#and this summer when they actually literally met queer family it was insane and they miss them so much

[soupydoobydoo]

i love watching movies about queer taiwanese people i love you my family

[acsversace-news]

The first thing you need to know about FX’s American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace is that it’s not really about Gianni Versace. While O.J. Simpson—and his fame, his race and his abusive history—were central to Ryan Murphy’s true-crime anthology in its first season, this story focuses on the man who killed Versace and the society that aided in that murder.

The new season is based on Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History, a 450-page tome the journalist Maureen Orth published in 1999. Much of the book is devoted to the life story of Cunanan, the 27-year-old spree killer who shot Versace in 1997. Her reporting is thorough and revealing, but much of her analysis is dated. When Orth explores Cunanan’s demimonde of meth, escorts, sugar daddies and BDSM, it feels as though she’s unaware that this milieu isn’t representative of gay male culture as a whole.

Especially considering that Murphy—who is gay and has created some groundbreaking queer characters—has also been known to perpetuate the occasional homophobic stereotypes, the interplay between the book and the series is bound to give us plenty to discuss. At the very least, Vulgar Favors is handy for determining which parts of the show are confirmed fact and which are purely conjecture. (I’ll also be using Deborah Ball’s House of Versace, a breezy history of Gianni, his family, and the brand from 2010, along with a few other sources.)

I don’t want to call these recaps “fact-checks,” though, because fiction doesn’t have any responsibility to stick to the official record. Instead, I’ll look at how the discrepancies between what Orth dug up and what Murphy depicts reveal the show’s real agenda. These pieces may take a different form from week to week, but since the premiere was mostly a reenactment of the crime and its immediate aftermath, we’ll start with some pretty basic background stuff.

July 15, 1997

Orth’s book ends with the death of Versace and the intensified hunt for Cunanan, who had already killed four men by the time he came to Miami Beach. American Crime Story begins with the murder and goes backward from there. It’s a promising approach, because the real suspense here is in the question of how the smart, charismatic, cultured young man we meet in flashbacks ended up on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

The show sticks fairly close to the facts in recounting what happened on the day Gianni Versace (Édgar Ramírez) died. He really was returning home from an early-morning excursion to buy magazines when Andrew, played by Darren Criss in a performance that’s already riveting, gunned him down on the steps of his palatial home (more on that later). One bullet also killed a turtle dove—a symbol that initially led authorities to suspect a Mafia hit. While Versace’s longtime partner, Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin), stayed at the designer’s side, the couple’s neighbor Lazaro Quintana chased Andrew until Andrew pulled a gun on him. Versace was rushed to Jackson Memorial Hospital, where he was declared dead at 9:21 AM.

Cops really did spot someone who matched Andrew’s description on the roof of a parking garage around the same time, but he escaped. (Orth doesn’t mention them tackling the wrong man.) It’s not clear what he was doing later that day, when police found the stolen red truck Andrew had abandoned and he became the suspect. The scenes that show him changing into fresh clothes and watching gleefully as the media descends on Versace’s house aren’t just plausible; they underscore how easily Andrew blended in among the town’s gay beachgoers.

One character to keep an eye on is FBI agent Keith Evans (Jay R. Ferguson). The Bureau was searching for Cunanan long before he killed Versace, and Evans was its man in Miami. Sadly, he was also inexperienced and unfamiliar with the city’s gay community. Sgt. Lori Wieder, the lesbian cop played by Dascha Polanco, wasn’t on the scene that day, but the officers who were there did find boxes of undistributed Wanted flyers in Evans’ trunk. The scene where the pawnshop owner complains to police about the legally mandated transaction form she’d filed a week earlier, which included Cunanan’s full name, is another embarrassing real-life detail. But the emphasis Murphy, who directed the episode, places on Evans’ neglect of his assignment is crucial, because it’s the first suggestion that law enforcement’s homophobia—its literal fear of engaging with gay men—contributed to its failure.

October 1990

Did Versace really know his killer? Well, sort of.

It’s true that Versace designed the costumes for a production of Capriccio at the San Francisco Opera, and stayed in the city during its run in 1990. At the time, Cunanan was living rent-free in Berkeley with his friend Liz Coté (Annaleigh Ashford), who Orth describes as a “rich and spacey debutante,” and her husband, Phil Merrill (Nico Evers-Swindell)—the couple we see in the flashback. A fixture in SF’s gay scene, Andrew met Versace at a club called Colossus. But, Orth reports, it was the designer who approached him: “I know you,” said Versace. “Lago di Como, no?” he asked, referring to his Italian lake house. It was, most likely, a flimsy pickup line. Andrew, who’d never been to Italy but had also never heard a flattering lie he couldn’t get behind, went along with it. On another night, Versace, Andrew, and a local playboy named Harry de Wildt were spotted together in a limo.

That dreamy encounter after the opera, though? It’s pure fantasy, although Andrew was known to lie about his Filipino father knowing Imelda Marcos, owning pineapple plantations and having a boyfriend. What’s important here is the conversation about Andrew’s future. “You are creative?” Versace asks, and his date answers in the affirmative. In fact, the only things Andrew ever created were fictions about himself, passed off as fact. (I won’t get too deep into that, because his lying is sure to come up later in the show.) “I’m sure you’re going to be someone really special one day,” says Versace. The distance between Andrew’s ambitions and the life he ended up with—as well as the reasons why he was such a failure—is going to be important.

The Family Business

The episode’s strangest divergence from the facts comes during the same scene. Versace explains the history of his company’s Medusa logo, recounting that he first spotted the image while playing in ruins as a child in Calabria. In fact, as Ball notes in House of Versace, he borrowed his logo from a door knocker at the Milan palazzo he bought in 1981. Perhaps we’re supposed to suspect Versace is a liar, too, but I’m inclined to believe the line is pure exposition, a hint of the designer’s humble beginnings that will soon become relevant to Andrew’s story.

Meanwhile, Versace’s mourning siblings/business partners, Donatella (Penélope Cruz) and Santo (Giovanni Cirfiera) provide some insight into the company’s status in 1997. Poor Cruz, normally a fantastic actress, has a thankless role (and a distracting accent) in this episode. All she does is sob, scream and provide dry background info that writer Tom Rob Smith doesn’t bother surrounding with believable human dialogue. For the record, it’s true that Santo, the oldest Versace sibling and the company’s most pragmatic voice, wanted to take the business public. And Gianni, after accepting a large dividend to subsidize his lavish lifestyle, agreed to do so. The plan was to make an initial public offering in the summer of 1998. It never happened. Two decades later, Gianni Versace S.p.A. remains a billion-dollar private company. None of this is particularly interesting, so here’s hoping it becomes relevant to the Cunanan story eventually!

Gianni Versace’s Fucking Insane House

There isn’t much art in this workmanlike premiere, but it does begin with a shot of the clouds painted over Versace’s bed that leads to a lovely, nearly wordless sequence contrasting Gianni’s civilized morning with Andrew’s primal scream. If you paid attention to the Renaissance-style art and the stained-glass windows and the gold accents and the massive tiled courtyard, it probably occurred to you that Versace’s home was totally off the wall. (“If Donald Trump had taste,” I said to myself, “this is what Mar-a-Lago would look like.”) Surely it was exaggerated for TV?

Actually, it was not. Built in 1930, Casa Casuarina, as the home was known, was inspired by Christopher Columbus’s son Diego’s residence in the Dominican Republic. In the courtyard of the 20,000-square-foot villa were busts of Columbus, Pocahontas, Mussolini and Confucius (all of which Versace kept). After Versace bought the property in 1992, he spent a million dollars restoring it. An army of artists and artisans filled the place with murals, mosaics and baroque furniture. Versace published a typically bizarre coffee-table book about his many bonkers properties in 1996, and in it you can find photos of the family frolicking poolside at Casa Casuarina alongside busy interiors and shots of naked men ironing. My favorite page shows a close-up of a burger, fries and a milkshake served on gilded Versace china, atop an ornate gold table. America! If you can’t track down a copy, this Google Image search should give you an idea. Look, here’s a bare-assed dude with a lampshade over his head! See you next week!

[cheezybiouwiou]

a briefing so i don’t have to repeat myself

My parents got divorced when I was one. He ‘went on holiday’ to Switzerland when I was about 6, the only contact I’ve had with him has been like through letters when we’ve tried to change our names in court or something.

I’ve lived in three countries and moved house over 30 times - it sounds weird but there’s always been a good reason.

We were like the famous five kids (my cousins, my sisters and I) for years, but then my aunt’s a little crazy, so long story short we fell out and didn’t see them for like 8 years (side note, saw them this summer and it was weird but nice).

Uncle is batshit crazy and a psychopath, we don’t talk to him. He likes to remind my mum that he could kidnap/murder us every so often which is fun. My grandma has alzheimers (so does my great aunt), and my dad’s side of the family we don’t have contact with. Everyone else just isn’t around or is dead I’m pretty sure (that’s not tragic it’s just old age yk).

Umm, so, mum was determined to send us to private school, so after the divoce although we stayed in private education, she/we sacrificed a lot to get there. We weren’t poor or anything, just life was tight. That at one point led to us moving to Spain for a year (wonderful but crazy experience, I was like 6 at the time and genuinely my heart is in Spain. We have a house there in this tiny village, it’s kinda the only constant I’ve had in my life.

After that we moved back to England and I went to a boarding school (very minimal boarding at first though, so easy). Had an amazing time, yada yada then my mum met my soon-to-be stepfather. Long story short again, he had a bit of money and they got married quick, it seemed great at first but he turned out to be a wackass hoe as well.

A series of unfortunate events involving us moving into my grandma’s to look after her and my batshit uncle threatening to kill our cat and kicking us out of that house led to us moving a bajillion times between holiday rentals for like a year. We then ended up moving to Shanghai, again seems incredible at first until you remember that this is the point at which he started showing his true colours and being super emotionally abusive to my mum. Shanghai also happened to be a really convenient way to isolate a person. Anyways, I got sick of it after a year because the education was shit so ended up going to the UK and going to a super uptight full-time boarding school for the next year.

Went here, homesick as shit and my brain decided it would be a perfect time (when I’m in a super intense academic and conservative environment where the only person I have in the country is my sister) for my ✧・ﾟ:* issues *:・ﾟ✧ to manifest/me to actually understand shit. So yeah, bad year for me. This was also compounded by my mum (yk cut back to China where she’s being emotionally abused and my other sister is having a shit time) having an absolute breakdown. Idk the timing worked out great bc my shit time coencided with hers and she couldn’t cope with that on top of my homesickness and on top of her issues so this, combined with the multiple arguments that I had with her, meant that she told me to stop bothering her and so I did. We didn’t talk for weeks, and now I have ✧・ﾟ:* emotional scars/trust issues and our relationship has never been the same *:・ﾟ✧. 

Anyways, she escaped by some miracle and we ended up back in England all together. This was when we returned to the flexi-boarding school (the one from before China) because it was the only one we could afford to go to. Sooo that place was super negligent and basically all I can say is that they had a really good PR team to stop all those suicide attempts within that school from going public.

Anyways, the first year was iffy, but as I said before, the issues that were becoming more apparently at the last school were kinda becoming more and more apparent (I now know it’s anxiety, depression, and then a possible spicy element of ADHD that we haven’t even got to yet). There was also another issue in that I’m bisexual and I was figuring that whole thing out (this is a side note but I’m probably non-binary but that’s a whole other issue that I’m confused/in denial about), but that led to me becoming friends with basically just the queer kids in my year because all my friends stopped talking to me. At this point I started almost full-boarding again.

Then I started dating one of my friends (Draco, AFAB but confused about their gender identity). Started off sweet, but long story short we dated for a year and a half and I’ve never been more broken (tried to kermit the frogicide 3 times hehe they barely counted as attempts yeet). Uhh there’s a lot to unpack with this one but I’ll try to simplify:

They had abusive parents (physically and emotionally)

They had bipolar

They also were raped by their dad multiple times

They were super manipulative. I wasn’t allowed to be happy about anything because it made them feel bad. 

I wasn’t allowed to feel confident in my body because they had severe body issues. I ended up developing an eating disorder (all I ate was tea, toast after midnight and like milk and digestives).

I started self-harming.

My relationship with my sisters and mum was atrocious. It was definitely a huge part my fault, but not entirely.

As a group we were definitely very toxic. But yeah, on top of all this their best friend committed suicide, and they’d been in emotionally abusive relationships. This led to them being super suicidal. There was I think from November to February where every time they left school to go home, they’d literally try to kill themself. And I’d be stuck while they’re messaging me the whole time saying like “sorry you’re not enough to save me”. Every night. For months I was spending my whole life literally just trying to keep them alive.

Idk if I blame them, because it was definitely their trauma that made them act like it, but some of the stuff they did was manipulative and shit. Lying to me a lot, promising they’re telling the truth when actually lying. Constantly pushing me away, and then being mad when I couldn’t talk to them because they blocked me. Telling lies to my friends to get them to stop talking to me and then stopping me from telling my friends the truth (I wouldn’t tell them just because Draco made it seem like it would hurt Draco, and I was terrified of doing that). That sorta stuff.

I became a therapist for a lot of kids in my year, and so all that pressure of keeping like 20 kids from committing not-alive, on top of my issues just wasn’t a good look for me.

This led to as I said, the eating disorder, and also heavvyyyy dissociation. It also led to alcoholism which was just an unexpected turn. I just didn’t realise how bad all of these problems were at the time. Not a good time, a lot of loneliness, skipping lessons, that sorta thing.

Anyways, mum managed to get me out of the school (after a breakdown and an ambulance having to be called to the school because I drank too much). I did my GCSEs from home by some miracle, and she moved me to the local sixth form. I broke up with the person, and then had a few months over the summer that were life changing.

I moved to a new sixth-form, and it’s been rocky and uphill and super hard but I worked my ass off and I’m in so much better of a place than I was. It was rough at the start, but basically I had a pathetic amount of CBT therapy from the NHS, and the only good thing it did for me was to let me know that 1) I hate CBT, and 2) I already managed to teach myself a lot of the coping skills in the last year.

Then corona rolled around, and my anxiety went through the roof again, depressive episodes came and went and I’m still getting no help. But yeah, it basically made me realise that sure I’ve come a long way but I’m barely holding it together. It most CERTAINLY isn’t helped by the astronomical stress levels I’m getting from my A-levels and just generally existing at the moment is hard. I’m also low-key lonely because people kind of suck (I lost almost all my friends from my old school, don’t get me wrong that was for good reason, but that doesn’t mean that it didn’t suck. But yeah, I also got into a group of people at the start that were kinda shitty and so now it can be kinda lonely because it’s hard to make new friends).

My relationship with my mum has improved but it’s rocky as fuck. She’s very childish and I’m pretty sure hit the jackpot for trauma in every capacity but just pretends that sHe’S fiNe. While I’m writing this, she’s been incredible. Genuinely incredible. But also she can be one of the biggest problems in making me want to cease existing. She can be extremely manipulating and invalidating of my emotions, and generally make me feel like I’m going insane because she knows that I have no power over my life. She’s admitted it’s because she has to be in control of everything, but admitting it doesn’t mean it’s not toxic. It’s one of the hardest things in my life when it gets bad.

So yeah, I think that’s most of it!

Also side note, I may have attachment issues from the constant moving schools/houses/issues with my mum/dad leaving/crazy stepdad/i completely forgot to mention my step-brother who nearly got institutionalised in china because of schizophrenia that i didn’t see after that/constant changing schools.

Also second side note, only figure out recently and I’m probably completely wrong and I can’t remember it properly because I was so young but a kid a few years older than me might have touched me up when I was younger. It wasn’t anything serious, it just made me uncomfortable when I realise. I don’t know if I want to talk about it though because there’s a part of me that wonders if I just invented this trauma to make me feel special or some shit and YES I’m aware that’s the dumbest shit to ever think but oh well. Edit: also I feel like I have no friends/they're constantly changing. Also, childhood Moreton bullying.