“When I first started in television, they only gave me thirty minutes to make an impression,” says Lee Miglin’s widow Marilyn, in the final episode of American Crime Story—which by now, in its ninth hour, has had 540 minutes to do the same, and which has revealed itself in increments to be far less about Versace than about queer lives, and queer death. The impression that it leaves is somber, and funereal, and its slow-burn voyeurism ends up feeling like an act of violence.

More than Gianni Versace’s ghost, the show is haunted by the specters of injustice, prejudice, complacency, heteronormativity, et cetera, et cetera; these are the spooks that make it just as much an American horror story as a crime one. Miglin’s widow is brought back, somewhat unsubtly, as a heart-rending reminder of the chaos Andrew Cunanan has caused throughout the season. When she talks about her marriage to Cunanan’s former john-turned- murder victim, Lee, as being like “a fairytale,” we’re meant to hear the “fairy” part a little louder. Mirrors are a motif in this final hour, so that when Andrew, on the run and hiding on a houseboat in Miami, is about to blow his brains out, he can’t help but turn and look at his reflection. In his mouth, the gun looks phallic; and because the gun looks phallic, it is hard not to assume that Cunanan is seeing himself (for the last time, no less) as the “faggy” kid his father mocked, “a sissy boy, with a sissy mind.”

“It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head,” David Foster Wallace said. “They shoot the terrible master.” With one shot, the sissy mind is violently evacuated, and the sissy boy that murdered all those men is dead. The true identity of the “terrible master” in this case is unclear: hours before the suicide, Modesto, Andrew’s father, is on TV offering up exclusive rights to the story of his son’s wild murder spree. The television screen, another mirror, shows Modesto’s callousness to Andrew, and shows us the son and killer’s face in fragments when Andrew Cunanan furiously smashes it and turns it black. A further dark obsidian mirror in Gianni Versace’s tomb will later throw back the distorted face of his distraught and grieving sister, Donatella, overlaid on a baroque medusa’s head. The line is blurred between man, woman, and inhuman monster.

Being a heterosexual woman born in 1988, I’ve had the luxury of being surprised by just how far American Crime Story’s real-life twists and turns have been informed by attitudes towards gay men that seem, to me, completely prehistoric. (I believe this is called “privilege”—although if you would prefer to call it “ignorance,” I would not necessarily correct you.) When the cops detain and interview a drug-addict named Ronnie who has previously sheltered Andrew, his despairing monologue sums up the season’s heaviest message: Andrew Cunanan did talk about Versace, Ronnie shrugs, but then, “We all did. We imagined what it would be like to be so rich and so powerful that it doesn’t matter that you’re gay. The other cops [before Cunanan killed Gianni]—they weren’t searching so hard, were they? Why is that? Because he killed a bunch of nobody gays? The truth is, you were disgusted by him long before he became disgusting…. People like me, we drift away; we get sick, and nobody cares. But Andrew was vain. He wanted you to know about his pain. He wanted you to hear. He wanted you to know about being born a lie. Andrew is not hiding. He’s trying to be seen.”

I looked up the difference between “murder” and “assassination,” and it turns out the dividing line is fame. American Crime Story turns out to be not much interested in fame or in famousness at all, but in the stories and the histories of queer men: the sons like Andrew Cunanan, yes, but the fathers, too—the closeted gay husbands of bored housewives, and the would-be husbands of out gay men who were not allowed to marry. Several times in the show, two men discuss the possibility of marriage; and in every instance, one man says, “We can’t,” and means it literally. Ronnie sneers in his big, heavy-handed monologue that men like Cunanan are “born a lie.” In fact, the lie is thrust upon them. The truth is the thing that dogs them, and that haunts them, for no reason other than the fact they’re told they should be haunted by it. (Who is saying this? The terrible master—as informed by Daddy, or by God, or by society, or by fear of the self.)

In a write-up of the second episode, I mentioned that the show avoids Milan Kundera’s definition of true kitsch—“the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word”—by showing us the ugliness, the evil shit, straight off the bat. “Shit happens,” I wrote then, “and then you die; a lot of this shit is unearned, unfair and brutal. A lot of this shit is painful and undignified, and it kills.” Since that week, a great deal more grim shit has happened onscreen. Many more have died. The death toll stands, eventually, at six, which is not much compared to something like The Walking Dead, but is a fairly heavy number for a true-crime series with nine episodes.

Andrew Cunanan dies ignobly on the houseboat, having been surrounded; Gianni Versace, so rich and so powerful it did not “matter” he was gay, is shot and killed; Antonio, his lover, is first excommunicated from the Versace family, and then tries to overdose. Andrew’s mother opens up the door to the FBI, and simply asks if they have killed her son. Modesto, sleazily, remains there in Manila trying to monetize his son’s horrendous crimes. Not happy to reject kitsch’s denial of all shit and leave it there, American Crime Story goes one further and—having first teased us with its possibility, and its seductiveness—rejects all glamour. It is its own slick obsidian mirror, gallows dark and too reflective. It’s affecting, and it’s hard to finish. There’s no other way to put it: what it shows us is entirely too much shit.

“The Assassination of Gianni Versace” Was a Rejection of Glamour

A single week off-schedule for American Crime Story, and I find myself identifying with the killer, Andrew Cunanan, as soon as it returns. This might be what is commonly called “Stockholm Syndrome.” It might also be good television—who can know for sure? What I do know for sure is that in this week’s episode, the sixth, there are no killings: we’re in 1996, a year before the first of Andrew’s murders, and it is his birthday. Present at the party are three future victims: Jeff Trail, David Madson, and Lee Miglin. Cunanan is living in an airy and palatial San Diego mansion as the guest and sugar baby of an older man named Norman Blachford, posing as his art consultant, his interior designer, and a man he definitely isn’t fucking.

“What a volatile mix you are,” one of Blachford’s friends sneers at the psychopathic toy-boy, catching him admiring his reflection after snorting some restorative cocaine. “Too lazy to work, and too proud to be kept.” As it turns out, both Cunanan and Blachford have been circling each other, so that what appears to be a mutual agreement is in fact a kind of double bluff—a meet-cute orchestrated by the younger man has ended, one year later, in his older lover hiring an investigator to expose the truth about Cunanan’s low-rent past. He is not, in fact, Andrew DeSilva PhD, but a college dropout. He once worked at a Thrifty drugstore, and his mother’s name is MaryAnn. The kind of total reinvention he’s attempted is not for the lazy, nor the proud: it’s hard and dirty, sometimes shameful work.

“A 1997 Washington Post profile noted that Cunanan was ‘a multilingual sophisticate who knew exactly which older men he wanted to meet,’” according to a piece at Newsweek probing the veracity of this week’s episode. Likewise: “Nicole Ramirez-Murray, a columnist for the San Diego Gay and Lesbian Times, said that if an older man was interested in orchids, ‘Cunanan would go out and buy every book available on orchids and soon he would be talking about the subject as if he had studied it all of his life.’”

Not being interested in orchids, or in older men who happen to be interested in orchids, I instead spent the show’s long week off-air with Zadie Smith’s most recent book, Feel Free. One of the essays therein happens to be “On Attunement,” which contains as elegant a summary of the specific hell of being undereducated in an overeducated room as I have ever read. (Like ending up in any restaurant where the meal requires several sets of cutlery, or being asked about my schooling and my parents’ jobs, this is my idea of a nightmare.) “I have known many true connoisseurs,” Smith writes. “They never fail to have a fatal effect on my self-esteem. When I find myself sitting at dinner next to someone who knows just as much about novels as I do but has also found the mental space to adore and be knowledgeable about opera, [or who] have strong opinions about the relative rankings of Renaissance painters…I feel an anxiety that nudges beyond the envious into the existential.”

Whatever Cunanan’s anxieties, he’s unafraid of homework. He is capable of posing as a man who knows about interiors, or orchids, or fine art; he can decode a wine list. How perversely freeing it must be to be a sociopath, and not to answer with the truth about your Podunk school, your parents’ jobs, your status as a former or a current rube: how weirdly punk to simply live the lie, and lucky to believe it.

After the Blachford live-in lover job implodes, our killer-autodidact heads to L.A., meeting David Madson for the kind of hotel dinner that requires—in my personal opinion—far too many forks. Asked about his family, Cunanan recounts the fiction that his father was a powerful stockbroker who travelled back to the Philippines to run a string of pineapple plantations, and his mother was a New York literary maven who brought lobster dinners to him at the school gates.

He looks as though he has convinced himself, despite not having managed to fool David. He is glassy-eyed with joy, half there and half lost in a manic fugue. When Madson leaves and Cunanan returns to squalor, takes up crystal meth, and ends up both hallucinating an encounter with Versace and returning to his family’s dumpy condo for an eerie, Norma/Norman Batesian exchange with mother MaryAnn, the lie seems necessary. Connoisseurs, most often, do not grow up poor with overbearing mothers. Real sophisticates are rarely bathed, as adult men, by loony parents. Saying that there was no killing in this episode was hardly accurate —it’s this sixth hour’s grim nadir that forces Cunanan to kill off, systematically, the last remaining sane, humane parts of himself.

Versace’s Killer Makes Being a Sociopath Look Like Freedom