Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York

by Elon Green

The Pines, Browne reflected, was the only place he experienced freedom, “or what a straight person feels every day of their life.”

Duncan Osborne, an investigative journalist who wrote for many of the era’s queer periodicals, noted, “If you were a crime victim and you wanted to get written about, you had to be a white person and you had to get killed in Central Park.”

The prevailing defense in those years was “gay panic”—a defense against charges of murder and assault that enabled perpetrators of anti-queer murders to receive diminished sentences or even avoid punishment entirely by, in effect, blaming the victim.