Jeffrey Dahmer

Bad Gays

Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller

History

4.6 • 842 Ratings

🗓️ 15 March 2022

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

For white, suburban, heterosexual middle America, Jeffrey Dahmer, like AIDS, was the natural, even the righteous, consequence of homosexual promiscuity. He remains one of the exemplary constructions of the supervillain serial killer, the perfect subject of a true crime story. Today’s episode is about Jeffrey Dahmer as man and metaphor: about the phenomenon of the serial killer-monster, about the ways in which homophobia, racism, and the various true crime myths Dahmer helped reify ironically impeded his arrest and enabled his crimes, and about the twisted, slap-happy identification with Dahmer pursued by some gay men. ----more---- SOURCES: ABC News. “Jeffrey Dahmer Hero Charged With Homicide.” ABC News. Accessed March 15, 2022. https://abcnews.go.com/US/jeffrey-dahmer-hero-tracy-edwards-charged-homicide/story?id=14853608. Barron, James. “Milwaukee Police Once Queried Suspect.” The New York Times, July 27, 1991, sec. U.S. https://www.nytimes.com/1991/07/27/us/milwaukee-police-once-queried-suspect.html. AP NEWS. “Dahmer Case Raises Complaints of Racism With PM-Dahmer Confession, Bjt.” Accessed March 15, 2022. https://apnews.com/article/6452017abebdb9eaa87e90817bf59b7e. AP NEWS. “Dahmer Tells Judge He Blames Nobody But Himself With PM-, AM-Dahmer Sentencing, Bjt.” Accessed March 15, 2022. https://apnews.com/article/49045923cf0d3c1a0ffc82eda398b935. AP NEWS. “Dahmer Tells Judge He Blames Nobody But Himself With PM-, AM-Dahmer Sentencing, Bjt.” Accessed March 15, 2022. https://apnews.com/article/49045923cf0d3c1a0ffc82eda398b935. Davis, Donald A. The Jeffrey Dahmer Story: An American Nightmare. St. Martin’s Paperbacks, 1991. Gage, Gabriella. “True Crime’s Deceits: The Genrefication of Tragedy.” Los Angeles Review of Books, June 21, 2021. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/true-crimes-deceits-the-genrefication-of-tragedy/. Masters, Brian. The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1993. O’Brien, Brendan. “Homeless Man Who Escaped Cannibal Serial-Killer Jeffrey Dahmer Gets Prison Sentence.” National Post, January 24, 2012. https://nationalpost.com/news/homeless-man-who-escaped-canibal-serial-killer-jeffrey-dahmer-gets-prison-sentence. Sarah McGonagall. “Did You Know? In 1991 Officer John Balcerzak Was Fired after Handing 14 Year-Old Konerak Sinthasomphone Back to the Man He Had Just Escaped from despite Two Bystanders Begging the Officer Not to. Later That Night, Konerak Was Tortured and Killed by That Same Man - Jeffrey Dahmer.” Tweet. @gothspiderbitch (blog), June 19, 2020. https://twitter.com/gothspiderbitch/status/1273785359869116421. Toofab. “The Racist Reason White Cops Handed a Dying 14-Year-Old Back to Jeffrey Dahmer.” Accessed March 15, 2022. https://toofab.com/2020/06/19/white-cops-handed-a-dying-14-year-old-back-to-jeffrey-dahmer/. Tithecott, Richard, and James R. Kincaid. Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien, downloaded from WFMU's Free Music Archive and distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner. ----more----

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Badgays. This is the last episode of our series. My name is Hugh Lemmy. I'm a writer and author.
0:21.6	And I'm Ben Miller, a writer, researcher and member of the board of the Shulis Museum in Berlin,
0:26.6	and just to reassure our US listeners for whom series means like the whole show and not the season,
0:31.6	this is not the last episode we're ever going to do, I hope, but it is the last episode of our season.
0:36.6	Sorry, the last episode of the season. Sorry, the last episode of
0:38.1	the season for our American season. So last week we were discussing John Wadowicz, the
0:43.9	bank robber whose life and story became the subject of the film A Dog Day Afternoon. Who
0:50.1	we talking about this week, Ben? Before I talk about who we're talking about this week,
0:55.9	I would like to issue a content warning that in a bit of black humor,
1:02.1	I labeled in my notes as content warning for everything.
1:06.2	But I think it's important that people know that we're going to be talking about a serial killer on this episode, that we're going to be talking about what he did, which involved particularly gruesome things. It involved sexual violence. It involves racialized sexual violence. If these are not things that you want to hear a whole podcast episode that
1:30.1	will basically be about nothing but that, I would really recommend turning the episode off now.
1:37.0	But to begin, if you grew up in the U.S. in the 1990s, as I did, then Jeffrey Dahmer loomed
1:43.4	large in your cultural imagination, the monsters as I did, then Jeffrey Dahmer loomed large in your cultural
1:44.4	imagination, the monster gay predator who kidnapped, lured, raped, murdered, and devoured young
1:49.6	men and boys. In the Stranger Danger workshops, they ran in our kindergarten in first grade.
1:54.4	Dahmer wasn't mentioned by name, but afterwards, at recess on the playground, the name was
1:59.3	tossed casually between groups of playing
2:02.2	boys like two teams throwing darts. I do actually want to stop and talk about these stranger
2:07.7	danger workshops for a minute. I grew up in a leafy liberal suburb of Boston, Massachusetts,
2:12.4	a place where strangers were truly not dangerous, at least if you were white and looked like
2:17.1	you belong.
	...

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