A Closet Surrounds Even the Most Open of Gay Lives

KEY STONE HEIGHTS, FLA. —  The coverage of Andrew Phillip Cunanan has been a film-noir version of “La Cage aux Folles.” Gays were worried, rightly, that the manhunt was giving them very bad publicity. And it was hard not to laugh over the idea that the killer was hiding in drag; or the explanation of a former drag empress--in a suit and tie on TV--that Cunanan was intelligent because he knew the difference among cognacs.

This was not the cream of gay life. No, it was the saga of a sort of queen most gay men meet at least once: the pretentious social climber, the name-dropping fake. When Cunanan left his hotel room in Miami Beach to stalk fashion designer Gianni Versace, he left behind fashion magazines (with Versace ads) and gay porn. When a TV news camera panned across magazines littering his seedy apartment in San Diego, on the top lay Architectural Digest. Big surprise. This case was all about Architectural Digest.

It was a fixation Theodore Dreiser or F. Scott Fitzgerald would have recognized: the poor boy who wanted to be rich. It was also, of course, a gay story. Cunanan turned out to be the gay man from hell--his history exposed a specific gay milieu like something under a rock you lift in the garden. Ironic that only true crime gives us a slice of contemporary life in a way “serious” novels don’t anymore.

Among the many things exposed was the degree to which gays and gay life are still in the closet; the myths the public retains about both, and the mind-set even gay people thought we had moved beyond. Now that Cunanan is dead, a criminologist on television said, people formerly afraid for their personal safety will be able to come forward and fill in the missing details. Not if you’re in the military, a man in San Diego pointed out--or in some strata of society where being gay is not exactly an advantage.

The latter certainly contains the one man we’re certainly not going to see an interview with: the “sugar daddy” in La Jolla who supported Cunanan and then reportedly kicked him out, if that is what happened. It is this rejection that seems to have started Cunanan’s downward spiral. It’s an interview I’m not holding my breath for, since to the truly A list, you only appear thrice in the papers--birth, marriage, death--and this affair is pretty tawdry. He is unavailable, we’re told. The chic escape from this mess--like Tom and Daisy Buchanan eating chicken in the kitchen after Jay Gatsby’s death.

The other, polar opposite figure whom the media left hidden during the tabloid frenzy was Antonio D’Amico, Versace’s lover of 11 years. He was in the Miami mansion when the designer was shot outside. Between these two silences lies an extremely large closet.

Versace worked in a profession where it’s far easier being gay than it is, say, in a Catholic Filipino-American family or in the snobbier circles of Southern California business and social life. It’s virtually assumed a male fashion designer is gay, till proven otherwise. Yet, being gay is still such a loaded reality in this country that TV reporters hardly mentioned the fact that Versace was--much less that he lived with a long-time lover who designed sportswear for his company.

What would that have done to the mind-set of those whose image of gay life was confirmed in spades by the details of Cunanan’s life as a kept man? It’s never been clear, since Bruce Weber’s photo of a young man sleeping in Calvin Klein underwear first floated over Times Square year ago, how much of the homoerotic subtext in fashion the public was getting, though it could hardly be clearer in Versace’s book, “Men Without Ties.”

Versace, who promulgated the images that the Southern California gay world, among others, apparently measured itself by, came out in an almost natural way--as part of his work, his enthusiasms, his life. Not in some coerced press release, or hysterical media event or, conversely, the silence in which the rich johns of Cunanan’s aspirations seemed to operate.

Of Cunanan himself, one many said, with a shrug: “He ran amok.” In one sense, that is all there is to say. In another, he’s infinitely fascinating. Because Cunanan, 27, should have been the beneficiary of years of gay visibility and self-acceptance. Cunanan, the spree killer, theoretically should not have existed at all. Cunanan was out in high school. He brought an older boyfriend to the school dance, wearing a red leather jumpsuit the man had given him. (A bit too in-your-face to seem indifferent to the issue.)

But then, rather than enter the world at large, which supposedly no longer requires a gay ghetto (the flip side of the closet), he entered the oldest gay milieu of all: johns and kept boys, and remains in the ghetto till he can’t maintain his persona there, either. (Cunanan was already over the hill, an acquaintance on TV said; he had nothing “they” wanted. Sounds awfully sinister, this “they”--though it’s a story as old as Petronius.) Then Cunanan ends up smashing to bits the man who should have been, and perhaps was, his hero--a man who had integrated his sexuality into his life, work and family with spectacular success.

It is possible, of course, that he did not kill Versace as a symbol at all, but merely as a man he wanted money or help from. Some witnesses say the two were arguing when Versace was shot. And in many ways, Cunanan’s murder of his best friend, Jeffrey Trail, is just as enigmatic. Why did he kill Trail in the first place? Why did he kill Lee Mioglin so viciously? (Mioglin’s family has felt the need to deny that he or his son is gay.) And why Versace? These are some of the many questions that will be asked now that Cunanan has cheated us of knowing the answers. Some police in Miami Beach had tears in their eyes, talking about this loss, a reporter said, because it diminishes their ability to prevent a recurrence. We may never know why he was so cruel.

Meanwhile, the silence of La Jolla, and Versace’s companion, will reverberate. Gay life will go back under the rock. Youth, beauty, abs and pecs will continue to be admired in bars and fashion magazines. At least most people know these images for what they are--nice if you can get them, but no measure of a person’s worth; and Cunanan for what he was--an individual, not a symbol.

And yet, and yet--it’s like asking O.J. Simpson or Rodney G. King not to be a symbol. Sociological ambulance chasers will now analyze Cunanan as a symbol of HIV rage (unfounded) or the retrograde aspects of gay identity. And we will draw our own conclusions. All are tragic, some will have to be based on the two remarks his parents made, however. His mother, at the outset, said he was a high-class homosexual prostitute. His father, claiming his son could be neither gay nor a killer, explained it this way: “He’s had a Catholic upbringing. He was an altar boy.” So much for Cunanan’s being out--or all the good it did him, and us.