American horror story hotel gay
For six seasons, American Horror Story(AHS) has been awash in gay and woman-loving woman characters and openly LGBT+ actors. The latest version, American Horror Story: Cult promises to be the same.
Although cast members were vague about the plot at August’s Television Critics Association Summer Press Tour, some facts were revealed. Cult involves a lesbian marriage and is also about the 2016 presidential election.
"As with all good horror and suspense, knowing less is actually so much more because it's going to unfold for you," executive producer Alexis Martin Woodall told the Associated Force (AP).
“Though show designer Ryan Murphy has said Cult was inspired by the election of President Donald Trump, Woodall said the seventh self-contained installment in the American Horror Story anthology ‘is more about the world around us’,” according to the AP.
The cast for AHS: Cult includes actress Sarah Paulson. She doesn’t appreciate labels, but has dated actress Holland Taylor for two years. Openly queer actors Cheyenne Jackson, gay heartthrob and actor Colton Haynes and gay player Billy Eichner are also in the cast as is transgender actor Chaz Bono.
The AHS series is no stranger to LGBT+
American Horror Story Is Leading the Way on Bisexual Representation
A bisexual affair, teased as a salacious plot signal featuring Lady Gaga’s dangerously sensual character the countess, was only the launch for this “Hotel” season of American Horror Story. As in chapters past, this iteration of Murphy’s instant cult classic hosts a range of lgbtq+ characters—with many of those characters setting their sights on lovers, refreshingly oblivious with gender.
Indeed, sexual fluidity has been a major theme of the first half of the season. A scorned lover out for revenge, played by the iconic Angela Bassett, fell both for the countess and a dude. Liz Taylor (Dennis O’Hare), a trans woman, was married to a chick before coming out; but after leaving that existence to work in the Hotel Cortez’s bar, she finds herself in the arms of a new male model. Finally, NYC fashionisto Will Drake (Cheyenne Jackson)—who the show initially suggested was gay—later becomes infatuated with the countess as well.
Yet, despite all these fabulous depictions of queer desire, it was not until last week’s episode that a ethics actually said the pos bisexual. In said episode, the countess and Drake pl
In Media Res
American Horror Story is one of the queerest shows on television. Characters on the show regularly exhibit sexual fluidity, whether they were introduced as straight, lgbtq+, or neither. Unlike many shows that have cast a mostly heterosexual ensemble to play the queer characters (see Queer as Folk), AHS continually features LGBTQ actors playing gender non-conforming roles.
Things keep getting queerer. Season 5’s Hotel brought the first major transgender character to the show, Liz Taylor, played by same-sex attracted actor Denis O’Hare. Taylor is arguably one of the most popular characters from any season. Straight characters continually gender her accurately even though she’s baldheaded and doesn’t “pass,” but that’s part of the point. Taylor is also an inherent agent of the ensemble, unlike the exploitative minor transsexual characters on other shows. Penny Dreadful’s Angelique comes to mind as ultimately more of a plot device than a person. Transsexual actor Chaz Bono has now been featured much more prominently in Season 7’s Cult, playing an ostensibly cisgender character. Cult also features five homosexual or bisexual main characters and a host of insignificant LGBTQ characters, including, for some reason, An
The sprawling queer legacy of American Horror Story
‘Halloween Part One’, season one episode four of American Horror Story, opened with a ghost story of a love gone sour. We see highly-strung homemaker Chad, elbow deep in Marie Antoinette-themed pumpkins, accusing his partner Patrick of infidelity. It seems the force of home renovations and family planning having tested the boundaries of their open relationship.
“I was the first time I'd seen a gay couple on TV,” says Tyler, 22, an avid AHS watcher from Tennessee, USA, who was 14 when the episode aired. “I was only out to a couple of my friends at that point because I was afraid of being judged or harassed. Seeing those characters felt like a blessing.”
It’s unlikely that, at such a tender age, Tyler understood just how groundbreaking his first glimpse at a queer relationship was. Neither Chad (Zachary Quinto) nor Patrick (Teddy Sears), were a ‘straight-acting gay’ nor a ‘closeted jock’. Their love wasn’t a shameful secret, the basis for a coming out story, or any of the other usual tropes that have propelled LGBT+ inclusion on screen. Instead, a generation of young homosexual people were gifted with characters who
The Cutprice Guignol
So, I wrote about the season premiere of American Horror Story: Hotel a couple of weeks ago. And I stand by everything I said in that review– it’s tasteless, pointless, and plain horrible. That said, I couldn’t help but enjoy the last couple of weeks- after a wobbly third and fourth season (come on, struggle me), it seems that they’re finally re-stabilising their balance in how to tell a coherent, season-long story. Also, Evan Peters plays a Vincent Price-esque serial killer and Angela Basset is a B-movie star from the seventies. It’s a hoot, and while I’m still sort of braced at the start of every episode for something that will undermine the good operate they’ve done so far, I’ll take what I can get. Oh, spoilers, by the way.
But oh, when did a Ryan Murphy show ever procure off that easily in this blog? One of the things that I did notice about this season, and something that crops up across all kinds of TV all the freakin’ time, is the problematic way they frame bisexuality and especially non-hereto sexual activity. So, let’s take a stare at all the plots so far that own involved bisexuality in some fo