“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.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |