The Refreshing Queer Sensibility of <i>American Gods</i>

There is something unabashedly and unapologetically gay about Bryan Fuller’s work. The writer and television producer may not quite be a household name yet, but his shows have rabid fanbases that have responded to his off-kilter sensibility and his, dare one say it, uniquely queer sense of style.

You can detect it in Fuller’s 2004 series Wonderfalls, which cast Diana Scarwid—who played the young, abused Christina in the campy cult classic Mommie Dearest—as an overbearing mother. You can’t miss it when, in the comedy-drama series Pushing Daisies, he got the Broadway star Kristin Chenoweth to recreate an iconic scene from The Sound of Music for a quick gag. And he definitely made good use of it when, for the 2012 TV special Mockingbird Lane, he put the actor Cheyenne Jackson into a snug adult-sized Boy Scouts uniform. But perhaps most famously, Fuller’s trademark style enwrapped NBC’s horror-thriller drama Hannibal, where he turned a notorious cannibal and his FBI profiler into a homoerotic pairing that inspired a fan-fiction genre called Hannigram.

The openly gay writer and showrunner has returned to television withCentered on a coming war between the Old Gods that roam the U.S. and the New Gods that have come to take their place, this allegorical meditation on American culture is right in Fuller’s wheelhouse and well-tailored to his signature take on the fantasy-horror genre. But like his earlier work, this Starz series, which Fuller co-developed with Michael Green, is unequivocally the brainchild of a queer writer: Gaiman’s imaginative premise has made way for Fuller’s deliciously campy casting choices, playfully witty repartee, and emphasis on male beauty.