Out of Place and Out of Time: Andrew Cunanan, Darren Criss, and Queer Filipinx Haunting

Abstract:The television series The Assassination of Gianni Versace (2018) has been widely praised for telling the tragic stories of Italian fashion designer Gianni Versace, his murderer, Andrew Cunanan, and queer life in the 1980s and 1990s. As this paper explores, however, this tale of queer tragedy is haunted by the ghostly presence of Cunanan's primitive and abject queer Filipinxness. By reading the relationship between the on-screen Andrew Cunanan and Darren Criss, the celebrated actor who plays the spree killer in Assassination, this paper explores the ways in which a primitive and abject queer Filipinxness continues to shape how we come to know Filipinxness in the present moment. In an attempt to acknowledge and bring forth this queer Filipinx ghost, I use a queer of color critical reading practice to look at the relationship between Assassination, the mythology surrounding Cunanan, and the celebration of Criss. In doing so, I wish to disrupt the temporal paradigm that places Cunanan in the past and the celebration of Criss in the modern present in order to get at what continues to haunt Filipinx being: the residues of US empire.