Alex Forrest, as an allegory for AIDS

It's interesting to me how feminists, specifically single career women, were the ones who were outraged over Alex, when really the character seemed more like a fearful commentary on gay subculture in New York. Alex's queerness is defined in four phases:

1) Her rapacious sexual appetite and the ongoing mystery of her sexual history.

2) The framing of her inhabiting desolate, hellish spaces outside of 'healthy, homely' human civilization (her meatpacking district apartment etc). There's a shot of her spying on Dan and Beth's house in the countryside, where she sees the married couple sat next to a roaring fireplace with their child and bunny rabbit: a Republican approved commercial of the 'all American family'. Alex's face contorts and she recoils from this to vomit: denied a place in heaven, she is condemned to the wilderness.

3) Her drag queen chic (Medusa hair, claw-like red nails and flashy outfits).

and finally...

4) The idea of her being insidious and diseased - seemingly in the mind, but on closer examination, being presented like a disease unto others. The narrative dictates that Alex is damned as a bringer of pestilence and as such has no recourse but to destroy Dan and Beth's heavenly existence.

However unconsciously, I come to the conclusion that the movie resonated because Alex embodied the specter of AIDS upon an aspirational society.