At a Pride performance called Finally Enough Love (in honor of the remix album of the same name) back in June, Madonna quipped, “One of the reasons New York is so great is that I’m pretty sure the first queer human evolved from this city. I think they came from the caves of Central Park West.” “Joke” aside, we all know that if queer people evolved from anywhere it was ancient Greece—but chalk it up to New York arrogance that Madonna would even try to present such a thing as a “jocular” theory. Anyway, the obvious point was, New York has long been a mecca for the LGBTQIA+ community—but more than that, a mecca for gay men.
This being the overt reason why Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s latest season of American Horror Story would opt to make NYC the backdrop of a dark time in gay male history. Or rather, one of those “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times” moments in history. For gay men did have quite the load of fun with their anonymous sex in those last days of disco. You know, before it all went to shit. Very macabre shit. AHS: NYC plays up that grisly era in the most heavy-handed of ways: by making AIDS the mysterious serial killer picking off scores of men throughout the city.
Of course, there’s a real killer in the mix as well, just to throw viewers off the scent and also stretch the season out to a full ten episodes. And perhaps Murphy is over-extending himself on the project front in that AHS: NYC arrived on the heels of his exploitative success, Dahmer. Which makes it feel as though Murphy currently has some tunnel vision about gay serial killing. And sure, AIDS might be deemed the personification of the most brutal gay serial killer of all—but that metaphor doesn’t translate very well in Murphy’s overwrought landscape.
In that same abovementioned performance from Madonna, she added, “If you can make it here, you must be queer.” It was precisely the opposite in 80s New York, when to be gay was a “quality” that all but assured the signing of one’s death warrant. Even so, just because the “horror story” (getting a bit more “poetic” this time around as the AHS juggernaut seems to be running out of “conventional” horrors to tackle) is about AIDS, doesn’t mean the season should be called “NYC.” Yes, New York does have a storied history of gay people—particularly gay men—flocking there to seek refuge from their narrow-minded family members, friends and hometowns. But to discount all the other major cities, especially San Francisco, where this disease ran rampant as a result of providing that sense of freedom to gays, is part and parcel of New York-style ego. Indeed, like New York, AHS: NYC is often bloated and overblown.
It starts, predictably enough, in 1981 (for all interesting and romanticized things that happened in New York were in the 80s). Opening on a pilot named Captain Ross rebuffing the advances of a flight attendant named Tawny as he claims to be married, flashing his ring as proof. Minutes later, the ring comes off as he prepares to go cruising along the West Side Piers, only to pay for his pleasure in a severed head. This establishes the initial threat as a sentient killer, whose wake of victims leads to the Brownstone Bar.
Unfortunately, Murphy and Falchuk were feeling experimental this season—and not in a good way (unless one counts use of Kraftwerk’s “Radioactivity”). Not sure what plot to follow, it appears that some of the decision-making was slapdash, including a particularly bad episode called, appropriately, “Bad Fortune.” In it, Sandra Bernhard gets to milk her needless role as Fran, hired by bath house singer/proprietor Kathy Pizzazz (Patti LuPone) to tell fortunes at another joint she owns. For key proof of the heavy-handedness described, look no further than this “narrative,” wherein Fran proceeds to draw the Death card over and over for every man she sees for a tarot reading. What’s more, even in what can be passed off as a “campy” part, Bernhard’s “acting skills” are little more pleasant than the sound of nails on a blackboard.
As the season tries to grow into its own leather-clad, lesion-pocked skin, viewers are hit over the head more frequently with the Big Daddy plotline—especially after the Mai Tai Killer is offed in episode seven, “The Sentinel.” And it is as Big Daddy is ramped up as a “grand metaphor” that one is reminded of Susan Sontag. For it is she who said in Illness As Metaphor, “My subject is not physical illness itself but the uses of illness as a figure or metaphor. My point is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill—is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking.”
Published in 1978, it was almost as though she could intuit that “something was coming” (“Something Is Coming” being the title of AHS: NYC’s first episode). How much a disease like AIDS could be weaponized by conservative factions filled with Republicans and evangelical Christians. Wielding the disease to say, “We told you so! Fag life is a sin! And now it’s being punished by God Himself!” Now, it’s been weaponized by Murphy and Falchuk to probably buy more real estate.
In AHS: NYC, it takes quite a while for “AIDS” to be identified by name, with Murphy’s love of revisionist history inexplicably offering a cluster of deer on Fire Island as a source of the new, highly dangerous contagion. Discovered by Dr. Hannah Wells (Billie Lourd), she notices an immediate correlation between what she’s been seeing in some of her gay patients and the deer that are rapidly dying off. So it is that she insists on killing the infected sect of the deer to prevent the spread of the disease.
Naturally, it’s already too late for such “preventive” measures. And while AIDS famously originated from chimpanzees, perhaps Murphy’s “creative decision” to make it appear as though Fire Island deer were the culprit is meant as an allegory for conservatives in power at the time trying to “control” the gay population (the way the deer population is being “controlled” through a sanctioned mass killing). All by allowing them to be exterminated by AIDS via doing absolutely nothing to help stop it. Maybe because, as some conspiracy theorists, like Fran, believe: the CIA unleashed the virus deliberately on LGBTQ communities. Still, that deer analogy could be giving too much credit to the show’s “layers.” And if Fire Island’s proximity to NYC is a chief reason for naming the season after a geographical location, then, really, it ought to have been AHS: Fire Island—but maybe it’s too soon since the release of Joel Kim Booster’s movie, Fire Island, for that.
At the same time as that ominous, leather-masked (and shirtless, to show off that musculature) presence referred to as Big Daddy (Matthew William Bishop) is terrorizing the city, so, too, is another man. This one dubbed the “Mai Tai Killer.” Those versed in their gay culture will recognize the similarities between this man’s modus operandi and the Last Call Killer that plagued 90s-era NYC. Needless to say, this isn’t the only form of pastiche Murphy and co. implement to “pay homage” (read: pass something off as their own) to the bad old gay days of yore. There are also allusions galore to William Friedkin’s Cruising (complete with using the same song on that soundtrack, Willy DeVille’s “Heat of the Moment”). A major progenitor of the gay male serial killer genre that’s cropped up as a means to illustrate the many-layered dangers that faced gay men just trying to get off through an anonymous hookup. Not to say straight women didn’t (and don’t) face similar risks (see also: Looking For Mr. Goodbar) in “the big city” as well.
Elsewhere on the Cruising emulation front, there is The Native journalist Gino Barelli (Joe Mantello), fervently reporting on the pileup of gay bodies as the Mai Tai Killer and/or Big Daddy (again, the manifestation of AIDS—that is, when the genre switches away from slasher/conspiracy and into melodrama) remain at large. Gino appears to be a clear foil for Arthur Bell, the journalist who wrote a number of articles about the unsolved murders of gay men, playing into the AHS: NYC theme of the NYPD not giving a goddamn about this “facet” of humanity. Of course, neither did the LAPD or the SFPD or any PD in America—begging the question, once more, why not just call it AHS: AIDS?
Even with a closeted gay cop on the inside, Patrick Read (Russell Tovey), it does little to help the community. And it certainly doesn’t make Gino, who is Patrick’s live-in boyfriend, happy to know that Patrick is working for the enemy. As other gay men, including Adam Carpenter (Charlie Carver) and Theo Graves (Isaac Powell), become ensnared in the swirl of violence that has been intensifying throughout the summer, everyone has a different speculation about who or what is behind it all. Initially, Adam tries to shake down Theo (in more ways than one) for info about this elusive Big Daddy, since Theo once photographed him in the style of Robert Mapplethorpe. Per his sugar daddy Sam’s (Zachary Quinto) assuance, Theo insists that Big Daddy disappeared and/or died a while ago, indicating that perhaps he was “Patient Zero” in this little revisionist scenario.
In the meantime, Mr. Whitely (Jeff Hiller) a.k.a. the Mai Tai Killer continues collecting his body parts to create a Frankenstein-esque human to display at the Pride parade. He calls it: the sentinel. A perfect representation of all the apathy toward gay men exhibited by institutions such as the NYPD and the government itself (namely, the Reagan administration). Just as Whitely is a representation of the self-hating gay that would do harm to his own kind.
The Mai Tai Killer plot is, however, but a red herring for the real killer. Effectively, AHS: NYC is about AIDS as the true murderer—which means the story could have taken place in any metropolis—London, Paris, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas. And, talking of that latter city, Dallas Buyers Club, despite its straight actors playing bi or trans, does a more humanizing and less exploitative job of addressing the subject of AIDS (with an especial emphasis on the extreme measures employed to attempt treating it in an era of no cure). With regard to AIDS in London, It’s A Sin is also more worthwhile than AHS: NYC. The existence of both alternate works are just a couple of many that convey how New York wasn’t the lone epicenter of AIDS. And titling a show that focuses primarily on AIDS as “NYC” is, again, a sign of pure ego. As though New York “owns” the “commodity” of gay history. It doesn’t.
Perhaps the reason the title (not to mention to the story itself) is so irksome is because there was much more potential in terms of what might be explored with such an all-encompassing term as “NYC”—and now, it feels as though an opportunity to unveil the manifold terrors of that city has been squandered. Leaving it up to Scream 6, one supposes, to pick up the slack. Even so, if the intent was to ensure that AIDS would be associated solely with NYC, therefore as the source of all pain and suffering, well, mission accomplished.
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