Netflix is being called out by viewers after their portrayal of Anthony Perkins in Ryan Murphy’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story.
Monster is an anthology series created by Ryan Murphy following notorious murderers. According to Queerty, Ed Gein is the killer who inspired several popular horror films, such as Psycho and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
The recent season began streaming on October 3 and has (like the previous seasons) been quite controversial. Murphy is known for exploring queer angles in his series, and Monster is no exception. In the second episode of the series, titled, “Sick As Your Secrets,” Murphy explores the influence of Ed Gein on Anthony Perkins’ role in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.
Perkins (if you aren’t aware) was an Oscar-nominated actor who remained closeted his entire life.
In Monster, Alfred Hitchcock tours Perkins around a recreation of Gein’s house, revealing details about the killer’s “base urges” that he had to hide from society, and how that made him become a killer. Hitchcock says, “Gein had a secret. A sexual function he could not express, and his inability to express his version of the sexual act turned inwards and transformed into sickness.”
As well as picturing Perkins going through shock conversion therapy, the episode implies that if Perkins didn’t go through with the “therapy,” he could have ended up like Gein. This comparison of an actor plagued by internalized homophobia and shame from society to a serial murderer is highly offensive and disrespectful.
This decision led to massive amounts of backlash online from queer people finding the comparisons to be insulting to the community, as well as Perkins’ memory.
This is a problem that Murphy is well-versed in. This season of Dahmer also received backlash from the LGBTQ+ community, as the series was initially marked under the LGBTQ category on Netflix. And in the second season involving the Menendez brothers, Murphy explicitly characterizes Erik Menendez as gay. In response, Menendez and his wife spoke out about the show being filled with “blatant lies.”
When is Ryan Murphy going to stop equating gayness with homicidal behavior?
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