When Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested in 1991, I was sixteen years old and struggling with my sexuality. I grew up in a small town in southwestern Virginia and attended an all-boys prep school in central Virginia, both places isolated and unsafe to be out. Unlike now, positive examples of gay men like Pete Buttigeig, Dan Levy, or RuPaul weren’t in the media, and certainly gay historical figures weren’t taught in the classrooms. Instead, I had Dahmer, whose criminality the media clumsily and maliciously mingled with his sexuality, implying that there was a relationship between the two.
When I heard that Ryan Murphy, the writer, director, and producer best known for the TV shows Glee and American Horror Story, was making Dahmer, Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story for Netflix with his long-standing collaborator Ian Brennan, my stomach churned, and my curiosity was piqued. Indeed, it was a double and, perhaps, paradoxical reaction: a physical revulsion at the idea of dredging up Dahmer’s horrors for profit and a true interest in how the series would handle the material artistically. My question: Would Murphy and Brennan counter the media’s initial treatment of the story and offer a truer, more balanced representation of the nightmare?
From Donahue to Dateline, the media’s extensive international coverage of the Dahmer case in the 90s implied a relationship between his homosexuality and his psychopathy. Immediately after his arrest, media and public officials referred to his crimes as “homosexual overkill,” to which lesbian and gay activists in Milwaukee passionately objected. Soon the term vanished from public discourse, but any attempt to unmingle homophobic prejudice from the moral outrage over the crimes did as well. As a result, teenage me doubled down on self-loathing and slid another bolt across the closet door. So, when I caught wind of Murphy’s project, I wanted to see what spin his creative team, which has done much to increase LGBTQ+ visibility in popular entertainment, would give this story. Would Murphy make something cathartic or revel in the usual serial-killer sensationalism? What kind of story would younger audiences only vaguely aware of the “Milwaukee cannibal” be told, especially when prejudice against LGBTQ+ people is on the rise in our country and the world?
According to CNET’s analysis based on Netflix’s metrics, Dahmer was viewed 856.2 million hours within its first days, making it Netflix’s third most viewed show ever worldwide as of mid-November. It’s a huge success, which isn’t surprising because, according to Morning Consult, two-in-three Americans are fans of serial killer content. Its cultural impact is undoubtedly powerful. Since it was released in September, it has also spurned an understandable backlash. Much has been written already about how the show, despite trying to represent victims’ points-of-view in later episodes, fails to respect their memories and the trauma of their families by profiting from their unspeakable losses. My focus, though, isn’t to rehash those concerns, which are indeed valid, but rather to argue that Murphy’s brand—and the aesthetic choices that reinforce his brand—are at odds with the sensitivity that material like this requires to be ethically responsible storytelling.
From the exuberant and frenetic color-splash of Glee to the salacious and frenzied blood-splatter of American Horror Story, Murphy’s brand’s aesthetic is chiefly about spectacle. He describes his style as “baroque,” “maximalist,” and I would add, enthusiastically superficial. Many critics have called it “camp.” He adorns cluttered plots with arresting visuals and thin characters with engaging performances from his bevy of talented actors. He tackles big topics—misogyny, race, homophobia, and transphobia—with broad strokes that gesture toward a deeper moral concern, but he rarely explores these issues with enough clarity to make a storyline or character feel fully realized. Splashy images and plot-twists fly at you so quickly it’s difficult to discern what the story is trying to say.
In his successful American Horror Story anthology series, co-created with Brad Falchuk, he constantly mingles kink with horror tropes. In the first season, Murder House, the Rubber Man, a murdering ghost in a rubber fetish-suit, stalks the inhabitants of a haunted house. Most notably, he dons the suit and kills the preppy white gay homeowners who bought the outfit to “spice up” their sex life. Why? Because they decide not to have a baby. They’re punished for failing to conform to nuclear family norms. In the eleventh and most recent season, NYC, a huge hood-wearing leather man stalks New York City’s gays in the early 80s, killing all types of gay men, but particularly those who venture out of domestic spaces and into nightclubs and Central Park after dark.
The series often aligns a curiosity or interest in sexual exploration with moral dissolution. If you like kink, watch out, the show suggests, you’ll unleash your inner boogeyman and transform into a psychopath—or be killed by one. If you remain clean-cut and vanilla in your sexual preferences, you’ll be the last girl standing—a trope with origins in Victorian notions about sexual purity that has been long critiqued, most famously (and gloriously) in Wes Craven’s Scream (1996). By demonizing kink, Murphy and his collaborators imply that it’s a doorway to murder and mayhem. Consequently, it suggests that wealthy, cis-gender gay men who have “respectable” vanilla sex are more deserving of acceptance by mainstream straight culture than those who fall outside these norms. The secret to Murphy’s success, I believe, is that he knows his audience is mostly straight people, who he titillates with the forbidden by offering a voyeuristic peek into the “dangerous” world of gay sex. All this has much more to do with how unconsciously homophobic people would prefer to see gay men’s sex lives than the complex reality of those lives. Instead of offering up a multidimensional version of gay sex, we get, well, a horror story, reliant on clichés and stereotypes.
Essentially, Murphy makes storytelling choices that seem overtly queer, but, in fact, pander to a straight audience to make money…Essentially, Murphy makes storytelling choices that seem overtly queer, but, in fact, pander to a straight audience to make money, which indeed, he has done. His success made it possible for him to sign the biggest deal in television history in 2018—a three-hundred-million-dollar, five-year contract with Netflix. Note that Billy Eichner’s Bros, a rom com that offers a frank, funny, and goofily human look into contemporary gay relationships, failed at the box office in its opening weekend in September, earning only $4.8 million when it was projected to earn between eight and ten million. Eichner has blamed its failure on straight people not showing up in the theaters. Indeed, they were all at home watching Murphy’s Dahmer series.
What happens, then, when you marry the aesthetics of Murphy’s brand and his straight pandering to a true crime story about Jeffrey Dahmer?
To be fair: the creative team behind Dahmer understands they need to tell a more responsible version of the story. They focus some narrative time and energy on the victims, their families, and the community in general. The sixth episode, “The Silenced,” focuses on the life of aspiring-model Tony Hughes (Rodney Burford) before Dahmer kills him. It portrays his joyful moments with family and friends, and the challenges of being deaf and black as he navigates the Milwaukee gay scene. In the second episode, “Please Don’t Go,” the series makes plain how systemic homophobia and racism in the police protected Dahmer: Glenda Cleveland (Niecy Nash), Dahmer’s neighbor, repeatedly warns the police about him to no avail. In an especially anger-inducing sequence, she attempts to intervene when Konerak Sinthasomphone (Kieran Tamondong) escapes Dahmer. When she calls the police, they ignore her concerns and deliver the wounded, half-conscious fourteen-year-old son of Laotian immigrants back to the killer’s apartment. Afterward, one of the cops jokes to the dispatcher that his partner needs to be “deloused” after interacting with gay men. The eighth episode, “Lionel,” shows Dahmer’s family in detail, especially his father (Richard Jenkins), as they navigate their pain and guilt. Even Dahmer himself, who is ably portrayed by Evan Peters, is textured and complicated at times, almost thwarting the label of “monster” in the series title.
The chief complaint about Dahmer is that it’s enthralled with the why and how of the killer, his monstrosity, not his impact on the victims, and other than a few episodes, the show is all about Dahmer. It even mentions his name twice in the title. Equally problematic, though, is the Murphy brand that permeates the season. At the end of the episode on Hughes, after he’s been brutally murdered, the show is once again Dahmer’s, and Hughes is reduced to a piece of meat on the killer’s plate. A sensationalized and frankly tasteless conclusion to an otherwise compassionate episode. The camera often invites us to contemplate Dahmer’s attraction to beautiful male corpses and his fingering of lustrous animal viscera, heightening that attraction-repulsion squeamishness reserved for horror films. Episode ten, “God of Forgiveness, God of Vengeance,” which sets out to contrast John Wayne Gacy’s sadism with Dahmer’s stated desire not to cause his victim’s pain, opens with a Gacy kill sequence that’s as indulgent and graphic as anything from American Horror Story, replete with Gacy torturing his victim in full clown garb, something there’s no evidence he did.
In episode three, “Doin’ a Dahmer,” Dahmer picks up hitchhiker Steven Hicks (Cameron Cowperthwaite), his first victim, and takes him home. After lifting weights together, he attempts to kiss Hicks, who is straight. Hicks rejects him, and Dahmer cries. Hicks calls him “faggot,” begins to leave, and Dahmer bludgeons him. By having Hicks call Dahmer a “fag,” we’re invited to briefly align ourselves with Dahmer, but this moment confuses us about Dahmer’s motivations. By his own admission, he killed out of a compulsion to control his victims, the violence of which gratified his sexual urges, not because he was being rejected for his sexuality. It’s a dangerous and problematic confusion, and one that wrongly suggests a link between Dahmer’s impulse to kill and his attraction to men, between the moral deviance of a serial killer and a gay man’s sexual expression.
After caressing Hick’s beautifully lighted well-toned body, Dahmer dismembers him, but has trouble disposing of his body parts. He burns them, smashes the bones, and scatters them from the roof of his home in a sequence that has a hyperbolic flair, pushing past realism and falling squarely within Murphy’s brand. Ultimately, we don’t know if we’re watching a series about a glamourized gay serial-killer or a serial-killer, who incidentally, was gay. The show doesn’t make it clear that Dahmer’s sexuality had nothing to do with why he killed men, echoing the original media coverage of the crimes. Instead, it’s a messy and damaging combination of good intentions and multi-million-dollar branding, designed to appeal to a mass audience comprised of mostly straight people who haven’t fully grasped their unconscious bias toward gay men.
When Netflix listed the series, it had an LGBTQ search tag, which after significant backlash about it promoting negative queer representation, was removed. Murphy defended the tag, claiming that not all stories about gay men need to be happy, and furthermore, his show is also about the victims. I agree, not all stories about gays need to be positive or happy—my novels are full of complicated queer characters—but those stories need to be told with care, because they do matter, particularly when you have an audience of millions. You have an ethical duty to challenge, not reinforce unconscious bias, even if it means pivoting away from your brand and losing viewers. Like American Horror Story, Murphy has signed on to do another series in the vein of Dahmer, dubbing the anthology, American Monster Story, and of course, people are speculating that Gacy will be his next subject. Please, no.
When I was sixteen, in my darkest, most angst-filled moments, I wondered if my sexual urges made me monstrous. After all, I was starving for positive role models and was offered Dahmer, and my social milieu didn’t dissuade me from thinking otherwise. I now know that it’s homophobia and transphobia that’s morally monstrous. I also know that, as a culture, we need stories that address queerness and monstrosity, but instead of equating them, challenge and complicate that equation.
Creator, show runner, and writer, Rolin Jones succeeds in doing that with AMC’s Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire by making her main character, Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson), black, unambiguously gay, and the center of the narrative. As well, the story is less about pitting vampires against humans or vice versa, but the emotional dynamics of a chosen family of vampires, each flawed, traumatized, and, in some cases, grappling with conventional morality in a world that reviles and fears them. The monsters, here, are queer, complex, and deeply human, so much so that they’re no longer lurid abstractions for a straight audience to gawk at, but easily identifiable, fully realized human beings. Most importantly, though, is that their acts of violence have little to do with shame or sexual repression and much more to do with a desire for agency and freedom.
While Jeffrey Dahmer is a compelling subject, and his impact on his community and on the world is difficult to ignore, how we tell stories about him and—other “monstrous” queer figures like him—requires a sensitivity to everyone involved, a commitment to sober narrative realism, and a willingness to resist the temptation to indulge in the sensationalism deep-rooted in Murphy’s aesthetic. Dahmer, Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story is what happens when a brand works the narrative, not the other way around.
