"The Troubling Thirst for Jeffrey Dahmer" Transcript

Video transcript is on the left. Plagiarized text is highlighted, as is misinformation. For more info, see how to read this site

We all like true crime. If the glut of true crime series is any indication, it's very suddenly become one of the most engaging forms of contemporary entertainment. And there's no sign of it stopping. From streaming to YouTube, to networks to podcasts, it seems the genre has yet to find its saturation point.

In 2022, true crime shows are among Netflix's most watched, and the number of true crime shows on Netflix is rapidly growing. Between July of 2020 and March of 2021, the service launched 18 such series, with around 40 original shows currently available to watch on their true crime page.

Since the release of Into the Deep and other popular documentaries on the service in recent years, such as Don't F**k With Cats, Making a Murderer, and Tiger King, Netflix has become particularly associated with the genre.

While true crime shows were once favored by older audiences, with shows like Dateline and 20/20 targeting those demographics specifically, they're now becoming increasingly popular among people my age and younger. And they raise a number of ethical questions, particularly for a streaming service like Netflix.

The true crime series you put on to help you go to sleep at night - it's about a real person, often who have surviving relatives who don't consider their deceased loved one's murder to be very relaxing. Though we may know better, we devour every serving of this genre that is provided to us, in no small measure by Netflix.

In September of 2022, Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan released Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, starring Evan Peters as the titular serial killer. Over 196 million hours of the show were watched in the first week alone, making it the most popular show on the streaming service at the time of release. Furthermore, just like Joe Exotic, the "Tiger King", Dahmer has received a great deal of publicity for all the wrong reasons.

Despite Netflix's claims that the series will give notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer's victims a voice, the show received harsh criticism for its portrayal of the victims upon its debut, with several of the victims' loved ones speaking out, saying Netflix didn't even involve them in the process.

Others have said that by hiring American Horror Story's Evan Peters, the object of many a girl's and gay boy's affection, the show has glamorized Dahmer himself. After the Netflix series premiered and Peter's portrayal of the character went viral, the actual glasses that Dahmer wore in prison were auctioned off for $150,000.

We've romanced^{[sic: romanticized?]} the serial killer for a long time. Mads Mikkelsen's portrayal of Hannibal Lecter in the criminally canceled show Hannibal is a great example of this. Thomas Harris' bread and butter character is fictional, and not only fictional but such a carnivalesque mix of sophistication, intellect, and brutality that I couldn't really say it passes for realistic. Hannibal lacks the quiet chaos that real life serial killers possess. Though Dahmer was also a cannibal serial killer, he lacked the "eat the rude" principles that Hannibal Lecter lived by.

Hardly a principled serial killer himself, Dahmer lacked Lecter's discipline to stop at just cannibalism, and also engaged in necrophilia and pedophilia. But the major difference between the two is that Hannibal Lecter's victims are all as fictional as he is, and so are the families of his victims. That is not the case for Dahmer's victims. It can be a lot to deal with, seeing the man who murdered your son or brother be glorified on billboards and ads on YouTube. Imagine getting that jump scare when you're looking up a cake decorating tutorial.

Navigating the ethics of true crime content is tricky. There is a fine line drawn between real life procedural cop dramas and celebrating the infamous. Critics have begun to question the need for entertainment mediums which fetishize or even sexualize serial killers (in the last three years alone, we've seen multiple films about Ted Bundy, with two of them coming from Netflix, one of them starring Zac Efron.) A whole new generation of girls fell head over heels for the infamous killer, which was a grim remake in itself of the real life Ted Bundy trial. He had fangirls defending him in the press and even begging to marry him. After the release of the Zac Efron movie, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile, Netflix's social media team actually begged viewers to stop stanning Bundy.

But unlike Bundy, nobody ever thirsted for Jeffrey Dahmer when he was on trial or in prison, at least not as publicly as with Bundy. But that seems to have changed now. There is a thirst for Dahmer made apparent on TikTok and Twitter, with hordes of white women droning over how attractive he is, because the message we need to send is that violent crime can turn a 5 into an 11. Again, both Bundy and Dahmer were serial killers who tortured and murdered dozens of people whose families are still alive and can see these tweets and posts on TikTok.

The Dahmer tag on TikTok now has more than one billion views —

[A screenshot of the #dahmer tag on TikTok, with a red oval around "6.1B views" and text superimposed below reading "More than 6 billion now 0_0"]

— with users posting videos expressing lust and even sympathy for the killer. Others have re-edited scenes from the series to resemble a romantic comedy, with many users commenting that they were "rooting for" Dahmer and at least one victim to live happily ever after.

Oh god, that sounds familiar.

[Distorted music plays; pan up on the last panel of Killing Stalking Chapter One. The screen shakes and a low drone plays before cutting back to James.]

In April of 2021, I released a video looking at the controversial Korean manhwa Killing Stalking, the story of a young man who is abducted by a maniacal serial killer and over the course of the series falls madly in love with him. The series ends with them both (presumed) dead.

The audience for Killing Stalking seemed to be split between people who enjoy dark complex horror stories (me) and teenage girls who were rooting for Yoon Bum and his captor, Oh Sangwoo... to come out of it as a happy couple. Because if you talk to a social worker, working out your problems with a violent abuser and finding some common ground is absolutely... not the objective.

I wasn't disturbed that people romanticized a fictional serial killer. Like I said, Hannibal Lecter has been romanticized even by his own creator. Granted, Fannibals were a little bit more... measured in their shipping of Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter, a ship name referred to as Hannigram. Instances of Will and Hannibal as a happy couple were usually depicted in alternate realities, where they could be together. Fans recognized that this was impossible in the canonical world the characters lived in, but the chemistry was so intense an AU for them had to be created. This nuance did not... does not seem to be present in much of the Killing Stalking fandom, where the fervor for the violent deranged serial killer Oh Sangwoo was almost exclusively derived from how sexy he looked.

So... should I be surprised that there is a visceral thirst for Dahmer coming from the same age group? No. Am I shocked anyway? Yes, shocked, and disappointed, and grossed out, and uncomfortable. Because unlike Hannibal Lecter or Oh Sangwoo, Jeffrey Dahmer was a real person, and his victims were real people with real friends and real families who grieved for the loss of their loved ones, who were already going through a rough time seeing the story of their murders brought back to light by a major Netflix series. And now have to deal with a sizable portion of the Internet talking about how cute or handsome Jeffrey Dahmer was, and how he deserved a break because they "get" him.

Honeys, among other things he wanted sex slaves. Sex slaves. And not in a fun, consensual, kink kind of a way, he enjoyed conducting chemical lobotomies to get what he wanted. Is there really a "I can change him mentality" to approaching these serial killers? That all he needs is the right person to change? That killing people and the other stuff is just a little wuirk that you can iron out? I know women who have been trying to get their men to wash their beard trimmings out of the bathroom sink for years with no luck, I don't know where you think you're gonna get with "stop being a psycho."

The true crime genre has rightly received its fair share of criticism for turning gruesome crimes into entertainment at the expense of the well-being of survivors. And perhaps there needs to be real action taken to address that. However, this delusional wave of people announcing that they are not disturbed by Dahmer's crimes feels like a whole new level of desensitization, They even say that the things we see him doing in the series really aren't that bad. [mockingly] Dahmer is just a little boy with doe eyes, misunderstood by everyone but them. They're not like other girls, they can handle a 14-year-old boy getting dismembered.

Is this a problem with media itself? Has the American pop culture fiction cycle pushed the role of the main character to be something warranting empathy and understanding without exception? Among the tropes, structures, and sensibilities of American fictions, is it just automatically taken for granted that the main character is an empathizable figure whose role, through any despicable actions, is ultimately redemption?

One of the parts of this odd phenomenon that I've noticed is that while girls of a certain age are acting like Jeffrey Dahmer was Harry Styles, not everyone is lining up with them. And by everyone, I mean the gays... You know, his victims.

We gays are notorious for thirsting over guys we really shouldn't, and also for being obsessed with true crime. But this seems to be one of the few exceptions, and for good reason. Gay men have been living under the shadow of Jeffrey Dahmer for as long as I've been alive. As the AIDS crisis was running rampant, and the community was only just starting to receive any large scale sympathy from the hetero majority, up pops the news of this gay male serial killer, who isn't just killing his victims, but zombifying them, eating them, and melting their bodies in vats of acid. He was a harsh example of what straight people always said we were, that we were deviants and monsters, never to be trusted. And he was the perfect poster child for this, a nearly unparalleled monster.

Nobody talked about the fact that the reason he got away with his crimes for so long was because he was targeting gay men, especially men of color, two groups the police notoriously couldn't give two shits about helping. People only talked about the cannibal queer and how certainly he wouldn't be the last to rise up to this prominence. The most disturbing aspect is how he was able to carry on his career for as long as he did. By picking gay men of color, he was able to escape the scrutiny of law enforcement. Dahmer for this reason is an uncomfortable reminder, not only of violence against the community, but that members of the community can be a horrible detriment to our reputation. And a reminder that not very long ago, we weren't worth the law's time, that we were nobodies to everybody, and it didn't matter how loud we screamed, the world had us on mute.

And in many sections of the United States, this fear of gay men never went away. Even today these people are influenced by Dahmer when they fight against gay rights. They associate his heinous crimes with others in the queer community, because if one of us could be a monster, that means we all could be. After the discovery of Dahmer's crimes, there was a rash of hate crimes against gay men across the United States, with vigilante mobs out to make sure that the next Jeffrey Dahmer, the next monster queer, wouldn't get a chance to find his victims.

And so the queer community, especially gay men, have lived with Dahmer's spectre for three decades. So you'd be hard-pressed to find a lot of gay men thirsting over the killer online. Evan Peters, yes, we've been drooling over him since he first showed up in American Horror Story, but not the actual Jeffrey Dahmer, and not Evan Peters' portrayal of Jeffrey Dahmer.

In fact, there was a huge pushback when the series was released because it was tagged as LGBTQ on Netflix, presumably because of Dahmer's own sexuality and the sexualities of his victims. But while the queer community fights back against a renewed push to remove our rights, do we want people seeing LGBTQ tagged to Jeffrey [silenced] Fucking Dahmer when they're browsing Netflix? No.

And so the community, in a rare moment of agreement, demanded Netflix remove the tag. And they did, which considering Netflix's pig-headedness when it comes to defending transphobic comedians on their platform, kind of shocked me. They're not exactly well known for doing what the queer community asks of them these days. They probably had the wherewithal to realize that Dahmer's existence as a serial killer was due in large part to homophobia and racism, so they didn't want to stick their hand into that particular hornet's nest.

This is a telling that at least doesn't completely ignore Dahmer's effect on the gay black community. They've had to dodge a lot of queer-related controversies this year; this is among one of the easier ones to resolve.

Typical accounts of his murder spree usually overlook the fact that queer communities of color were easy targets for Dahmer due to long-standing patterns of police violence and especially indifference in major cities across the Midwest.

Similar to what happened in many cities after World War II, Milwaukee, where Dahmer committed the majority of his murders, saw an increase in the visibility of its gay communities. Nearly 1,000 gay men called Milwaukee home, according to a study conducted by the city's influential crime prevention body, the Metropolitan Commission on Crime Prevention, during the war. As word spread about them, more arrests and convictions were made in the city.

During this time the city's Black population also grew as a result of the Second Great Migration, an exodus of African Americans from the South, spurred by The increased demand for manufacturing goods during the Second World War.

Milwaukee cops happily targeted these new growing communities as well, in spite of the fact that they were directly contributing... to the war effort...?

The media also played a role in the criminalization of City residents who were seen as leading immoral lifestyles. The Milwaukee Journal's editorials from the 1940s frequently used terms like "slaves of lust" and "menace of sex perverts" to describe the emerging gay community. It also supported the Metropolitan Commission on Crime Prevention's 1946 "Sexual Psychopath Law," which would have institutionalized "overt homosexuals" until their deviant behavior was "cured or otherwise." Otherwise meaning dead.

To diffuse the threat of a growing minority presence, these sexual psychopath laws were introduced and passed in places like Milwaukee as the gay community grew in prominence, and as more African Americans relocated there. Black people were not safe from these sexual psychopath laws, because as far as police were concerned, interracial relationships were just as bad as gay ones.

Because of the city's changing demographics, Milwaukee's police department created new units to better defend White, straight residents from Black and other minority groups.

In the 1960s, the Fifth Police District in the city's predominantly Black Northside had four and a half times as many officers as the adjacent majority-White district.

This kind of terror against Black Milwaukee residents created a culture of fear and distrust between the police and Black and queer people, who often hesitated to report crimes committed against them - which helps explain how someone like Dahmer could go relatively unnoticed or unpunished for so long. Plus a municipal statute from 1911 called "The Freeloader Clause" barred people who did not own property from filing complaints against the police with the Fire and Police Commission, so many Black renters assumed their cries for help would fall on deaf ears.

These long histories of anti-Black and anti-queer violence created in an environment where Dahmer could murder 17 Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latino, and gay men and boys with little pushback. Many were particularly susceptible to Dahmer and his tactics because of decades of the city's structured racism and homophobia.

Today we know that there were many instances in which the police could have intervened but did not. In one instance, officers John A. Balcerzak and Joseph Gabrish had the opportunity to rescue a disoriented, unclothed and bleeding 14-year-old boy from Dahmer. However, they took the killer at his word that the child was actually 19 and just drunk. No probing, no investigation. Although Balcerzak and Gabrish were eventually fired for their actions, they were reinstated with back pay in 1994. Balcerzak had a long career in the police department, serving as president of the Milwaukee Police Association from 2005 to 2009, before retiring in 2017. 2017. Five years ago. And people question why Pride organizations don't want police officers to participate in uniform.

Over the years and the many retellings of the Dahmer story, his victims have been described as "street urchins," "drug addicts," and "people not unfamiliar with their own brushes with the law." As if that should justify the heinous things done to them. Creating a sense that they were far from innocent victims allows most people to look at the crime spree as the actions of one queer psychopath.

If he only targets people who have it comin', then there's no cause for concern if you live by the straight and narrow. Regardless of how this betrays malice and laziness on the police force, culminating in decades of police abuse and neglect. How many other people disappear because the police don't think they're worth their time? How many that we never, ever hear about? It was almost a trope in the gay villages of big cities. Young gay men and trans people just going missing, and no one investigating it. Many hoped they'd just packed up and moved home, but most knew it was never something quite so innocent. Talk to the elders in your local queer community. They remember.

But even with all of this knowledge of neglect, heartbreak, disappearances, lost and destroyed lives, all of it freely available to anyone who can type Google into an internet browser, the thirst for Dahmer is real.

Despite his cannibalism, despite the decades long erasure of his victims, these women (and mostly teenage girls) are swooning over him. And why not? To our knowledge, Dahmer never killed any teenage girls or any women at all, so there's a level of disconnection, just like with Killing Stalking. Would the teenage fans of Killing Stalking be so in love with Oh Sangwoo if they were watching him spend each issue horrifically torturing and murdering a woman? He kills women in the series, multiple in fact, but they're barely side characters. Yoon Bum is the main event. And in my opinion, because Yoon Bum is a man, female readers are able to take in a horror story without facing the true horror of it.

Because unfortunately to this day, many women still see gay men as nothing more than a fancy accessory, especially teenage girls who lust for the perfect gay best friend. A boy whose sex life is secret, so you never have to hear about it. But he's always there to tell you if your boyfriend's being a jerk. Gay men and boys as a purse or a fancy iPhone case. Something to show off, but ultimately, something disposable.

And we get an extra layer of that with Dahmer's victims, since the vast majority of them were not white, but the vast majority of Dahmer's thirsters online are white, there's further license for disconnection. They get to look at them even less like people than if they were white gay men. It's telling that the person fans ship Dahmer with the most is Stephen Hicks, his first and whitest victim.

And while I am far from opposed to queer villains in media, I do wonder how smart it is to drop this story onto such a large platform when the gay community is already seeing an increase in hate crimes and anti-gay laws across the United States.

The media's initial reporting on the Dahmer case was entangled in a subtle but pervasive homophobic logic, even as it denied having any such effect. Lesbian and gay activists in Milwaukee and elsewhere protested strongly against initial references to the Dahmer murders as "homosexual overkill" by public officials and the mainstream press, arguing that Dahmer's actions were no more representative of the homosexual community than the killings of a heterosexual serial killer would be representative of the heterosexual community. Thus, the term "homosexual overkill" served to normalize heterosexuality, even heterosexual serial killers, while pathologizing homosexuality. The media surprisingly responded quickly to the protests, and the phrase "homosexual overkill" was quickly removed from coverage of the case. In fact, it appears that the media became so concerned that their reports not appear homophobic, that they largely dropped any mention of Dahmer's sexual orientation. Even at Dahmer's trial, his sexual orientation barely registered as an issue.

Those who advocated for gay assimilation praised this development. According to this line of thinking, bringing up Dahmer's sexuality in media coverage of the murders was inappropriate because it had nothing to do with why he became a serial killer. But if Dahmer's sexual orientation could not be mentioned, neither could institutional homophobia. Which was a problem. Given the overwhelming evidence that Dahmer had internalized societal homophobia to such an extent that he felt guilt, shame, discomfort, and hatred about his own homosexuality, a logical though extreme result of these feelings could have been the urge to kill those to whom he was sexually attracted. In a twisted way, I could perhaps understand how someone would think that having male zombies for sex and sex only would separate him from all the other trappings of the gay lifestyle. However, with his sexuality out of the question, society would have to take no blame for the killings.

The few reporters who did discuss homophobia and Dahmer's gayness (mostly in LGBT magazines) tended to ignore the fact that Dahmer was white. The reluctance to discuss interracial sex in light of the Dahmer murders can be interpreted as a sign of shame, and fear of having one's sexual orientation linked to racism, or both.

According to several of Dahmer's acquaintances, he displayed a deep-seated bigotry toward African Americans and made racist comments about black gay men in particular.

While authorities and the media learned to avoid making overt references to Dahmer's sexual orientation in their official portrayals of him, Dahmer himself made use of what we might call gay rights strategies as his career as a serial killer gained momentum. These actions, along with the media's delayed coverage of Dahmer's sexual orientation, highlights the inadequacies and potential social hazards of the neoliberal gay rights rhetoric.

He used his gayness to his advantage. When convicted of sexual assault in the enticing of a child for immoral purposes in 1989, he came out to the judge afterwards.

The judge sentenced him to five years' probation and one year in the House of Corrections, with work release permitted in order so that he wouldn't lose his job. At this point, he had already killed five people. He would kill twelve more before finally being caught and convicted.

In 1978 he had killed Steven Mark Hicks, an 18 year old. By Dahmer's admission, he was bludgeoned with a dumbbell and strangled to death before being dismembered. Remains were pulverized and scattered behind Dahmer's childhood home.

In 1987, he killed Steven Walter Tuomi. His body was dismembered in the basement of Dahmer's grandmother's house and the remains discarded in the trash.

In 1988, he killed two men^men?, James Edward Doxtator, a 14 year old, and Richard Guerrero. In 1989, he killed Anthony Lee Sears. After the murder, Dahmer preserved his skull and genitals in a filing cabinet.

In 1990, he killed Raymond Lamont Smith, Edward Warren Smith, Ernest Marquez Miller, and David Courtney Thomas on September 24th. In 1991, he killed Curtis Straughter [abrupt cut - on screen it says he died February 17, but he actually died February 18.], Errol Lindsey on April 7th, Tony Hughes on May 24th, Konerak Sinthasomphone on May 27th, Matt Turner on June 30th, Jeremiah Weinberger on July 5th, Oliver Lacy on July 15th, Joseph Bradehoft on July 19th, and then was finally arrested on July 23rd.

Does this sound like the man anyone, let alone teenage girls, should be lusting over? Having a thing for serial killers isn't new, and it hasn't risen up just because of shows on Netflix. There are several online communities, such as blogs and message boards, where fans of serial killers like Bundy and Dahmer and Richard Ramirez and others express their adoration for these individuals, as if they may be a pop star. However, as evidenced by the statements made by the families of Dahmer's victims, and the show's proclivity for trying to understand the killer rather than to tell the stories of his victims simply because the killer was a moderately attractive white man, maybe adaptations of these stories can arguably create more harm than good.

This is much worse than the situation with Killing Stalking because although the thirst was and is real for Oh Sangwoo, he, like Hannibal Lecter before him, was a fictional character who never actually hurt anyone. The creation of an artist is a commentary on our willingness to forgive nearly anything if someone is attractive. But Dahmer was real, and his victims were real, and the pain their families suffered still is very much real.

So maybe the next time a producer greenlights a movie or streaming series about a notorious serial killer, perhaps they should refrain from playing armchair psychologist, pretending that their movies or series can give some new insight into the killer that hasn't already been gleaned by criminal psychiatrists long before now. And instead, focus on the people whose lives they took. They are the people we really ought to remember.