Green emphasizes the often closeted, fast paced, high traffic, and fluctuating nature of queer life. He works especially hard to create a vision of the complicated queer networks that allowed people to meet in relative safety in addition to the networks that could be deeply unsafe.
The geography of the landscape of New York’s gay scene at the end of the twentieth century is particularly significant for Green here. This book arrives alongside similarly poignant (re)told histories of queer life that deal with systemic issues such as Justin Ling’s Missing From the Village (Random House 2020) or programs like It’s a Sin (created by Russell T. Part of Green’s ambition is to transcribe and make visible to a new generation the wider cultural moment of fear and paranoia that had been largely silenced in dominant heterosexual culture. Green tells us that this same man would “be dead just over three months later, when an unchecked pandemic devastated the planet” (218). And this new generation wasn’t there for it’” (218). It’s so long in the past that now it’s in the history books. Green quotes the man as saying “‘I sort of equate it with 9/11. Interviewing a gay man who lived and worked in New York during the AIDS crisis, the two talk about “how the terror of AIDS has vanished” (217). Last Call is just as educational as it is visceral because Green is aware of his audience. Beyond being the first history of a killer, the text narrativizes a community in turmoil as it struggles to find joy and connection. Therefore, his book seems to carry a certain weight behind it. Green emphasizes that writing down the histories of a culture that has existed for so long underground with the fear of violence and detection is now crucial to queer survival. His awareness that many of these histories-histories that vary across cities and states-often live only in the heads of the elders who survive to tell them. The first book on the subject of The Last Call Killer, Green seems aware that in telling the story of a predator, he is also telling the story of a marginalized community at the height of a number of issues related to violence, health, and visibility. Green’s writing seems exceedingly conscious of the way queer history works and has worked for decades.
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