in walking distance. These are events in which a bottom stations up to be fucked by several men in succession, sometimes dozens at a time, almost always without condoms and almost always with the express goal of having the top cum inside. Interested parties can google to find videos of these sorts of events, for me they fall into that vast category of “hot to imagine, but exhausting and sort of scary sounding.” The scary part comes from the specter of HIV, AIDS, and other STDs, which haunt sex between men in ways that I think they don’t for other populations. Even with PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) and DoxyPEP (an as-needed dose of doxycycline for post-exposure prophylaxis, intending to prevent bacterial STIs), sex with strangers can be a daunting thing. How many times out of a hundred is the response to “you prep/ddf?” going to be a lie (or a lie by ignorance, how many guys are truly getting tested every 3 months?)?

And then there’s the logistical organization. While writing, I opened Sniffies to see what Big Events were around me. Here’s the biggest one (75 attendees!), which is within walking distance:

Sexy fit cumdump for your loads 💦

Perfect bubble butt ass up at an easy access in [—] from 5:30-10:30pm. Pump n dump style. Unload in me, add your tally mark on my back, head out. Looking to take 30+ loads 💦 get me flooded. No drugs, other bottoms, condoms, or lingering. Poppers are ok

This is typical. Within short distance there’s a posting with 65 sign-ups for an oral play event, another pump and dump up the street at a known cruising hotel (a mere 3 sign-ups so far, poor guy), and one across the street from that one on the map with 12 sign-ups. When I see these, I’m tempted to reach out to the hosts and ask, “What is your attrition rate?” Hookups on sites like these are notoriously flakey, so I imagine what, maybe 20% of the attendees no-show? That’s still more than 50 guys for that first event – 50 guys are going to fuck and cum inside him? Good god, I can’t imagine the endurance it takes, or the preparation.

Betancourt doesn’t talk much about these events in the cruising essay (maybe not at all), which is a shame, because they open something up that I think is a little different, a bit of fantasy. Almost a cruising-by-proxy. It’s a perverse little thrill to imagine them. I think it’s probably easier to fantasize about one than to actually go, but I don’t see myself finding out anytime soon.

As an aside, there’s also a reference to Marcus McCann’s book Park Cruising which didn’t make my reading list below. Park cruising is something I think about sometimes, the high-risk nature of it. It is another one of those things that falls into that “hot to imagine but not for me” list. Sniffies also has cruising sites listed, and you can even post messages like, “will be there around 1” or some such. These make for fun reading, more often than not they’re people shittalking each other or calling out weird behavior happening at the parks (or, very often, saying cops are around). When I’m walking up the park steps, I notice a trodden path to a tree surrounded by bushes, but with space all around it, and no grass to be seen. As if a park planner designed it specifically for cruising. Not a few times have I see condom wrappers or used condoms in the area, and I’ll admit they give me a little giggle. I’m sure a lot of people pass them in disgust, but I think, “oh my, someone had fun last night.” (Though I do not support littering.)

Betancourt does not write about other aspects of having sex with strangers. It is, always, a risk. Not just one of disease transmission, that ghost that haunts all of us gays, but of assault, failure, or imbalance. A stranger may not value you as anything more than a hole, and saying “no” or “I can’t do that” doesn’t always translate to respect, even though it should. Even fun encounters feel out of balance, maybe feeling that, once the door is closed and the person gone, there isn’t anything meaningful beyond hygiene happening. That is not the feeling of being “wanted” that Betancourt loves to talk about in his Cruising essay. I think these are things that would have made this book feel more thoughtful and whole.

All of Betancourt’s teasing and playful writing about his DMs and how often he seems to be cruised does get a little annoying. It it not a galloping shock to flip back to find his author photo depicting a pretty conventionally attractive gay guy (almost stereotypical, down to the roughing short beard and pretty shoulders). There is some odd gray zone happening, where the non-specific sexiness of things is quite interesting to read, and thoughtful, but they often feel weighed down by way Betancourt talks about his personal experiences. That might be unfair of me, I’m not sure, but something about it does not work well all the time.

The frustration of it all comes to a head in his (almost) last three essays, Two’s Company, Three’s a Crowd, and Three’s Company. These explore marriage and then non-monogamous relationships or their contexts, all soaked in autobiography and film/book references. I was predisposed to dislike these, I think, because I am not at all interested in non-monogamy and the ideas/practices around it make me deeply uncomfortable. Betancourt et al might say that is hypocritical, how can one find slutty fantasies and cruising hot and then find non-monogamy strange and off-putting? I don’t have a good answer to that, other than, “I contain multitudes.” And so, when essay Three’s a Crowd begins with Betancourt typing out, “The day I told my husband I had cheated was the day I knew my marriage was over,” I restrained the urge to say out loud, “no shit, cheating prick,” and instead just rolled my eyes into the back of my head. Betancourt does not appear to take any pride in it, and it’s clear he feels conflicted, but none of it is interesting to read.

In fact, I found the last two of that chunk of essays stupefyingly boring. The book reads as though he walked from his divorce court and into an event and essentially cruised/got cruised his way into a throuple. What a boon for him. There are probably others that would find this all very interesting, but to me it reads like just a little self-pity and a lot of rationalization/over-correction. But I also know that my mindset here seems condescending when, in truth, it is probably just jealousy and loneliness manifesting as petty annoyance.

Whatever the source, at the end of the day I found Betancourt’s book uneven and often boring. It is almost perfectly half interesting, half sleep-inducing for me, and so that’s my 2.5/5 rating.

Reading List

Books/essays mentioned that I would like to track down:

• The Lover’s Discourse: Fragments — Roland Barthes
• Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking — Tim Dean
• Garth Greenwell gets several mentions. I loved Small Rain just a few weeks ago, and have copies of What Belongs to You and Cleanness on my table now.
  • Also cited is Grenwell’s review, for The Atlantic, of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, which is titled “ A Little Life: The Great Gay Novel Might Be Here.” I have had reservations about reading the book, and most personal conversations with people I know have amounted to “I don’t recommend this.” I also loved Andrea Lon Chu’s scorching review in Vulture (though I read it in her essay book, Authority).
  • Another essay, “How I Fell in Love with the Beautiful Art of Cruising.”
• City of Night — John Rechy
• The Sexual Outlaw: A Documentary — John Rechy

Notes

• p42 - TB: Really pleased to see Andrew Haigh’s 2011 film Weekend here, which I spoke about a little on an episode of the 70mm Rejected podcast for pride month earlier this year. You can listen here
• p62, quoting an exchange from The Boys in the Band” - “You show me a happy homosexual, and I’ll show you a gay corpse.”
• p130 - This is a question that continues to be posed decades since: How can we build and acknowledge relationships that straddle the line between the romantic and the erotic without carefully delineating the boundary that distinguishes them?
• p131 - We would all do better to nurture such close friendships, as erotic or as chaste as they may be, without fearing them becoming something else. “Patriarchy,” hooks writes, “has sought to repress and tame erotic passion precisely because of its power to draw us into greater and greater communion with ourselves, with those we know most intimately, and,” crucially, she adds, “with the stranger.”