Ryan Murphy has claimed that Netflix should have left the LGBT tag applied to Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. The streaming platform had been the target of much criticism after putting the tag on the series, so much so that they later removed it.
Murphy has argued that perhaps the tag was applied to the show in the first place because he is part of the LGBT community. “I think that it got the tag, one, because of my involvement,” he said in an interview with Variety.
“I’m a gay man, so most of my stories deal with some sort of LGBTQ thing and I do that selfishly; when I was growing up, I had nothing,” he added. “My mission statement has been to talk about those stories and those characters and unearth buried history.”
Murphy, however, understands why some members of the LGBT community found the tag from Netflix unnecessary and that they prefer shows with a more positive outlook. “Many people in the community want to uplift. I understand that,” he said. “It’s about homophobia. I have a saying: ‘My job as an artist is to hold up a mirror about what happened.’ It’s ugly. It’s not pretty.”
“Do you want to look at it?” Murphy continued. “If you do, watch it. If you don’t, look away, and sometimes, some of this outrage is directed at the frame of the mirror instead of the reflection. I try and say, I really understand why you’re upset about the inclusion of that. I understand it, but I also disagree with it personally.”
In other Monster/Murphy news, the actor has recently claimed that he contacted several family members of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims but admitted that he had not received a single reply. “We reached out to 20, around 20, of the victims’ families and friends trying to get input, trying to talk people,” he said. “And not a single person responded to us in that process. So we relied very, very heavily on our incredible group of researchers.”
