Archival footage lays out on one hand the virulent cruelty of Anita Bryant’s anti-gay speeches and the unabashed homophobia of law enforcement leaders sneering that sodomy is a crime, and the rage of AIDS protests and the pleasures of queer nightlife on the other. Last Call ensures viewers won’t suffer from the same cluelessness, however. Instead, the comment highlights how little the police understood (or cared to understand) about the communities they were meant to be investigating, or about the justified anger and distrust those populations might harbor against them. As far as the authorities are concerned, “The gay thing wasn’t really relevant to the investigation other than finding out who might kill him, and where he hung out.” Presumably, the cops mean to head off any suggestion that they would’ve taken Anderson’s case more seriously if he’d been straight. “Why is the emphasis on the gay part?” a Pennsylvania cop asks Caronna at one point. I don’t suppose it’s a spoiler to say the killer is eventually identified, or that the final episode follows the case through to the arrest, the trial and the verdict.īut I also suspect it’s no surprise that it takes the cops an infuriatingly long time to get there - nor that the deeply ingrained homophobia of law enforcement specifically and American society more broadly is what slows them down. Director Anthony Caronna (FX’s Pride) retraces the investigations step by step, through interviews with the officers who worked the cases back then, and who even now seem to recall them as uniquely horrifying. All the targets - Peter Anderson, Thomas Mulcahy, Anthony Marrero, Michael Sakara - were gay men picked up in Manhattan one evening only to turn up hours or days later as severed body parts in roadside trash cans outside the city. Straightforwardly, the four-part, four-hour docuseries centers on four killings that took place around the New York metro area between 19. Along the way, it transforms Last Call from a simple retelling into a powerful act of reclamation.Įxecutive producers: Anthony Caronna, Howard Gertler, Liz Garbus, Dan Cogan, Jon Bardin, Kate Barry, Elon Green, Charlize Theron, Beth Kono, AJ Dix, Matt Maher, Nancy Abraham, Lisa Heller, Tina Nguyen This line of inquiry yields righteous anger and unspeakable sorrow it also taps into love and courage and a determined sense of hope. It’s a rare true-crime docuseries whose attention is turned not toward death but toward life - that cares more about who the victims were, the people who cherished them, the communities that embraced them and the histories that claimed them, than about how they were snuffed out. The triumph of HBO‘s Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York is how deftly it flips that balance. They’re turned into sidenotes and details, objects to be acted upon rather than worthy subjects in their own right. But amid all that horrified leering, the lives destroyed can get erased a second time. Understandably so: The murders are of course shocking, the details sensational, the killer inherently bizarre and the race to find them urgent. It can be so easy, in a serial killer story, to lose sight of all but the nastiest details.
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