'Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story didn't need to be as gay as it is'

The only thing Ryan Murphy loves more than casting twinks is baiting controversy. For his latest Netflix venture, TV's most prolific creator has hit a double whammy by including both in the second chapter of his Monster anthology series.

Starring Nicholas Alexander Chavez and (the twinkalicious) Cooper Koch, Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story revolves around the night Lyle and Erik brutally murdered their parents in August 1989. That alone was horrific in just about every way possible, but what the show does in fictionalising this real life crime is equally horrific in a very different way.

Read more: Why is Monsters on Netflix so controversial?

Once the brothers were arrested, aged just 21 and 18 at the time, they claimed in their defence that their father, José Menendez, sexually abused them repeatedly throughout their lives. Lyle and Erik were convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder after a judge dismissed their claims because of a lack of evidence, and they were jailed for life without the possibility of parole in 1996.

Murphy's adaptation rings true in this regard, but where Monsters runs into a big problem is in how it suggests the brothers were gay for each other, despite there being little to no evidence of that being true in real life.

While we usually welcome The Gay Agenda™, it's a bit different when the subject matter is this sensitive, and about real people, no less. Because both Lyle and Erik have asserted multiple times that they are in fact straight, dating (and even marrying) women before and during their respective prison stints.

Read more: What happened to Lyle and Erik Menendez?

During a tell-all interview with Barbara Walters, the real Erik responded to these rumours regarding his sexuality and how they related to the case: "No [I am not gay]. The prosecutor brought that up because I was sexually molested and he felt in his own thinking that if I was sodomised by my father that I must have enjoyed it and therefore I must be gay.

"And people that are gay out there must be sexually molested or they wouldn’t be. It was upsetting to hear, but I am not gay. But a lot of gay people write and feel connected to me."

Unwelcome connections between queerness and molestation, this outdated assumption that abuse and homosexuality are connected, isn't just a 90s relic if Monsters is anything to go by.

Even before The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story was released, a homoerotic poster for the show put the two brothers together in a pose more fruity than a bag of skittles. But Murphy, who's single-handedly employed at least 90% of LA's twink population, didn't stop there.

Alongside longtime collaborator Ian Brennan, he and other key writing partners included multiple scenes where it's suggested the Menendez brothers were actually horny for each other, despite the whole brothers thing.

The second episode includes a scene where Lyle, in his excitement, kisses Erik on the lips, and a short time later, Lyle gets between Erik and a woman who were dancing at a party, much to the intrigue (and disgust) of coked up onlookers nearby. As their bodies draw closer, Erik wipes powder from his brother's nose and then puts his thumb into his mouth.

That first kiss scene has since gone viral with many viewers expressing their disgust very loud and vocally online. Suggesting two real-life brothers are incestuous lovers without any evidence to support that isn't great at the best of times, but when you consider that the pair were also victims of sexual abuse, conflating the two in a dramatisation of real events is pretty grotesque whichever way you look at it.

Read more: The true story behind Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story

Murphy has since responded to this criticism in an interview with Entertainment Tonight, explaining that he had an "obligation" to portray two brothers matching each other's freak like this: “What the show is doing is presenting the points of view and theories from so many people who were involved in the case.

"Dominick Dunne wrote several articles talking about that theory. We are presenting his point of view just as we present Leslie Abramson's point of view. We had an obligation to show all of that, and we did."

While Monsters does present the incest as one journalist's theory, scenes where the Menendez brothers touch each inappropriately are peppered throughout the season in ways that blur fiction and the reality this story is trying to adapt.

If the brothers were clearly incestuous in real life — and if they were definitely gay for that matter too — then there wouldn't be so much of an issue here. After all, LGBTQ+ representation shouldn't always shy away from portraying morally dubious people who identify as queer. But why risk perpetuating this outdated, painfully ignorant perception of gay men as predatory when there's no evidence these killers were even gay in the first place?

The ways in which Monsters titillates using queerness, from that poster to the moment when Kitty walks in on her two sons showering together, just doesn't feel right given the subject matter. And what's worse is that these moments actually detract from the abuse that really did happen, something which is handled far more sensitively in other aspects of the show, such as that masterful long take in episode five.

Erik himself, the real Erik Menendez, has since released a statement from prison (via his wife, Tammi) that decries Murphy's decision to "undermine decades of progress in shedding light on childhood trauma".

He wrote: "It is sad for me to know that Netflix's dishonest portrayal of the tragedies surround our crime have taken the painful truths several steps backward – back through time to an era when the prosecution built a narrative on a belief system that males were not sexually abused, and that males experienced rape trauma differently than women."

Just as the families of Dahmer's victims rallied against Murphy following the first season of Monster, the people involved in the real Lyle and Erik Menendez story are outraged too. And rightly so. Because it's not just the titular monsters who suffer when shows like this cruelly warp the truth.

Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story is out now on Netflix.

This article originally appeared on Yahoo TV UK at https://uk.news.yahoo.com/monsters-lyle-erik-menendez-story-didnt-need-gay-130026451.html