Ryan Murphy knows one thing for certain: 1981 was the year that made him.
He was 16, growing up in a Catholic family but getting his first taste of freedom. That included television. It was only a few years earlier that his mother had even let him watch it for the first time, an experience marked by the memory of his visceral reaction to the infamous episode of “All in the Family” when Edith (Jean Stapleton) is attacked on her 50th birthday. “I was wailing and crying,” Murphy says.
But by 1981, things had changed for him.
“[It] is probably the most seminal, important year of my entire life,” Murphy tells Variety ahead of receiving the Norman Lear Award at Variety’s Showrunners Breakfast Aug. 14. “I turned 16. I drove a car for the first time. I had my first date. I had my first sexual experience in February of 1981. I came out of the closet in February of 1981, not that I was ever in. And then [a few] months later, the New York Times ran an article about a new disease called AIDS. I, like so many people, had a very truncated adolescence, where I instantly linked all forms of intimacy with death and dying.”
Murphy has long been asked to write about his life, particularly those early years that he is still trying to unpack himself. “I don’t want to write about my life in that way though,” he says.
