The latest iteration of American Horror Story features a gang of clown costume-clad serial killers, but the real horror in AHS: Cult is its investigation of the deleterious effects of the 2016 presidential election on the American psyche. The series, from creator Ryan Murphy, inherently leans left, but no political ideology really makes it out alive, including those held by Sarah Paulson's white suburban lesbian mom, Ally, who voted for Jill Stein and her wife, Ivy (Alison Pill), a Clinton devotee so rage-filled over the election's outcome that she buys into a murderous cult of (primarily) Donald Trump supporters who seek to burn down the entire system.
Still, the show saves its greatest excoriation for sheep-like Trump devotees who eschew vetted news outlets and facts in favor of blindly following cult leader Kai (Evan Peters), a patriarchal figure who appears amped on equal parts steroids and Adderall. Besides Kai, no character on the series embodies the blind devotion of a Trump zealot more than Chaz Bono's MAGA-hat sporting Gary, a role that excited and challenged the actor due to his obvious political differences with the character but also, surprisingly, for what they had in common.
"He was closer to me than a lot of parts that I've played. [Gary] didn't have an accent or a strange voice or a different kind of body movement or anything like that, so at first, I felt very naked compared with my character in [AHS: Roanoke] or other things that I've done," Bono told The Advocate. "But ideologically, we couldn't have been more different, so that was a challenge, and for me, one of the challenges was at the beginning we had more in common [physically] than I'm used to having."
In terms of privilege, class, and experience, Bono, the son of celebrity parents Cher and Sonny Bono, is a true coastal elite by birth. He also worked for GLAAD in the '90s and came out as transgender in 2009, all of which renders him just about the exact polar opposite of Gary, a Michigan-based grocery store manager who takes inspiration from a candidate (Trump) who's endangered the lives of LGBT people, particularly trans people, by revoking rights and protections since taking office.
While Bono, 46, found Gary's physicality closest to his own of all the characters he's played, he struggled to find something to relate to in Gary's belief system, he said.
Likely best known among LGBT people as an activist and writer (Bono was a writer at large for The Advocate in the '90s), and although Cult and his appearance on AHS: Roanoke last season are his most recognizable roles, Bono is no stranger to the limelight, having often joined his parents onstage on The Sonny and Cher Show when he was a child. And fans of reality competition shows may recall that Bono enjoyed a successful stint on Dancing With the Stars in 2011.
But Bono has long honed his craft as an actor beginning with attending the High School of Performing Arts in New York City and later studying at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in Los Angeles. One golden rule of acting that Bono learned through the years is to refrain from passing judgment on the characters he plays, something that didn't come easily to him at first when in terms of playing Gary.
"I was trying to give him humanity. But, in the beginning, when you first meet Gary, he's this white working man feeling forgotten in this country and being excited by Trump, which is a hard person for me to relate to," Bono said.
Surprisingly, it was a conversation with Bono's mother, Cher, a firebrand on Twitter who often fires off searing anti-Trump tweets, who helped her son excavate Gary's humanity.
"It was probably a conversation that I had with my mom. I know people think of her as so 'lefty,' but we were talking one day about it and she was just like, 'I've traveled so much on tour. You've got to see these people. They're really hurting out there. They're desperate for something, and they believed him,'" Bono said. "And that actually really helped. That conversation really helped me open my heart to [Gary] and not judge him."
Beyond "not judging," Bono, who's played only cisgender characters since really delving into acting (although he told The Advocate he would be open to playing a trans role in the right project if he were able to solidly establish himself as an actor down the road) had to dig deep into the psychology of the character whose life is so unlike his own.
"This is a guy whose life is not as good as mine, and he works in a grocery store and feels like nobody gives a shit about him, and all of a sudden here comes this guy [Trump] that he's seen on TV, and he thinks he's smart, and he must be smart because he's a billionaire. He must know what he's talking about, and he's talking to me, and he's going to change my life," Bono said. "That was the place that I had to come from in the beginning."
If viewers on the left fail to connect with Gary's fervor for Trump, one particularly gruesome plot point that brings the character face-to-face with Kai for the first time is oddly relatable for voters passionate about their candidate, regardless of party. A flashback sequence reveals that Gary had harassed Ivy (Pill) and Kai's liberal Wellesley grad sister Winter (Billie Lourde) at a rally, so the women take revenge on Gary by chaining him to a post in basement on election night to keep him from pulling the lever for Trump in the swing state of Michigan. At the eleventh hour, Kai finds Gary and hands him a saw to cut off his own hand in order to vote for his candidate, which he does.
Although most voters wouldn't opt to saw off their own arm to get to the polls, the instinct to do everything it takes to vote for the person one believes will lead the country best and make their life better, cuts across party and candidates. And Bono can relate on some level.
"I remember going to vote that day, and I was so excited. I was really excited to go vote. I actually had one of my Hillary t-shirts on and they got upset with me at the polling place," Bono said. "I felt as passionately about Hillary as I think Gary felt about Trump so I can understand that part of it."
TV has weighed in on the age of Trump with shows like Hulu's uncannily prescient The Handmaid's Tale, based on Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel in which women are reduced to the viability of their reproductive organs. But Cult is the most direct rebuke of the chaos the Trump administration has wrought with its clarion calls to white nationalists, jingoism, anti-immigration sentiment, misogynistic, and anti-LGBT ideals and policies. Like the show, which excavates the psychology of Trump, Clinton, and Stein voters as well as nihilistic nonvoters, Bono attempts to balance his emotions around the state of politics.
"I was very angry and very depressed," Bono said of Trump's election. "And I remember being particularly angry at LGBT people that voted for him."
But Bono, with his long history of activism and knowledge of politics, especially around those rights and protections that LGBT people have worked toward for decades, knows that there's a long game in which he can't allow his anger to win.
"We need moderates on both sides to come together and make compromises and get our government working again," Bono said he often thinks. "And then I go back to thinking about the last eight years with Obama and Mitch McConnell stopping absolutely everything and I think, We shouldn't lift a finger to do anything for them. I know that's the angry side."
Thoughtful and ultimately measured in his approach to politics, Bono clarified one thing about his identification with Gary with the kind of humor only afforded a non-swing state voter: "I don't think I would cut my hand off for Hillary, especially because I live in California and I knew we were going to win this state."
