In 1999, just two years after Andrew Cunanan’s cross-country killing spree, a cartoon spot ran regularly in between the videos on MTV. The spot showed Ricky Martin walking down the street, and every woman fainting at his feet. This was the summer of “La Vida Loca,” when the public had agreed to enter into a collective sexual delusion, a la Wham, about the pretty and flamboyant Latin singer and his perfect leather pants—never mind that no straight man had ever made a hot relationship with a daring woman sound so dreadful or exhausting, or so apt to end in copious jail time. The cartoon’s punch line is that one girl doesn’t faint at all: she shrugs. We see a frightened Ricky Martin, soaked in sweat, sit up in bed and scream. The whole scenario was, for the “definitely-heterosexual” pop lothario, a bad dream.

Even aged eleven, I remember thinking something seemed a little off; which is perhaps the reason why the spot has stuck with me since then, and why, when Martin finally came out more than ten years later, happy and a father to two children, I remember also thinking that it seemed like the end of a real-life nightmare. It seemed like a realized dream. This, and not the adulation of the women of the world, was what the private Martin had desired all those years: to be himself, and to be loved for being himself, and to be given full permission to love anybody that he felt like loving. It is funny to be waxing serious and thoughtful, now, about a man who once released a single with the lyric “up in the Himalaya/you know I wanna lay la”—but this is a year of curious turns. If you had said to me six months ago that in this, The Year of Our Lord Disick 2018, I would find myself in tears at a scene from a TV drama starring Ricky Martin, I would not have bought it. Times, as well as being full of change, are strange. Thank God there is a little wonder left in all this chaos. I am, frankly, ready for the Martinaissance.

Despite Gianni’s status as the victim of the series’ title, he seems happier, more at peace, than any other character.

The scene in question is a recreation of Gianni’s interview with the gay magazine Advocate in 1995, and is the lynchpin of the episode—emotionally, and perhaps conceptually—despite being fairly brief. At this point, Gianni and Antonio have been together thirteen years (as famous and unfamous couplings go, this is no minor innings). Ricky Martin, as Antonio, is patient and devoted, and heartbroken by the fact that he’s usually mistaken for Gianni’s personal assistant. Gianni, clearly smitten with Antonio, is keen to right this wrong. He asks the journalist if they can do the interview together, a united front; and the look the two men give each other is a look of such excruciating tenderness that it can’t help but be informed by something real. “The ups and downs,” said Martin in an interview in January with US Weekly, “the frustrations, the uncertainty, the fear of losing your career because you’re gay is something that is there… I’m a gay man that lived in the closet for many years. To see the process of Gianni actually coming out and sitting down in front of a journalist to talk about his reality is something that moved me in many ways.”

It moved me, too. This week, it struck me that despite Gianni’s status as the victim of the series’ title, he seems happier, more at peace, than any other character; he is beloved by both his lover and his (terrier-like, but basically protective) sister, and does not appear to feel the least discomfort over who he is. Unlike Jeff Trail, whose shame at being forced to leave the military under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is revealed to have informed his feelings on his sexuality, or David Madson, who obsessed over his father being disappointed in him for the fact that he was gay, Gianni says the phrase “I am a gay man” with about the same inflection as he might say “I was born in Reggio Calabria,” or “I adore a Greek Key trim.”

Every episode so far of The Assassination of Gianni Versace has been more unpleasant, and moreover more violent, than the last. This week, an ugly exploration of individual, internalized and institutionalized homophobia, is grimmer still. “You live in isolation, surrounded by beauty and kindness,” Penelope Cruz’s perfectly extraordinary-looking Donatella tells Gianni. “You have forgotten how ugly the world can be.” When she worries that his coming out as gay might cost the brand endorsements, he says—wryly and delightfully—“we’ll still have Elton.” Andrew Cunanan’s first victims have been closeted or down-low: we have yet to see what Gianni’s open lifestyle, opulent and unashamed, provokes in him. One has to guess it might be envy. Seeing Gianni and Antonio, in love and in the public eye, one cannot help but almost feel a pang of loss on Cunanan’s behalf—they make a then-brave thing look easy.

What Did Versace’s Lifestyle Provoke In His Killer?

Apparently not having overwhelmed myself enough already with the ugliness of Andrew Cunanan’s cross-country killing spree, this week I started reading Three Month Fever, Gary Indiana’s book about the case. “[A] synthesis between ‘the classic serial’ and ‘the classic spree’ killer,” writes Indiana in its preface, “Cunanan seemed less a threat to the general public than to familiar narrative genres and their claims to classicism.”

American Crime Story does not share the same disdain for a conventional crime narrative, nor for a classic serial killer trope. It does disdain conventional chronology, which helps explain why this week’s episode is dedicated to the Minneapolis-set murder that begat—or at the very least began—the spate of killings, even though it is the series’ fourth. Cunanan’s first victim was Jeff Trail, whose great misfortune stemmed from having slept with Cunanan’s intended long-term partner, and his sometime lover, David Madson. Madson, a young up-and-coming architect, bore witness to the crime, which happened in his gorgeous home: the episode begins with Andrew having lured Jeff to the front door. There are lingering, worrying shots of Madson’s photogenic dog.

Andrew Cunanan, a homme fatale, is both scorned and resentful of the straight world’s status quo.

The blows begin to rain the moment Jeff steps in. Ensuring we will never forget Cunanan’s first time, the sound design conspires to make us feel we’ve seen all twenty-seven hammer strikes. Blood Pollocks up the wall. It pools around the body like a wet, red joke: so bright and so extravagant in volume that it looks like Pop art, or a cartoon. Cunanan describes the killing as a loss of control, which would feel far truer if he did not say this in a voice so even-tempered and considered that nobody ever sounded more assured. If David calls the cops, he says, they will suspect him, too. The dog howls bloody murder. David ends up on the run with Andrew, looking even more like a conspirator than if he’d stayed.

A seducer, then a killer, Cunanan exists as a kind of male inversion of the hot-but-crazy femme fatale, whose unnerving affect tends to be mistaken for erotic freakiness instead of—well, just freakiness. Often, femme fatales are furious because they want to game the heterosexual system, which casts men as the deciders and the femmes, who ought to be obliging rather than fatale, as something men decide on. Sometimes, they are women scorned. Andrew Cunanan, a homme fatale, is both scorned and resentful of the straight world’s status quo. “They hate us, David,” he explains, fanning out gay porn as manufactured evidence. “They’ve always hated us. You’re a fag!”

“He has this feline intuition,” David says at one point said to Jeff, an observation notable for the fact that almost no one likens men to cats. Cunanan, aloof and neat and perfectly methodic, is a cat. (With this in mind, I had expected him to kill the dog. Thank God: he does not kill the dog.)

Jeff, meanwhile, is a cute, blonde, jockish boy with close-cropped hair and an appealing but unmemorable face, which means he’s nearly interchangeable with David. (Nothing stranger than white racists who insist that other races look homogenous, when most attractive Chrises and hot Laurens look—to me, at least—like variations on one milquetoast factory model.) Loving one’s own doppelganger might be the textbook definition of a narcissist, at least the way Narcissus happened to embody the idea; a sociopath like Cunanan might, under different circumstances, understand the impulse.

As it happens, Jeff and David’s interchangeability succeeds in throwing the police. They call the murder, first and with an air of casual disgust, “a gay thing.” They assume that David is the dead man, and a hookup’s gone far south. They’re half-right, in the sense that David Madson is a dead man walking from the minute he steps out with Andrew Cunanan—that while the latter sees their going on the lam as a lovers’ road trip, an excuse to sing along to Technotronic on the radio and fantasie about how Mexico will look at sunset, Madson sees a monster. One day later, Cunanan has killed him, too: strike one, and then strike two, of five eventual strikes.

Versace’s Killer Was a Male Inversion of the Femme Fatale