HBO’s Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York is rare true-crime docuseries that cares more about the victims’ identities, the people who loved them, the communities that embraced them and the histories that claimed them.

This line of inquiry transforms Last Call from a retelling into a powerful act of reclamation.

The four-hour docuseries centers on four killings that took place around the New York metro area between 1991 and 1993.

All the targets — Peter Anderson, Thomas Mulcahy, Anthony Marrero, Michael Sakara — were gay men picked up in Manhattan, later found as severed body parts in trash cans outside the city.

Director Anthony Caronna (FX’s Pride) retraces the investigations step by step, through interviews with officers who worked the cases.

The killer is eventually identified, or the final episode depicts the arrest, the trial and the verdict.

“Why is the emphasis on the gay part?” a Pennsylvania cop asks Caronna at one point. For the authorities, “The gay thing wasn’t really relevant to the investigation other than finding out who might kill him, and where he hung out.”

The comment highlights how little the police understood or cared about the communities investigated, or about the anger and distrust their members harbored against them.

Archival footage shows the virulent cruelty of Anita Bryant’s anti-gay speeches and the homophobia of law enforcement leaders sneering that sodomy is a crime, and the rage of AIDS protests and the pleasures of queer nightlife.

My Book:

Iconic Gay Directors. By Emanuel Levy (Columbia University Press).

Activists like Bea Hanson and Matt Foreman and reporters like Duncan Osborne remember reports of hate crimes, and the hostile indifference of establishments like the NYPD or  mainstream media toward them.

More recent clips connect those old prejudices to the anti-gay sentiment bubbling back up today, though Last Call assumes most audiences can make the connection on their own.

The interviewees tend to be ones who were on the ground in the early 1990s. The particular experts’ firsthand knowledge turns them personal and immediate.

It lingers with Anderson’s ex as he recounts “the first night there was hanky-panky” between them. It catches the grief of another victim’s high-school sweetheart as she describes a photo he’d sent her. Marrero’s big brother still cannot bring himself to acknowledge that Anthony was a gay sex worker; Antonio, Anthony’s bisexual Gen Z nephew.

Last Call eventually gets around to the usual questions of who killed these people and how and why.

We see the tight-knit crew of regulars who’d listen to Sakara close out his favorite bar with his favorite song every night, or the bond Mulcahy’s daughter, 18 his death, could have developed with him.

It is not the shock of their brutal demises, but the ache of their absence, and the frustration toward the institutions that failed them.