Ryan Murphy goes cruising
American Horror Story’s eleventh season is a tableau of New York’s gay subcultures, thriving in its 1981, pre-AIDS glory. Its characters are male eye candy in jockstraps and stripy socks, daddies in leather straps and twinks out for a laugh. As Kal Penn’s cynical police commissioner summarizes, "That community? They come here for a reason. They come here to get lost, and that's exactly what they do.” The style? A mood board of Mugler costume-fashion, Chrome Hearts leather jackets, Lagerfeld’s filled shoulder pads and Calvin Klein underwear billboards. But its premise is that of an earlier and much more controversial gay masterpiece: Cruising.
