Ryan Murphy and DAHMER

 Ryan Murphy, the successful and openly gay white writer, director and producer who has AMERICAN HORROR STORY, episodes of GLEE, the HOLLYWOOD mini-series, and FEUD with Susan Sarandon as Bette Davis and Jessica Lange as Joan Crawford during the making of WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? on his long list of credits, is now giving us MONSTER; THE JEFFREY DAHMER STORY as a limited series on Netflix. Dahmer was a gay serial killer who truly was a monster in Milwaukee. His reign of evil was able to continue for as long as it did because of racism and homophobia in the city -- especially when those two weapons of discrimination were aimed at people of color in under-served neighborhoods. I graduated from a university in Milwaukee and stayed in the city after graduation to start my professional broadcast career with the goal of getting to New York. I was in Milwaukee for 10 years total. I grew up in Los Angeles on a cul-de-sac block in South Central L.A. with neighbors who were Black, Mexican, Filipino and White. The Los Angeles I knew was racially and culturally diverse with warm weather all-year round. When I arrived in Milwaukee to start my college education, I was rattled by two things -- how racially polarized the city was and how cold snow was. I'd never been in snow.

About the racial polarization: After graduation, when I had landed my first professional broadcast job, I lived in an apartment near an entrance to the 27th Street viaduct. It went from the North Side to the South Side. In Milwaukee, folks called it "the bridge that connects Africa to Poland." My apartment building was five blocks away from where Jeffrey Dahmer had lived alone in an apartment.

He preyed upon gay men of color at gay bars in the city. Bars I knew. Bars where gay guys could go, hang out with friends, catch up with friends and dance. There was often a CHEERS-like atmosphere in the clubs. People knew your name and, often, you liked seeing regulars whose names you didn't know but it was always a hoot to see them. In my group of friends, such a person was a guy they called "The Martex Towel Boy" because often had his hair in a white Martez towel wrapped like a turban on his head. He didn't even need a dance partner. He was a gentle free spirit who'd hit the dance floor and spin happily on it by himself.

It was long known that, at that time, there was an antagonistic relationship between the Black community and the Milwaukee police force. Dahmer lived with a relative in a predominantly white suburb. I worked on-air at the city's ABC affiliate. One afternoon, I was shooting a station promo in that suburb. Our crew took a station van to the location, a van with the station logo painted in huge letters and numbers it/ For our commercial, I had to deliver dialogue while holding a portable TV. There I was, on a sidewalk, wearing a microphone, our producer was a few feet away, holding a clipboard and a stopwatch and right behind her was our cameraman with the camera pointed right at me.

A cop car pulled up and the cop, looking at me, said "Can I help you?" All three of us politely explained that we were taping a commercial for WISN TV/Channel 12. The officer apologized for ruining our take and drove on his way. I was the only Black person in our three-person crew.

Jeffrey Dahmer left that suburb, called West Allis, and moved to the North Side in a mostly-Black neighborhood. It would be easier for him to bring men of color back to his place frequently in a predominantly Black area than it would be in white suburban West Allis where neighbors would be watching suspiciously and calling the cops. And the cops would respond quickly.

For months, Black residents complained to authorities about the extreme foul orders and strange, loud nocturnal noises coming from Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment. Nothing was done. He was enabled by White Privilege when approached by police.

When he hit the gay bars, he did not have the dorky and twisted bookworm look he has in the Netflix promo. He was handsome and used that as his personal spider web. Cleaned up and pulled together to hit the clubs, Dahmer looked like a male model in a designer cologne commercial on national TV. That was his trap.

Here's a trailer for the upcoming Netflix series about the serial killer.

My career goal was to get a TV job offer from New York City -- which I did in 1985. One thing that also fueled my goal to leave Milwaukee was that I tired of being called "n****r" and "f****t." I had racist and homophobic things shouted at me in Milwaukee from drive-by cars and once even at a Bruce Springsteen concert. I worked on an FM rock radio station where one of the DJs said that I would be "swishing in" soon for my shift. I was the only Black person in the station's on-air team. There were racial slurs directed to me in anonymous snail mail and in voicemails left on my phone after work hours.

None of that happened to me in New York.

I'm interested to see how the racial element is handled and revealed in this upcoming Ryan Murphy creation. I hope he had a good number of Black people in his production crew.

One last thing -- the Martex Towel Boy was one of Dahmer's victims.