The Gay-Free Provincetown of "American Horror Story: Double Feature"

 There was no new episode of American Horror Story: Double Feature last night because producers think everyone spends holiday weekends rushing madly from barbecues to picnics to beach blanket bonfires and not watching tv.   But the three episodes to date have been enough.  I could not be more disappointed.

American Horror Story is an anthology series; each season involves roughly the same cast playing different characters as they explore American horror icons:  a haunted house, a carnival "freak show," haunted New Orleans, a post-Apocalyptic nuclear winter.  There is usually good gay representation.  Not here.

Finn Wittrock, who has played gay characters in past seasons, here plays the annoyingly retro heterosexual Family Man Harry Gardner, a writer-with-writer's-block torn directly from Stephen King's The Shining, who descends upon the rustic Cape Cod town of Provincetown to work on a tv pilot.  He brings along his wedding ring, his wife Doris, who has an interior decorating job  and is about 300 months pregnant (that's all you need to know about her), and his piano prodigy daughter Alma, about the nastiest, most entitled, least personable child since The Bad Seed, even before she goes over to the Dark Side.

Provincetown is a gay resort, but you'd never know it, except for a throwaway comment about Bear Week, and some hustlers who hang out at the deserted docks asking passersby if they are tops or bottoms (because gay guys are all into street cruising, right?).

It's the off season, so everything is closed except for one restaurant and one grocery store.  At each, a crazed meth head named Tuberculosis Karen stalks Harry and yells at him to "Get out."  The town is overrun by snarling Nosferatu-style vampires, which everyone explains as meth addicts, although they look and act nothing like meth addicts.

No gay people exist in this world, except for the hustlers, who go both ways.     Mickey (Macaulay Culkin) is cast as a "gay hustler," and he does offer his services to Family Man Harry, but he spends the series hooking up with and hanging out with women:  romance writer Belle Noir, Tuberculosis Karen, Harry's money-obsessed agent. 

Famous writer Austin Sommers (Evan Peters), who comes to Provincetown every winter for inspiration to write another best-seller, says things like "Do you want me to shove it in without lube?", but he's not actually gay.  Every night he goes to the restaurant to sing love songs with Belle Noir (Frances Conroy).

The plot:  The famous writers give Harry a pill that will spark the creative juices, so anyone with talent will churn out masterpieces and become rich and famous;  the talentless turn into Nosferatus.

Ok, this is ridiculous.  First, how does a pill know?  Talent is on a continuum.  And subjective.

Second, churning out a masterpiece does not guarantee recognition.  Many great writers are ignored.  Melville died in obscurity, Moby-Dick forgotten as hack work until literary scholars discovered it fifty years later.   

Back to the plot, such as it is: even for the talented, the pill has the unfortunate side effect of making you crave human blood.  Soon Harry is going out with the writers on murder-and-blood-drinking runs; usually they feed on meth heads who are advertising stolen merchandise on craigslist, but sometimes they grab under-the-docks hustlers, and Belle Noir likes stolen babies.

 Another complication: Harry's bitch daughter takes a pill to help her become the greatest violinist in the world, so now she's craving blood, too.  

Setting this gay-free tale in a gay resort can't be just a coincidence; there must be metaphor here?  Heterosexuals should stay out of gay spaces, or they'll catch a disease?  AIDS?

Drag queen Chad Michaels, who specializes in Cher impersonations, is listed as a recurring character.  Maybe things will get better.