American Horror Story, Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s exhausting anthology series, has, almost since its inception, cleverly found a way to immunize itself against criticism. Sure, sure, you can complain about how nothing in its second season, Asylum, made any damn sense. Or you can bitch plenty about Freak Show, the fourth iteration, being a dull disappointment. But if you go much deeper than that, if you actually take issue with some of the things that American Horror Story says, well then, you’re being a humorless square, someone who just refuses to see Murphy’s (and Falchuk’s) campy, queeny gay sensibility for the arch, transgressive genius it is.

To which I say pffffft, as loud as I can. I may be a humorless square, a traitor to my camp-loving gay brothers and sisters, but so be it. As demonstrated in the first episode of the show’s fifth installment, Hotel, American Horror Story is garbage. Not trash. Trash can be fun. Garbage. Something we need to bag up and throw away, or flush and forget. Always a juvenile, antisocial show, A.H.S. reached what I hope is its nadir with the Hotel premiere, a confusingly paced, self-indulgent episode that managed to offend in myriad ways.

Let’s cut to the chase: when Max Greenfield, cutie patootie from New Girl and Veronica Mars, first swished onto the screen, bleached blond and practically voguing, I was naïvely excited. I was curious to see Greenfield’s attempt at playing what I assume was meant to be a gay man, because he’s funny and seems like a good guy. I trusted that, even if he were playing extremes, he wouldn’t be a jerk about it. Oh, how foolish I was. Because before I knew it, there was Greenfield, aping the bitchy swish, getting anally raped by some sort of zombie monster wearing a metal spike strap-on. This sequence went on and on and on, graphically, while a baby-doll goth Sarah Paulson cooed in Greenfield’s ear.

After that scene, I took to Twitter, as one does, to complain that the scene was basically treated as a joke, because isn’t gay rape so funny. Immediately someone responded that, um, the scene wasn’t meant to be funny, to which I say pfffffft again. If the scene, and the whole episode, wasn’t meant to be at least amusing, then why cast Greenfield, a comedic actor, to play a Brant brother–type only to quickly punish him with a horrific—and, again, incredibly graphic, given that it aired on basic cable!—rape? Everything on American Horror Story at this point is played at the very least for camp value; the days of Murder House seriousness, or Asylum pathos, were firmly gone by, say, the time Evan Peters’s Lobster Boy whored out his claw in Freak Show.

Which, on principle, is fine. Who doesn’t love the idea of a sordid, wicked, gay horror anthology series? That sounds great! I wish that existed! What we have instead is a show where Ryan Murphy can indulge his fantasies about hairless, pouting pretty boys, while punishing or otherwise marginalizing limp-wristers and cross-dressers, and where he and Falchuk can yuk it up together over a kitchen-sink style of Grand Guignolia that uses excess to mask its ineptitude. If there were anything resembling wit behind American Horror Story’s grotesquerie, I’d feel very different about that dreadful scene. But at this point it’s impossible to see any value in the show’s lurid shocks.