Manuel Betancourt

HELLO STRANGER by @bmanuel.bsky.social is available now in paperback! 📚

✨ "Persuasive and well-researched." — @nytimes.com

✨ "A collage of thoughts on closeness and what it all means." — @altajournal.bsky.social

✨ "Funny, warm, and brilliant." — @ala-booklist.bsky.social

The Preview: Seven Documentaries to Catch at Sundance 2026 Documentary’s editors select seven documentaries to catch at Sundance 2026

If you’re in Park City attending Sundance and need some doc recs, we at Documentary magazine have you covered.

New Generation: Eva Victor, SORRY, BABY #LAFCA

Best Documentary/Nonfiction, Winner: MY UNDESIRABLE FRIENDS: PART I — LAST AIR IN MOSCOW #LAFCA

Best Music Score, Winner: Kangding Ray, SIRĀT

Best Cinematography, Winner: Adolpho Veloso, TRAIN DREAMS #LAFCA

A highlight of my visit to Bend, OR for their fab film festival was time traveling to the early 2000s inside the very last Blockbuster.

Photo of the three vampires from “sinners” trying to get invited into the juke joint where a party is happening

“we heard tale of expanding the tent”

Glad you’re enjoying it (and also I’m always so happy when I see library copies of Hello Stranger)!

I just found this book in my library and it's everything I needed for thinking about the stirring of possibility that comes from opening into connection and frisson and being seen and known by others, and vice versa.

Category is:

Posing with my book, HELLO STRANGER which came out six months ago today!

Get it wherever books are sold (namely, your favorite indie bookstore!); and yes, you can even get it on audiobook (read by yours truly).

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: I don't know who the hell it is that's ended up convincing us—the people who want to start a revolution-to accept the idea that revolution is apocalyp-tic, catastrophic, and bloody. We need to grasp once and for all that it's counterrevolution that's apocalyptic and catastrophic and bloody. You already know the figures: more than thirty thousand dead, thousands im-prisoned, thousands tortured by the leaders of the Chilean military coup. My idea of revolution is of the search for individual happiness through collective happiness, which is the only just form of happiness.

Reading the interviews of Gabriel García Márquez and this passage stands out to me, from the 1970s but relevant in this time, that in this era the fight must be for collective happiness, which as he astutely describes, is the only kind of just happiness

BELIZE: Well I hate America, Louis. I hate this country. It's just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you. The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word "free" to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me. You come with me to room 1013 over at the hospital, I'll show you America. Terminal, crazy and mean. (A rumble of thunder. Then the rain comes. Belize has a collapsible umbrella, and he raises it. Louis stands in the rain.) BELIZE: I live in America, Louis, that's hard enough, I don't have to love it. You do that. Everybody's got to love something.

Angels in America remains my go-to work whenever I feel despondent and sink into despair.

What a fucking nightmare

“you come up with a mean nickname to call this guy on TV?”
“sure did boss, real fuckin sexy just like you asked”

here’s a pretty good rebuttal of the new Andrew Sullivan piece from Tony Kushner.

Oh look it was written over 30 years ago.

www.thenation.com/article/arch...

Love Astoria, my former home.

So many faves I left off.

How My Reporting on the Columbia Protests Led to My Deportation As an Australian who wrote about the demonstrations while on campus, I gave my phone a superficial clean before flying to the U.S. I underestimated what I was up against.

I was deported by the U.S. for reporting on the Columbia University student protests.

www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...

How My Reporting on the Columbia Protests Led to My Deportation As an Australian who wrote about the demonstrations while on campus, I gave my phone a superficial clean before flying to the U.S. I underestimated what I was up against.

“Look, we both know why you are here,” the agent told me... “It’s because of what you wrote online about the protests at Columbia University,” he said.
www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...

CLARIFICATION :

The Trevor Project's hotline will still be live. But basically this means LGBTQ people can no longer be connected to it through the US national 988 suicide prevention hotline.

They will need to be contacted DIRECTLY

So spread this around

They can be texted. They can be called.

Can’t really go wrong for Pride with Judy :)

very much enjoyed @bmanuel.bsky.social’s Judy at Carnegie Hall—a perfect Pride month read.

Never had a movie lost me so quickly as that film’s opening sequence.

posting about the crushing state of things and then promoting book stuff (h/t to @maris.bsky.social for this)

Judy Garland's Judy at Carnegie Hall On the night of Sunday, April 23, 1961 Judy Garland made history. That's no hyperbole. Surrounded by a throng of ecstatic fans (3,165 to be exact), the legendar…

Also highly recommended: @bmanuel.bsky.social Manuel Betancourt’s book about the Carnegie Hall concert.

The Male Gazed book against a naked male torso

Hello Stranger book against a naked male torso

Happy Pride! 🏳️‍🌈

If you’re going to buy gay books this summer, may I recommend two that make for excellent poolside/beach reads?

A still from an early scene in "Cruising" of a jockstrap dance party.

Reading @bmanuel.bsky.social's "Hello Stranger" has added about two dozen books, essays, and films to my "for later" pile, including "Cruising", which, fucking woof. 🥵

Yes! It’s a damn fine list of films if I say so myself.