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Gay gun will travel Andrew Cunanan gives the media a hard-on by MATTHEW HAYS
* From the day that Gianni Versace was shot outside his Miami home and the chase was on for his killer, police and media pundits alike appeared intent on writing a clichéd character description for a bad film script. Cunanan was a "chameleon" by numerous accounts and, according to Newsweek, "a skillful fraud... he knew enough to fake his way into glittery worlds far beyond his means or station." The Newsweek spread included several photos of Cunanan's evolution. The problem? He looked virtually identical in every shot. But surely the most idiotic, ludicrous, absurd, bizarre and all-around lame speculation came when police stated they suspected that, since Cunanan was on the lam and trying to elude authorities, he just might be impersonating a woman. The reasoning behind this genius hunch? Police officers had found a razor blade with some of Cunanan's hair on it--enough evidence to assume a suspected killer who happened to be gay must be donning frocks.
* In what looked like a desperately needed respite from all the bad detective work and self-aggrandizing media punditry, a gay reporter was on hand during CNN's Larry King Live. Unfortunately, Nicole Ramirez-Murray of San Diego's Gay and Lesbian Times turned out to be among the worst of the lot. When the Cunanan-in-drag topic came up, rather than tear down the theory's inherent idiocy, Ramirez-Murray added to the pile. Cunanan "is part Asian," Ramirez-Murray surmised, and "some of the best cross-dressers are Asian." This meant Cunanan would "pass" as a woman as do many of the finest drag queens. So much for the gay press trying to quash insane stereotypes wherever they rear their ugly heads.
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If mainstream media seemed to have become more sensitive to gay-related issues in the past decade, you never would have known it by their coverage of the Andrew Cunanan serial killings. Here is our media overview of the chase for a suspected murderer who was virtually tried and convicted before he was even captured for questioning:
* The crimes were frequently referred to as "gay murders." Newsweek stated that "Versace was an architect of a gay jet-set culture whose dark side may have done him in." NBC's popular current affairs program Dateline proceeded with the flip side of this scurrilous journalistic double standard. Their reporter chose to focus on "the other victim," William Reese, a cemetery caretaker who apparently was murdered by Cunanan in his bid to steal a car. Reese, pronounced Dateline, lead a "quiet sensible life, [which] ended with a senseless murder." Reese's widow and pastor appeared before the cameras, intent on setting the record straight (literally): Reese had been lumped in with Cunanan's string of affairs, but there was no way the two men had had any kind of sexual liason. "They could've been in Wal-Mart at the same time," his wife stated, "but there was no relationship." The contrast in reporting on Versace's lifestyle with that of Reese's points to a dichotomy only too familiar to gays in the age of AIDS: there are two sets of victims--the guilty and the innocent.
* After Cunanan took his own life, Time magazine's post-mortem on the entire affair was telling. The weekly managed to acquire exclusive photos of Cunanan cuddling with David Madson, his "lover-turned-victim." The photo and accompanying story fuse to become the perfect metaphor for AIDS. That age-old equation, linking the gay lifestyle with death, was upheld.