At another point, a detective turns the questions back to ask: “Why is the emphasis on the gay part?” “The gay thing wasn’t really relevant to the investigation, apart from who might have killed him and where he hung out,” one says, straight-faced. There’s an uneasy defensiveness to the tone, clueing us in on attitudes at the time, still depressingly unchanged.
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You’re also angry, you’re angry that this perpetrator was able to do this for almost 40 years.”Īlongside interviews with the families and friends of the victims, the series also speaks to the detectives involved with the case, located in different states and counties due to where the victims were found. “There were really high highs and really low lows during the process of making this because you’re processing it all and you’re processing it through your own queer lens. “It definitely took a toll,” says Caronna, who has previously worked on 2021’s Pride docuseries and 2017’s portrait of nightlife maven Susanna Bartsch. The pair had “trauma training” before production and while there’s restraint used in confronting the gnarlier specifics at times when others would have used overkill, it remains a difficult series to watch and was an even more difficult series to make. “Righteous anger was a part of it,” says Gertler, of making the project as a gay man. It’s frequently infuriating, as a trail of apathy and incompetence takes us back to an unhinged killer who could have been stopped decades earlier and forward to a future that shows that, for some, few lessons have been learned. The makers worked with the queer historian Nikita Shepard from Columbia University to construct a clear timeline matching murders with local history, ensuring authenticity. We hear from the activists desperately ringing the alarm to the same cops they were being targeted by. We hear from a man, drugged and cornered, who somehow managed to get out alive. We hear from a daughter whose closeted father was outed only in death, who “went to New York on a business trip and never came home”.
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“I wasn’t really interested in doing true crime and I was also really worried about re-victimising the community.”īut after meeting with the producer Howard Gertler, whose credits include 2012’s sprawling and sensitive HIV/Aids doc How to Survive a Plague, he realised that by lasering in less on the gory details and more on the bigger picture, the macro over the micro, there was a way to make something uniquely important.īased on the book by Elon Green, the HBO series is a richly detailed, often devastating, watch. “I passed on the project because I don’t do true crime,” says the director Anthony Caronna over Zoom. In the space of four, tightly contained episodes, Last Call retraces his steps and contextualises his killings, expanding focus from one man to thousands of them to explain how he got away with it for so long and why his story is emblematic of a time, a place and a bigotry. He would stalk, seduce and savagely murder, leaving body parts scattered out of state, terrifying the community and baffling the authorities.
The Last Call killer, as the media came to call him, mostly found his victims in the one place his victims used as safe refuge: gay bars.
It’s a grim picture by itself but that era also saw another threat enter the frame, quietly and gruesomely picking off gay men already living on a knife’s edge. As an exhausted and emotional gay man says in archival footage: “Do you know what it is to be assaulted for being alive?”
Or it could be from the cops, gleefully over-policing a community that the NYPD had long treated as sub-human. It could be on the street, a slur casually turning into an assault (in the first nine months of 1991, there were 600 anti-LGBTQ+ attacks in the West Village and Chelsea alone). It could be via a deadly disease, one that had been around for a decade yet was still woefully under-researched and any infrastructure surrounding it maliciously under-funded (between 19, there were over 116,000 Aids deaths in the city). In early 90s New York City, that violence could find you in many forms.
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