“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” may not hit the tear-down-the-sky heights of the previous two episodes of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, but simply not feeling like a letdown after those two magnificent hours is itself a victory. The grim tale of how the dehumanizing Clinton-era policy on gays in the military destroyed Jeff Trail’s dreams and helped place him in Cunanan’s crosshairs isn’t as stomach-churningly chilling and sad as the show’s depiction of the last hours of Lee Miglin and David Madson, to be sure. But the stakes wind up being just as high, as is the cost in wasted human potential and life.
“DADT” is one of the most temporally complex episodes of the series so far, bouncing back and forth in time and between protagonists. In out-of-order fashion, it traces the life of Jeff Trail from the waning days of his career in the military through the night he first meets Andrew to the hours after his murder, with special attention paid to his and David’s interactions with Cunanan in the days leading up to their killings. (Andrew has a blowout fight with Jeff and has his marriage proposal rejected by David. There’s also a polka bar.) Meanwhile, a side plot chronicles Gianni Versace’s decision to come out as gay in the press, with the support of his partner and to the chagrin of his sister.
But with Andrew himself pushed mostly to the margins and no threat of new murders hanging over our heads, it falls to Finn Wittrock to carry the weight of the episode as Jeff, investing the story of how institutionalized homophobia helped lead to his death with the same sense of tragedy and intensity as a serial-killer narrative. It’s a testament to his note-perfect casting — he simply has the exact physical and psychological mien of a military man, from the cadence of his voice to the way he walks around in his nondescript civvies — that he pulls it off.
With Wittrock’s Jeff as the bedrock, a thematic layering emerges that’s even more impressive than the time-shifting storyline. Throughout the episode, Jeff is painted as a parallel figure to both his eventual killer and his killer’s most famous victim. The comparison with Versace is as direct as possible: Writer Tom Rob Smith structures the episode by juxtaposing Gianni’s triumphant coming-out interview with the Advocate with Jeff’s anonymous, silhouetted testimonial in a CBS News special about closeted soldiers and sailors. Both interviews take place in hotels, though Versace’s is in the Ritz Carlton while Trail’s is in a seedy motel. Both men are also shown talking with their clearly beloved sisters, each of whom is deeply concerned about her respective brother. Donatella advises Gianni not to go through with the Advocate profile (I do wish they’d speak Italian with subtitles in their scenes together — trust your audience, Ryan Murphy! — but whatever), while Jeff’s very pregnant sister, herself career military, jokingly issues “a direct order as your commanding officer” for him to finally come out to their parents years after the recording session.
Jeff and Gianni’s fates following their respective interviews were as divergent as their accommodations and their sisters, yet Andrew finds something equally infuriating about both. His beef with Versace is obvious enough. The stalker-wall of newspaper and magazine clippings that Andrew maintains, many of them about Gianni’s life as an out and proud gay man with his longtime partner Antonio, indicates resentment. Why should this man have it all, while Andrew has to lie about fame and fortune and can’t find anyone who loves him back?
Jeff, by contrast, is a crash-and-burn case. The military’s discovery that he was gay has left him “a washed-up queer in a shitty job and a shitty condo, bitching about how you could have been somebody,” as Andrew cuttingly puts it. “You’re not wrong about that,” Jeff replies fatalistically — he won’t even bother to deny it. Of course, you’re not wrong to see shades of Andrew himself in that description, except insofar as he has no job and no condo at all anymore, not even shitty ones.
But it’s not self-recognition that drives Andrew to kill Jeff, or at least not self-recognition alone. Earlier, we see Andrew advise Jeff not to do the interview at all, unwittingly playing Donatella to his Gianni. Like Donatella, he’s concerned about career fallout for his friend. More importantly to Andrew, though, Jeff’s interview is pointless because he’s just some sailor and nobody special or famous. “Who cares what you have to say?” he asks incredulously, not even noticing the insult he’s delivering. He genuinely doesn’t understand why anyone would be interested in a non-mover-and-shaker’s thoughts on the topic, or why a non-mover-and-shaker would be interested in sharing them. “It’s something I need to do,” Jeff replies. “I can’t explain it any better than that.” For Jeff, it’s a question of honor: being true to himself, to the Navy, to his country, to the lifelong dream that binds them all together for him. He might as well be speaking an alien dialect for all Andrew is able to understand that kind of idealism.
So Andrew appears to first formulate murderous intent toward his former friend and protégé when he watches a VHS recording. The belief in a cause bothers him. Jeff’s stated belief that saving a fellow gay sailor from a vicious beating at the hands of their crewmates gave his own homosexuality away — leading to an attempt to carve away a tattoo that could incriminate him and a failed suicide attempt as well as his eventual discharge — bothers Andrew even more intensely.
It’s during this portion of the interview, where a stricken Jeff says “I did a good thing, the bravest thing I’ve ever done, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve dreamed about taking that moment back and letting him die, just so people wouldn’t know about me,” that Andrew, wearing the white hat from Jeff’s uniform, points Jeff’s gun at the screen, starting to psych himself into the idea of murder.
Watching Jeff’s final confrontation with Andrew prior to the murder is painful, then, both because of what he gets right and what he gets wrong. “I don’t know what you stand for,” he shouts at Cunanan. “I don’t know who you are. You’re a liar. You have no honor.” Correct on all counts — possibly lethally, so if you figure this contrast in their outlook is a big part of what drove Andrew to kill. But when Andrew rightfully points out that he believed in and supported Jeff while his beloved Navy treated him like shit — “I saved you!” — Jeff bitterly retorts “You destroyed me. I wish I’d never walked into that bar. I wish I’d never met you.” He says he wants his life back, as if Andrew took it from him, instead of Bill Clinton and Uncle Sam. Andrew does take his life away, eventually, mere hours from that moment in fact. But in a sense, he was just an accessory after the fact. Jeff signed his own death warrant the moment he decided, in the face of society’s hatred, that some principles are worth fighting for anyway.
A fashion designer coming out as gay to The Advocate was a huge deal in 1995. Two years later, that designer was murdered.
In Ryan Murphy’s retelling of Gianni Versace’s murder — American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace — that 22-year-old Advocate interview comes to life, depictingjournalist Brendan Lemon, who also also broke several other coming out stories for The Advocate, sitting down with Versace.
Read the vintage interview, where Versace discussed his new book, the men in his life, and how Italian Vogue is full of “ugly boys,” below:
THE IMAGE MAKER
Known for his sexy designs, famous clientele (Elton, Madonna, and Sting) and his homoerotic advertising campaigns, Gianni Versace gives a glimpse into his private world of men. Brendan Lemon reports on the fashion front.
As I walked over to Manhattan’s St. Regis hotel to interview the Italian designer Gianni Versace, sexy advertisements for his jeans collection kept staring at me from the streetside phone booths. Ever since the ads began appearing earlier this year, I have had to ration the number of glances I tender in the direction of the posters’ muscular, marmoreal figures.
Advertised images of male flesh have not riveted me since the Greek-church shots displaying Calvin Klein’s underwear brightened city streets more than a decade ago. Both campaigns, I knew, had been photographed by Bruce Weber. But the association ran deeper than the man behind the camera: As Klein’s men embodied a kind of male-oriented fantasy of the ‘80s, when the buffed male torso seemed inescapably homoerotic, so Versace’s beautiful bodies seem to reflect a decade in which a penchant for this kind of advertising has begun to indicate something less automatically gay.
Not that Versace has ever shirked homosexuality. Richard Martin, curator of the Costume Institue at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, says that “there is no question that Versace’s own out gay identity has been a part of this work. He is in the tradition of the avant-garde, which means that he is willing to risk a lot. And he doesn’t run for cover when his risks provoke outraged response.” But, Martin adds, the seemingly avant-garde Versace look — from the Luke Skywalker designs for the early ’80s (he started designing under his own label in 1978 — to the S/M runway displays of the early ’90s — no longer denotes Versace’s true place in the fashion universe. “Five years ago he seemed extreme, in both his men’s and his women’s clothing,” he says, “but now he’s a coin of the realm. He reads America in the ’90s better than anyone else.” And why is that? “Versace,” explains fashion jounralist Hal Rubenstein, “understands more completely than any other designer that men are about much more than what they wear to work.”
In his new book, Men Without Ties, Versace captures this brave new world of men and thier attire. The latest in a line of deluxe volumes that the 49-year-old designer has produced over the past decade, Men Without Ties features Versace’s unfettered approach to menswear, as filtered through the photographs of Weber, Herb Ritts, and Richard Avedon. The vision is entirely fresh, yet it also carries echoes of earlier generation, whose totems — Picasso, Cocteau, Buster Keaton — pop up in its pages.
The generational theme is sounded right away on the volume’s dedication page. Versace writes, “To the three Antonios of my life: my father, Antonio d’Amico, my nephew.” I begin the hotel-suite interview by asking the designer — a courtly figure with short white hair who lately favors jeans and bright-hued cashmere sweaters — to say a little about each of the book’s dedicatees.
“My father was a handsome man,” he replies proudly. “I was afraid of him and also a little in love with him.” Versace talks about long boyhood walks the two took together in the southern Italian town of Reggio di Calabria, where he grew up, When he goes on to mention his mother, the tone is more nuanced — and with reason: It was in her dressmaking atelier that he learned both the craft and the business of fashion.
Versace calls Antonio d’Amico simply “my companion,” and for once, the phrase connotes not some Jamesian spinster being trundled around Europe by a niece or some euphemism bestowed by New York Times obituary writers but a genuine term of endearment. D’Amico, who has dark Caesar-cut hair and a warm, flirtatous manner, sits in on the interview and chips in the occassional well-informed comment. As a higher-up in the Versace empire (whose various lines of menswear, womenswear, couture, fragrances, and licensees last year had combined sales of more than $650 million) as well as Versace’s intimate for more than a decade, he’s well-placed to do so.
It is d’Amico who knows every detail of the designer’s peripatetic lifestyle: the constant zigzagging from the business base in Milan to a restored neoclassic villa on Italy’s Lake Como to a highly decorative house in Florida (a required stop for first-time South Beach strollers) to a town house on Manhattan’s East Side. This last being furnished in gold-and-white Louis XV style and will be completed by year’s end, as will a large new Manhattan Versace store.
“Little Antonio, so blond, so macho” is how Versace describes is 4-year-old nephew, the son of his younger brother Santo, who oversees the family’s business affairs. Santo’s children and the sprightly son and daughter of Santo and Gianni’s sister, Donatella, and her American husband, Paul Beck, crop up frequently in the designer’s conversation: for someone so relentlessly associated with the trappings of rock and roll (Elton John, Sting, and Madonna are among his most visible clients) and the virtues of pagan excess, he has a surprisingly soft spot for children. One hyperbolic visitor to various Versace households swore to me that Versace and d’Amico tended the children and that only Donatella — whose love of nightlife causes d’Amico to dub her, affectionately, “the queen of the gays” — liked life in the limo. (If that’s true, she gets a lot of work done there: Donatella helps design both the Versus and the Istante lines.)
When I bring up the subject of his perceived limo-laden lifestyle, Versace laughs and says, “The truth is that I spend most of my time at home sleeping, watching TV, and working,” and then he returns the converstaion to Men Without Ties: “The book is about men and about their beauty, but it is also a reminder about my career. The roots of my fashion are very classic. People judge me avant-garde, people judge me rock and roll, and I am smiling. I am the most classically influenced of the Italian designers, which no one seemed to realize until the last year.”
Anyone flipping through Men Without Ties or staring at ads from almost any of Versace’s recent campaigns would have to be doltish not to detect these classical ideas in play. In fact, the fun of looking at Versace’s recent projects has been the feeling of freedom that the looking now imparts: You can at the same time muse about Roman marbles or about the poetry of Ovid and appreciate some model’s hot ass or thighs.
I mention this to Versace. “Conventionally,” he replies, “if you are a man who comments on a male beauty — say, a movie star like Kevin Costner — people immediately think you’re gay. But that attitude is changing. For the younger generation things are already very different. People are feeling freer to comment on all kinds of beauty without feeling that it types them one way or another. It’s great to feel that those of us who have fought for the right to enjoy all kinds of beauty will perhaps have made a difference. I say that even as I believe that recognizing beauty wherever and whenever it occurs is not just about the desire for sex.”
Versace’s category-transcending attitude strikes me as eminently refreshing and admirable. Unfortunately, not everyone is as evolved as he is. His American publisher, Abbeville Press, asked him to remove two photographs from the Italian edition of Men Without Ties before it would publish the book here. Both were full-frontal male nudes.
“The publisher is afraid, certainly,” Versace admits before informing me slyly that the Italian edition is available for purchase at most Versace stores in the United States. He insists, however, that the American edition, which includes ten pages not in the Italian version, perserves his vision of men’s fashion.
And just what is that vision these days? “It’s about comfort,” Versace replies, “about wearing what you like. It’s also about feeling elegant in a formal situation without having to wear a tie.” This does not mean, however, that anything goes. Versace insists on quality, on correct proportions, right down to the briefs. In fact, he deplores the new way of showing skivvies that has started showing up in fashion magazines here in and abroad. “The last Italian men’s Vogue is full of ugly boys, boys on heroin, in underwear. I guess they needed a new trend.”
Don’t expect any ugly boys to show up in a Versace campaign any time soon. (This is, after all, the man who helped make South Beach and skin synonymous.) Before I left his hotel that day, Versace let me leaf through an unoffical photo album of a Boston-area shoot Bruce Weber had just completed for his fall men’s campaign: 40 fresh-faced young men — and Claudia Schiffer. A couple of the shots — of seminaked boys enmeshed in a muddy rugby scrum — seem destined for bedside status. And one photo of a long-haired young hunk is so blindingly beautiful that I can already count how many phone-booth posters of him will be ripped off before Christmas.
As we continue to go back in time (are these backwards timelines hurting anyone else’s brain?), we learn more about the events leading up to the murders of Jeff Trail and David Madson – still not a satisfying “why,” in my opinion. The one thing Trail, Madson and Versace had in common, though, is the fear that they would be outed as gay.
Versace seems quite fearless about wanting to be interviewed by The Advocate, much to the trepidation of Donatella, who is afraid his outing will ruin their business. How could anyone not know Versace was gay, right? It was the ‘90s and “don’t ask, don’t tell” didn’t just apply to the military. Maybe we all knew, but back then celebrities didn’t feel comfortable confirming their sexuality, and not with great risk (Ricky Martin, who plays Versace’s partner, Antonio, came out only 10 years ago).
Jeff Trail feels the real effects of “don’t ask, don’t tell” since he serves in the military. It is pure fiction if he feared he would be found out or if he contemplated suicide, but as this show sometimes does, it really isn’t about the facts as much as it is about tapping into the culture of the time when being gay in the military meant secrets, dread, and consequences. Who knows if Trail in fact felt this way? What does matter is that this was a common feeling amongst LGTBQ service people. It was the mood.
Just like Versace, Trail bravely goes forward with his interview with “48 Hours” too (it really happened). Even though his identity is hidden, it is still a major step for him to share his experiences. He’s not publicly coming out, but he is speaking up for military personnel hiding in their own proverbial shadows.
David Madson was “out” to his co-workers and his family (though that didn’t go well for him as we saw last week), but he still seems to be dealing with a great societal fear. When Cunanan proposes, he keeps protesting “it’s illegal,” not “I don’t love you.” I think that was a choice of the writers to show 1) Madson was sympathetic to Cunanan and was trying to let him down easy and 2) Madson is very concerned with what people would think. Cunanan shames him easily after Trail’s murder that he will be judged by the police if he reports it. Again, we don’t know what was actually said, but it’s not entirely wrong as Trail’s and Madson’s murders were originally thought to be a domestic dispute and it was not taken seriously that a serial killer was on the loose.
Then there’s Cunanan. Does he have an internal shame he’s not outwardly expressing? Is his self-hate the true reason for his murder spree? It’s still not clear if his anger stems from insecurities about his own sexuality, jealousy over the success of others, or his rejection by both Trail and Madson. The man is such an enigma I feel like we still may never know his heart – or lack thereof.
We’ve come a long way from the ’90s – gay military personnel now serve openly, a celebrity’s sexual orientation barely makes headlines and gay marriage is now legal. But it’s not over yet and if this show does not solve Cunanan’s case, it still gives us an insight into the LGBTQ community we may not have been aware of. And for that, it is valuable.
Next week, we continue our journey back in time to how Madson and Cunanan met and another speculative interaction between Versace and Cunanan.
OK: For anyone wondering if this show is going to become less heartbreaking over time? It’s looking like no.
Last week’s emotional heavyweight “House by the Lake” focused on the psychological torture and eventual murder of architect David Madson (Cody Fern). But the hint is that Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) got to Madson via Jeff Trail (Finn Wittrock), the man he bludgeons with a hammer in the first minutes of the episode, so we’ve been primed to expect this episode take us back to how Trail got wrapped up in this horrible spiderweb. The fifth episode of this series is the first not to have an actual murder in it, but trust me, it’s not going to make anything less painful.
“Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” is a layered meditation on uniforms and conformity, masks and unmaskings. It moves back and forth in time in a way that’s easy to track but a little hard to describe; there’s a logic to this episode that poets will recognize. It turns on symbol and metaphor at least as much as plot, and it has a lot of layers of commentary on…well, on the nature of identity when you get down to brass tacks.
Gianni Versace (Edgar Ramirez) arranges an interview in which he intends to come out publically. Donatella (Penelope Cruz) is annoyed (when is she not?) because she thinks her brother’s coming out might have a negative impact on sales. “Well,” her brother quips, annoyed, “we’ll still have Elton, no?” She blames Antonio (Ricky Martin). She tells Gianni it’s not only his decision; the company has to be taken into account. She reminds him (thanks, Sis) of how people stopped buying Perry Ellis’s clothes after he appeared on the runway so ravaged by AIDS his models had to help keep him on his feet. “Probably his most important show,” Versace remarks. He calmly makes it clear to Donatella that he’s done hiding, that after his own brush with mortality he intends to spend the rest of his life being who he is. Nothing in the closet here (except a lot of very loud print fabrics).
Meanwhile, Jeff Trail is working a manual labor job and loses it when a fellow vet asks why a career-track Annapolis graduate left the Navy. He has this friend-friend-plus?—an architect named David. They both get the news that Andrew’s coming into town. It’s not good news; they both have a past with him. Jeff takes evasive maneuvers, bunking with his pregnant sister, who urges him to come out to their parents. David’s left to deal with Andrew, who gives him a gold watch, proposes marriage, says he’s “a whole new person.” (He’s emphatically not a whole new person: Same sociopath, different day.) After David turns down his marriage proposal, he lets himself into Jeff’s apartment, rummages through his clothes, finds Jeff’s dress whites meticulously folded in a box along with his gun and a VCR tape. Wearing Jeff’s dress hat, Andrew watches the video, which contains interview footage that, as Jeff notes on camera, will probably end his career. The interview is about being gay in the military in the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” era. “They know,” he says. “I saved a sailor’s life once, they were beating him to death because he was gay. I did a good thing, the bravest thing I’ve ever done. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve dreamed about taking that moment back, and letting him die, so they wouldn’t know about me.”
We flash back two years, to the incident described in the interview. Trail’s an officer with a good record and a bright future-until essentially outs himself by comforting the badly hurt and completely terrified victim of the beating in view of another officer. In the soul-searching that follows, Trail receives veiled and not-so-veiled threats, attempts an at-home tattoo removal, is given a truly freaky-looking “don’t ask don’t tell” primer presented in the form of a comic book, and attempts to hang himself but can’t go through with it. Eventually Trail goes into a gay bar. A young man in glasses notices him. “First time?”
“Is it that obvious?”
“There were clues,” Andrew Cunanan replies, and, in one of the show’s many brilliant moments of hideous inevitability, starts ordering rounds, being charming, and insinuating himself into Trail’s world. Jeff Trail is sincere and kind and bright and gorgeous and he has no idea he has just signed his own death certificate by letting one guy in one bar buy him a drink. But we do.
The two spend time together; for a while, Jeff feels that Andrew has helped him come to terms with his sexuality in certain ways. Andrew tries to undermine Jeff’s decision to go through with the interview (“So humiliating! Your face shadowed, your voice altered-like a criminal!”) but, like the wealthy couture designer in Miami to whom he will never know he is permanently connected, Jeff’s done wearing a mask. Done with being threatened, called “faggot,” and passed over for promotions. We see him drive to a motel for the interview, cutting the scene with Gianni and Antonio also walking down a (much more posh) hotel hallway to meet a journalist too. It’s a striking moment of contrasts and parallels. Two men, one famous, one a near-faceless piece of military machinery. One in sunlight, one in the shadows. One with a partner by his side, one alone. One a fashion designer, one a sailor. One is asked if he’s comfortable being “on the record” (yes) and the other asks for reassurance that the interviewer cannot be forced by military police to reveal his identity. They could hardly be more different. Yet the process—he reclamation of identity, the act of self-acceptance and helping to destigmatize something that shouldn’t be controversial but is, often violently so—is eerily identical.
Of course they do have one other thing in common, something neither of them will have time to realize: they will both be murdered by Andrew Cunanan.
We re-enter Minneapolis on the day of Jeff’s murder. He comes into his apartment, finds his dress uniform in a wrinkled mass on the bed and Andrew in his room. In the conflict that ensues Andrew’s still trying to tell Jeff the military doesn’t care about him, doesn’t want him but Andrew does. “You’re a liar,” Jeff says. “You have no honor.” Andrew keeps trying to manipulate and bait Jeff, but when Andrew tells Jeff how much he loves him, he gets an explosive “No one wants your love!” that we know before Jeff does has pretty much sealed his doom. Andrew zips his bag, and we get a glimpse of the gun Jeff doesn’t yet know he has stolen. He goes to David’s, interrupting a date. The other man leaves. David agrees to a talk.
Jeff meticulously presses and puts away his uniform. Then he gets a call from Andrew, with probably the only words that could possibly get his attention: “I have your gun.”
Jeff Trail’s sister delivers a baby girl. His answering machine slowly fills up with messages from his family, urging him to come and meet his niece.
Every episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace poses a different question about Andrew Cunanan’s unlikely murder spree: How did he survive long enough to kill Versace? Why did a rich and powerful man like Lee Miglin invite an unhinged rent boy into his home? Why didn’t David Madson, a successful architect whose friends and family loved him deeply, try harder to escape? The answer is always the same: Homophobia. This week, it explains how Jeffrey Trail—a kind, bright and beloved young Navy officer—came to be friends with a monster.
“Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” alternates between the weekend of Trail’s death in 1997 and two years earlier, likely because it was convenient to juxtapose his story with that of Versace’s Advocate interview. In truth, Maureen Orth writes in Vulgar Favors that Jeff met Cunanan and sat for an anonymous interview with 48 Hourssomewhere around 1992-93. “Whether people like it or not, there are gays in the military,” Trail told reporter Richard Schlesinger in the heartbreaking conversation. “They’re very top-notch performers. They know what they’re doing. You’re gonna weaken our national defense if you remove gays from the military. And you’ll never be able to do it 100 percent—it’s just whether or not you’re gonna continue to hunt us.” Schlesinger later recalled that Jeff “had absolutely nothing to gain by doing the interview. Yet he took the risk and spoke out. My colleagues and I left San Diego very impressed with Ensign Trail.”
Trail had grown up as the conservative oddball in a close, liberal Midwestern family. Friends and teachers remembered him as clean-cut and warm, with a strong code of ethics. Determined to follow two of his half-siblings into the military, he learned to fly in high school and matriculated at Annapolis; after graduating in 1991, he was assigned to Surface Warfare Officers School in San Diego and worked on the USS Gridley navy cruiser seen in the episode. That same year, he hooked up for the first time with a male student at San Diego State and began acknowledging his sexuality. Bill Clinton’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in 1994 quickly became notorious, but Trail had enlisted amid the outright ban on gays in the military that preceded it.
It’s true that Trail was drawn to Cunanan in San Diego because he seemed so comfortable in his identity; in turn, Cunanan worshiped Trail’s wholesome good looks and navy pedigree. Trail’s sister Lisa told The New York Times, “When Jeff got a haircut, Andrew had to have the exact same haircut. When Jeff went to San Francisco and got a certain style of baseball cap, Andrew had to go to San Francisco and get the very same cap. When Jeff grew a goatee, Andrew grew a goatee.”
But they never dated, or by all accounts even slept together. Instead, Cunanan made himself indispensable by introducing his newly (somewhat) liberated friend to other gay men and treating him to expensive nights out. Trail hated drugs, and he wasn’t happy to hear that Cunanan was dealing, but his pity outweighed his anger. By 1996, Trail and David Madson—the most important people in Cunanan’s life, even though Madson had broken up with him and Trail had grown tired of his lies—both lived in Minneapolis. Cunanan visited the city often, despite the fact that both men were trying to distance themselves from him.
Is it fair to imply, as screenwriter Tom Rob Smith does, that homophobia killed Jeff Trail? Only in the sense that he might not have become reliant on Cunanan if he’d been free to come out in high school, at Annapolis, or in the military—which is certainly worth considering. But the flashback’s most disturbing moments—the scene where Jeff saves a gay soldier from being beaten to death, the suicide attempt—are nowhere to be found in Orth’s book. Trail did have a tattoo of Marvin the Martian on his left ankle, but neither the scene where he tries to slice it off nor the witch hunt that precipitated that act of desperation is part of the official record.
Trail left the military in 1996 after superior officers stuck him with the blame for an incident in which, unbeknownst to him, cans of lead paint were hidden on his ship before an EPA inspection. Perhaps he became the fall guy because his bosses suspected he was gay, or simply because his secret prevented him from bonding with them. Trail is a hero regardless for having the courage to appear on48 Hours when he knew it could have ended his career. Surely, the dignified Jeff we meet in American Crime Story, played by Finn Wittrock, is meant to stand in for the many queer soldiers who endured similar physical and psychological ordeals.
Even when they’re fabricated, the flashbacks in “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” are some of the most affecting scenes in the series. Still, my concerns remain when it comes to fictionalizing a real, non-famous murder victim’s life to the extent that Smith does in these last two episodes. Furthermore, after two focused, immersive episodes I found all the temporal skipping around—from 1995 to 1997, from Jeff’s backstory to the Versace subplot—distracting. This season’s starting to feel rushed, and I wonder how different the show would be if it played out over ten episodes instead of nine.
Fact-Checking Lightning Round
Did Gianni Versace really come out of the closet in a 1995 Advocate profile? Not really. Even as a provincial teen, Gianni ran in gay circles. In the 80s, he installed his partner Antonio d’Amico in a position of power at Versace; they attended gay clubs, together and separately, all over the world and double-dated with Elton John. There were often naked men in Versace ads. In the spring of 1995, he published a photo book called Men Without Ties that might as well have been titled Men Without Shirts. So when Brendan Lemon (the reporter seen in the episode) profiled him for the July issue of The Advocate, he took Versace’s queerness as a given. The piece is still an interesting read, though; Versace introduces Antonio as his “companion,” and there’s an aside about Antonio—who, as we know, didn’t get along with Versace’s sister—calling Donatella the “queen of the gays.” Versace also offers thoughts on male beauty.
What was that about Perry Ellis? Poor Penélope Cruz, forced once again to deliver all the exposition. Considering that Gianni was for all intents and purposes out in the 90s, it’s hard to imagine Donatella begging him to stay closeted for the sake of the business. But the story she told about Perry Ellis is, unfortunately, mostly true. When he came out to greet the audience at the end of his fall 1986 fashion show, the designer had to be supported by two assistants. He tried and failed to walk down the runway. Forty-six-year-old Ellis died weeks later, and although his cause of death was listed as viral encephalitis, it was clear he’d been ill with AIDS. That summer, New York magazine published a sad and fascinating cover story investigating his life and death. Sales slipped after Ellis’s passing, as Donatella mentions, although a 1988 Times article suggests the culprit was “lackluster collections.”
What was supposed to be going on between David Madson and Jeff Trail? Your guess is as good as mine. We heard them arguing over whether Andrew “knew” about them. We heard Andrew accuse them of sneaking around behind his back. We saw a photo of the men together in Jeff’s bedroom. I’m not sure whether Smith wants us to believe they were secretly seeing each other or demonstrate why Andrew might have, in his paranoid state, decided that was the case. Either way, in real life, Madson was dating a few different guys when Cunanan arrived for his final visit, and Trail spent the weekend with a boyfriend, not his pregnant sister.
This week’s American Crime Story review takes a look at the latest episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace, “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.” Spoilers follow.
The Victims
Jeff Trail made a brief appearance last week before being brutally murdered. On this week’s episode, “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”, we get to see Jeff’s story. This episode isn’t so much about Jeff’s murder – we’ve already seen that after all – as it is about the heartbreaking trajectory of his brief life. If last week’s episode, “House By the Lake”, served primarily as a bait-and-switch moment to show us what this season of American Crime Story was really about, “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” is the episode that truly underlines the thesis. It’s also the best episode of the season, without question.
First, however, we spend some time with Gianni Versace. In his first appearance after being absent for two episodes, Versace is in Italy in 1995. He tells his sister Donatella that he plans to come out during an interview with the LGBT-interest magazine The Advocate. Versace had never publicly spoken about his sexuality, and now, in 1995, he feels the time is right.
Donatella is not happy – she reminds Versace that they’re opening stores in countries where homosexuality is a crime, and she worries that the rock stars and actors and royalty Versace dresses may no longer want to be associated with the Versace brand. She also reminds Versace that when Perry Ellis was diagnosed with AIDS, people stopped buying his clothes.
This is the overall theme of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” – coming out of the closet can be devastating. The lives of Gianni Versace and Jeff Trail are contrasted this week, and despite their similar sexual preferences, the two men’s experiences couldn’t be more disparate. By episode’s end, Versace will have come out comfortably, whereas Jeff will end up the first casualty of Andrew Cunanan.
Don’t Ask Don’t Tell
What makes The Assassination of Gianni Versace such an ultimately heartbreaking season of American Crime Story is the way it takes the time to introduce us to its victims. Yes, the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were tragic, but we never really met them as characters last season. The show kicked off after they had already been killed.
Technically, Versace begins after its victims have been murdered as well, but the show’s backwards-moving narrative device has the power to resurrect these characters from the dead. Only to snuff them out again. “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” is particularly brutal in this regard, because it spends almost its entire length introducing us to Jeff Trail; we want to stop the clock and keep him alive longer; stop him from showing up at David’s apartment to meet his cruel fate. But we can’t.
Andrew Cunanan arrives in Minneapolis four days before Jeff’s murder, and proceeds to bully his way into David and Jeff’s lives. David is sympathetic, but Jeff clearly wants nothing to do with him. Jeff is a former Naval officer working a dead-end job, filled with regret. When we meet Jeff here, we see him talking with a new coworker who was also in the military. When the new employee politely asks why Jeff left the Navy, he snaps. “I made the decision!”.
This leads to a flashback to 1995, two years before Jeff’s murder. Jeff is relatively happy with his life in the Navy, but he also lives with the fear that sooner or later, the secret of his sexuality will come out. This fear intensifies after he saves another gay sailor from being beaten by a group of other sailors. This one event triggers the path of the episode, as Jeff grows more and more intense and nervous that he’s going to be found out.
In one particularly disturbing sequence, Jeff learns that there’s a chance that another gay sailor is going to identify other homosexuals in the Navy. This sailor apparently doesn’t know names, but can recognize his sexual partners via their tattoos. This story sounds utterly made-up when you remove yourself from it, but for Jeff, in the middle of it all, it has a ring of truth. His solution is to try to cut a tattoo off his leg with a box cutter; an action that doesn’t go according to plan.
Later, Jeff’s paranoia reaches a fever pitch, and he attempts to hang himself. This, too, doesn’t go according to plan, and Jeff eventually ends up at a gay bar, where he first meets Andrew Cunanan. Once again, we want to stop the clock; to warn Jeff that befriending Andrew will be the biggest mistake of his life. But Jeff is alone, in need of comfort, and Andrew – in his own manipulative, sneaky way – can offer it.
During the course of the evening, Jeff tells Andrew he plans to conduct an interview with the show 48 Hours about gays in the military – an action Andrew thinks is a mistake. “The Navy are going to witch hunt you, Jeff,” he says. But Jeff feels he has to go through with it. The interview Jeff gives is brilliantly contrasted with the interview Versace gives to The Advocate. As Jeff meets in a cheap motel room in secret, hidden in shadows, Versace is seen in a well-lit, expensive hotel. His interview with The Advocate frees him, while Jeff’s 48 Hours interview simply makes things worse. There’s no catharsis here; no emotional weight lifted from Jeff’s shoulders. Instead, he recounts how he saved the gay sailor’s life earlier in the episode, and adds: “It’s the bravest thing I’ve ever done, and I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve thought about taking it back, just so people wouldn’t know about me.”
Back in 1997, in the days leading up to Jeff’s murder, the situation between Jeff and Andrew grows more and more radioactive. Andrew is in Minneapolis, under the assumption that he, Jeff and David will spend time together. But Jeff wants nothing to do with Andrew. We learn that Andrew once sent a postcard to Jeff’s father in a feeble attempt to out Jeff to his parents, which has only made the relationship between the two men more strained. Yet Jeff is still nice enough to let Andrew stay at his apartment for a night while he crashes at the home of his pregnant sister.
The idea is for Andrew to vacate the premises before Jeff gets home, but Jeff finds him waiting there, at which point Jeff’s rage simmers until he can’t keep it tamped down any longer. He accuses Andrew of ruining his life, and says that he wishes he had his old life in the Navy back.
“They don’t want you,” Andrew says. “They never wanted you. I want you.” When Andrew adds: “I loved you–”, Jeff snaps, cutting him off and shouting, “No one wants your love.” It’s in this moment you can see the wheels turning behind Andrew’s eyes. You can see the decision slowly forming; the decision to kill Jeff. Andrew realizes that he can no longer manipulate Jeff; no longer use his lies to bend Jeff to his will. In other words, Jeff has become useless to Andrew, and in Andrew’s mind, there’s nothing left to do but end his life.
“No One Wants Your Love”
Andrew is mostly in the background in this episode, and that’s for the best. After two weeks in a row of his excessively destructive behavior, the character has long overstayed his welcome. Darren Criss continues to do great work on the show, but it was wise for American Crime Story to shift the focus away from him this week.
The star of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” is obviously Finn Wittrock, who gives an honest, heartbreaking performance as the increasingly conflicted Jeff Trail. As a character, Jeff bottles up most of his emotions, and Wittrock does good work playing up all that simmering angst and rage. He’s even better when he lets the emotions come to a head and snaps, such as when he yells at a co-worker, or at Andrew.
Director Dan Minahan, who also helmed last week’s episode, goes light on the stylish touches this week. There aren’t as many dramatic flourishes in camera movement or placement, and that’s not a bad thing. Perhaps sensing that this week’s script, by Tom Rob Smith, was powerful enough as-is, Minahan knew it would be better to keep the direction subtle and let the actions speak for themselves.
We’re now moving beyond Andrew’s murders. The following episodes will travel back even further into Andrew’s life, and peel back the lies and deception to show us who he really was. One can’t help but think this makes The Assassination of Gianni Versace a front-loaded show, where all the true action happens in the first five episodes, and the back-half of the season is more subdued. Still, American Crime Story has a few more tricks up its sleeve.
Stray Observations:
– You can watch an excerpt from the real 48 Hours interview with Jeff Trail here:
– You can read the real Advocate interview with Versace here.
– While this episode is primarily focused on Jeff, the scenes we get with Andrew stand out due to Andrew’s desperate, unsubtle attempts at control and manipulation. At one point, Andrew and David go to a club to meet friends from David’s work, and Andrew spends the entire evening being loud and abrasive, constantly trying to get the upper hand.
