“John Wayne Gacy Jr.” by Sufjan Stevens is a gentle, eerie elegy for the famed serial killer and his victims. Stevens tells the disturbing story of Gacy’s tragic youth and predatory adulthood, exploring themes of innocence, violence, and humanity through haunting vocals and winding melodies.
It is Stevens’s unwillingness to compromise that makes this song so devastating. He forces the listener to recognize Gacy’s personhood along with the indescribable pain he caused the boys he murdered and their families. This sensitivity and awareness demands that we each interrogate our own capacity for violence.
Stevens’s tender account of the abuse and assertion that he and Gacy are the same lead listeners to believe that aspects of Gacy’s story represent Stevens’s own guilt regarding his sexuality. Stevens is a devout Christian and although he has never publicly spoken about his sexuality, themes of desire and shame are present in his work (take “The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades is Out to Get Us!” for example).
Stevens manages to humanize Gacy without minimizing his horrific crimes; however, the song makes it clear that honoring the victims takes priority. In one of the song’s most devastating moments, Stevens mourns the twenty-seven people found buried underneath Gacy’s house singing, “Even more, they were boys, with their cars, summer jobs/ Oh my God”.
“John Wayne Gacy Jr.” is a haunting, thought provoking ballad whose beauty is intrinsically tied to the tragedy at its center.