This post discusses some extremely basic plot points for American Horror Story: Asylum.

Of all the genres I wish I appreciated more, the one I have the most regret about is horror. An early encounter with an extremely violent graphic novel version of Frankenstein gave me childhood nightmares and a life-long aversion to being deeply frightened by my entertainment. I mustered up the courage to see my first horror movie, Drag Me To Hell, several years ago for a long piece on the recession in movies, but nothing’s pulled me back since. I’m aware that in staying away from horror, I’m cutting myself off from a tradition that’s rich with explorations of our darkest social anxieties and pathologies, from violence against women to immigration. But it’s been very difficult for me to justify subjecting myself to images that upset me so deeply to get to the substantive ideas expressed by them.

Somewhat to my surprise, this season of FX’s anthology series, American Horror Story, is prompting me to try again. The second mini-series from creator Ryan Murphy, this time set at an insane asylum in 1964 New England overseen by the Catholic church, with its central mystery the identity of a killer of women who skins his victims, is at the very outer limits of my tolerance for violence. But its exploration of sexual taboos and repressed desires is more deeply felt and certainly as frightening as Bloody Face, as the killer’s been dubbed by a morbidly obsessed public, and much more interesting than the buckets of blood and organs sloshing around in the space between those themes.

At first glance, it looks like American Horror Story is pitting the mostly-innocent and not necessarily insane inmates of Briarcliff Asylum against its proprietors, most notably the severe Sister Jude (Jessica Lange). There’s Shelley (Chloe Sevigny), incarcerated as a nymphomaniac, her head shaved for punishment, mostly on the grounds that she has a high sex drive. “Men like sex and no one calls them whores. I hate that word. It’s so ugly,” she tells Dr. Arthur Arden (James Cromwell), who appears to have a more serious set of problems than some of his patients. “I like sex. It’s my crime.” Kit Walker (Evan Peters, one of the few returning members of the original American Horror Story cast) is a young man, newly and secretly married to his African-American wife, when he experiences what appears to be an alien abduction, she is brutally murdered, and he is arrested on suspicion of being Bloody Face. “Did her dark meat slide off the bone easier than any of the other victims?” Sister Jude asks him nastily at his intake session.

And then there’s Lana Winters (Sarah Paulson), a journalist relegated to the recipe column who comes to Briarcliff, ostensibly to write up Sister Jude’s famous bread bakery, but is using the assignment as cover to try to get a coop on the Bloody Face story. After an accident at the asylum, Sister Jude has her put in a cell, first telling Lana it’s so she can recover, but later blackmailing Sarah’s lover, Wendy (Clea Duvall), a young school teacher who fears having her sexual orientation exposed and being fired, into having Lana committed. “You have no legal standing,” Sister Jude tells Wendy. “I have a moral standing,” Wendy protests, seeing defeat already but determined to have her say. “Moral. That’s an interesting word,” Sister Jude tells her. The heartbreak of that decision, which Wendy immediately recognizes as an error, is the truest emotional beat in a new season with a fair number of them, mostly because it relies on real social conditions rather than lights in the sky or people made up as freaks to achieve a profound sense of fear and despair.
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From Deadline, this will be either amazing or terrible:

Sacha Baron Cohen and his Four By Two Films will develop a feature for Paramount Pictures inspired by Cecil Chao, the Hong Kong billionaire who offered $65 million to any man who succeeded in marrying his lesbian daughter. Chao’s offer made international headlines last week following reports that his daughter had a French church bless her relationship with her longtime girlfriend. The film’s tentatively titled The Lesbian, and is a potential starring vehicle for Baron Cohen, who presumably would play the billionaire. He’ll produce through his Four By Two Films banner. A writer has not been attached.

The key to a project like this will be to satire the homophobia, megalomania, and alienation from family Cecil Chao represents. The problem with Baron Cohen’s work is that, for every singalong to “Throw The Jew Down The Well,” he tends to elicit total decency from people: his sense of what constitutes exposing someone is not as well-calibrated as he thinks it is. In Hugo, he gave one of the better performances of his career as a rigid, wounded veteran of the Great War who inflicted his pain on other people and cut himself off from kindness, but that was when he was being directed by Martin Scorsese from a script by John Logan. Hopefully Baron Cohen has the good sense to get home help on this one. It’s a story that could cut deeply if done correctly. And it would be nice to have it land.

Normally, I would pay absolutely no attention to anything Paris Hilton says, except that her anti-gay meltdown yesterday and her apology today are a perfect example of how the media’s learned to process offense. The hotel heiress found herself in headlines again after a New York taxi driver clandestinely taped her speaking with a friend in a cab, in itself a totally gross thing to do, no matter how gross whatever he captured is. And the exchange between Hilton and her friend is both unattractive and ignorant:

“Say I log into Grindr, someone that’s on Grindr can be in that building and it tells you all the locations of where they are and you can be like, ‘Yo, you wanna fuck?’ and he might be on like, the sixth floor,” the friend explains. “Ewww. Eww. To get fucked?” Hilton replies. “Gay guys are the horniest people in the world. They’re disgusting. Dude, most of them probably have AIDS.” “I would be so scared if I were a gay guy,” she adds. “You’ll like, die of AIDS.”

Of course, she’s apologized immediately, releasing a statement through GLAAD:

As anyone close to me knows, I always have been and always will be a huge supporter of the gay community. I am so sorry and so upset that I caused pain to my gay friends, fans and their families with the comments heard this morning. I was having this private conversation with a friend of mine who is gay and our conversation was in no way towards the entire gay community. It is the last thing that I would ever want to do and I cannot put into words how much I wish I could take back every word.HIV/AIDS can hurt anyone, gay and straight, men and women. It’s something I take very seriously and should not have been thrown around in conversation. Gay people are the strongest and most inspiring people I know.

Everyone involved here benefits. Hilton gets herself back in the headlines, and doing something that makes her look comparatively classy: apologizing and praising the resiliency of gay people is an upgrade from getting thrown out of Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium for smoking pot, or turned away from Japan for drug convictions. GLAAD gets its position as the arbiter of publicly (or in this case, privacy-violated ) expressed speech about LGBT people and its role as a redemption engine reaffirmed. And anyone who falls into the category of people who still care about Paris Hilton’s opinion and felt harmed by her speech gets reassured she doesn’t actually mean it. I suppose it’s a good thing that these mechanisms exist. I just wish the standards for making amends were higher, and produced more meaningful results than publicist-brokered apology statements. If we’re going to make famous people go through the motions of bringing their attitudes in line with what’s publicly acceptable, we might as well get more meaningful commitments or donations of time and energy out of them than that.

Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, which won this year’s Orange Prize for fiction, is a retelling of a very old story, the rise of the Greek warrior Achilles to immortality through his feats at Troy. Its innovation, however, is that the person who tells the story is Achilles’ companion Patroclus, a shadow by the hearth of myth, and to make the love story between the two young men explicit rather than inferred. Miller does a magnificent job of balancing antiquity and a sense of the modern. And in doing so, her novel highlights some of the profound limitations contemporary storytelling about LGBT people and relationships between people of the same gender has placed on itself.

In response to decades of popular culture that framed same-sex desire as a condition that could only lead to isolation, misery, and death, movies, television, books, even music videos responded with narratives that framed homophobia, whether externalized or internalized, as a powerful and deadly force, and a significant driver of stories. While the stories have been powerful tools in changing attitudes—Vice President Biden cited Will and Grace as a factor in changing his mind about equal marriage rights—they have something in common with the stories they pushed back against: both sets of stories treat homosexuality as a source of problems. As we imagine a future destination for gay-friendly popular culture, in other words, maybe what we should be dreaming of is stories that look like those from the distant past Miller summons back into existence, rather than anything from the recent past.

In The Song of Achilles, Achilles and Patroclus’s relationship is doomed not because they are men and love each other, but because their relationship is tied up in the warp and weft of history and the forging of legend. Throughout the novel, their relationship is presented as erotically emotionally fulfilling, and both men fight for their relationship and live it in public as a point of pride. Achilles claims Patroclus as his husband. Warned that in Troy, their relationship could cause comment because they are beyond the age when Greek boys stop having sex with each other and begin having sex with women, they choose to live publicly together anyway. They don’t even necessarily break because Patroclus is mortal and Achilles is half-human and half-god. Patroclus summons his courage to insist to Thetis, Achilles’ divine mother, that he is a worthy lover of her son, and ultimately, she comes to believe him. Ultimately, their love founders because Achilles ultimately chooses his fame over their relationship.

It’s a vision Patroclus sees early in his arguments with Thetis, who urges Achilles to come with her, away from his human father and his education. “She would feed him with the food of the gods and burn his human blood from his veins,” Patroclus worries. “She would shape him into a figure meant to be painted on vases, to be sung of in songs, to fight against Troy. I imagined him in black armor, a dark helmet that left him nothing but eyes, bronze greaves that covered his feet. He stands with a spear in each hand and does not know me.” In Troy, Achilles slowly becomes the sum of his fame. Walking through the camp and realizing that Patroclus knows many more of the men than he does, Achilles tells Patroclus “There are too many of them…It’s simpler if they just remember me.” And when he and Agamemnon clash, it becomes clear that Achilles is in love with the promise of his legend as much as Patroclus. “‘My life is my reputation,’ he says. His breath sounds ragged. ‘It is all I have. I will not live much longer. Memory is all I can hope for.’ He swallows, thickly. ‘You know this. And would you let Agamemnon destroy it? Would you help him take it from me?’” Their tragedy is Achilles’ romance with his own death, a self-destructive, immortalizing urge that has nothing to do with self-hatred over his love for Patroclus.

It’s exactly the kind of story that we need more of: depictions of relationships between men and women as sources of passion, emotional support, and pride that serve as the basis for characters who have other entanglements with the world, other triumphs, other tragedies. This is not to say that we should eliminate stories about the power of homophobia, given that it remains a powerful force in American society and the world at large. Coming out, self-hatred, family rejection or surprising family acceptance, and displays of societal homophobia, from verbal intolerance to violence, are both reliable dramatic fulcrums, and powerful mobilizing tools against hateful attitudes. And making those experiences central to gay characters’ identities and story arcs is also a way of acknowledging that straight audiences, when encountering gay characters, may foreground those characters’ sexual orientations, and may have as their central experience of those characters either grappling with their lingering assumptions about LGBT people or congratulating themselves for embracing characters wholeheartedly, even if the fictional people in those characters’ lives do not.

But if the only thing gay characters are allowed to do is be a vehicle for straight people’s revelations, or for conversations about the state of society, we’re replacing stereotypes with sainthood and the burden of social utility. And after a while, if the only or biggest problems characters have stem from the fact that they aren’t heterosexual, the lingering collective message is that homosexuality or bisexuality are a problem, even if one of society’s making and to society’s shame. It may be an inversion of old Hollywood narratives that portrayed gayness as a reason to be depressed, miserable, or suicidal. But it’s still a striking limitation to place on characters if the goal of such shows is to defy cramped visions of gay life and to present gay characters as fully human. Joy matters. As Daniel Mendelsohn writes in a piece for the most recent issue of Out about growing up without gay television, “Who hasn’t learned how to kiss from the movies? What I was desperate to see in the mid-’70s, when I was 14 and 15 and 16, was precisely what the pop culture wasn’t ready to show me — the images that all my straight friends had been casually absorbing all along: what desire and sex, kissing and lovemaking, happy coupling actually looked like.” What we need is not to render homophobia invisible, and swap one dominant narrative for another, but more stories overall, and more diversity in their narratives.
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