For years, Eric Wynn was the only black drag queen at Club 219 in Milwaukee. He performed as Erica Stevens, singing Whitney Houston, Grace Jones and Tina Turner for adoring fans, eventually earning the title of Miss Gay Wisconsin in 1986 and 1987.
“I had this group of black kids who came in because they were represented,” Wynn, now 58, says of his time at the club in the late 1980s and early ’90s. “I saw them and let them know I saw them, because they finally had representation onstage.”
Among them were Eddie Smith, who was known as “the Sheikh” because he often wore a headscarf, and Anthony Hughes, who was deaf. Hughes was “my absolute favourite fan” and blushed when Wynn winked at him from stage. In return, Hughes taught him the ABCs of sign language.
“He would sit there laughing at me when I was trying to learn sign language with my big, old fake nails on,” Wynn recalls, laughing.
But then, Wynn says, the group of young black men began to thin out.
“They were there and then all of the sudden there were less of them,” he says.
It couldn’t be more wrong, more ill timed, and it’s a media grab
Smith and Hughes were two of the 17 young men Jeffrey Dahmer killed, dismembered and cannibalised in a serial murder spree that largely targeted the gay community in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. Dahmer was a frequent customer at Club 219. He was sentenced to 15 consecutive life terms but was killed in prison in 1994.
Dahmer’s life has the been the subject of several documentaries and books, but none have received the attention or criticism showered on Netflix’s Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, which dramatises the killing spree in a 10-part series created by Ryan Murphy. It stars Evan Peters as Dahmer and Niecy Nash as a neighbour who repeatedly tried to warn the police, and aims to explore Dahmer’s gruesome tale through the stories of his victims.
For many critics, that attempt failed immediately when Netflix labelled the series under its LGBTQ vertical when it premiered last month. The label was removed after pushback on Twitter. Wynn and families of the victims questioned the need to dramatise and humanise a serial killer at all.
“It couldn’t be more wrong, more ill timed, and it’s a media grab,” Wynn says, adding that he was “disappointed” in Murphy. “I thought he was better than that.”
Murphy, who rose to fame with the high school comedy show Glee, has explored true crime before. His miniseries American Crime Story tackled the assassination of Gianni Versace, the OJ Simpson trial and US president Bill Clinton’s impeachment. But it was Murphy’s pivot from The Normal Heart, based on a play written by AIDS activist Larry Kramer, and Pose, about New York City’s 1980s ballroom scene, to Monster that stopped Wynn in his tracks.
Of Pose, Wynn says, “I was so impressed, we finally had representation that we were involved in.” He adds, “It was such a great homage to all of us. And then he turns around and does this, somebody who is actually attacking the black gay community.”
Instead of focusing on the victims, Wynn says, Monster focuses on Dahmer. The Netflix label of an LGBTQ film and the timing right before Halloween did not help either, Wynn says.
It brought back all the emotions I was feeling back then
Netflix did not return a request for comment.
In an essay for Insider, Rita Isbell, whose brother Errol Lindsey was murdered by Dahmer, described watching a portrayal of her victim’s statement at Dahmer’s trial in the Netflix series and “reliving it all over again.”
“It brought back all the emotions I was feeling back then,” she wrote. “I was never contacted about the show. I feel like Netflix should’ve asked if we mind or how we felt about making it. They didn’t ask me anything. They just did it.”
Eric Perry, who says he is a relative of the Isbells, wrote that the series was “retraumatising over and over again, and for what?”
Scott Gunkel, who is 62 years old, worked at Club 219 as a bartender when Dahmer was a customer. Gunkel watched the first two episodes of Monster but could not continue. He says he and his friends “don’t want to relive it.”
“The first ones really didn’t have any context of the victims, I was taken aback,” he says of the episodes, adding that the bar scenes did not accurately portray the racial mix of the city’s gay bars at the time. It was largely white, not black, as the show depicts.
Gunkel also remembered Hughes, the deaf man, who he says would come into the bar and wait for it to get busy. Hughes was one of the few victims to receive a full episode dedicated to his story.
“He’d get there early and have a couple sodas and write me notes to keep the conversation going,” Gunkel recalls. “He disappeared, and I didn’t think much of it at the time.”
That’s in part because the Dahmer years also coincided with the AIDS epidemic. There are opaque references to the crisis in the Netflix show, including hesitation by the police to help the victims and a bath house scene in which condom use is discussed. But Gunkel says customers vanishing was not uncommon.
“We had this saying in the bars – if somebody was not there any more, either he had AIDS or he got married,” Gunkel recalls.
[ My Friend Dahmer: The lunatic as a confused young manOpens in new window ]
The AIDS epidemic combined with the transient lifestyle of many gay men in Milwaukee and “institutional homophobia and racism targeting the community” provided a perfect cover for Dahmer, says Michail Takach, a curator for the Wisconsin LGBTQ History Project. Takach was 18 years old when Dahmer was arrested.
“People were always looking for something new and people always disappeared,” Takach, now 50 years old, says. “This was different, because it just got worse and worse.”
Missing person posters climbed “like a tree in Club 219 until they reached the ceiling,” he says.
The show has brought back those memories, Takach says, and has also surfaced people claiming to be associated with the Dahmer years who were not.
“This is the invisible cost of the Dahmer resurgence,” he says, “this dreadful mythology, this unexplainable need to attach to someone else’s horror.”
Nathaniel Brennan, an adjunct professor of cinema studies at New York University who is teaching a course on true crime this semester, says that it “is by nature an exploitative genre”.
There’s an idea that if society had done more, it could have been avoided
Even with the best intentions, he says, “the victims become the pawn or a game or a symbol”.
Contemporary true crime often falls victim to an unresolvable tension, Brennan says. “We can’t tolerate forgetting it, but the representation of it will never be perfect.
“That balance has become more apparent in the past 25 years.”
[ At school with a serial killer: growing up with Jeffrey DahmerOpens in new window ]
Criminals are often portrayed with tragic backgrounds, he says. “There’s an idea that if society had done more, it could have been avoided.”
Much of Monster is dedicated to Dahmer’s origins, including a suggestion that a hernia operation at the age of four or his mother’s post-partum mental health issues may have impacted his mental development.
Wynn, who lives in San Francisco now, says he did not plan to watch the series and Murphy owes an apology to the families of the victims and the city of Milwaukee. “That’s a scar on the city.” – This article originally appeared in The New York Times
