The Laramie Project is a play based on over 200
interviews. It chronicles life in Laramie, Wyoming
after the brutal killing of Matthew Shepard, a young
gay college student, who died bound to a fence in
the hills outside the town.
Quoted from Time Magazine (Oct 26, 1998): What people
mean when they say Matthew Shepard's murder was a
lynching is that he was killed to make a point. When
he was 21 years old, the world's arguments reached him
with deadly force and printed their worst conclusions
across him. So he was stretched along a Wyoming fence
not just as a dying young man but as a signpost. "When
push comes to shove," it says, "this is what we have
in mind for gays."
Three days after Shepard died, a crowd of around 5,000
gathered in the night on the steps of the Capitol in
Washington, in a candlelight vigil that struggled to
make another argument and extract another message from
his death. Ellen DeGeneres, Ted Kennedy and Barney
Frank, the openly gay Massachusetts Congressman --
all the expected speakers took the microphone. What
was less expected was the sheer turnout of lawmakers at
a moment when Congress was embroiled in the crazy
closing hours of the budget deal. So many members
showed up to voice their grief and anger that House
minority leader Dick Gephardt had time only to read
their names. "It speaks volumes about how much progress
we've made," says Winnie Stachelberg, lobbyist for the
Human Rights Campaign, the nation's biggest gay-rights
group. "Yet Matthew's death shows how much farther we
have to go."
Jeff Korhonen, 27, can explain the situation as well as
anyone else. He was raised in Cheyenne, his father a
career military man, his mother a Mormon, his grandfather
a First Assembly of God minister, and there was no dinner
conversation long enough for Korhonen to slip in the news
that he was a different kind of cowboy. Not until his
early 20s, as an exchange student in Florida, did he
come out, and there is something to be learned about
diversity in Wyoming when you hear Korhonen say,
"Orlando was like a gay Mecca to me."
The program done in Orlando, he went back home and began
his coming out. He moved to Denver for a while, which for
him was heaven on earth, but he wanted to finish college,
and the only way he could afford it was to go to Laramie.
His family by then had dealt with who he was and accepted
him.
"When I left Cheyenne for Laramie," Korhonen remembers,
"my father said, 'I know you're very proud of who you are,
but please, please watch yourself because there are people
who will want to destroy you simply because of who you are.'
I gave him a big hug and said, 'I know.' And then the first
thing I saw when I got to Laramie was a bumper sticker that
said HATRED IS A FAMILY VIRTUE."
Travis Brin, a 24-year-old welder, remembers being at parties
with Aaron McKinney, who was like a lot of people who talk a
lot. He had nothing to say.
"A total redneck," says Brin. "He'd say crazy, stupid stuff
about black people and gay people... One time he said we
ought to get all these people with AIDS, stick them in an
airplane and blow it up. But if you got up in his face, he'd
back down, because he was a punk, like any other young punk
you see on the street."
Police say it was McKinney, 22, and his quiet-man pal Russell
Henderson, 21, both high school dropouts, who met Shepard in
Laramie's Fireside Lounge. "After Mr. Shepard confided he was
gay, the subjects deceived Mr. Shepard into leaving with them
in their vehicle," reads the Albany County court filing of
first-degree murder, kidnapping and aggravated robbery charges
against McKinney and Henderson.
In addition to being an unspeakably gruesome crime, it was a
profoundly dumb one. After allegedly leaving Shepard hanging
on the fence on that rocky ridge just outside of town, McKinney
and Henderson drew attention to themselves by getting into a
fight with two other men. It was then, police say, that they
found a bloody .357 Magnum in the pickup truck, and Shepard's
wallet in McKinney's house. McKinney, by the way, was awaiting
sentencing for burglarizing a Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Those who squirm over Shepard's life-style might have felt
more righteous last week when it was reported that he'd made
a pass at a bartender in Cody last summer, got punched in the
face and falsely reported to police that he'd been raped.
(No charges were filed.) If only a punch in the face were the
stiffest penalty for making a pass.
There's a touch of homophobia in the Wyoming legislature,
state representative Mike Massie of Laramie tells you. It's
a religious thing, he says. God has apparently channeled his
thoughts on gays through a few good ole boys in Cheyenne.
Four times this decade, Massie has co-sponsored antibias
bills; four times they've died. There's no problem with
enhanced penalties for crimes against race, religion or
ethnicity, he's been told, but if he doesn't drop sexual
orientation from the list, there's not a chance in hell.
Other opponents argue against special legislation for any
group or contend that existing laws are sufficient.
"I am so angry over the fact that it never passed," Massie
says, because now the nation can wonder whether, "gee, maybe
Wyoming tolerates this kind of thing."
And that, for all the legalistic hand wringing, is the most
compelling reason for such a bill. The symbolism. Politics
is at least half symbolism anyway.
"You know the quote: The only prerequisite for the triumph
of evil is that good men do nothing," said Graham Baxendale,
an Englishman who came to America in August to study, of all
things, hate groups. He teaches a University of Wyoming class
on "the implications and ramifications of hate crimes."
"Unfortunately," he said at a teach-in last week, "my job
just got easier." There's no telling how long it will last,
Baxendale says, but there is a dialogue in Laramie where
there wasn't one before, and it has spread through Wyoming
and beyond.
Shepard's body was taken home last week to Casper, where he
once played Little League and acted in local theater and was
always the littlest kid. Annie Spitzer, a Shepard family
friend known as Sister Annie at a Pentecostal ministry,
remembers a trip downtown with Matt when he was in elementary
school. "He saw a flag at half-staff, and he asked me, 'What's
wrong with that flag? Why isn't it all the way up?'" And she
told him, "Oh, that means that someone very important has died."
As she explained mourning, Matt hugged her legs.
Snow fell Friday at Shepard's funeral in Casper, where the
flags flew at half-staff and hate groups demonstrated not
far from St. Mark's Episcopal Church. Winter, beautiful and
wicked, is coming to Wyoming.
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