The latest installment of Ryan Murphy’s Monster franchise might initially focus on the 1950s Wisconsin-based serial killer Ed Gein, but the Netflix series extends beyond Gein’s immediate atrocities and into the Hollywood horror stories he inspired. One of those films is the classic Alfred Hitchcock thriller Psycho, which borrows Gein’s obsession with his mother to fuel the main character Norman Bates, who was played by actor Anthony Perkins.

Fictionalized versions of Hitchcock and Perkins appear in Monster: The Ed Gein Story, and the series also contends with Perkins’s real life and how the role of Norman Bates affected both his career and his psyche. Ahead, we’ll unpack what the true-crime drama got right about Perkins and what liberties it took in its portrayal.

Anthony Perkins was likely queer in real life.

Perkins never officially came out of the closet, given the era’s conservatism, but was known to have homosexual lovers, including fellow actor Tab Hunter, who is depicted in the show’s second episode. Hunter and Perkins allegedly dated for four years before Perkins filmed Psycho. While Monster: The Ed Gein Story depicts an argument about whether or not Perkins should take the role as the demise of their relationship, it’s not clear whether that happened in real life. Hunter called Perkins a “special part of my journey” in his memoir Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star, which detailed his struggles with his sexuality during that time in Hollywood.

Monster: The Ed Gein Story shows Perkins with another homosexual lover as Psycho is released in theaters. In the series, his partner pleasures him in the theater, and after the movie is over, Perkins promptly breaks up with him by announcing that he’s going to marry a woman. While there is no record that Perkins was dating anyone during the filming of or immediately after the release of Psycho, it is believed that he dated dancer and choreographer Grover Dale through the 1960s.

Perkins later married a woman named Berry Berenson in 1973, with whom he had two kids—Longlegs director Oz Perkins and musician Elvis Perkins. In an interview with The Irish Times, Oz stated that his father’s sexuality was not something they discussed in their house. “The surprise about it was that it was no surprise. Right? The surprise was that we hadn’t been talked to about it,” he said in 2024. “I don’t know who would have that talk. Maybe, even today, I’m not sure how that conversation goes for people whose public lives don’t allow it. I don’t know how that conversation happens with children.”

Perkins did endure conversion therapy.

After filming a harrowing scene of Psycho, the Netflix series shows Perkins leaving the set for a therapy appointment. He meets with psychotherapist Mildred Newman and tells her that “the act of sodomy felt monstrous” and that he gets sick every time he sleeps with his boyfriend. Newman, a well-known proponent of conversion therapy, suggests he take care of this affliction with a lobotomy, electroshock, or conversion therapy.

Of course, we’ll never know the exact conversations that Perkins and Newman had, but it is reported that Perkins agreed to undergo conversion therapy. Soon after, he married Berenson.