In the piercing, packed new docuseries Last Call, the activist Matt Foreman finds a chilling way to connect the shifting, multi-layered experience of being queer or trans: “If there’s one thing that is universal, in my experience, to LGBTQ people, that we all know intuitively, it’s violence.”
In early 90s New York City, that violence could find you in many forms. It could be via a deadly disease, one that had been around for a decade yet was still woefully under-researched and any infrastructure surrounding it maliciously under-funded (between 1990 and 1993, there were over 116,000 Aids deaths in the city). It could be on the street, a slur casually turning into an assault (in the first nine months of 1991, there were 600 anti-LGBTQ+ attacks in the West Village and Chelsea alone). Or it could be from the cops, gleefully over-policing a community that the NYPD had long treated as sub-human. As an exhausted and emotional gay man says in archival footage: “Do you know what it is to be assaulted for being alive?”
