DATELINE–Miami Beach, Fla.

In the wake of relentless, coast-to-coast Cunanan coverage, an unseasonable chill has descended upon Miami’s exclusive and happy-go-lucky gay enclave: South Beach.

This cosmopolitan metropolis once known as the “northernmost capital of Latin America,” has recently seen its sun ‘n’ fun image eclipsed by the harsh and unforgiving lights of a national media hellbent on discovering this year’s O.J. Simpson.

For better or worse, South Beach Miami has been officially “outed” as the unequivocally homosexual hideaway of one equivocally identified Andrew P. Cunanan.

It was in South Beach, after all, that the infamous “spree” killer supposedly met his living end. But contrary to popular belief – and relief, – the real Andrew Cunanan is not yet dead.

Indeed, under expert scrutiny the only available evidence indicates that Andrew Cunanan may never have existed in the first place.

On Thursday, July 24, 1997, the alleged body of the suspected killer (Cunanan) was discovered, literally faceless, on a houseboat in Miami.

It was then and there that local and federal enforcement agents appeared to have finally caught their “chameleon” killer. But, yet again, they were denied a good look at Cunanan’s true colors: the body of the homocidal enigma was now without a proper face.

But even with a face, Cunanan was widely held as a chameleon. Why?

Was it because he was an exotic and invisible Asian man? Or was it simply because Cunanan was an even more absurdly incongruous figure: a man who unabashedly loved other men?

Asian or gay? Both or neither? Was he really ever dressed up like a woman? Was he really a real man?

As the FBI slaps “FOUND DEAD” banners on its “10 Most Wanted” posters across the country, onlookers and intimates alike can only wonder: “Was there ever an Andrew Cunanan?”

As Cunanan’s picaresque wends its way to a violent, inevitable end, his fable turns out to be not so much a puzzle but a crudely constructed collage.

How else could Cunanan have made his way across the country from San Diego to Miami undetected? The only logical explanation: he was not one man but many men – indeed, many persons all at once.

Televised snapshots were said to depict him alternatively as both stout and slender, grizzly and hairless, masculine and feminine, Caucasian and Asian.

Racist and homophobic slips on behalf of the media or simply factual statements?

And what of the singular motives of this multifaceted – yet mute – public figure?

After being labeled a “shapeshifter,” members of the gay community publicly postulated that Cunanan had embarked upon his killing spree after being notified that he was HIV positive. According to this contagious logic, Cunanan came to embody the carnage ushered in by the AIDS epidemic – a spectacle of repetitive ceremonial death no single gay man had been able to accomplish before him.

Even the dramatically ineffectual Miami Police Department attempted to pin their very own homophobia on Cunanan, arguing, in so many words, that “If this fag had outrun our Law it was only because he was disguised as a woman.”

Cunanan: a model minority gone awry or a changeling of preternatural origins?

Cunanan: superhuman criminal genius or your average, intelligent gay man and a cold-blooded killer, to boot?

In this mass-mediated game of double jeopardy, the press and the police have thus far disguised their helpless queries as frightening and bizarre answers.

Any true explanations of the Gay O.J. that never was will come only in the form of blunt questions.

Andrew Philip Cunanan, we hardly knew ye.