Last Call

Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York is a riveting true-crime narrative that tells the tale of the “Last Call Killer,” a serial killer who preyed on gay men in New York in the ‘80s and ‘90s.⁣ But Last Call doesn’t just recount the grisly murders and the hunt for the killer; Jewish author Elon Green gives you a multidimensional portrait of gay New York during the AIDS crisis, the city’s queer social scene and nightlife, and the failures of policing with regard to the gay community. Green, who I discovered when he wrote on “The Enduring, Pernicious Whiteness of True Crime,” is very mindful of the failures of the genre (whose stories get told, why do we fixate on white victims, and so on), and it’s clear the care he put into telling the story of the victims and not just the murderer.

“To strip a story like this of its historical and political context would be malpractice,” Green explained. “In answering the question, ‘Why doesn’t anybody know about this case?’ you have to talk about what was going on in the city and the country at that time. It was the height of the AIDS epidemic; queer New Yorkers were being assaulted to such a degree that it was basically legal to do it—there were basically no legal repercussions—and there was an indifference to their lives. Writing about this felt like not only something I wanted to do but something I had to do. One of the reasons I spent so much time on the nightlife is because it had never been written about in any real kind of way. The bars and clubs of that era, if they were written about at all, it was only through the prism of AIDS. Because, to some degree, the events in this book center around the piano bars, I wanted to make it clear to the readers (and to myself) why people enjoyed going there and what their role was in the life of the city. I wanted people to be able to see these men having a good time.”

 A worthwhile read and important addition to the true crime genre.