Ryan Murphy continues to defend his controversial Netflix series Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.
In a recent New York Times profile, the American Horror Story creator and executive producer said that he disagreed with the streaming platform’s decision to remove its LGBTQ tag from the series.
“There was a moment on Netflix where they removed the LGBTQ tag from Dahmer, and I didn’t like it, and I asked why they did that, and they said because people were upset because it was an upsetting story. I was, like, ‘Well, yeah.’ But it was a story of a gay man and, more importantly, his gay victims,” he told the Times, explaining that he doesn’t think all gay stories need to be happy stories.
Netflix removed the tag shortly after the show dropped in last September, following viewer outcry over its inclusion in their LGBTQ film and TV offerings. “This is not the representation we’re looking for,” one TikTok user said in a post at the time.
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The series also came under fire for romanticizing Dahmer due to casting frequent Murphy collaborator Evan Peters in the title role. Family members of some of the notorious serial killer’s victims also spoke out about feeling exploited and retraumatized by the show.
Murphy previously told The Hollywood Reporter that he and the show’s writers and researchers had reached out to “around 20” of the victims’ families while developing Dahmer.
“And not a single person responded to us in that process,” he said. “So we relied very, very heavily on our incredible group of researchers.”
In the Times profile, Murphy told writer Maureen Dowd that he was drawn to Dahmer’s story because he wanted to shed light on the racism and homophobia that prevented authorities from bringing the killer to justice for so long.
“It was the biggest thing I’ve ever seen that really sort of examines how easy it is to get away with things with the white privilege aspects,” he explained.
