But it is to Green’s credit that I never forgot the names of the four known victims.The gripping true story, told here for the first time, of the Last Call Killer and the gay community of New York City that he preyed upon. More than once in the abrupt final chapters, in the midst of reading about him, I forgot the murderer’s name. That missing confrontation creates a fissure in his otherwise impressive reporting. Green acknowledges that Rogers, who is serving two consecutive life terms in prison, declined his attempts to interview him.
Ultimately, that strength is also the book’s weakness. We are never allowed a moment of perverse awe for the murderer. He provides an adrenalized police-procedural plot without ever losing sight of the fact that these were innocent human beings who were duped, butchered and discarded. Green proves a conscientious crime writer. With great compassion, he widens his scope to explore the social value of gay bars to the queer community and the vital work of grass-roots groups. Instead of focusing on the killer, Green opts to humanize his victims. Last Call is Green’s first book, and it admirably demonstrates his commitment to sidestepping easy sensationalism for the far grittier work of checking sources, poring over police reports and reinterviewing witnesses. But there’s also the imperative of truth-not just the factual tally of names, dates, and numbers, but the existential question of why such horror happened at all. Most true-crime writers favor the crime half of the equation.
preserves the poignant irony that the trust and vulnerability that once made gay bars synonymous with gay community were also vectors of death, both in the form of murder and, later, HIV/AIDS.
Such offbeat details compensate for Green’s smooth but bland prose. a salvage operation not only for individual lives, but for a whole bleak chapter of underground queer life. Green, who identifies as straight, never explains why the victims obsessed him. It’s a reparative act that doubles as an extended elegy for the decades of closeted or bullied queers who encountered similar demons in schoolyards, across dinner tables, in pews, or in the browser histories they desperately erased. Rather than focus on the killer-who has all the allure of a wet cocktail napkin-he foregrounds the lives and milieus of the victims.
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