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

by Elon Green

Queer people don’t grow up as ourselves, we grow up playing a version of ourselves that sacrifices authenticity to minimise humiliation & prejudice. The massive task of our adult lives is to unpick which parts of ourselves are truly us & which parts we’ve created to protect us. —ALEXANDER LEON

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

Between 1985 and 1989, the number of anti-queer incidents reported by local groups increased from 2,042 to 7,031. These figures are almost certainly on the low side.

As for the nature of anti-queer violence: a paper, published at the beginning of the decade, argued that murders of gay men were characterized by an uncontrollable anger, present in nearly every case. “A striking feature of most murders,” wrote the authors, “is their gruesome, often vicious nature.