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By Bob Minor Minor Details
Since the play first opened in Denver in February 2000, performed by the Tectonic Theater Project, it has become a part of our national theatrical repertoire. I saw it as the opening production of the 28th season of the Unicorn Theater in Kansas City, Missouri, a venue where provocative, thoughtful, edgy works are the norm. The Unicorn performed it with "that fence" reconstructed across the stage. Who could forget it. But even if you know all you want about the events surrounding Matthew Shepard's brutal murder, The Laramie Project will take you further. Four weeks after the murder, nine members of the Tectonic Theater Project visited Laramie, Wyoming to collect interviews from its residents. That became the material for the play. They returned to Laramie in November 2000 to perform it there. Reports are those in attendance were moved as well. Matthew Shepard's fate became a national rallying point for "Hate Crime Laws" even where, as in Wyoming itself, they were never enacted. His parents became some of those national spokespersons who never asked for that status but who took up a cause that many would rather not face, much less discuss. What struck me more and more as I thought about it was how this play took me beyond three of the images we had been given about the events -- images which distort the truth to soothe mainstream America. The first image was to portray Matthew Shepard, the brutally tortured and murdered University of Wyoming student, as a "martyr." There is little question that his death provoked some in this country to reconsider their attitudes toward the treatment of gay people. There is little question that it was the impetus for activism for some others. In that sense, we may be consoled by the idea that, "Good came out of evil." But Matthew Shepard was not a martyr. Martyrs choose to give up their lives for a cause. He didn't have a choice. His life was not given but taken, stolen from him. He wasn't asked. And that is something we must never forget.
But the many got no media attention. Matthew Shepard is a symbol not of a life given up but of the epidemic of violence against LGBT people, a reminder of all those whose lives were taken, most brutally. He should not be used to make us feel better about it. The second image the media played upon was an attempt to make him the "boy next door." They wanted him to be "wholesome," to look the part of the innocent kid, intelligent, with earning potential, and so "all-American." They wanted to believe that he was somehow not like others - that he didn't "deserve" it because he didn't fit any stereotypes of LGBT people. Now, he didn't deserve it. But neither does any person deserve violence, murder, brutality, or any type of discrimination, no matter how they do or do not fit anyone's views of the "all-American." And it did not matter, though many seem to think it did, whether he was interested in sex with his murderers. It didn't matter whether he propositioned them. It didn't matter whether he turned down their propositions. Yet the media portrayal which reminds us of our culture's sickness around sexuality says "all-American boys" wouldn't do that.
They were "red necks," "low-life," of low intelligence, right-wing fanatics, no-good, born to trouble, etc. You know the picture. They were not like "normal" mainstream, decent, middle class folk. It was like believing that the only people who harbor any white racism are the Ku Klux Klan or the Neo-Nazis. We're clean, innocent, and in no way responsible. We're off the hook on that one too. How convenient that image is. Mainstream America and it's institutions aren't the problem. They're not homophobic or heterosexist. We're not like Fred Phelps and his family. We don't hate gay people. Then why is it so hard to institutionalize equality in this country? All three images somehow took the sting out of what happened in Laramie, Wyoming, and of what happens regularly in this good-ole U.S.A. They also took the reality out of it all. That's not what the play did for me though. There Zubaida Ula, a passionate, inquisitive Muslim woman from Laramie confronts us with another portrait of the events, which we, like her town, may not be willing to let sink in to replace media images. "But it IS that kind of town. If it wasn't this kind of town, why did this happen here? I mean, you know what I mean, like - that's a lie. Because it happened here. So how could it not be a town where this kind of thing happens? Like that's just totally - like, looking at an Escher painting and getting all confused like, it's just totally like circular logic, like how can you even say that? And we have to mourn this and we have to be sad that we live in a town, a state, a country where shit like this happens. I mean, these are people trying to distance themselves from this crime. And we need to own this crime. I feel. Everyone needs to own it. We are like this. We ARE like this. WE are LIKE This." She's right. No matter how we'd all like to deny it, we really are like this. Robert N. Minor is author of Scared Straight: Why It's So Hard to Accept Gay People and Why It's So Hard to Be Human and Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas. He may be reached at www.fairnessproject.org. |
I saw The Laramie Project. It refused to leave my mind long after the
curtain came down. I realized what it did for me that most of the media,
gay and straight, around Matthew Shepard's death had not.
Matthew Shepard: Is he a martyr? 
© 1997-2002 BEI