Several years later, on a sunny day on Christopher Street (then the center of New York’s gay life), a man using an anti-gay epithet smashed my best friend in the head with a rock.
In that same time frame, a close friend was gay-bashed into unconsciousness by a gang of young men, causing a days-long stay in the hospital, and I was punched so hard in the stomach outside a gay dance club I thought the guy must have used a hammer.
In the early 90s, a man who lived two floors below me was bludgeoned to death by a guy he picked up in Central Park. I can speak to the frequency of violence in the gay community back then. ‘Their function was extraordinary.’ Photograph: Wonwoo Lee/Getty Images/Image Source Between 19 the city saw a greater number of killings than in any other stretch in more than half a century.īack in that benighted era, gay bars were often ‘the one refuge from the perils of everyday life’, says Green. According to police records, there were 2,605 murders in the city in 1990, the single bloodiest year of the last 70. “Aids took what was, at best, a level of indifference towards gay people and turned it into revulsion,” said Green.Ĭonsider, too, the general level of violence in New York City at the time.
Worse, that period represented the height of ignorance and fear about Aids, as well as the peak death toll in the gay community in the west, greatly impacting how the community was viewed. While LGBTQ people may still be at considerably elevated risk for violence, the level of peril and contempt was far higher in the late 80s and early 90s, when the bulk of the book takes place. “They need to understand the stakes, not just for the victims but for the men who simply went to these bars during that period. “It’s important for people to see how anti-queer bigotry manifested itself in this case,” he said to the Guardian. Now, three decades after the murders, journalist Elon Green has written a book titled Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York that goes beyond the facts of the story to reveal the larger issues that surrounded them. In fact, the case got so little attention relative to its horror that today few remember it, even within the gay community. In fact, the people who were most at risk – in this case, gay men who met for hook-ups at New York City bars that served the community – were given no sustained or amplified warnings by either the authorities or the media, creating a safe space for the murderer to continue to wreak havoc.
#Gay bars new york city serial#
If this story had traced the common arc of serial killings, a wave of fear would have rippled through the communities most likely to suffer the next victim. Over the next few years, similar scenes of horror would emerge in the region, leaving scores of clues about the character of the victims as well as the origin and method of their deaths. The parts had been cut so cleanly that barely any blood could be found amid the sinew and bone. O n 10 July 1992, a grisly stash of body parts was found in trash bags by a rest stop on the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey.