You probably don’t need me to tell you about this book which is currently getting the full barrage of press treatments, but I loved it and so here I am.
I blew through it in a day when I got a digital ARC a few months back. I couldn’t stop thinking about it for weeks after. I breathlessly read every review online despite having already read the book.
Fair warning: it’s true crime, so the vibe here today will be decidedly less escapist than usual. But it is excellent true crime.
If your complaints about true crime are that it elevates killers to mythical figures and artificially inflates the danger to white women in white women’s imaginations, you’re in the right place. This is not that.
But let’s just get that part out of the way. Elon Green’s Last Call is about a male nurse from Staten Island who met gay men in NYC piano bars in the 80s and 90s, plied them with alcohol, and took them home to mutilate and kill them.
But that’s also not what the book is about at all.
Most of these crimes were done to men already living in the shadows or on the fringes. These men’s lives, like their deaths, were secretive and mysterious, because AIDS forced them to be secretive and mysterious. The culture forced them into obscurity and then left them there.
Police forgot them and often so did their families and so did the city. But Green doesn’t. He takes you into the culture, sits you down at the bar, plunks a napkin in front of you. You feel it, the piano humming and the the floor sticking and the beer pouring. That’s what this book is about: the lives of the people that made New York City what it was. Their stories breathe and expand, as they should always have been able to. Their stories are this book.
Because the thing is, for a very long time, the only place to feel safe as a queer person in America was at a bar. Because even in Philadelphia in the early aughts, the maintenance guy could refuse to service your apartment because you were living with a woman. He could do that openly—say it to your face—and you’d have to live with raw sewage leaking into your closet for months until you finally got your complaint high enough up the chain for them to fix it, and even then, all they made him do was apologize to you.
There are so many ways to hate people. Even inside their own homes.
But the queer bars in downtown Philadelphia opened my heart, opened my mind. They felt safe in a way I didn’t even feel safe in my own apartment. Still today and always, I only frequent queer bars.
The killer is boring. He’s a sort of regular dude. Who cares why he did it or how he was treated as a child, who cares how he honed his skills. (Who cares what made my maintenance guy a bigot, truly?) The bits about him will make your skin crawl, of course. But what stuck with me more than anything were the lives he ended, the community he infiltrated. The people from whom he stole the last crumb of safety in a cruel world.
It’s a gorgeous and necessary book. Read an excerpt here.
And of course, buy it here.