In the early 1990s, with homophobia and hate crimes on the rise as the HIV/AIDS crisis worsened in the United States, a serial killer preyed upon gay men in New York City, infiltrating queer nightlife to find his victims. A gripping, investigative crime story, Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York also dives deeply into the prejudices and attitudes of the times, when deep-rooted biases in the criminal justice system and the media’s distorted public perception of the victims undermined the investigation and enabled a brutal killer to prey on a marginalized populace. The complexities of the closet combined with a long-standing mistrust of law enforcement further complicated the case. It also highlights the heroic efforts of activists, including the NYC Anti-Violence Project’s Matt Foreman and Bea Hanson, to force law enforcement to recognize and protect the queer community.
Through archival and new interviews with activists, investigators, family members, and friends, Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York illuminates how the LGBTQ+ community fought to solve the murders and demand fair treatment of queer crime victims. Their work remains relevant today.
With Emmy voting now underway, and Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York streaming on Max, director Anthony Caronna (Susanne Bartsch: On Top; FX’s Pride) and Oscar-nominated executive producer Howard Gertler (How to Survive a Plague; Crip Camp; All the Beauty and the Bloodshed) speak exclusively with The Queer Review’s editor James Kleinmann about their approach to adapting Elon Green’s best-selling book into this riveting and emotionally potent series.
Howard, why was this a book that you wanted to adapt?
Howard Gertler: “I was sent Elon Green’s Last Call by Story Syndicate and HBO and they were curious to know if I thought there was a show there. When I read the book, in addition to it being a gripping story, I felt like there was an opportunity to go deeper into the nature of violence against queer people and what it took to combat that violence, as well as to talk about who got justice during that time period and who didn’t. There was also a chance to go deeper into the lives of the victims who were actually all quite complicated, even more complicated than we’d assumed once we started talking to the family members and freinds who participated.”
“It was really exciting to discover all of the AV material that was out there to help tell the story, especially Gay USA. Queer media covers queer stories differently to mainstream media and so to be able to have them tell the story of this set of crimes and this investigation also allowed us to talk about the larger issue because they were covering all of it and that perspective was really important.”
What made you agree to direct the docu-series Anthony?
Anthony Caronna: “Elon’s book first came to me when it was in pre-publication. I read it and loved it, but it was initially pitched to me as a basic true crime show and I didn’t want to do true crime at all. I was also terrified of revictimizing the queer community and all the possibilities of telling the story that could go wrong, so I turned it down. Then about a year later, Howard approached me about it and we went out to dinner to discuss it. That evening we kept talking about how there was a really great opportunity to use the true crime genre—which is everywhere and it’s everything that people watch right now—as a Trojan horse to get into people’s houses and have a much deeper conversation around anti-queer violence and the history of anti-queer violence, which was by far the most exciting part of this entire process for me and the entire story.”
One thing you explore is how under-reported anti-queer violence was to the police in the early 90s because was a mistrust of the police stemming from their ignorance about our community. How did you want to approach that in the series?
Anthony: “David Wertheimer, who was at the Anti-Violence Project, said that violence in one way or another touches all of us in the queer community. We all know the fear of violence, and many of us know what the act of violence is like upon us. So it felt like we were touching on things that, weirdly enough, had never come up in any of my previous work. Despite having done so much work about the queer community, I’d never really dived into the world of anti-queer violence. Once we got into it, there was a wave of people wanting to talk to us. Everybody from Anti-Violence Project was eager to have this conversation about anti-queer violence because it hasn’t happened in a thorough way before. I’m so honored that we got to explore it in this show.”
“In terms of the police, there was a lack of understanding about the queer community. It was like, they don’t work with queer people and they’re not around queer people. There was also a lack of wanting to understand that still persists today.”
Howard: “We also felt like it was incumbent on us to be very specific about the nature of homophobia within law enforcement and within the NYPD, so that an audience would understand why this dynamic existed and why there was this very fraught relationship that made it more complicated than it should have been to find resolution. Cutting the show was really about getting as specific as we could without losing people in all of the details so that they can see the big picture at the same.”
Homophobia is the key to so many aspects of this story isn’t it? From the gay panic legal defense to internalized homophobia, institutionalized and societal homophobia. Was that a thread that really struck you as you were assembling the series?
Howard: “At the very beginning of the development process we brought on a queer historian who specializes in queer history, Nikita Shepard, who teaches at Columbia and was a student of George Chauncey. They were working with us to create a timeline of queer history to see where our story beats mapped within the greater context. Then they would watch cuts and give us guidance. People would invoke homophobia regularly, but Nikita was really helpful in guiding us towards being very specific about what the roots were of homophobic speech and action during that time period because it was not a free-floating hatred. Anita Bryant is a figure who comes up over and over again on all these queer history projects that I’ve worked on. What she sparked spread like wildfire and it certainly did play into the story here. We also wanted to be as historically specific as we could about why this was happening and where it was coming from.”
Speaking of Anita Bryant, how important was it for you to make connections between then and what we see today because unfortunately a lot of people have very similar talking points to hers in 2024 and we’re in the midst of a wave of anti-LGBTQ legislation in many states across the country?
Howard: “For younger queer people especially it’s a very fraught and scary time right now. Ultimately, when we looked at the show as a whole—especially by the time we finished editing that last episode, on that very last night—we were like, ‘Alright, let’s get it exactly right.’ When we talk about where we are today, the point that we wanted to make is that queer people have been here before in history and they’ve successfully fought back and they will continue to fight back. The support system now is even bigger than it was 40 or 50 years ago. So as scary as it can sometimes seem, there is strength in a community that has been there before. One thing that was really important for us was for the community to not feel revictimized by a show about violence, but ultimately, a lot of it is about the strength of the queer community in the face of this kind of violence.”
Anthony: “What excited me the most about this show is that I had never seen it laid out like this before. We had the opportunity to take the true crime genre and use it in a way to timeline anti-queer violence right up through to today and show all of those connections. I don’t know that I will ever again in my career have the opportunity to explore something so profoundly important that affects my community in this way. It was such a gift to be able to lay out the timeline like this and have it be palatable to a mainstream audience. I’m really proud of the fact that we were able to bring mainstream viewers into something that is so deeply about the history and present day of anti-gay violence.”
Each episode is named after a victim or multiple victims and you paint really layered portraits of them, partly through interviews with their friends and family members, which are very moving. What was your approach to conducting those interviews and piecing together that part of the series?
Anthony: “It was incredibly important, not just for Howard and I, but for our entire team to get that aspect right. We took classes with journalists and we really took great care in how we conducted each interview, not pushing subjects to sit down with us, not trying to do “gotcha” interviews. We took great care in allowing people to navigate the interviews and their comfortability around questions. These interviews were sometimes six or seven hours long and they were emotionally and physically exhausting in many ways. With almost every single one them, the person walked away talking about how cathartic it was and feeling good that they had participated in this. Especially the family members. To do something within this genre and have everybody walk away feeling good about it was really a great feat and our entire team took such care in doing that.”
I love Cayenne Doroshow’s contribituons, she brings such insight and warmth to what she says.
Anthony: “I love Cayenne, we’ve been friends for a long time. Cayenne was in the FX show that I directed and then we stayed friends. I’d known that Cayenne had worked out of Port Authority years and years ago, so I called her to ask about her experience there. I mentioned that the person who we were tracking was Tony Marrero, but I realised that there was probably not much chance that she knew him. She said that his name didn’t ring any bells but I texted her a picture of him when we got off the phone and she immediately called back crying. She said that he’d called himself Eddie when she knew him. They were friends and she didn’t know that he had passed in this way. So it was emotionally very difficult to work with Cayenne on this, but I think it provided a certain amount of closure for her and it was a really wild, beautiful experience with her yet again.”
The cold hard facts that the detectives relay and the gruesome details of the case are effectively juxtaposed with these delicately-crafted, emotional portraits of the victims. Eventually, when you had to bring the killer into the story and talk about him and his life, what was your approach to that?
Anthony: “Personally, I didn’t care about getting to know this person. The details of his life were only to serve the purpose of showing how he was also wrapped up in the societal homophobia that we’re all wading in. It was never our intent to profile this serial killer or get to know this killer as a person. It was about the men, it was about their lives and the awful way that they left this world. It wasn’t really about him. So in that final episode, when we talk about him, as Bea Hansen says, it’s really not important what his name is. The show was not an opportunity to profile some serial killer or gruesome murders and we really didn’t do that.”
Howard: “For the crimes that we illuminate in the show he pled not guilty and he was convicted with the preponderance of excellent forensic evidence. So it’s not like we’ll ever get to know why he did it because he’s not saying that he did it. So what’s to know? But we felt like the previous two crimes and trials were illuminating about who he was and about the legal system. The first time it was the gay panic defense and the second time it was “the Fatal Attraction defense”. That movie had just come out before his trial and his lawyer says about the victim, ‘he’s just like Alex from Fatal Attraction, it’s his own fault’. Several months after his acquittal, he killed his first victim. So those trials illuminate the way the judicial system helped to set the stage for what was to come.”
How would you describe your approach to using archive material to contextualize queer life at certain points during the decades that you cover?
Anthony: “We had amazing archivists, Rosemary Rotondi and Rebecca Stern.”
Howard: “We’ve both done a bunch of films that are heavy on queer archival material so we asked Rosemary and Rebecca find stuff for us that we’ve nveer seen before. Rebecca did a deep dive into all the queer archives in New York and I did an email blast to all my friends who I thought might have photos or film from that time period. It’s challenging because of the status of queer people during the 60s, 70s, and even the 80s to a certain extent. There’s not a ton of archival that was out there because queer people were keeping their lives secret or private to a some degree.”
“When we were looking for the footage to illuminate Peter and his lover Tony in the first episode, Rebecca asked, ‘Have you ever seen the movie A Very Natural Thing from 1974?’ We watched it and we’re like, ‘Oh, my God, it’s period appropriate, it has gay actors playing gay roles and what they’re experiencing was a sign of the times’. We felt that we could use clips to illuminate that relationship. It’s clear to the viewer that this is not the actual couple, but it’s a stand in for that. We also realized that Parting Glances from 1986 had great footage from that era and got some 4K remastered footage from UCLA to put in episode three. It was really exciting to find a way to work in some scripted queer material as archival from that time period in a way that felt deep in the story, but also if you know the footage, you get even more from it.”
Anthony: “It was also important to us to show queer joy so we could get viewers to understand what this violence was shattering. For that, we leaned into the Nelson Sullivan archive, which seems to be in every single thing I’ve ever done because it’s such a wonderful archive. We leaned into all of these great places that were documenting queer joy in the 80s and early 90s to highlight what was being taken away from us by all this violence.”
Howard: “Like footage from Gay USA, Glennda Orgasm and all this other great queer-generated media from that time period.”
Anthony: “Linda Simpson’s stuff on public access.”
Howard: “We loved working all that material into the series to help tell the story, it was fun.”
By James Kleinmann
Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York is streaming on Max.
