These Gay Men Frequented Manhattan Piano Bars. So Did Their Killer.
The Townhouse, the gay piano bar where two of the killer’s victims were seen with him. Instead of focusing on the killer, in “Last Call,” the journalist Elon Green opts to humanize the victims. This proves a thorny task when dealing with gay men who led pointedly secret lives.Credit.Edward Keating/The New York Times
Buy Book ▾
By Christopher Bollen
By Elon Green
On a Sunday afternoon in May 1991, a maintenance worker emptying garbage barrels on the Pennsylvania Turnpike made a grisly discovery: Wrapped inside eight knotted trash bags was the mutilated body of a 54-year-old man, killed by stab wounds to the abdomen, his severed penis shoved in his mouth. In a notable concession to the overriding paranoia of the era, the maintenance worker was advised to take an AIDS test, even though he hadn’t come in direct contact with blood.
USA TODAY
CHICAGO – Living alone with her two dogs, working remotely as a high school Spanish teacher and distancing from her parents because of COVID-19, Sarah Manos said she felt a little less lonely last April when the man she met on Bumble started buying her flowers.
But two months later, after the man tried to cut Manos off from friends and family and allegedly killed her two dogs, she discreetly packed her bags, fled to her parents house and called the National Domestic Violence Hotline, according to a civil suit Manos filed last week in Cook County circuit court.
Courtesy
Chances are, if you’re a moviegoer, you’ve heard a little something about women’s fight for equality in Hollywood. According to Women and Hollywood, a nonprofit organization that educates and advocates for the cause, women remain poorly represented behind the camera, making up just 10% of directors and 19% of writers. It’s no wonder that women, so often boxed out of sharing their stories on screen, would distill that pain into their filmmaking, creating powerful stories of how sexism and misogyny continue to oppress women from all walks of life.
In these ten movies about sexism, women struggle for equality everywhere from iron mines to NASA to the Supreme Court. They also rail against the intersections of bigotry, seeing their fight for gender equality inflected by racism, homophobia, and other shameful prejudices. For women, these films will ring as validations of a shared struggle. For everyone else, they’ll be an education, an exercise in empathy, and a rous
Santiago Felipe/Getty Images
The 12th season of
RuPaul’s Drag Race offered us all a weekly (albeit brief) respite from 2020’s unending chaos. The latest season wrapped in May, with Milwaukee-based queen Jaida Essence Hall (pictured above) snatching the crown. “I hope I can inspire so many young, Black people like myself who never feel like they’re special or that what they offer the world isn’t important,” a tearful Hall told
Entertainment Weekly after the season finale. “Hopefully, they see this and realize, ’What I am and who I am is enough, I matter, and I have something special to offer to the world. ”