‘Last Call’ Is a Moving True-Crime Tale of New York’s Gay 1990s: TV Review
Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic The current backlash against queer and trans people, led by a vivified cultural right, may have come as a surprise to younger people who assumed their rights and protections wouldn’t backslide. For this potential audience most of all, “Last Call,” a rigorous yet emotionally vivid documentary series on HBO, will come as a startling depiction of all-too-recent history, and a call to stand united in the face of a world’s worth of threats. Produced by, among others, recent Oscar nominee Howard Gertler (“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”) and directed by Anthony Caronna, “Last Call” tells a set of stories that tend to begin at a piano bar. In the early 1990s, a cohort of gay men, often in culturally forced heterosexual marriages and living their true lives only after dark, frequented various drinking establishments in New York City; time and again, one of this set would turn up not merely dead but dismembered, in a sort of brutal testament to antigay feeling.