We’ve been preoccupied this season with whether NYC really feels like American Horror Story. But perhaps all this time it would have been better to dissect what AHS, as a medium, has most saliently offered us in the past. Do we watch AHS to be frightened? Sure. But more often, don’t we watch it to have our limits pushed, whether that’s through the visual of abject gore, the humor of some over-the-top campy characters, or the emotional pull of loss? Those are all hallmarks of horror as a genre, broadly speaking. So maybe NYC doesn’t have the exact same pace and flair as previous seasons, but it extended the boundaries of what we have always turned to AHS for. It doesn’t matter whether it was a good season of AHS: It was good television.
The majority of NYC centered around two questions: Who is Big Daddy, and what is this growing illness that’s plaguing the gay community? We get answers to both of these questions in parts one and two of “A Requiem: 1981/1987,” even if they come in the form of metaphors.
The rapid progression of the illness is the focus of part one, as we see the disease take out both Sam and Patrick even though they’d only experienced mild symptoms earlier. Before their deaths, however, each is visited by ghosts from their past, as though they’re Ebenezer Scrooge in the early hours of Christmas morning. Sam is visited first by Theo, then by Henry (whom we never did see die). Theo brings Sam through the hospital, showing him how men he knew and neglected to show kindness to have all succumbed to the illness as well. With so few in the outside world willing to extend any warmth to those dying, Theo pushes Sam to finally offer some himself. These scenes are just as moving as they are terrifying — to die alone in a hospital, begging for help and compassion, is a true horror, one so many in both the AIDS crisis and more recently in the COVID-19 pandemic have actually experienced.
Next, Henry takes Sam to a dungeon, where he must confront the ways he’s transferred the pain he experienced at the hands of his father and previous bosses into sexual depravity, before showing him the beach on Fire Island. There, Sam unmasks Big Daddy, who becomes a noticeably less large blond man, perhaps a former lover. All of this remains ambiguous but further suggests that Big Daddy has always been some sort of specter, capable of embodying whatever those who see him fear most of confronting. Patrick undergoes a similar quest as Sam, forced to face how his own internalized homophobia has hurt others, how his commitment to masculinity and policedom caused unnecessary pain. By the end of part one, we finally hear the word “AIDS,” confirming that the illness being discussed throughout the season isn’t just a parallel, but the crisis itself.
Throughout this sequence, and with the explicit mention of AIDS, we get closer to the purpose and message of the season. With Sam and Patrick’s ghosts, there is a reckoning occurring not only with these characters themselves, but perhaps even with the writers and creators of the show. This season is, without question, about the gay community, and hasn’t shied away from addressing some of the more controversial components of it. Some members of the community do abuse drugs, some do engage in dangerous sex, some do fall into a trap of depravity, some do hide their shame in damaging ways. Sam, in particular, represented some of the darkest corners of this world — he, not Whitely/Mai Tai, served as the bogeyman of the ills of the community, the monster that many of those who opposed queerness may have thought the entire community to be.
In Sam and Patrick’s case, their physical decline is suggestive of the idea that the body keeps the score, that their shame and pain have manifested into disease. This is a belief many homophobic bigots had in the midst of the AIDS crisis, too, that the illness targeting the gay community was a punishment. The final episodes of NYC do not address this much, but it represents one of the more complicated aspects of the season. At times, NYC showcased behaviors that bordered on harmful stereotypes, but in doing so it made a crucial point: One does not need adhere to the most stringent standards of heteronormative acceptability in order to be worthy of compassion and dignity.
In part two, we learn that Hannah has died from HIV/AIDS herself, having caught it from Adam via insemination, but she was beginning to uncover the nature of the illness prior. We don’t get full answers about where it came from, how it relates to the deer of Fire Island, or whether there was some sort of lab leak or institutional conspiracy at play. As with the actual AIDS crisis, much remained unresolved. HIV deaths have declined steadily in the United States since 1995, but rose dramatically in the decade prior — bolstered by government inaction. We never fully got answers for this, and NYC maintains that ambiguity. Instead of providing a cohesive narrative to the season’s mysteries, part two distills them in loss. In one of the most poignant, affecting scenes of AHS, we watch Gino’s slow decline as he watches the AIDS crisis grow around him and in himself, set to Kraftwerk’s “Radioactivity.” The gaping absence of those who succumbed to AIDS and the powerlessness felt by those it surrounded is palpable because it is real. AHS is never one for happy endings, but there is often a catharsis. Here, the only catharsis that can be offered is that of the bitter resolve of those who remain.
This season of American Horror Story and these final episodes were not perfect, and plenty of ends remain loose. Was Big Daddy ever anything more than a symbol for pain, shame, trauma? What happens with the lesbians? Is there really anything supernatural here at all? We’ll likely never know. But unlike the last season of AHS, NYC had a purpose, a point, and it never lost sight of that. An elegy to the AIDS epidemic, NYC and its plotlines functioned as a powerful poetic metaphor for the suffering and mourning of the gay community while maintaining an absorbing narrative cohesion. It was a slow, gritty burn that gently melted into an emotional portrait of a true and honest American horror.
Body Count
• Whitely will enter the ranks of some of AHS’s greatest complex and sympathetic villains. Really, his heart was in the right place! One has to wonder if any change could have occurred, any future deaths prevented had the Sentinel become real.
• Patti LuPone was a delight throughout the season, but her presence was never once justified in the plot. Sorry!
• The paper that Gino worked for, The Native, was a real gay paper in NYC between 1980 and 1997. It was there that journalist and physician Lawrence Mass was the first to publish anything in the press about AIDS. Unlike Gino’s character, however, Mass is still alive.
