TC's confrontation here is about performance and narrative colliding, which is forcing her to recontextualise what she's involved in and who she's involved with artistically and professionally, and the shortcut she takes in applying Lestat as she knows him - a hypersexual frontman - has her reduce his truth to Louis' sexual gratification, which diminishes both Lestat and Louis' stories, and their reasons for speaking.

It's a sentiment revisited directly at the start of 3.03 by Daniel, and like TC, when offered a truth - more than the one TC got about what the song's about - Daniel deflects to sex. Lestat can speak, can put things out, but Daniel, here, would put things in. It's not words in his mouth, which he'd do sometimes to Louis, it's - for want of a better word, haha - dicks. It's all sexualised, all objectifying, something punctuated by the later blow-up doll line.

In interviewing here about both Nicki and Magnus, Daniel seeks to exploit traumas that never should've been shared with him in the first place, and in doing that, Lestat's truth isn't what Daniel's after, but his pain. He's looking for something he can sell in Lestat, a juxtaposition to his interview with Louis which while no less exploitative, was steeped still in a place of genuine journalistic interrogation and truthseeking, no doubt tied to their shared history.

For Daniel, Louis' story was about the story, Lestat's story is about the product, two different sides of his career aspirations - profile and profit.

The glory hole in the same episode twists that thread of truth not as something ignored, but something that needs to be silenced. With the book and Lestat's music being vehicles of vampiric truth, Lestat's violated image behind Louis' shoulder escalates the sense of silencing to a literal and violent 'gag order'. It eschews TC and Daniel's initial introduction of the thread at least as something consensual between two married men, and compounds the objectification of the blowup doll to dehumanising effect, punctuated by its place within the broader episode.

But then in 3.04, another pivot - an important pivot, in my opinion, because for the first time, Lestat ends up playing into it. It's at the party, documentary crew in tow, after Lestat recounts his time with Gabi in the Italian tavern, when Daniel asks if the religious man still clutched his Jesus figure while Lestat sucked him off.

Of course, Lestat's not the one who fucks him. No, that scene precursors the later reveal of Gabi's coercion of, and rape of Lestat, and here, Lestat takes Daniel's sexualisation of him, the ease with which he'd put something into his mouth rather than listen to what comes out of it, and uses it as cover for his own shame and violation. This time, the first of these four instances, truth isn't what Lestat wants to express, but rather something he wants to conceal, and he uses his own sexualisation to do it. If he blew the man that night, maybe his mother didn't take him instead.

I was already thinking about this, but that sneak peek today with muse!NIcki talking about Lestat going down on Armand as Lestat tried to sing Big Boss really made me think it's a thread that's going to have another evolution, and how it's tangled up in truth and silence and sex and violation will, I think, be really interesting to see.

(Apologies as always for my dodgy capping on unsubbed videos, haha).