{"id":250726,"date":"2025-10-25T12:53:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-25T12:53:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/250726\/"},"modified":"2025-10-25T12:53:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-25T12:53:09","slug":"john-wayne-gacy-approaches-queerness-murder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/250726\/","title":{"rendered":"John Wayne Gacy Approaches Queerness, Murder"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tPatrick Macmanus doesn\u2019t usually read reviews \u2014 but the veteran showrunner went into his new series, Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy<\/a> (now streaming on Peacock<\/a>), ready to break that habit. \u201cUsually, I don\u2019t want to think about it and I just want to move on,\u201d he tells The Hollywood Reporter. \u201cBut in this case, I\u2019ve been reading literally everything \u2014 and for a very specific purpose. I came at this release from a real point of curiosity as to whether people would get it. And so far people have gotten it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHe\u2019s referring to the years of work that went into separating Devil in Disguise from the rest of the true-crime, serial-killer-drama pack. Despite examining one of the most notorious American serial killers in history (played here by Michael Chernus<\/a>), this show, which has received wide critical acclaim<\/a>, doesn\u2019t directly depict any of Gacy\u2019s crimes. It doesn\u2019t spend any time on his relationship to the victims, rather allowing them the narrative space to exist on their own terms before their lives were cut tragically short. Most crucially, it intently avoids the massive, common pitfalls that come with telling a story where queerness and psychopathy are central but utterly distinct themes.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIn his years of researching true events for his shows, Macmanus has learned he often doesn\u2019t know what he doesn\u2019t know. So to make Devil in Disguise, he enlisted GLAAD<\/a> \u2014 the non-profit focused on the advancement of LGBTQ+ representation and advocacy in media \u2014 as partners in everything from script outlining to the final stages of postproduction. \u201cWe rarely get brought in quite this early,\u201d says Dana Aliya Levinson, GLAAD\u2019s associate director of entertainment. \u201cThere were only a few episodes written at the time that we came on, so we actually got to have a real hand in shaping what the LGBTQ representation looks like, rather than tinkering around the edges, which often happens.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tGLAAD reacted to Macmanus\u2019 initial outreach with \u201cweariness,\u201d Levinson admits. \u201cIt\u2019s understandable with any sort of true crime story, especially one that was sort of framed so salaciously by media at the time.\u201d Gacy, who was sentenced to death in 1980 and executed by lethal injection 14 years later, killed a minimum of 33 boys and young men, many of whom he first tortured and\/or raped. He identified as bisexual and was rather mistakenly dubbed the \u201cKiller Clown\u201d in press because he had performed in a clown club \u2014 in short, he became both a monster and a punch line in popular culture. But even look at recent depictions of serial killers in American scripted TV, like Netflix\u2019s popular but derided <\/a>Monster: The Ed Gein Story<\/a> \u2014 which THR\u2019s review<\/a> called \u201cawful\u201d (it\u2019s at 18 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) \u2014 and you\u2019ll see a long line of salacious, bloody dramatizations of these murderers at work.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tMacmanus had assembled a predominantly queer writers room for Devil in Disguise and engaged in deep conversations with GLAAD about how to not \u201cequate queerness with psychopathy or evil or bad.\u201d A case study would be how the show very carefully identified Gacy\u2019s obsession with his mother\u2019s underwear \u2014 a visual that\u2019s long served as an ugly stereotype of trans people in media and tends to exacerbate homophobia. Macmanus initially felt like the concern was \u201cnuanced,\u201d but came to realize the vitality of approaching it with utmost sensitivity. (Worth noting, Ed Gein opens by luridly depicting its subject, played by Charlie Hunnam<\/a>, masturbating in his mother\u2019s undergarments.)<\/p>\n

\n\tGLAAD never got in the way of showing what needed to be shown for the story, however. \u201cOur line is always: If you choose to step on that landmine, we just want you to know that you\u2019re doing it,\u201d Levinson says. Their involvement stayed in the realm of guidance, not directives. \u201cThey were never trying to force an agenda,\u201d Macmanus says. Other topics that led to extensive discussion were Devil in Disguise\u2019s portrait of sex work, balancing destimigatization with the real dangers it posed at the time, and \u201cnot adulting\u201d the victims of Gacy who were not legal adults.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThen there\u2019s the throughline of systemic homophobia. \u201cIf we\u2019re not going to show murders over and over again \u2014 which was what we chose to do very specifically \u2014 we are replacing that with the people who were responsible for allowing him to get away with it,\u201d Macmanus says. \u201cWe made the choice to basically say, \u2018These are the people who were partially responsible for this happening over and over again.\u2019\u201d Adds Ryan Mitchell, GLAAD\u2019s senior entertainment media consultant: \u201cDespite the fact that many of Gacy\u2019s victims were not queer men, they were assumed to be gay by the authorities.\u201d It\u2019s a point some critics have argued was made a bit too repetitively in the series. Macmanus counters: \u201cSo that may have been too much, but sometimes it\u2019s not too much to be able to show the violence on the screen over and over again? It\u2019s just an interesting criticism.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tDevil in Disguise leaves ample room for queer joy amid so much terror \u2014 perhaps its most radical act. \u201cWe need to continue to see our stories in a time where, put simply, we are being erased in our storytelling,\u201d Mitchell says. \u201cIt\u2019s important to have a partnership like this where we can really help construct what it looks like to have complex, nuanced queer stories on television.\u201d Levinson, meanwhile, has thought back to the way Gacy\u2019s crimes were covered in media for decades until Devil in Disguise came around: \u201cTo finally get to see them as people with families and loved ones, living full and complete lives, and then feel gutted as an audience when we see them taken too soon \u2014 it helps us understand this story through the lens of [how the victims] were real human beings with complex, layered existences.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe know from data that storytelling changes hearts and minds,\u201d Levinson continues. \u201cThe attention and care with which these stories were told is ringing truthfully for a lot of people.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tDevil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy is now streaming on Peacock.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Patrick Macmanus doesn\u2019t usually read reviews \u2014 but the veteran showrunner went into his new series, Devil in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":250727,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[127301,88,136641,127306,74305,220],"class_list":["post-250726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-devil-in-disguise-john-wayne-gacy","tag-entertainment","tag-glaad","tag-michael-chernus","tag-monster-the-ed-gein-story","tag-peacock"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=250726"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250726\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/250727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=250726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=250726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=250726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}