Jackrabbit Goes Down the Rabbit Hole: Fear, Loathing, and "The Laramie Project"

Just... two more days...

2011-11-29T16:24:00.001-05:00

And I will be a functioning member of blogging society again. Hooray!

In the meantime, I am well on my way to finishing the prospectus, and will be back with you shortly.

How's the writing going, you may ask? Kind of like this:

On the other side of the coin, it's getting done. And that's the important part!

~~Jackrabbit

PS: In case you were wondering, the other "Jackrabbit" gave her dissertation defense yesterday, and I am excited to report that she is now officially "Dr. Jackrabbit." I couldn't be prouder of her. Way to go, my friend!

Six Things my LGBTA Taught me About the Gospel, part 2

2011-11-18T00:41:00.000-05:00

I spent a couple hours last month experiencing something absolutely incredible: I was given the opportunity to talk with a loving Christian woman who struggles with the fact that her adult daughter came out as a lesbian two years ago. She had initially reacted badly to her daughter's confession, and for a time their relationship was shattered.

It took a lot of forgiveness on both sides, but they are on speaking terms now. However, their relationship had stalled. She had so many questions about what her daughter was going through, but she needed an interpreter to translate the Christian perspective through LGBT eyes and back again to show her why her overtures for a deeper reconciliation were getting rebuffed.

As we began speaking, I told her about Matt Shepard's death and James' suicide, and what that had taught me. Then I told her about all the wonderful things I was learning from the LGBT community, and I saw such a transformation in her body language as she moved from frustration and loss to real empathy. For me, seeing that woman's love for her daughter break out unfettered by her suspicion of and frustration with the gay "lifestyle" was absolutely humbling.

We had scheduled for a one-hour conversation at a local college ministry, but three hours later we left with a hug and a promise to check in with each other again. She said she felt ready to pray for the well-being and safety of the entire LGBT community and to take a stand against hate in her church. And, she said with some trepidation, she might even get the courage to meet her daughter's partner and be civil-- but she's not quite ready for that yet. She still needs a little more forgiveness and time, as we all do, but I feel confident that their relationship is on the mend.

So, as I finish out my list of lessons I have learned from the LGBT community, I wanted to end with the different perspective that the LGBT community has regarding my faith community, in the hopes of showing why so many well-intentioned evangelicals stumble around on two left feet when interacting with the LGBT community. And so, without further ado...

4. If we're all supposed to die to the self, then why do I have to go first?

I've learned from my friends that the biggest hindrance to reconciliation with our exiled LGBT family is our hypocrisy. That really shouldn't come as any huge surprise. The problem, as it seems to me now, is that most evangelicals don't believe that their own sexuality and the so-called "gay lifestyle" overlap a lot. They therefore feel free to demand that LGBT people give up an important part of one's pursuit of happiness without a second thought to their own sexual continence. If you're "defending" marriage, my friends want to ask my Christian community, then why aren't you starting with yourself?

Here's my problem: So, we supposedly believe that being gay is a sin and undermines "true" marriage, right? For the sake of argument, I'm not going to challenge y'all on that. But now what? Where do you go from there? The problem is that, in Christianity, all sexuality is broken because all humans are fallen. Marriage is no longer what it was in Eden; now it's a stopgap for sexual incontinence, if you believe what Jesus and Paul said about it. If you believe the one premise, I would contend that you need to believe both. Our sexuality is broken, too.

If that's the case, then perhaps the true culprit destroying marriage isn't a bunch of people who largely want to be just as monogamous and domestic as the rest of us. It's the people who already have the right to marry but are opting out of that institution who are the problem, and, well... that's us. We're being hypocritical, and they know it.

According to recent studies, the divorce rate and premarital sex rate among Christians is nearly indistinguishable from that of the rest of America. And, as has been making headlines recently, adultery and pornography are both pretty widespread in the pews, too. In the way we normally think about marriage and sexuality, these actions are all a threat to the familial institution, right? So why aren't we tackling our own sexual brokenness to "save marriage" just as hard as some of us are fighting against gay marriage? You can't walk up to someone and demand a complete abandonment of that secular ideal of happiness if you haven't done so yourself. It's like having a conversation about salvation like this:

Christian: If thy right eye offends, my friend, pluck it out! Here's a knife. Better get carving.

Sinner: Woah, wait just a minute! Jeez, are you nuts?

Christian: Of course not. We must die to the self and offer ourselves as a sweet-burning sacrifice to the Lord. Take the knife; take up your cross and follow Him.

Sinner: Is this, uh, required? You haven't even...

Christian: Of course it's required, it's in the Bible. You go first, my friend. I'll be right behind you.

Think of it this way: gays and lesbians have been fighting for over a decade for the right to participate in the ideals of the very nuclear family that evangelicals claim they're protecting. They want to be monogamous and form cohesive bonds with one another. Christians, in contrast, are rebuffing their attempts to join the "sacred institution" even while they are tearing it down themselves, one divorce and affair at a time. That's just one more reason that our shrill arguments about gay marriage and whatnot fall on deaf, deaf ears. Our LGBT friends and family have seen the hypocrisy firsthand, and they have no reason to respond to any call that the church isn't following themselves. Nor should they have to.

Every Christian is called to an extreme sacrifice of the old self for the new; it's about time that evangelicals embrace the difficulty of that command as much as we preach it for others.

5. Christian, lay your weapons down: there are no enemies in front of you.

Having observed Christian culture as an evangelical with one foot out of the door since I was twenty has taught me a lot about the culture wars. It started when I found out that I was attending the infamous "Baptist Church" from The Laramie Project and had a not-so-positive reaction to the news. It reached an unprecedented level of repugnance after my friend James killed himself and nobody else seemed to care, and it came back into balance when I discovered InterVarsity, my minister friend, and a community of other Christians struggling with the same thing. After living through all of this, if there is one thing I feel like I now know for sure, it's that conservative Christians are living in a decade of moral panic.

We don't know why our communities are slipping so far out of control-- churches in decline, families divorcing, young people leaving the church en masse or rejecting Christian social values-- and in response we are drawing lines in the sand and starting crusades against the prevailing culture. While that battle makes perfect sense to me for my LGBT brothers and sisters (after all, it's their lives being smothered and lost, and so they must naturally fight), it doesn't fit Christian theology. Our battles are supposed to be against "against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places" (Ephesians 6:12). Our only true battlefield as Christians is the spiritual, and only weapons God allows us to use in the battle are God's word and prayer. Every other part of the Armor of God is a defensive tool to keep us from getting hurt by the powers of darkness.

If our battle is in heaven, then there shouldn't be human casualties to our warfare. In the last twenty years, however, vast numbers of us in the Evangelical and conservative communities have let their spiritual battles degrade into cultural wars, and a lot of different groups of people-- not just gays and lesbians-- are ending up as collateral damage. When our leaders and parishoners are more concerned about a "hidden homosexual agenda" in schools than they are about keeping children from being brutalized by homophobic children, there's something wrong. We teach our kids that every person in the world is loved by God and He offers them grace and reconciliation. But then we teach them about gays and lesbians entirely in scare quotes, or-- even worse-- refuse to talk about them at all. We can't keep fighting a culture war which destroys the people we are called upon to love.

I've seen it first-hand. A friend of mine once thought it was more important that her middle school child know that homosexuality was wrong than it was to keep him from yelling vicious taunts and threats at "that gay kid." Another friend's church family decided it was more important to keep clear principles on homosexuality than to show affection to him; as a result, he suffered two years under a virtual damnatio memoriae among his own church family, and nobody came to his defense when the bullies came knocking on his door.   I've listened to people from everyone from Focus on the Family to my old preacher talk with disgust and hatred for those who disagree on everything from homosexuality to evolution. For Christians, principles are meant to uphold the dignity of God and his creation, not to destroy others. Most of us already understand that, but somehow with the hot-button issues of the culture wars that idea was lost in translation.

At some point in this debate over the soul of America, the Christians who were engaging in moral debate in the public sphere missed a crucial, watershed moment: the point where they had to decide whether people or principles were more important. Unfortunately, a lot of them picked their principles and accepted that people would become casualties to those beliefs. That's the moment when we lost the culture wars, if such a thing actually exists-- for the two are supposed to be indivisible. Godly principles are based upon love of God and of neighbor. Thus, the moment when Christians divorcing their moral standards from the rule of Love, they ceased to have any real Christian footing. Consequently, the godly principles of the culture wars drifted from any foundation in God's love and became just one more line in the sand: a foxhole, a stretch of razor wire, a deadline.

I will never tell my co-religionists that they need to drop their firmly held moral convictions, because I know how deeply such convictions are tied into our spiritual well-being. Asking a Christian to separate their moral lives from their daily existence unravels one's personal wellbeing very quickly. I would rather ask you, my friends, to reconsider how to put those convictions into action out of love for Christ and for our neighbors.

As for me, after looking at all the Pyrrhic battles where Evangelicals are currently deployed in trench warfare against their own family members, their neighbors and friends, I looked at the gay marriage battle and asked myself, "Am I willing to die on this hill, and take everyone else with me?"

For me the answer is "no."

This, however, leads me to one more point, which brings us to six lessons, six gifts given me by my local LGBT community:

6. You can't say "I love you" until you also say "I'm sorry."

The entire point of the Gospel message is seeking perfect love and forgiveness from Love and Forgiveness Himself.   And, it's about seeking reconciliation from those we have rejected, be it God, which is an important component of grace, or whether it be from each other as we are alternately the culprit or the victim of injustice. We are supposed to embody the love and forgiveness of God to those who are still separated from Him, but in this case, we are the injuring party. We as body therefore need to seek forgiveness from those who have been grievously hurt by the church's members.

As my friends have repeatedly shown me, the LGBT community did not create this breach. We did, years ago when we let our principles dictate that some parts of God's creation should be treated as less than fully human. If our two sides are to ever be reconciled, we need a radical kind of forgiveness, and the first move needs to be ours. Christians are called upon to be the healer of that breach and take responsibility for the tears in our relationship. It means abandoning the moral high ground we thought we deserved even though we must stand eye-to-eye with our fellow imperfect human beings.

It's a tough thing to do, as that means accepting that we have collectively sinned against others, but the only thing I can think of that would be more beautiful than the Church seeking out the vulnerable and wounded ones we have exiled would be letting some of those exiles forgive us our trespasses.

The gift of reconciliation is powerful, a force driven by love and forgiveness; it the power of the Gospel itself, and reconciling others to the love of God is a powerful blessing for both sides.

Then you will call, and the LORD will answer;
You will cry, and He will say, 'Here I am.'
If you remove the yoke from your midst,
The pointing of the finger and speaking wickedness,

And if you give yourself to the hungry
And satisfy the desire of the afflicted,
Then your light will rise in darkness
And your gloom will become like midday.

And the LORD will continually guide you,
And satisfy your desire in scorched places,
And give strength to your bones;

And you will be like a watered garden,
And like a spring of water whose waters do not fail.
Those from among you will rebuild the ancient ruins;
You will raise up the age-old foundations;

And you will be called the Repairer of the Breach,
The Restorer of the Streets in Which to Dwell...

Stop the ride, I wanna get off...

2011-11-15T23:32:00.001-05:00

I love you Dr. L, I really do, but I feel like I'm arguing in circles with a congested, fatalistic turtle called "Prospectus."
Any pointers?

So, I have a doppelganger in the English Department here who is also named "Jackrabbit" and is a year or two ahead of me in the PhD program. When I passed my last exam, I was literally skipping down the hall when I ran into her at a desk in our computer lounge.

"Congrats on passing your specialized exam," she told me.

"Thanks! It feels so good to be ABD (all but dissertation)!" I chirped. "It's all downhill from here!" She shifted her baggy, exhausted eyes from the disorganized pile of her chapter revisions on her desk to me with baggy, sleep-deprived eyes full of pity.

"Jackrabbit, I love you and all, but don't you realize?" She begged. "You're done with the easy part. The hard part is just starting. This stupid dissertation is going to put me in my grave." And thus, having completely deflated my naive, cheerful buoyancy, she turned back to her revisions with a groan.

"Oh," I answered.

It only took a month to get to the same point that my friend the other "Jackrabbit" already was at. I am officially done with the emotional toll of graduate school, and I haven't even finished my stupid prospectus yet. I'm all for calling it "good enough" and rolling on with the rest of my life.

Wipe that grin off your face and help me with a thesis
statement already, Falcor. I'm desperate.

Unfortunately, my dissertation committee, like a certain stodgy turtle from an old movie from my childhood, has other plans. One of those plans involves another three semesters in school and a grinding, hopeless weight that's pulling me underneath like Atreyu's horse in the Swamps of Sadness, and I'm still waiting to get pulled from the muck by the sudden arrival inspiration with big wings and floppy ears. Stupid Luck Dragons-- never around until the last possible second. I mean, look at that face; he's mocking me, I swear.

Some of my colleagues are a lot worse than me right now, however. In the last month I've had three different PhD candidates crying on my shoulder in despair, and this afternoon I made a freshman burst into tears just by asking her about her paper topic. To top it all off, yesterday I stepped on a roofing nail and drove the thing almost an inch into my foot, so I earned a visit to Student Health for a free tetanus shot. Winter vacation in Wyoming absolutely can not come soon enough.

What that means for blogging, however, is that I'm going to have to shift from regular posts and research on TLP temporarily to more of an ad-hoc basis. Although, if I'm honest, that's been what I've been doing since April anyhow, so nothing will really change that much on everyone else's end. It does mean, however, that I won't get near as much progress done on keeping up-to-date with everything as I would wish, but, hey, at least we'll keep rolling. And, if anybody has a contribution they'd like to add, or advertise an upcoming "Project," or point me to something cool, I'll certainly have the time for that.

And so, do not despair, I am still fully committed to blogging! I should have a few posts up over the next week and a half. I find that blogging is a relaxing way to procrastinate from writing a dissertation proposal. Just as long as Dr. L doesn't find out...

Aaaaand I'm off!

2011-10-09T12:34:00.000-04:00

I'm about to head out to the Maryville College production of The Laramie Project, and I think a few of my friends from the outreach center will be there as well.

I'll let you know how it went sometime in the near future. Wish me luck!

Scholarship: Social Impact of the Shepard Tragedy in Academia

2011-10-09T00:54:00.000-04:00

If you're a literary person, you're probably like me and can't believe how few literary, scholarly articles there are actually out there on The Laramie Project. If you widen your scope to documentary theater or work on Tectonic in general, the net gets wider, but few people in my field are tackling this play as a text or performance like any other drama. The social and historical angles of the play, perhaps, are taking precedent in the scholarly imagination.

On the flip side, though, that means that other disciplines are interested in Matthew Shepard and The Laramie Project as well-- and they're writing about it. This past week I found some fun, interesting, and melancholy reflections across the disciplines. I found doctors, psychologists, archaeologists pedagogy experts all reflecting on the tragedy and the play, and each of them sheds a little light on the social impact both Matt and Tectonic Theater had on America in the previous decade. Here's a list and shot description of some of the most interesting I found. Enjoy!

Blackburn, Mollie, and J. F. Buckley. "Teaching Queer-Inclusive English Language Arts." Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 49.3 (2005): 202-212.

Charles, Casey. "Panic in the Project: Critical Queer Studies and the Matthew Shepard Murder." Law and Literature 18.2 (2006): 225-252.

Dunn, Thomas R. "Remembering Matthew Shepard: Violence, Identity, and Queer Counterrepublic Memories." Rhetoric and Public Affairs 13.4 (2010): 611-652.

Hoffman, Scott W. "'Last Night, I prayed to Matthew': Matthew Shepard, Homosexuality, and Popular Martyrdom in Contemporary America." Religion and American Culture 21.1 (2011):121-164.

Hurst, James C. "The Matthew Shepard Tragedy: Management of a Crisis." About Campus 4.3 (1999): 5-11.

Noelle, Monique. "The Ripple Effect of the Matthew Shepard Murder: Impact on the Assumptive Worlds of Members of the Targeted Group." American Behavioral Scientist 46.1 (2002): 27-50.

Saewic, E., and S. Marshall. "Reducing Homophobia in High School: The Effects of The Laramie Project Plays and an Integrated Curriculum." Journal of Adolescent Health 48.2 (2011): 111.

Upcoming "Projects": Maryville, TN, this weekend!

2011-10-07T00:28:00.001-04:00

How did I not know about this sooner?

Source: www.maryvillecollege.edu

The Laramie Project is returning to Appalachia! A small college within driving distance of my home in Appalachia is doing a performance this weekend. It will be a small affair, involving both college students and community members. The director of the performance is interested in the ethics of performing real people:

Dr. Heather McMahon, associate professor of theatre at Maryville College, said she selected the play for a variety of reasons.

“For one thing, the play is a challenge for actors, since all cast members will play a variety of roles,” McMahon said. “Each actor must differentiate the characters from one another so that the audience can see the townspeople of Laramie, Wyo., come to life. Because the play represents real people, there is an even greater responsibility to do justice to the characters.”

What makes this performance stand out to me is that Maryville College is a religiously-founded institution with Presbyterian roots, so their interpretation of events should be really interesting, I hope. I'm really hoping I can make the trip to go see this this weekend with some of my friends. It would make such a nice point of comparison for the Duke performance (of which I still need to talk about, I know.)

You can read up on the performance in the Knoxville News Sentinel here, or at the theater's website here.

Location: Clayton Center for the Arts, Maryville, TN

when: Thu, Oct 6 thru Sun, Oct 9, 2011

where: Haslam Family Flex Theatre

time: 8:00 PM Thurs. through Saturday, 2:00 PM Sunday

The Matthew Shepard Effect

2011-10-06T23:39:00.000-04:00

You often hear of the positive effects of Matthew Shepard's story on other people, but not a lot of people get on YouTube to explain that in a video. A friend of mine posted this on his webpage, and so I wanted to share it with you.

YouTube vlogger Denactor created this post to give his reactions to-- and appreciation for-- how Matthew Shepard's death impacted his own life, starting at age twelve, to a closeted teen, and now to an outspoken gay adult. It's an interesting trajectory to see in one guy's life.

Such are the power of stories-- even the horrible ones, like Matt's murder-- for they teach us about who we are.

Six Things My LGBTA Taught Me about the Gospel, part 1

2011-10-05T10:46:00.000-04:00

Just because I love this motorcycle.

SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING

FOR THE STAUNCHLY SECULAR:

This post gets kind of preach-y at other Christians.

Proceed with the Jesus talk at your own discretion.

So: this year marks the start of my third year with the LGBTA as the random, straight evangelical who hangs out with them at meetings. Usually, when I talk to other Christians about why I'm there, they think that I'm walking among my gay brothers and sisters from some moral high ground and I'm giving them moral instruction. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The fact is that they have taught me more about how to be a Christian than I think I ever did in my six years in the SBC.

It's not that I didn't learn a lot about God in the SBC; they supported me through my first years as a believer, and though their higher organization grieves me a lot, they still deserve some credit (or blame?) for making me who I am. It's just that I learned more about this whole Gospel thing by walking with my gay friends than I ever did by running with the holy rollers.
I have learned some great lessons from the wonderful people of my Appalachian chapter of the LGBTA, the outreach center on campus, and especially one specific professor, who is one of the coolest people on my campus and a good friend. And so, let me share a few of those lessons with you. So, if you're not of a particularly religious bent, feel free to skip this post, and I'll see you in a week or two. Here we go!

1. Jesus came to save the world from the religious. So should we.
Usually, when we tell the story of Jesus' ministry in Jerusalem and his conflict with the religious leaders, we read ourselves into the story as the good guy. The way we tell it, the world is surrounded by these same religious Pharisees (in our minds, often sporting a beard, a pyx, or priestly collar) from which we-- American Protestant Evangelicals-- will save the unsaved world, just like Jesus had commanded his disciples to do. Evangelical churches preach again and again to their congregations that it was Jesus' mission, and our Great Commission, to "save the world from mere religion."

My friend "Lucas" taught me how true that last part was. A week after I came out to Lucas as a Christian, he showed me a bumper sticker on his car that said, "Jesus, save me from your followers." After listing to his horrific coming out story in a Southern Baptist community, I had to agree with him. We've got the story wrong, you see. Who are the American Pharisees? Who is the powerful religious sect, the ones with a severe eye on and rigid enforcement of Christ's purity commands and are vying for control over the culture? In America, that's us. If we're going to have any meaningful relationship with the LGBT community, we'd better start standing up against those Pharisaical forces in our own faith and defending gays and lesbians against the oppression of an impersonal, inhuman religion.

You know who I'm talking about, fellow Christians. Please, stop ignoring the 400-pound homophobic elephant in the room: those who hide behind Biblical doctrine to justify his or her repulsion and hate. They're everywhere among us, from the guy who screams at gays from a bullhorn on my campus to your fourteen year-old son who tells you to run over a kid in front of your car because he is, and I quote, "such a queer." (Yes, that really happened.) We already know this is wrong. So why don't we say so and take a strong stand against it? What are we afraid of?

Secondly, we need to stop sacrificing human beings as collateral damage to our principles, for that was another shortcoming of the Pharisees. These religious leaders weren't monsters; they just had tragically misplaced priorities. Think back to the story of the Good Samaritan: the men who left the beaten, robbed man on the side of the road to die were, at least in part, more afraid of getting blood on their hands and being ritually unclean than saving a mugging victim abandoned in the middle of nowhere. It took a Samaritan who didn't give a crap about all the blood and dirt to look past those principles and see the human being lying beneath.

Conservative Christians, I have realized, do that exact thing all the time. I see wonderful, caring Christians stepping back from doing the right thing for the LGBT community because they are afraid of "damaging their witness" or look like they are "condoning" homosexuality. Nobody wants to be collateral damage to our principles, my friends. "If they think beating and killing us for that targeting us for being gay is wrong," my gay and lesbian friends tell me, "why don't they do something about it?" Say what you will of the general political bent of the LGBT community, but they're living out an important Christian tenet in their own way: if you know what the right thing is, you don't just say it-- you do it. If you're still confused, see Matthew 25 and the Letter of James.

2. No, really, it's just you.

When I walk down "Religion Row," the street on my campus where the denominational houses are all located, I often see Sal hard at work. He's dedicated himself to "saving the heathens" here on our campus who walk past him to the cafeteria. For the last four to five years, this has mostly consisted of tract pushing and the occasional street sermon on the four spiritual laws at the top of his lungs. Now, I know deep down that Sal means well-- somehow-- but his idea of reaching the "lost" souls on campus is to yell at every girl wearing a short skirt or guy with a rainbow flag that they're going to hell. Here's the usual process I've seen, not just with Sal, but also in my time in the SBC and among several denominations:

No, this isn't Sal. Sal has way more tact.

Evangelist accosts a random "heathen" the street.
Evangelist hands said "heathen" a tract and/or starts sharing the gospel.
Said "heathen" gets in their face.
When the dust clears and the "heathen" stalks off, insulted, the evangelist says to him/herself, "It's not really me they reject, it's God."

No, Sal, it's not always God that's got them steamed. It's just you.

Now, I imagine that, were I to posit this idea to Sal, he'd reel off Luke 10:18 to me: " He that heareth you heareth me; and he that despiseth you despiseth me; and he that despiseth me despiseth him that sent me." I was taught this as a young evangelical, too, but the context is interesting. Jesus starts this speech with a long injunction about proper behavior to his disciples-- things like, don't be a parasite, don't travel in comfort, and don't be a jerk when you enter someone's house-- before he sends them off with that reassurance ringing in their ears. Don't presume to speak for God unless you act like his disciple.

Rather, we need to be sensitive to the difference between the message and the messenger, and my friends' own complicated responses to street preachers seem to reflect that. When the traveling shock evangelists show up (pictured above), usually the atheists (who are fewer than you'd think) just use it to reaffirm why they reject the idea of a deity, and many others just tune out the noise. But those with spiritual leanings often feel mad, confused or hurt-- not just for the disrespect to themselves, but also for the disrespect they feel is being shown to God by misrepresenting who He is. To put this in equally preachy terms: whoever says that they are in the light and hates their brother is still in darkness. It's the fastest way to spot a phony.

You would not believe the amount of respect and admiration for God I have seen in some of my conversations with lesbian and gay people, dwelling side-by-side with their extreme contempt for the Pat Robertsons of the world. We need to realize (and celebrate) that non-straight people often are very spiritual, just like everybody else, and they have a keen idea of who Jesus is supposed to be because they've experienced firsthand who He isn't. The reality is that we're letting people with no mercy or compassion rail at them with a bottom-tier theological approach to them as human beings and a flattened-out caricature of God. Their response is not necessarily to reject God; rather, they reject that we have any idea what the hell we're talking about.

3. Preach with your ears, not with your mouth.

A common apologetical argument I've heard about the early disciples has to do with their martyrdom. James, for instance, was thrown from the top of the biggest building in Jerusalem. If their witness to the power of Christ was just a lie they made up, my pastors have told me, then how come maintaining that lie was more important to them than death? If James, looking down toward the ground over the edge of the temple, knew deep down that he was just a fraud... don't you think he'd recant before they shoved him over the edge?

I heard that same story, with a twist, from a friend last year. "Look," he said after sharing his coming out story, "I've been disowned by my parents, thrown out of my church, lost all my friends, and tormented in high school. We're constantly under threat of harassment and violence, and some of us have even been murdered just for being gay. We don't even get the same rights as everyone else. If being gay were my decision, don't you think I'd have chosen something easier at this point?" Several others chuckled in agreement. "Yeah," he finished, "being born this way is the only explanation I have for why I still put up with this $#!&." When he told me that story, it rang more true than the old apologetic because that story also came with a piece of my friend attached. And this is what I have learned:

Stories-- the good ones, at least-- are people. How you listen is also how you treat that person.

Listeners-- the good ones, at least-- can transform the storyteller just as much as the teller transforms them. You may persuade some with a good argument, but the power to change lives comes first from the ears.

A speaker can do little good unless he or she is also willing to let the story change them, too.

Stories are the most powerful tool of language we have. When Jesus wanted to really get people's attention, he told stories. The lives of the confessors and martyrs tell a story, too. The word "martyr" is Greek, and it literally means a "witness" to something. And when we talk of "witnessing," we're telling the things we have seen and learned (and, often, suffered) in the storyteller's voice-- just like my friend had done that night over dinner.

As powerful as telling such stories are, the most powerful part of a story lies in the relationship it creates between teller and listener, that dynamic, visceral bond that comes in the connection-- for when you exchange stories, you now carry a bit of each other. That's what so many of my fellow Christians are missing-- the relationship of story. They want to share their story impersonally, without the messy attachments that come with that kind of relationship, and that's not really possible.

If there's something that the LGBT community has perfected among themselves, it's the art of this mutual witness. At the outreach center, sometimes the bonding process with new friends includes sharing each others' witness to the injustice of the world, and what surprises me is that their stories are almost indistinguishable from the confessor's tales and martyrdom stories I read as a medievalist. Their stories tell about how hard it is to remain true to themselves and bear witness to a world which rejects them utterly. You should see the way they listen to each other, fellow Christians-- you'd think they were a church small group swapping testimonies, and in a way, they are. They need to hear these stories as much as they need to tell them, to bind each other's wounds with the knowledge that someone else out there gets it and shares the burden with them.

They taught me that hearing their stories changes you. Once you have another person's story, you have a responsibility towards them because a tiny piece of their own humanity is now embedded inside yours. Naturally, that kind of vulnerability is a bit intimidating, and not every die-hard missionary even wants to bear that kind of responsibility. And yet, to me, this is where radical empathy starts, from that little seed of exchanged humanity-- the self you can see inside the other, and the other you can see inside yourself. If you truly want to change lives, my fellow Christians, start with your own, and start with your ears. Let them change your own life in ways you'd never expect. Break bread: share stories together, and change the world.

After all, that is the same lesson we learn from The Laramie Project, isn't it? Listening to a person's story changes you-- and them.

Head, meet desk. Repeat.

2011-10-04T17:53:00.000-04:00

It seems that now is not an auspicious time for me to start TLP blogging again. A friend of mine sent me this link a little while ago, and while it's not in Appalachia, it's close enough to my home to make me queasy. So: now that it appears that pastors are using deacons as bouncers to rough up gay family members, what is the appropriate, Christian response? Anybody?

Naturally, it's a little early to know for sure what's going on, and the truth will come out in time. I just know of one pastor that needs to be booted from his church.

October's Aphorism of the Month, courtesy of Nothing Profound

2011-10-04T07:00:00.000-04:00

So, it's October once again, and with it has come the first cold weather here in Appalachia, the changing of the leaves, and the end of our midterm cycle.

For me, though, it's also a bittersweet month. It makes me think of Laramie thirteen years ago. It makes me homesick, and it makes me think of Matt. With all this in mind, I picked this aphorism to guide the blog for this month, as always, courtesy of Aphorism of the Day:

Leaves, while they live, hang together; 
dying, they fall one by one.

Thanks again, Marty, for giving us something to ponder.

I'm back!

2011-10-02T20:29:00.000-04:00

Finally!
With the conclusion of my final graduate exam just a short while ago, I am officially less busy than I've been recently.

I also passed my oral exam! I am officially ABD (all but dissertation,) and I have been declared competent enough in my field to write 200 pages of nonsense. Something about Anglo-Saxon geographic and spiritual identity, or something.

The bad news is that I now have to write a dissertation proposal in the next three weeks, so I'm not out of the woods yet. But I do have time to reconnect with you all in TLP-cyberspace and start blogging again.

So: in order to start my return off with a "bang," I want to highlight an important new source for research on The Laramie Project for play productions and researchers, but this time it's not a what-- rather, she's a whom. I'd like to introduce you all to Susan Burke, who started this past summer at the Shepard Foundation as their new Laramie Project Specialist. Here's a little blurb from her profile on the Foundation's website:

Susan attended the Graduate Acting Program at the Goodman School of Drama in Chicago (now The Theatre School at DePaul), and has strong backgrounds in theatre, journalism and Matthew’s story. At the time of Matthew Shepard’s murder, his funeral, and the trials of his killers, she was the Executive Producer/Senior Anchor for the evening news at KTWO Television. Based in Casper, KTWO-TV was the statewide NBC affiliate, and it was Ms. Burk’s primary responsibility to arrange and implement coverage for all of these events, including community reaction and response. She produced a series on the making of The Laramie Project film that won the top news awards from both the Wyoming Associated Press and the Wyoming Association of Broadcasters that year. She is based in Casper, Wyo.

Wow: Susan is a woman of many talents who was also personally involved in Matthew Shepard's story. Her job is to make intersect with the Laramie Project theatrical community and make your life easier. And, plus, she's a wonder person to talk with. She and I have communicated with each other a little bit by email and I have found her to be an engaging and upbeat person with a lot of great knowledge. I would completely endorse her as a "must see" source for TLP for a wide range of questions.

If you're interested, take a look here at the Shepard Foundation's website, and contact the organization for more information on the help which Susan Burke can provide.

It's good to be back. And it's even better to be back with a new supporter/research buddy to share the same adventure with!

~~Jackrabbit

Upcoming "Projects": Camarillo, CA, 2012

2011-09-09T19:15:00.000-04:00

The first director to take me up on posting comes from Camarillo, CA, where a new production of TLP is in its earliest stages. Jolyn Johnson's production isn't until April 2012, but it sounds like a little help from the larger community would be useful:

I'm currently studying all I can about TLP and Laramie itself. I'm directing the show at Camarillo Skyway Playhouse and auditions are in January, but I wanted to get the word out early. Recently, I attended our county's PRIDE Festival to spread the news to the LGBT community. I called and spoke with a member of Tectonic Theater as well as contacting the Matthew Shepard Foundation for resources.

I still feel like I'm not quite there yet, that I haven't found the truth of Laramie. I want to know all about these people and this town, about the hard times and the hope. If anyone has information they could pass to me since I sadly lost my dramaturg, it would be greatly appreciated! Photos, stories of the *people*, anything to show my rather conservative community what really happened in Laramie.Our show goes up April 13-May 13, 2012. I'm excited and honored to be the director of TLP; I only hope that I can do it justice.

Good luck moving forward, Jolyn, and I hope to hear about your progress as the play moves into full production.

Calling all Theater companies!

2011-09-07T22:56:00.000-04:00

Oh, for the time to blog again!

I ask you to forgive the long, long pause in the progress of "Down the Rabbit-Hole" recently. Like most PhD students, at set times in my life cycle I tend to hibernate in dark, gloomy caves (read: libraries) and only come out for fresh air and coffee. Now is one of those times.

With only one comprehensive exam standing between me and the much-coveted "All But Dissertation" status, I have been hunched over the books for the last two months trying to cram as much random crud about medieval geography in my head as possible. The process is much like trying to cram clowns into a Shriner's car, and just as messy. The exam is in about two weeks. I ask for prayers for stamina now that I've been forced onto a caffeine-free diet.

In the meantime, it pains me to see this blog lying fallow when I know that there are dozens of TLP productions getting started right this semester. Right now dramaturges, directors, designers and actors are asking hard questions about how to stage this play, and why. There are actors starting to feel the serious emotional demands of their roles. Wouldn't you like a place to talk about it and to see how others are dealing with the same issues?

Since I don't have time to write until my Prospectus is done, I'd love to hear from others about their current and former TLP experiences from any part of the production process! If nothing else, tell me about your production and I'll put up a post to advertise it. If you want to bare your dramaturgical soul about how much you love Brecht's "Street Scene," I want to hear it.

All interested parties can contact me at jackrabbit.blog@gmail.com and I'll be delighted to post them. Take care, y'all! Drink some coffee for me.

September's Aphorism of the Month, courtesy of Nothing Profound

2011-09-07T19:00:00.000-04:00

Although it comes a little late in the month (yet again), here is this month's aphorism to guide our musings, courtesy of Out of Context :

Thought should be less profound and more human.

Thanks once again for a great spot to start our musings for this month, Marty!

June's Aphorism of the Month

2011-06-10T21:55:00.000-04:00

Although it comes a little late in the month this time, here is this month's aphorism to guide our musings, courtesy of Aphorism of the Day:

Ideas stand in the corner and laugh while we fight over them.

Thanks once again for a great spot to start our musings for this month, Marty!

Radio Silence

2011-06-10T21:42:00.000-04:00

So, as it's probably obvious to everybody, I sort of dropped off the planet for a little while after my second Durham trip, and the reason is health related. For most people, summer brings thoughts of vacations, gardening, swimming pools and barbecuing; for me, however, it brings swollen joints, sinus problems and an irresistible desire to sleep all day. I've spent the last few weeks in and out of doctor's offices getting things ready to start a new medicinal treatment, which so far has only given me some freaking surreal dreams and zero appetite. I guess we'll see how I'm feeling sometime around September and go from there. (Stupid malaria drugs.)

In the meantime, a friend has dragged me out to tai chi classes to help stretch out the joint problems, which totally makes me feel like a fifty-something granola addict. On the other hand, it works, so maybe I shouldn't poke fun at it anymore. But I still feel feel like giggling whenever we get to "Back up To Ward Off Monkeys" our tai chi set.

So, in the meantime I've been doing a lot of reading for my upcoming orals coming around sometime in September. The good news is that my husband Badger will be graduating with his doctorate at the end of the summer, so one of us should be bringing in a decent income soon.

The sad news, however, is that one of my colleagues who graduated with her PhD when I started in 2006 died suddenly this weekend in an accident. She was a medievalist like me, and her family is from the northern part of North Dakota-- from "my people," so to speak, as my family also has strong ND ties. Her name was Anita and the memorial is Sunday, so any prayers for her family would be appreciated.

Well, as I type this, I'm avoiding reading Macrobius' Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, so I'll have to cut this short. I'll be back again soon to start the series of commentaries I promised to make much earlier...

~~Jackrabbit

May's Aphorism of the Month

2011-05-08T23:06:00.000-04:00

In keeping with my new monthly posting ritual, I have chosen the following aphorism for the month of May:

Peace is in the house of the enemy where one has been forbidden to go.

As always, these little maxims of wisdom are courtesy of fellow Blogpost blogger Nothing Profound, from his most excellent Aphorism of the Day site. If you like an unusual mix of both the whimsical and the deeply profound, you owe it to yourself to check out his daily bits of wisdom. Thanks, Marty!

Jackrabbit goes to Duke: the sequel!

2011-05-03T22:25:00.000-04:00

This last Thursday and Friday I was back in Durham, NC to talk to the cast of Duke University's production of The Laramie Project, mostly to talk about the production and spend some time with whomever had the time to stop by and chat with me the Friday before finals began. I had a couple of great conversations with four of the cast members, had an opportunity to explore a tiny bit of Duke's enormous campus, and even attend a get-together at Duke's LGBT resource center (which is a-MA-zing!!!) while I was there. Then, after I had to run, I ran to Trader Joe's for some groceries (and some Two-buck Chuck), promptly locked my keys and wallet in my trunk, and then had a nice, quiet time watching the sun set over a strip mall as I sat on the trunk of my car waiting for the locksmith to show up. After a lazy drive back to my home in Appalachia, I slept till eleven the next day.

So, how was my trip overall? Well, it was great, really.

Now that I've had a chance to talk to actually run by some of my thoughts on the production past the cast and ask a few questions, I'm going to be writing a series of posts on my first viewing of TLP since the reading of Ten Years Later back in 2009. I'd especially like to take some time to discuss how this play can look in different theater configurations and how an over-arching philosophy driving a production can do wonders for a performance. Thanks so much, each of you, for keeping me company and sharing a little piece of your lives with me last week, and I can't wait to share the fruits of that trip with you shortly.

But there's one catch: I need your help on this one, everybody. Human truth is ultimately found, I believe, in dialogue, and since you know your personal experiences better than I do, I would absolutely love your feedback-- particularly because I've only really had a chance to really talk with about 20% of you all, and all your voices count. By all means, feel free to comment, correct, disagree, or whatever you like as we go along!

And, as always, thanks to Jules Odendahl-James and the cast and crew of TLP for letting me in on the fun. I can't wait to read your final blog entries.

--Jackrabbit

Back to Durham

2011-04-28T21:19:00.003-04:00

UPDATED UPDATE: Okay, so it seems that the coffee shop is back open again. Whee. I'll see you inside, according to the original plan. Sorry for the confusion!

* * *

UPDATE: I told everyone I'd be around from 1-3 at the library, but it seems that the pavillion where the coffee shop's at will be closed for a private gig until 1:30. Check for me just around the corner past the pop-up anatomy book display! (wait, that sounds like something I didn't, I mean... whatever. Just look past the "Animated Anatomies" exhibit.)

Hey all,

Jackrabbit is back in Durham, NC! I'm taking a second trip to visit the cast and crew of the Duke University production of The Laramie Project. My hope is that I can have an extended chat with anybody who worked in the production and would like to chat about their experiences. So, you know who you are, cast and crew: come find me! Your wonderful dramaturg, Jules Odenahl-James, can fill you in on the wheres and whens. The more people who show up, the more interesting the conversation will be.

Just so everyone else knows, my goal from all this will be to write a series of posts in the next month or two detailing the performance, its interpretive decisions, and what kinds of questions it raises. Due to their unique take on the text and their creative use of space, there's a lot we can discuss and consider-- and I feel like the cast and crew of this production have a lot of wisdom to share about the powers of TLP.

I hope you all look forward to the fruit of this conversation as much as I do. See you soon!

Blogging in the Dark

2011-04-26T15:06:00.000-04:00

Last night, I was sitting in the final LGBTA meeting on our campus, and just as we were about to finish up, the tiny, windowless conference room we were in went completely black. Everybody in the room screamed like little girls, and then the cell phones came out to give us enough light to find the door. When we looked out to the full-length windows in the foyer of our Student Union, the entire world was the same color of angry gray. It was raining so hard that we couldn't see the trees planted just twenty feet or so past the windows, and the wind was whipping all that angry rain around, 'round in eddies like a tornado.

Then it just... stopped. The sun came out, the rain still fell, and we all walked outside to find the entire campus covered in plant debris. Just down the street, a Dodge Charger had an entire tree sitting on its trunk. Fortunately the driver was okay, but all of downtown and areas west of campus was a litter of downed trees and fallen power lines. Around the English department, only a few of the old, seasoned trees are still standing. In one spot, a green ash tree was completely uprooted and took out an entire magnolia tree. The little spot where the touchy-feely creative writing classes like to have lectures is buried under three-odd tons of raw lumber.

We have power on campus, but everything's still dark back home, and I'm starting to fear for my deep freeze-- specifically, the three and a half gallons of soup stock I froze this weekend. In the meantime, I'm living on campus so I'm not tempted to open my refrigerator and I don't have to use glow sticks to navigate my own bathroom.

So, for your enjoyment, and while we're waiting for *another* storm cell to hit us, here are a few pictures of the mayhem! Here's what was left of an intersection a block from our University Center:

Here's a picture of the Dodge Charger with a tree on top of it. The falling tree took out most of the intersection lights as well. That gray thing in the street is the top of a street light:

And it looks like more is on the way. What fun. If you wouldn't mind praying for safety and a lack of downed power lines, I'm sure we could use it...

A Little Piece of Laramie

2011-04-20T12:48:00.000-04:00

So: I would just like to announce for the world that, not only did I see another performance of The Laramie Project, my first since 2006, I didn't have a total mental breakdown this time. As a matter of fact, it was great. It seems that a year and a half of blogging about TLP is doing me some good: just maybe, I'm starting to heal. Perhaps the ghost has gone and I'm no longer haunted. It felt so good to have such a normal, healthy interaction with this play. Everything's perfectly normal.

I still cried a little, though.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.

In a lot of ways, I think that I liked the overall vision and creative performance of this crew even more than Tectonic Theater's 2000 run of the play, and there are a lot of reasons for that. The way that this company adapted and creatively used their lab theater space allowed for a much more dynamic performance than Tectonic had done. A lot of that is the difference between working in a lab space with creative arrangements and performing in huge, fixed-space theater halls on tour, but even more important was the kind of interaction with the audience and willingness to doubt their text that the Duke performance brought into the theatric space. But I'll get more into that later.

And so, thank you, Duke cast and crew, for giving me a little piece of Laramie re-created on your campus last week, and I hope the final three days' run were as magical for everyone else as Thursday was for me. Regardless of what you think about all the arguments of "artistic license" or "accuracy" or "documentary" aspects of theater, you embodied a genuine little bit of Laramie in your performance-- and not because of your heavy research or need to get every little detail exact to the place. Actually, it was quite the opposite. In your willingness to let yourselves and your characters bleed together in all the strange little ways you've been talking about on your student blog, you invoked Laramie and brought it to life on the stage. And it was awesome to watch, you all.

I never got a chance to explain to everybody about the little pieces of Laramie's collective memory I gave you after the performance. As you know, Matt passed away in the Sherman Hills subdivision in a barely developed area that, back then, was still full of prairie smells and and wind, the marks of its still-lingering isolation from the community. That area of Laramie's eastern edge is named for the Sherman Range, a geologic upthrust which pushes out coral-colored mountains out of the living earth. Sherman Hills sits right at the base of their western edge, and the Sherman Granite peeks out of the earth not too far after.

Sherman granite has a remarkable story. This rose-colored stone was first created deep in the geologic furnace 1.4 billion years ago, but about 70 million years ago, the upthrust which created the Laramie range forced the granite back into the sunlight. It is a brilliant pink from its high iron and feldspar content, highly crystalline, full of quartz, and it sparkles. The crushed granite on the shoulders of I-80 glitter in the early morning sunlight.

One would think that an igneous rock made by fire and cooled in the living earth would be impervious, but Sherman granite is more vulnerable than one would think. Over those millions of years, that granite has weathered under the winter's freezing melt, cracking it into blocks and eating its surface. The oldest and smallest boulders, isolated from the living rock, crack easily; sometimes their surface comes apart under the push of a strong finger. The weather has turned both Curt Gowdy State Park and Veedauwoo into castles of strangely broken granite:

As for your little pieces of the Sherman range, I didn't want to bring you a piece of a grisly tragedy, so your rocks come from a few miles east, from where people camp and hike in a place where the granite stands tall. I picked up pieces from one of two locations. Your rocks either came from here, deep within Kurt Gowdy where I collected my own little piece of Laramie:

This old boulder-field is deep within the park, full of lichen-covered chunks of granite, where trees and scrub twist deep in their cracks and break them apart. I'm pretty sure I picked up a bottle of rocks right at the base of that twisted old tree.

Or, perhaps they came from here, at my favorite star-watching spot not too far from the entrance to the park:

Laramie sparkles, doesn't it?
Thanks for bringing me a little piece of Laramie. I hope you also enjoy yours, and thank you.

--Jackrabbit

To Durham, To Durham we go...

2011-04-15T10:23:00.001-04:00

So, as of 5 AM this morning, I pulled back in my own driveway after a 24-hour road-trip bender to North Carolina to see the lab theater production of The Laramie Project and its student cast.

How was it? Well, it was... okay, I'm not going to lie. It was freakin' amazing.

I'm pretty dead-headed right now, but I'll detail a little more about my visit, chatting with the cast and crew, and eating at Hogwart's (yeah, the Great Hall looks like the movie set) while I was there.

Spencer, Naomi, Summer, Andy, Jeff, Jacob, and everybody I know I just forgot to mention by name: thanks for talking with me.

To the crew I only got to see in the shadows: Thank you for making it snow.

You all really are truly remarkable.

--Jackrabbit

My Six Whole Seconds As a Lesbian

2011-04-14T07:00:00.025-04:00

Okay, so over the last weekend I was at a conference in Atlanta to participate in a panel about my friend's dissertation project (because I was one of her data sources) and catch some panels on social justice and the composition classroom. Last Thursday, as two of my buddies and myself pulled into town, I was a weary, exhausted, nervous wreck. And I hadn't eaten since 11 AM. By the time I had checked in to our massive, creepy-looking hotel (I felt like I was standing inside a giant pink ribcage like in the end of Pinocchio) and actually found my room, I had missed every dinner invitation and was starving. Actually, I had low blood sugar and was about to become a dizzy pile of goo.

I didn't have a clue about where to find food, but as I was stumbling out the door to find something, anything to eat, I ran into my friend "Althea." She was just getting back from one of the dinner invites I had missed. She saw my glazed eyes and took over. "We have to get you some food fast," she said, and she grabbed me by the arm and marched me out the door.

Now, there's something you should know about both myself and "Althea." I grew up as an incurable tomboy and to this day don't really like dressing up "femmy," so to speak. My hair is currently an inch and a half long. Even on a day I dress up I can run the risk of "slipping under the gaydar," so to speak. On that night I was in travel clothes: blue jeans, hoodie, and my old, comfy Doc Marten's combat boots. "Althea," in contrast, is old Southern society and was raised to be a debutante. She was dressed in a sun dress and her "rhetorical pearls," as she likes to call them, and she'd had one mimosa too many at dinner. On our way into the nearest takeout place-- a pub, as it turned out-- Althea clung to my arm, just a little tipsy, and chatted amicably nonstop. I didn't think a darn thing about it, honestly. This is just who Althea is.

We ordered my food and walked out of the bar again, but this time I was getting really woozy from lack of food, so Althea grabbed my arm again to keep me upright. She put her head on my arm for a second. At that moment, I looked up at one of the patrons sitting at the bar. He was watching us. Then he gave me "the look." He glared at us like we weren't human.

At that exactly that same moment, Althea giggled and blurted out, "I love you, Jackrabbit!" That look on his face intensified to something like pure hate. Even though I was a bit dizzy, I immediately decided to "own" it. I gave him a nasty smile and tromped out the door with my "girlfriend" on my arm. I don't really know if Althea had noticed, and I sure wasn't going to tell her. Pearls or no pearls, she would have seriously gotten in his face for doing that.

I didn't have time to think about it until I had some food in my stomach and could finally think straight. On the one hand, it's not like people haven't "wondered" about the girl who likes to wear boots and pick up frogs before. I'm used to speculation, and I never cared; I know who I am, and I'm comfortable being the butch-y straight girl. What was different was the value judgment that came attached this time. That look was a complete rejection of me as a human being. It made me feel a little naked and totally pissed off. Nobody, nobody has the right to judge like that, I fumed.

And then I wondered what it would be like to feel that feeling for every single day of your life as an LGBT person. My mind was a little blown. It's one thing to know something mentally and something else entirely to feel it. And, in a weird way, I was kind of thankful that, for my six seconds, I had just a tiny taste of what it's like so I could better understand what my friends are facing.

A day later, I was slouched on a couch next to the pool with my frind "Pam," and I told her this same story while Althea was soaking her feet in the shallow end. "How on earth do you respond to something like that?" I asked her. "Pam," who's married and ex-roller derby, also knew what I was talking about; she got a wicked grin on her face.

"There's only way to respond, Jackrabbit," she told me. "You answer, back, 'I love you too, babe.' Then you waltz out the door." I cackled at the mental image.

Ya know what? She was right. I don't think it could have been any more appropriate than that.

The Airing of Grievances: A Retrospective

2011-04-10T20:17:00.000-04:00

I have thus laid my disappointments in The Laramie Project bare to the world and my personal Festivus has now ended; now, we need to take one step further than the regular Festivus airing. It's time for me to reflect upon these grievances to determine which disappointments are legitimate and which are just my plaintive whining about how Tectonic did not write the play I would have wanted them to write.

I wanted to get my grievances out in the open with this series, sure, but I also wanted them to turn into something more productive (and less pathetic) than using the Internet to whine like a tragically middle class emo kid with a YouTube channel. If I am to accomplish that, then I need to step back and look at these criticisms with a little more distance and a lot more insight. I need to be radically reflexive, which means that I have to rigorously examine my own motives and interior monologue just as rigorously as anybody else's-- and I have to be consciously aware of that process. If the Scripture calls us to work out our salvation with fear and trembling, then our scholarship should call us to work out our conclusions with fear and loathing. That means it's once more time to dig deep and think hard about fear, loathing, and The Laramie Project.

Why? If there is anything I've learned so far from this experience, it's this: Understand where your own perspective and prejudices come from, and act in awareness of that knowledge. Every time. The most inadequate (and inaccurate) scholarship sometimes comes from a failure to understand one's own personal tilt or experiences informing their scholarship in ways they don't intend. Some of the best scholarship comes from those who do. And, since I'm in the precarious position of being personally and emotionally tied to this event and the play it produced, I need to be extra aware of how that changes my perspective. Know thyself, Jackrabbit, and thou shalt improve thy scholarship. I think the world would be a better place if everybody followed that advice, and since I kind of turned Tectonic over my knee for it, I had better do it with myself, too.

So, which of these ways in which I feel like Tectonic has disappointed me are perhaps legit, and which are merely a difference of opinion or personal taste? That's a very important question to ask, so let's see how my summation of the Grievances holds up after the jump!

Grievance 1: Contributing to the Delinquency of Narrative

When I was in Laramie this past January, I was talking with an acquaintance about TLP when he asked me if I had seen the HBO movie of TLP. When I answered, he scrunched up his nose at me and protested, "They made us look like Texas." Considering that my acquaintance is originally from the Northeast and the tenor of our conversation before this point was fairly dispassionate, it interested me that he felt he needed to lodge this particular complaint. There is a disconnect between Laramie and this representation, he seemed to be saying to me.

I have heard enough responses from Laramie residents and close family to realize that these unintended consequences do in fact occur. Naturally, I can't prove that they occurred because of a "kidnapped narrative" or the like, but I do know what the few Laramie people I chatted with have told me. I have seen evidence of a rift between Laramie and Tectonic which takes extremely individualistic forms, and, while I can't declare the reason, I can only say that this disconnect seems to center on the Tectonic narrative-- the way it frames the Laramie story, or how it has simply made people feel vulnerable or uncomfortable.

To declare that The Laramie Project has spawned unintentional consequences in the community they interviewed should not be used to heap a lot of unnecessary guilt on Tectonic Theater; socially powerful theater, naturally, causes socially powerful consequences. They just might not be the consequences one was intending. My main disappointment with them stems from their (up to now) official stance of not acknowledging that fact.

This grievance is hereby UPHELD.Tectonic, I am so dissapoint. Sorry, guys, but I still love you.

Grievance 2: Failure to Maintain Self Loathing, part 1 and part 2

The more I think about this Grievance, the more I think of two things: 1) This was the most fun to write because it was gleefuly cathartic, and 2) it's a pretty dumb thing to hold against them. Of course this play focuses on what Tectonic (and, it seems, Kaufman) was really interested in. Just because I wanted some mention of the larger context, both with the cultural views of homosexuality and with the string of violent crimes within which Shepard was murdered doesn't mean they were obligated to satisfy my narrative palate. Come on Jackrabbit. Get your head back in the game and stop whining.

And so, having recognized my failure to be a reasonable critic on this count, is there nevertheless anything useful I can take away from writing through this charge? Other than reinforcing the fact that I have emotional issues with Tectonic Theater I just have to get over, it did lead to one really useful realization.

When it comes right down to it, my complaints about what did and did not make it into TLP are based on the fact that I don't think that Tectonic's version of events represents how Laramie experienced the tragedy. Granted. So, whose perspective does their telling of the story represent? Everyone else. The reason that this version of the telling doesn't encompass mine (and a lot of others') memory of the killing is because Tectonic's narrative follows how they experienced the crime. The national experience of the Shepard murder was simply not the same as it was in Laramie.

For instance, a lot of Laramie citizens learned of Matt's murder in the context of other murders: Kristin Lamb, Daphne Sulk, Cindy Dixon. That is the narrative that Loffreda's book mentions briefly, and it formed the framing narrative of Dr. Daniel Klein's recollection of the murder, too. In contrast, on the national level, Matt's death seemed to come out of nowhere, in a largely idyllic community still trying to live out the American Dream. The murder of Russell Henderson's mother never made much waves in national coverage and could be easily overlooked, while it was very much important in Laramie. The seeming nightmare wave of bizarre murder just kept on going.

The same goes with the focus on the religious narrative behind Matt's death. In the national media, everybody was talking about faith and LGBT identity. Focus on the Family had just debuted their ex-gay commercials which caused a national scuffle between the religious right and gay equality activists; the Defense of Marriage Act, the darling of many conservative religious groups, was making national headlines. Then, after Matt was found after his brutalization, many high-influence writers such as Kushner and Gore Vidal went on the attack against religious homophobia, and the religious media responded in kind. The national community first tried to make sense of Shepard's murder from within the framework of religious intolerance, and ultimately, that was the angle which Kaufman and Tectonic Theater decided to promote.

So the problem is not what did or did not make it into the play; the problem is whose experience of Matt's death the play claims to speak for. Perhaps that's part of the reason that this play connects with national audiences so well. For those who remember Matt's murder, it represents their percieved experience of the crime. For those who don't, it often represents the same forces that have marginalized gays and lesbians in their own experience.

Part of my reason for dismissing this Grievance has been digging into the secondary literature and realizing how much fear and loathing was in fact a part of the playwriting process-- just not the kind I would have expected. In Kaufman's American Theater writeup (which is fuller version of what became the Introduction to the Vintage edition) and realizing the amount of interpersonal angst and strife that eventually came of it. (That would have been a nice thing to keep in the Intro to TLP, IMHO, because it humanizes you all, Tectonic. I like seeing you as humans.)

This grievance is hereby DISMISSED by reason of complete unreasonability. All I have actually concluded is that this play is projected through Tectonic's point of view and not Laramie's. Y'all are off the hook.

Grievance 3, Laramie Is Not Our Town:  

By the time I got to the end of writing Grievance Three, I had a much better idea of why the realness of the Laramie landscape and the events of 1998-99 were so important for Tectonic, in spite of the fact that using real people and landscapes made everything a hell of a lot more complicated than it needed to be. If they hadn't placed Matthew's death on the map of America and within the fabric of our concrete, lived experience, this loosely Brechtian play would have lost much of its social bite. Its message would not have been delivered near so powerfully to the national, political stage.

So, it became more obvious to me that one could not have really anticipated or gotten around much of the negative social impact of this play without ruining its social potential altogether. And if you make me pick one over the other, I'm pretty sure I'd pick softening LGBT relations and curing social injustice over my personal angst. I'm mot sure that every Laramie person who was there would make the same choice. My brother Coyote, for instance, resents being on the losing end of that proposition: "I can totally see where this play has done a lot of good, but why did we have to be the ones to pay for it?"

However, we still have to deal with the theoretical framework of this play and whether or not it causes problems of its own. After over a year of puzzling through the criticism, I still agree with Tigner's point about the role of landscape and pastoral in this play, even if I would like to quibble with her over what it means for this story to be "true" just to make sure we're on the same page. When Tectonic brings this story "perhaps from afar what is already founded," and then, through the lens of their own perspective of the Shepard murder they "give it our own identity," the result isn't "Our Town" so much as it becomes "Their Town."

This grievance is hereby PARTIALLY UPHELD, but only on the charge of framing Laramie as the pastoral, geographic or ideological Other too much in the play's overall structure. This should therefore be regarded as simply a lesser charge as a part of Grievance 1. I guess that means I'm just a little bit disappointed.

Grievance 4, Trying Too Damn Hard:

As I discovered while thinking through this Grievance, "Trying too damn hard" isn't necessarily a bad thing. The main issue I have is with Kaufman's relentless pursuit of "the truth" of Matt's death. This tends to short-circuit, I'd argue, his claim that this is a town speaking through the shock of a nationally televised tragedy. THAT'S THE IMPORTANT PART. You can't really have it both ways; if you construct a play through the disparate, discursive voices of an entire community to speak for itself, making an absolute truth claim doesn't really make much sense. Sorry to show my humanities roots here, but when it comes to narrative study, I am firmly resolved that, since all knowledge comes through sensory experience, there is no clear, definable truth-- only individual stories of truth. The story and its context is the truth-- not what can be constructed out of them.

This grievance is therefore a SPLIT DECISION.It's simply my literary palate that is insisting on a more loose, baggy story rather than the heavily manicured one we got in TLP. However, I really do think that trying to force the disparate voices in The Laramie Project to specifically shore up "the facts" of the Shepard murders puts unnecessary strain on the dramatic form of The Laramie Project and seems to run amok when you get to 10 Years Later. Some criticisms of the Epilogue run this direction, too, so I might not be the only person to feel this way.

THE VERDICT: AMBIVALENCE

So, what are my conclusions from this excursion into my personal grudges against Tectonic Theater?

We cannot, and must not, ignore the fact that this is a story told through Tectonic's perspective, no matter how seductive the real voices of Laramie residents and the concept of "documentary" might be with this play.
Tectonic has to consider the likelihood that their contribution to the national discourse on sexuality has come at a cost to the local identity of Laramie. Their presentation of their take on Laramie's story to the world will naturally cause some resistance and push-back from Laramie proper.
Kaufman's model of traveling "out there" to bring a story "back here" is problematic because it has unintended consequences for the town "out there." It turns Laramie into a pastoral space whose otherness to urban America makes it a foil, rather than merely a compelling story about "all of us." In this I have to agree with Tigner. In an ethnographic sense, it also runs the danger of making the researcher's position in the community a hegemonic one, something that Tectonic strove to avoid.
Geographic/cultural and ideological space don't always overlap nicely, especially when that ideological space doesn't arise just from within the culture.
Kaufman's vision for TLP is a little at cross-purposes with itself because, on the one hand, the play is a multi-vocal attempt to capture the thoughts of an entire community and inspire dialogue, but on the other hand, he seems obsessed with reinforcing "the facts" of the Shepard case with those voices. The only people who know what really happened to Shepard are McKinney and Henderson-- and, as I have argued before, I think they've lost the ability to tell us. (This point makes a hell of a lot more sense if you view TLP through the Epilogue from 2009, where Kaufman feels the need to "clarify the facts" through O'Malley's testimony. )
Lastly, and most importantly (for me at least), none of my upheld grievances have anything to do with Tectonic being horrible people or agenda-driven politicals. Charges 1 and 3, specifically, deal with the play's after-effects; they don't deal with anything having to do with personal motives or hidden agendas. They have to do with Tectonic Theater being composed of human beings.

And so, I hereby bring the Airing of Grievances to an ambivalent closing, just as they had started. Hooray!

Scholarship: First-hand Accounts of the Shepard Tragedy

2011-04-05T07:00:00.002-04:00

Now that I've had free time to start back up on bibliographic snooping, I'm starting to find a lot of personal responses to Shepard's death from Laramie witnesses, but what surprised me is to see where these personal experiences are popping up: in trade journals. It seems that a lot of people in Laramie and Fort Collins who were involved somehow with the Shepard attack looked introspectively at how they personally and their professions were forced to respond. Douglas Black, for instance, bore the nation's brutal outrage and abuse for months afterward as a university spokesperson in CSU; Dr. Klein felt his professional role seep deeply into his personal life and his family's connections to the killing.

The exception, of course, is Walt Boulden's recollection of Matt Shepard as a personal friend, which is purely a personal recollection of Matt and was published in Journal of Gay and Lesbian Social Services a year after TLP opened in Denver. He recalls a strawberry hunting expedition on Casper Mountain with Matt that really humanizes Shepard-- and Walt Boulden, come to think of it. It's worth a read if you can get hold of it.

In any case, enjoy!

Black, Douglas. "Straw Men: An Exercise in Virtual Unreality." American Scholar 69.2 (2000): 93-100.

As some of you may know, Colorado State University's homecoming parade coincided with Matt Shepard's brief stay before his death at the Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins. At some point in the parade, which had a "Wizard of Oz" theme, one float erected a straw man in the truck with the phrase "I'm Gay" spray-painted on its face and "up my ass" on its back. That was the second attack on Shepard, only this time in the form of a cruel joke, playing out not far from where Matt was struggling to survive. That stunt cost one Greek organization its charter, and another nearly suffered the same fate.

Douglas Black worked at CSU in the President's office as a staff member, and he bore the impossible burden of the nation's outrage; almost immediately, Black, as the mouthpiece for the university on this incident, became the focus of national abuse. Outrage against the float mutated into personal insults and threats to him personally, and the incident left Black feeling personally scarred in much the same way as his childhood bullying had; he also notes, "The most savage attackers were those claiming to speak for tolerance." His perspective on the way the story traveled, how the university responded, first-hand look at how Cyberspace and messaging technology fueled the outrage and fueled vigilantism and abuse is extremely personal and interesting. We may be used to this in our Facebook world and Twitterverse, but it was still all new in 1998. Also, the writing is really, really good. You can tell what Douglas Black does for a living.

Boulden, Walt. "A Tribute to Matthew Shepard." Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services 13.1(2001): 7-14.

If you want a perspective of Matt Shepard that doesn't involve the typical platitudes but is nevertheless entirely positive, Walt Boulden's tribute in Journal of Gay and Lesbian Services really is rather touching. Boulden seems to feel he is charged with the impossible task of rescuing Matt's memory from the grave, which is an unfair burden to take on, really; what he eventually produces, however, makes Matt feel more human to me than anything else I've had time to read so far.

Boulden knew Shepard in Casper and remained friends with him at UW. There's one particular story of Matt he shares which at first seems a quirky choice-- a tale of hunting for wild strawberries on Casper Mountain-- that offers the reader a tantalizing glimpse into Matt Shepard's personality.

If you can't find the article, this also serves as the introduction to the book From Hate Crime to Human Rights: A Tribute to Matthew Shepard. Routledge, 2001.

Hurst, James C. "The Matthew Shepard Tragedy: Management of a Crisis." About Campus 4.3 (1999): 5-11.

This is the most impersonal recollection of the ones I've read, but that's due especially to the kind of article Hurst is writing. James Hurst was the VP of student affairs at UW when Matthew Shepard was murdered. The article explains the university's actions in trying to deal with the sudden crisis on campus it caused, and he details especially what the university president, student organizations, and administration did in the days following the beating to deal proactively with the incident. This is a great article if you want a backstage peek at how the LGBTA, the university, and the community responded to the hate crime.
(Oh, and he also mentions that initial reports from the police mention the possibility that the murder was a robbery and/or a hate crime. Simultaneous narratives. Just sayin'. )

Klein, Daniel S. "What Happened in Laramie." Annals of Internal Medicine 130.3 (1999): 235-236.

Daniel Klein is an MD in Laramie and was the county health officer when Matthew Shepard was beaten, and his response to the tragedy is both as a Laramie community member and as a concerned doctor. His narrative of how his family experienced the crisis shows just how close this community really is, relationally speaking. Even though he was not the attending physician in the ER that night, his position brought him in the orbit of the murderers, their acquaintances and family, the media, the victim, and the emergency workers who attended to him. As a personal/professional response to Matt's murder, he gives a good representation of one eyewitness perspective of the Shepard tragedy. Note especially how the narratives of two previous murders in Laramie, the landscape, and community play in his telling.

Aphorism of the Month, Courtesy of Nothing Profound

2011-04-03T17:19:00.001-04:00

Spring is here, a new month has arrived, and in honor of thinking too hard and diving into introspection I am going to initiate a new tradition: My Favorite Aphorism for the month. These come from "Aphorism of the Day," run by a curious philosopher and lover of experience who calls himself Nothing Profound. One eye sees things through Nietzsche, the other sees the world through Whitman, all written in the style of Solomon and the insight of... himself. Marty's an interesting enough guy without all the philosophical trappings.

So, without further ado, here is the aphorism which will be my secular lectio for the month:

The power to judge becomes a substitute for the power to love.

Personally? I like it. Feel free to discuss among yourselves.

Thanks, Marty!

Laramie In Picures: UW by Snowlight

2011-04-01T07:00:00.001-04:00

The problem with visualizing the UW campus from most promo photos is that they don't show what it looks like for most of the school year-- that is, covered in snow. Up on the top of Laramie's sub-arctic plain, the snow comes early and lingers well past its time. As such, most students walk through Prexy's Pasture on the way to their classes when the ground is white rather than green, attended by the crunch of snow under boots rather than the smell of fresh-cut grass. The bewildering spring in Laramie usually comes rather late, and even during finals week, one can often find sunbathing undergraduates not too far from unmelted drifts in the sun-starved shadows.

But we Rocky Mountain types adapt to such conditions rather quickly; very little changes in our routines except the numbers of layers we wear on our way out the door. Most students who bike to class still do so in the winter, their knobby tires balanced perilously on the thick winter skin of ice glazed on the streets and walkways. Some of my favorite memories involve such tomfoolery as watching my husband-to-be play Frisbee with his buddy in the middle of the soccer field in the dead cold of January, and the year I married my Frisbee-toting trumpet player saw a freak snowstorm in the second week of June, which knocked down power lines and trees all over Laramie.

One of the things I really like about the UW campus now is the inclusion of some natural elements into the landscape, which soften the edges of the concrete in the summer, but in winter they add dimension to the endless folds of snow. As such, these boulders, trees and natural grasses make the most of Laramie's most populated season-- winter. I hope you enjoy the view!

The best view of the Student Union I could get, with a lot of that landscaping in the foreground.

North of Prexy's Pasture, looking back towards the Agriculture building and the College of Education (both obscured.)

Although I'd never want to try and ride a street bicycle on snow pack, it's not all that unusual in Laramie. Many students continue to bike through campus even in winter, even though it's impossible to keep the streets and walkways clear of ice and pack. My preferred transport was a mountain bike with very wide, knobby tires.

Some of that natural landscaping I was talking about. This is in front of the Cheney Center.

Oh, that cold, cold wind ripping off the top of the Classroom building that everyone knows so well! You get a sort of natural wind tunnel between the science buildings here sometimes.

This was one happy mutt, but his owner's fingers got a little cold after their game of fetch.

Links: Kaufman's take on "10 Years Later" in "American Theater"

2011-03-28T21:22:00.000-04:00

When studying The Laramie Project, usually the first starting point for studying the play are two articles written by Don Shewey and Moisés Kaufman published in American Theatre. With the premiere of 10 Years Later came yet another article from Kaufman about the project, again published in AT. Like his previous work, this article is also an expository work explaining the process of producing the play, from its first inception, changes to the process, and its final form as a worldwide Internet linkup premiere. I'm not entirely sure how helpful Kaufman's explanation is for explaining the whole process behind the creation of 10 Years Later in reality, but it is surely a great exploration of what Kaufman thought they were doing as they interviewed Laramie residents and former residents again, ten years after Matthew's murder. It makes his investments, beliefs and goals for the new epilogue very clear for the researcher.

One thing I found interesting is that Kaufman claims that this new play "deals with history" and how it's created, which is quite different from the first play's goal. That's fair enough, but he talks (again) about the emergence of the robbery narrative as if it started after the fact, an attempt to re-write history-- and as I have pointed out repeatedly from my little soapbox in this little corner of the Interwebs, the robbery narrative arose at the exact same time as the hate crime narrative. Oh well. He also calls his re-interviews with DeBree and Dave O'Malley as an attempt to "clarify the facts." That may be the most interesting comment I've heard Kaufman make in print so far.

Nevertheless, how and why someone chooses one narrative over another as "truth" is particularly interesting regardless-- not just for Laramie, but for Mr. Kaufman, Tectonic Theater, and myself as well. You can read the article online here through the Theatre Communications Group website.

Source:

Kaufman, Moisés. "Anatomy of an Experiment: When the Tectonic Team Returned to The Laramie Project, the Docudrama's Sequel Became a Collective Creation Seen and Heard 'Round the World." American Theatre Jul/Aug 2010. Web.

The Bibliography Upgrade is Complete!

2011-03-23T07:00:00.001-04:00

The updated bibliography lists are now available! You know, for all dozen or so of you currently studying TLP. But I hope it helps nonetheless...

After I had gathered a lot of things I wanted to add to my old bibliographic master-list on this blog, I made things easier on myself by dividing things up to make searching through it a little easier on the researcher.

When you now click on the Bibliography link, which is now just under the title bar at the top of the page, you will be directed to a page asking you to choose which page you want: literary/dramatic, or non-literary/dramatic sources. Things which are useful in multiple applications, however, appear on both lists.

With this also came an increase in useful material on both lists. If you have any questions, remember you can always email me at jackrabbit.blog@gmail.com and I'll help out as much as possible. I'll even ferret things out for you from my capacious Research I library if you need it.

Also, if there's something that should be on this list that currently isn't, please, by all means let me know! I'll happy to add it to the list.

The Airing of Grievances, Charge 4

2011-03-21T00:37:00.011-04:00

Being the Final Grievance (hooray!) Against Tectonic Theater

During this Festivus Season

I was having a conversation a while back with an acquaintance of mine who also studies The Laramie Project. Dr. F, as I'll call her, is this beautiful, crazy, wonderful, innovative rhetoric and composition professor in our department, and she's a theater fanatic on the side. Our chat eventually wandered over to Angels in America, a play which we both love, and she started talking about staging.

"One thing I've noticed about American theater right now," she told me, "is that most directors don't seem to trust their audiences as much as those abroad." I had to ask for clarification on what she meant. "Well, take the Central Park encounter in Angels," she responded. "When I was studying in London, I saw a production where the two actors in that liaison were on opposite sides of the stage. They just trusted the audience to make the connection about what's going on without having to stage the action with each other or even act it out. It made that moment of sex look as disconnected and lonely as it really was." Having seen the Laramie production of Angels, I could really see her point, where that sexual encounter was enacted on a platform between the actor playing Louis and Jed Schultz.

"Most of the plays I saw in London played fast and loose with the directing, which opened up the stage to all sorts of new possibilities," she continued. "But that meant that they had to lean on the audience to make the connective leap. I really haven't seen a lot of theater here in the States that is willing to trust their audiences quite like that."

Trusting the audience. Although I'm a little on the fence about her judgment of American theater, I've been mulling those words over for quite a while now. What's more, I think I'm starting to see a connection to that idea with some of the aesthetic differences I have with The Laramie Project. As I've been working through my "Airing of Grievances," I've started to notice a few patterns; sure, I have problems with the structure of the play and how the concept relates to Laramie as both a community and place, but there's something else here, too, that has more to do with the structure of the play itself.

I think that maybe 1) these people are incredible, brilliant, and talented writers with a clear interest in dramatic form, and 2) these form-driven dramatists are afraid to trust their audiences too much with the factually ambiguous story of Matt's murder. Perhaps, Tectonic wants to tell a story of cause/effect through Laramie's voices, but the narratives we have don't lend themselves to it, and the only way to get their voices to tell that cause/effect story is to push them that way. This problem of overworking, strangely, has an element of narrative and truth to it, too: Tectonic's willing to let narrative drive most of their play, so long it never gives any doubt about the forensic facts of the murder, of the cause and its effect. A fear about the fragility of forensic truth might be forcing them to heavily edit the narrative truth.

And so, I hereby submit my final charge against Tectonic Theater regarding their production of The Laramie Project and 10 Years Later, which I guess isn't really a bad thing at all:

#4: Trying Too Damn Hard

Maybe this is just a difference of aesthetic taste on my part, and on that note, failure to meet the needs of my literary palate shouldn't really be a grievance per se. Nevertheless, it's a concern I want to discuss.

Okay, so I know I keep wandering back to South Africa's apartheid past and the TRC whether it fits or not, but hey, it's the only analogue to narrative and determining truth I can comfortably speak about. So, here goes...

Even though the [Truth and Reconcilaton] report offers a good exposition of different concepts of truth, especially of factual truth and narrative truth and then of social or interactive truth, the distinction is not sustained. In arriving at findings, all is accepted as evidence, an ingredient of the factual truth. If we ignore the frame of our various dispositions through which evidence reaches us, we lose the context of the multiplicity of truth, both in dimension and in perspective. Truth, reconciliation and national unity can only be understood within the concept of multiple truths...

To pour history into a mould is to recreate the potential for conflict which our Constitution and politics since 1990 have largely removed. A shared understanding of our history requires an understanding of different perspectives, not the building of a new national myth. Presenting 'the truth' as a one-dimensional finding is a continuation of the old frame.

--Wynand Malan,
TRC South Africa Report Minority Position, sec. 27

TRC executive member Wynand Malan didn't win a lot of praise for writing this minority report on South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission's findings (actually, he was called callous and insensitive to the victims giving testimony), but regardless of whatever frame determines his own perspective on truth, he has a point. Experiential, narrative testimony treads an uncertain path alongside narrative truth, forensic truth, and myth, and many of us are uncomfortable with that concept.

Although Malan really wants for these kinds of truth to be easily separated and he criticizes the Commission for not maintaining that clean line between them, that's impossible; for they inhabit the same mnemonic space. In contrast, Tectonic seems more aware of this strange situation of memory-- that forensic truth in Matt's death is built, not as a part of objective reality, but from layers of different narrative truth which often contradict one another. In this sense, I might say that Tectonic has a leg up on Malan, who was struggling through these same issues as the Commission wrote its report.

What Malan realizes that Tectonic does not, however, is that when one "pour[s] history in a mould" to replace a previous, bad history, you're not understanding the truth or history or whatever you want to call it. You're just replacing one monologic narrative of history with another, and that fuels rather than defuses cultural tension. This is the question-- the motives and details of Shepard's murder-- that Tectonic seems the most anxious about: one story must displace the other rather than coexist; they must struggle in dialectic.

Why so much concern, Tectonic? I have a guess (which is probably wrong) but I believe that the social power of Tectonic's play-- what the TRC would call its social or interactive truth-- lies in laying bare the voices of a community trying to come to terms with an unthinkably horrific act of homophobic hate. Tectonic seems to think that a clear cause and effect-- Matt was killed specifically because he was gay-- is an essential backdrop for the conversation that follows. For that reason, the play never really lets us doubt for even a second that Matt's death occurred because he was gay. They allow doubt and angst of uncertainty charge the play in so many other places, but it cannot dwell here.

I really don't think that such a clear cause and effect is really necessary. The important thing is that, after Matt's murder, people start talking about homophobia and where it comes from, whether or not the "gay panic" defense, the robbery motive, or the hate crime angle are "really the truth." I feel like that most good audiences can make that connection without having to be spoon-fed the "right" answer.

So, that's where I think this all comes down to an issue of audience trust. Tectonic is willing to tell us in detail about what happened to Matt over the hours he was brutalized and abandoned, but they seem to be afraid of giving the impression that Matt's death could be anything but an out-and-out hate crime. They're afraid of letting the audience decide if if the Baptist Minister's callous dismissal of Matt Shepard is "the seed of violence." Tectonic Theater's editing choices trust the audience with a lot of difficult things, like synthesizing the disparate voices, dealing with multiple reactions to his murder, and even handling the raw-edged grief of his friends and family onstage. They want the audience to live in an ambiguous realm of multiple stories, but they seem much more afraid to do let the audience dwell in an ambiguous realm of facts.

Don't get me wrong-- this criticism comes as someone who doesn't doubt for even a moment that Matt's murder was a hate crime. And yet, I'm also someone who believes that the forensic truth behind the murder has been lost to memory.

If I'm going to say that a multi-narrated play representing an entire town through the voices of almost 70 people has been over-edited and monolithic, I sure as heck better put my money where my mouth is. For that reason I would like to walk you through two examples: the Fireside and the religious moments in Act 2. Let's start with the moments at the Fireside to give us a good place to start.

1. Modus operandi

MATT GALLOWAY: [...] And I remember thinking to myself that I'm not gonna ask them if they want another [beer], because obviously they just paid for a pitcher with dimes and quarters, I have a real good feeling they don't have any money.

ROMAINE PATTERSON: [...] They can say it was robbery... I don't buy it. Not even for an iota of a second.

MATT GALLOWAY: Then a few moments later I looked over and Aaron and Russell had been talking to Matthew Shepard.

KRISTIN PRICE: Aaron said that a guy walked up to him and said that he was gay, and wanted to get with Aaron and Russ [...] They wanted to teach him a lesson and not to come on to straight people.

MATT GALLOWAY: Okay, no. They stated that Matt approached them, that they came on to them. I absolutely, positively disbelieve and refute the statement one hundred percent [...] Bullshit. He never came on to me. Hello?!? He came on to them? I don't believe it [...]

ROMAINE PATTERSON: But Matthew was the kind of person... like, he would never not talk to someone for any reason [...]

PHIL LABRIE: Matt did feel lonely a lot of times. Me knowing that-- and knowing how gullible Mat could be... he would have walked right into it. (30-31)

In this passage you can see a pretty complicated tennis match going on in the middle of Matt Galloway's narrative of Matt's final hours. For some reason, his full testimony can't just stand alone as a firsthand account from the last person to see Matt alive; it has to be put into a different context, within a different story frame, so that the audience isn't misled about McKinney and Henderson's MO. He has to have a conversation with others to make it clear that both the robbery motive and the "gay panic" defense aren't true.

The first issue comes with Galloway's recollection of the murderers being broke, which you can see above. At this point, Tectonic breaks up Galloway's narrative to insert Romaine's testimony about Matt's generosity and her denial that the motive was robbery. Even though Matt Galloway is a trustworthy figure overall, Tectonic didn't want to let this statement go by unanswered, and so Romaine speaks here to fill in the gap. Was that even necessary? Maybe it was, or maybe not.

Next, look to Kristin Price's statements which immediately follow when Galloway notices the two suspects talking to Shepard. What were they talking about? Only McKinney and Henderson really know, of course; so, Kristin Price tells us what Arron told her-- that Shepard made sexual advances, and that they planned to rob him in response. Now Galloway gets to step in and refute Kristin's version of events: "They say that Matt approached them, that he came on to them. I absolutely, positively disbelieve the statement one hundred percent" (31). Galloway refutes both claims fairly handily, especially since Matt was the one sitting at the bar and they were the ones wandering around beforehand.

But if Galloway is right, why would Shepard even talk to them? And why would he leave the bar with them? The last two statements, from Matt's friends Romaine and Phil Labrie, answer the question for us: Shepard was too friendly for his own good. He was gullible. And whatever these two proposed, a sweet, clueless fellow like Matt Shepard "would have walked right into it." The end of the Moment comes when the DJ, Shadow, sees them leave with Matt and he claims, "I didn't figure them guys was gonna be like that."

What would have happened if these voices spoke on their own, without interrupting or refuting each other? Would the audience get the "wrong" idea? I don't know how to answer that. But the one thing we have to keep in mind is that, out of all these different narratives of what happened at the bar, none of them knows the truth. What we have are different stories, speculations based on different kinds of experiences. Matt Galloway was there, but he didn't hear what was going on. Romaine and Phil knew Matt Shepard extremely well, but they weren't there. Kristin Price heard it straight from Aaron McKinney's mouth, but neither she nor McKinney are trustworthy. In the face of this, Tectonic weaves their accounts together in such a way that discredits any motive that would suggest that Matt's murder wasn't a hate crime. What they don't do is allow these different perspectives combine to give us a glimpse at the truth. They edit these testimonies, vaguely like the TRC did, into a report.

So, how much does Tectonic's "history in a mould" change how an audience might read these lines? Let's try shuffling around some other voices to see what we might have gotten...

MATT GALLOWAY: [...] And I remember thinking to myself that I'm not gonna ask them if they want another [beer], because obviously they just paid for a pitcher with dimes and quarters, I have a real good feeling they don't have any money.

JEN: Aaron's done it before. They've both done it. I know one night they went to Cheyenne to go do it and they came back with probably three hundred dollars. I don't know if they ever chose like gay people as their particular targets before, but anyone that looked like they had a lot of money and that was you know, they could outnumber, or overpower, was fair game (60-61).

MATT GALLOWAY: Then a few moments later I looked over and Aaron and Russell had been talking to Matthew Shepard.

KRISTIN PRICE: Aaron said that a guy walked up to him and said that he was gay, and wanted to get with Aaron and Russ [...] And Aaron got aggravated with it and told him that he was straight and didn't want anything to do with him and then walked off. He said that is when he and Russell went to the bathroom and decided to pretend they were gay and get him in the truck and rob him. They wanted to teach him a lesson and not to come on to straight people.

Does the structure of these voices matter? Yes. That whole stupid, ugly rewriting I just did relies on the subtraction of a single voice and the addition of another. Now imagine that "moment" with some mention that Aaron McKinney was in trouble for robbing a KFC, and you'd have the hate crime deniers drooling all over themselves in excitement. My new, edited frame, however, is just as forced, just as misleading as what Tectonic did. Neither frame for these narratives can claim to be the truth, for truth comes only in considering multiple perspectives, not weeding them out.

As Wynand Malan had said before, "If we ignore the frame of our various dispositions through which evidence reaches us, we lose the context of the multiplicity of truth, both in dimension and in perspective." Tectonic has provided a very clear frame through which these stories reach the audience, and it's one which doesn't let the audience decide for themselves that, when you sift though all these perspectives, a homophobic man killed Matt because he was gay, and a friend of his helped.

If these voices were just allowed to talk on their own instead of talk back and refute, I now feel confident that the audience would still have the same revelatory and socially-charged response to The Laramie Project that they do now. Maybe, even, the play would have gotten less pushback for "forcing" a specific perspective on their viewers, as the haters have claimed. Perhaps, however, since I'm not a playwright myself, I just have too much faith in a playgoing audience to wrestle through these issues seriously after they walk out of the theater doors.

* * *

2. Seeds of Violence

For this example, I'd just like to give you a list of short moments leading up to Matthew Shepard's death in the hospital:

1. Two Queers and a Catholic Priest: Father Roger explains that homophobic and hateful language against gays and lesbians is "the seed of violence."
2. Christmas: Andrew Gomez and Aaron McKinney talk about why he murdered Matt Shepard over Christmas dinner-- in jail. McKinney says that Shepard came on to him.
3. Lifestyle: The Baptist Minister says he will work for McKinney's salvation, as Shepard is now beyond all help. He says that he hopes Shepard had a moment before death to repent of his "lifestyle."
4. That Night: Shepard's condition worsens, and he dies at the hospital.
5. Medical Update: Rulon Stacey reads the press announcement of Matt Shepard's death.
6. Magnitude: Stacey admits to "losing it" and bawling on live television; he then recounts receiving, among many e-mails of support, a very hostile message: "Do you cry on TV for all of your patients or just the faggots?" Stacey describes his shock at the message, noting, "I guess I didn't understand the magnitude with which some people hate."
7. H-O-P-E: Tectonic departs after their second visit, and Doc Connor says that Matthew wouldn't have wanted his killers to die.
(end of Act 2)

In The Laramie Project, most of the religious opinions in the play are intended to all stitch together for a simple point: to reinforce the idea that McKinney and Henderson's religious influence had a lot to play into their actions, and that those influences are the major religious traditions in the town. From Johnson's opening comments that Baptists and Mormons are "like jam on toast" to Father Roger's insistence that hateful words against gays are "the seed of violence," all these statements are carefully stitched together to come together to a single phone call where The Baptist Minister acknowledges his connection to one of the murderers and condemns Shepard in the same breath. This is something that Stephen Wangh noticed and commented on as well when he pondered Tectonic's focus on the religious narrative and the nature of forgiveness:

In the play, we hear [The Baptist Minister's] unsettling sentiments right after listening to Father Roger tell two theater company members that, in his opinion, calling homosexuals names is the seed of violence [Kaufman et al., 2001, p. 65]. So we understand that the Baptist minister’s homophobia is just such a seed of violence. The point is driven home in the last act when an antigay activist, the Reverend Fred Phelps, comes to picket and to preach outside the funeral of Matthew Shepard, carrying a sign that reads God Hates Fags. (Wangh 2005, p. 13).

Not surprisingly, I tend to agree with Wangh. While it is very neatly done, and certainly the sign of some amazingly well-scripted work, it's not exactly letting each person's narrative speak alongside one another. To reiterate, we have to be aware of the "frame of our various dispositions through which evidence reaches us."

The trajectory of these voices runs as follows: we start Act 2 with Matt Shepard in the hospital. At the point of the "Two Queers" moment, Tectonic uses Father Roger's conversation to set a clear cause and effect: hateful speech against the LGBT community is a "seed of violence" and leads to real violence later. We then see Gomez and McKinney sharing a few "seeds of violence" over Christmas dinner as they talk crudely about Aaron's victim. Their homophobia comes out over a meal on a Christian holiday. We see a clear, but coincidental, connection between faith and violence in this moment. But we don't know one very important thing: where did he learn it from?

The next moment, with the Baptist Minister, answers that question for us-- McKinney was a visitor to the church, and his girlfriend was a member. Then we hear similar statements from McKinney's "pastor," so we are led, showing the legacy of this seed of violence from minister to congregant. We immediately switch to the moment of Matthew's death, and more seeds of violence spewed at Rulon Stacey afterward. The seed of violence and the end result of that violence follow in very quick succession; we see the extreme damage that violence does when Shepard dies, and we see those same seeds of violence planted again with the anonymous email. The audience sees a clear cause and effect.

That cause and effect is on a theatric level, but is there really? Let's put these moments back in their original contexts and consider their individual circumstances. Father Roger's warning about the "seeds of violence" is originally directed at Tectonic Theater, not others:

"Do you realize that is violence? That is the seed of violence. And I would resent it immensely if you use any thing I said, uh, you know, to-- to somehow cultivate that kind of violence, even in its smallest form. I would resent it immensely. (66)

Father Roger's bringing this statement about language up because he's afraid of being taken out of context, not only because he is opposed to hate speech. And he labels violent speech and hate-speech the kind of thing he most dreads and would most resent being applied to him.

Now look to The Baptist Minister, and strangely enough, that is exactly what Tectonic does to him. Granted, TBM is a blunt, unlikable fellow with unsavory thoughts on same-sex desire, but there's no reason to think that Father Roger would label TBM's preoccupation with "living right" and Matt's "lifestyle" in connection with his concern for his salvation should be labeled the seed of violence; however, the proximity of the two statements makes the connection for us. But what did Father Roger say the seed of violence was?

...you know, every time you are called a fag, or you are called you know, a lez or whatever...
LEIGH FONDAKOWSKI: Or a dyke.
FATHER ROGER: Dyke, yeah, dyke. Do you realize that is violence? That is the seed of violence. (66)

Father Roger might intend a lot of things being the seed of violence, but he was referring here to verbal attacks. TBM is referring the need for salvation, not just for a gay male, but for Aaron McKinney and Kristin Price as well, whom TBM would also say were suffering from issues of "lifestyle" (they had a kid out of wedlock and lived together). Andrew Gomez and Aaron McKinney, we see, are guilty of that kind of verbal violence, as is the e-mail attack on Rulon Stacey. But would Father Roger say that, since Rulon Stacey doesn't "agree" with the homosexual "lifestyle," that he is guilty of the seed of violence as well? That's where I hesitate. It's the same generalization the audience is being asked to make about the difference between Father Roger and TBM even though their denominations' doctrinal stances on homosexuality aren't that far apart.

Father Roger sets out a clear cause/effect we can see in "Christmas" and "Magnitude," and the medical moments and the end of Act 2 drive home the very real consequences of that violence. But since TBM has to speak into this specific context rather than simply the context of the original conversation, he is specifically named as the source of Aaron McKinney's real violence on Matthew. It's a matter of the cum hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy: just because certain conditions occur in tandem with an event doesn't mean that one caused the other. They may be completely unrelated. But this sequence of events, which mimetically reproduces the seed, dissemination, and fruit of violence together, doesn't let the audience consider them as discrete narratives with their own perspectives. What we're seeing is the result of Tectonic's historical mold pressed over Laramie's voices to make religion the main source of homophobia.

So, in short, I think they could have made this narrative a hell of a lot more complicated by just cutting loose and letting the audience struggle with these voices without providing a clear answer like they did. Make them uncomfortable, Tectonic. Blow our minds; allow us to be confused. Trust your audience enough to make those same amazing leaps of intellect that we see in some of your interviewees. Just as they grappled with this event and were confused, challenged or inspired... your audience needs to feel that, too, they need to mimetically process these disparate voices and feel that same ambivalence so they can take it into the real world. Such is the very point of the kind of theater that you produce, and it is important. I want you to make this leap because what you do is so important to all of us.

So, is this necessarily a "charge," to say that Tectonic just worked too damn hard to try and steer this giant mess of a story? In one sense, not really, I think. You had some of the best theatric minds in the nation come together and craft this tale from a pool of over 200 interviews, representing probably more perspectives than we can even imagine. And they're all writers. They are "writing" this story of multiple voices. And when you get that many good writers with strong, narrative minds at work, seeing patterns, themes and ideas they want to promote... the result is going to be a heavily manicured text no matter what.

You can't turn nine horticulturists with clippers loose on a wild hedge without expecting to get something very beautiful-- and heavily domesticated-- when they're done. That's sort of how I feel about The Laramie Project at the moment, which, when you think about what the hell this play is actually like is a bizarre statement. And yet, I still say that this baggy, multi-vocal play is just too well-groomed. The wildness for which this play is praised is mostly on the surface, and when you strip away that surface, you see its fine architecture and German-made precision engineering purring away on the inside.

In another sense, however, I do think that this is a legitimate gripe on my part. Since Laramie residents have only really had a chance to speak out about their experiences through TLP, this is the narrative through which others see them, and perhaps, this is a narrative in which they could just as easily feel trapped. (I can only speak from my own experience on that point.) Furthermore, when this play tries way too freaking hard to push a cleaned-up narrative structure that flattens out the complications and cleans up the activist waters a little bit, we don't get to seem a full, or as complicated, as we really are. And the circumstances around this tragedy don't get to be as rich as maybe they could be, either.

All I know is that sorting through all of this on my own without a guide, twelve years after a friend-of-a-friend I never met was murdered, has been extremely beneficial for the screwed-up eighteen year old who didn't have the chance to sort things out when it was all happening. And I now wonder if keeping things less neat, without an overarching narrative "mold" to make things fit a predetermined version of events, would give others that same experience.

Related Posts:

The Airing of Grievances, Charge 2 cont.
Scatter Plots (this is the first of a short series, and looks at different angles)
The Second Casualty is the Truth
Failure to Engage: the Robbery Motive (Please allow me the grace to be wrong now and then...)

Sources:

Malan, Waynand. TRC South Africa Report Minority Position. TRC South Africa Report, vol. 6. Cape Town: Juta and Co. Ltd., 2003.

Wangh, Stephen."Revenge and Forgiveness in Laramie, Wyoming." Psychoanalytic Dialogues 15.1 (2005): 1-16.

PHOTO CREDIT:
1) Detail of a 1998-99 production of Angels in America staged by the University of Minnesota Dept. of Theatre Arts and Dance, courtesy of the UMTAD Flickr Photostream. (You can see pics of their 2005 production of The Laramie Project here, too.) Available through a Creative Commons license.

2) The now-defunct Fireside sign, by me.

3) Some awesome topiaries, taken from baralbion's Flickr Photostream. Available through a Creative Commons 2.0 license.

Links: Study Guides for TLP on Sub/Text

2011-03-18T07:00:00.001-04:00

For those of you who teach The Laramie Project, one of the most useful things available online are theater website productions who produce study guides. For instance, verybody knows about the Guthrie Theater and their semi-famous student guides for their own productions (if you don't, you need to look. I used their guide for Amadeus during my first year teaching), but they don't have material for everything. Unfortunately, the Guthrie never performed TLP until 10 Years Later came out, and their only available material is a link to Tectonic's study guides.

A lot of other productions, however, have picked up the slack, and one particularly useful source of information is Sub/Text, which was created by Jeanine Sobeck in connection with the Mead Center for American Theater's Arena Stage. Sobeck creates pages of background information for different productions every theater season, and there's a great guide for The Laramie Project and the Epilogue, which has some great background material for the study and discussion of the two plays.

The study guide is full of useful stuff, but the page which first got my attention was this super-useful timeline of events leading up to The Laramie Project and its sequel, which would be great for those teaching students who can't remember the Shepard murder.

Let me give one more quick shout-out to Jeanine Sobeck for doing such a great job with the Arena Theater's "Online dramaturge," and be sure to check out all the available guides if you teach drama!

What does cold smell like?

2011-03-17T11:30:00.000-04:00

Just for fun, here's a picture I snapped just north of Medicine Bow, Wyoming last January when I was on my way back to Casper for my flight. The weather had been in negative digits in Laramie all week, and it was far colder out in the flats south of Shirley Basin. I can only guess, but I figure it was around ten or twelve below zero at dusk.

So, what does this level of cold on a sub-arctic plain smell like?

Vaguely of copper, actually.

Prairie Fires and Cannon-Fodder

2011-03-14T07:00:00.003-04:00

Being another day in the life of a straight, conservative, evangelical fledgling LGBT activist...

Do you ever get really bizarre dreams when you're really preoccupied with something? I usually only get weird dreams when I eat pizza right before bed, but anyhow...

I had the strangest dream the other night. I was somewhere on my college campus in the middle of a massive, angry protest, and I ducked inside a storefront of some kind after the demonstrations turned violent. Things seemed safer inside, but then everything was filled with the sound of shattering glass as the protesters hurled some sort of heavy projectiles through the windows. I took refuge in a side hallway to avoid getting hit.

I saw one of the missiles rolling down the floor near me. I picked it up and unscrewed the top to see what was inside. It was full of ground-up pennies and old screws. Suddenly, the whole contraption under my hands burst into flames like a Molotov cocktail, and I kicked it out a door into the open quad stretching between the four different wings of the brick building. That's when I realized that I was standing in M______ Hall, in the new LGBT outreach center here on my campus.

Anyhow, the flaming bomb rolled against the big magnolia tree and caught the entire side of the building on fire. I flew to the next wing of the building looking for a fire extinguisher; in my head I knew that the rioters were on the other side of the building, but now they seemed miles away. Even the sound of the conflagration was quiet, even peaceful. When I looked wildly around the hallway for the extinguisher, an old, bearded man sat in the foyer of the building on an old couch. He was completely unconcerned by all the chaos.

"Where's the fire extinguisher?" I shrieked in panic. "Everything's catching fire..."
"We don't have one," he drawled. In my dream, I felt my heart skip. My mind was still full of rioters and flames and panic.
"What do you mean you don't have one? Every damn floor in this building is supposed to have a fire extinguisher," I yelled. That old man didn't even bat an eye at my mounting panic but glanced at me curiously.

Why are you so worried? his eyes said to me. That's about when I woke up, for my husband was trying to get me out of bed to get ready for church.

So, obviously, my weird dreams are just a symptom of me trying to work out in my sleep what's been worrying me when I'm awake. I had spent the last week in some pretty heavy negotiations with my minister buddies and the LGBT center grad student over my presence in the LGBT community. I've made some rather big plans. And I'm terrified that they're going to cause a firestorm with the LGBT Powers That Be and the more conservative campus ministers at my university.

It started with my minister friend. After our Tuesday prayer group I told him that I was considering volunteering at the LGBT center over the summer. I knew exactly why I wanted to do it. I wanted to be useful to my friends in the gay community for a change. The center was a great place to meet people in a setting that didn't require them to to put on a persona. And, I wanted to demonstrate goodwill to the administrators of the center. The goal of this is that I want to start up a non-invasive spiritual study for the members where they can start to heal from their victimization by Christians, and I want to start slowly immersing some curious evangelicals into the LGBT culture so they can get to know them as human beings instead of just a sin category. That's how I want to start a quiet reconsideration of what their denomination has taught them about what it means to be gay.

My minister friend was really ambivalent about it:

"I don't know, I think you're crossing the line between ministering to the lost and promoting," he answered. I'm pretty used to comments like that. In our circles, it's okay to love gay people as long as you make it very, very obvious that you disagree with their "lifestyle." Whatever. My minister friend knows better, too, but old habits die hard.

"It's not like I'll be standing at the door handing out condoms," I replied. "I'd just be there to keep the door open for the students and answer the phone."

"But, why? What are your goals?" he insisted. After some pretty intense discussion about sexuality, culture, and my opinion on what exactly "promoting" meant, I told him, "Look, there's only one word in the LGBT community for a straight person, and that's 'Ally.' I have to take that seriously." He cautiously agreed with me. But he was still a little worried.

My next stop, the following day, was to meet with "Andy," one of the two ministers who had helped me with the street-preacher protest. We had a long, long conversation. It has been neat to see "Andy" grow into the idea of laying down the traditional Christian defenses to just minister to gay people's needs like everyone else. Actually, he's actually grown rather passionate about it. "Torben" was out for the afternoon, so Andy and I had a long chat on our own.

"So, what do you think about volunteering?" I asked "Andy." He shrugged.
"Honestly, Jackrabbit? You have to open yourself up to the possibility of making mistakes. You're in uncharted waters. If this is your conviction and it's wrong, you'll learn later. But if it's what you think you need to do, you can't be afraid to do it."

He didn't see the need to necessarily volunteer at the center for what I wanted to do, but he was fine with the idea nonetheless. Wow. A year ago that would have been unthinkable.

So, the real problem came on Thursday, when I met up with someone associated with the center.
"Luke" is a great guy-- he's an ally like me, a Christian even. At the time we met, the first anniversary party for the center was underway, and we were crushed on every side by cake, people, and balloons. Everything was a swirl of merry, merry chaos.

I shared with him all the things I had been thinking about doing, but when I got excited about the possibility of some kind of safe Christian/LGBT interaction, he pulled me aside. "There's something you need to know," he said gravely. Then he told me that two of the directors of the center, X and Y, were "extremely tired of the Christian/LGBT connection," he said. What he meant was that X and Y were so sick of covert evangelism and judgment underneath Christian outreach that they didn't want to have anything to do with anything that smacked of Christianity.

I was now starting to feel like I was just setting myself up as a giant target for the wrath of X. She would instantly think I'm some kind of missionary "plant" in her program, and since she's very much a momma bear like me, I have no doubt that she would "protect" her gay college students from me accordingly. It occurred to me that I was dealing with a cultural war much larger than myself, and that I was stepping out into the DMZ to call for a truce before the two sides had even put down their rifles. If I wasn't careful, this could make things very, very ugly for my campus. I could be kindling a reconciliation between my two favorite communities-- or I could be throwing a Molotov cocktail into the center of them, blasting out an irreversible hole between them. Which is it?

To put it a differeht way, not all prairie fires need to be put out. The slow-moving fires clear out the dead to make way for the living; they feed the land what it craves. But some fires, the really devastating ones, can't be stopped once they start burning. All you can do is sit on the next hill and watch the wind play havoc with the flames and turn the world turn to ash.

So, after my dream, here's the real question: in the midst of this cultural war, which fire am I really afraid of starting?

Coming Soon: Changes to the bibliography!

2011-03-12T07:00:00.000-05:00

So, one of the more popular places on this blog has been, since its inception, a running bibliographic master-list of everything I've found regarding The Laramie Project and the Shepard murder and trials. In order to keep up with the newest stuff coming out and to make it much more reasonable to navigate, I will shortly introduce two new lists instead-- one for literary study and one for everything else. These will include a lot of updated bibliography and links to video sources as well.

Eventually, this will include a list of things I think are useful for the teaching of The Laramie Project at the high school and college level. But that's going to take a little more time. I'll let you know as soon as both of the new pages are operational!

Links: The Laramie Project at Duke University

2011-03-11T07:00:00.002-05:00

Okay, so I found out about this upcoming production of The Laramie Project in an odd way: linkbacks. While I was cruising through my Flickr account the other day, this website I hadn't known about showed up in the stats, and when I followed the link back, I found this really, really great classroom and theater production blog. The space includes a lot of great posts on producing, directing and acting this play, and those are things I can never talk about with authority. Well, until I quit my job as an Anglo-Saxonist and take up stagecraft or something, that is.

You can find the blog here, where you'll get a variety of different meditations about the entire production process. It's very, very useful for teaching The Laramie Project. One of my favorite posts so far, on acting the roles of characters, is linked here if you'd like a good place to start digging through the posts. If you're in NC or the surrounding area and would like to see the production, opening night is April 7th at the Sheafer Theater. With this much thought and careful preparation, it's bound to be a great production.

The Airing of Grievances, Charge 3

2011-03-07T07:00:00.003-05:00

Okay, so it's been a while since I've kept up with my Airing of Grievances, and the Festivus season has long since ended. That's what I get for being way too busy with school since January. In any case, let us proceed through the last two installments!

To some degree, Laramie is indeed presented as a latter-day Grover's Corners, a cozy place where everyone appears to know everyone else's business and actually finds comfort in this. But if ''The Laramie Project'' nods conspicuously to Wilder, this play is ''Our Town'' with a question mark, as in ''Could this be our town?'' There are repeated variations by the citizens of Laramie on the statement ''It can't happen here,'' followed immediately by ''And yet it has.''
--Ben Brantley, New York Times

Just for fun, and because I was avoiding reading things for my second field exam, I picked up a copy of Thornton Wilder's Our Town while I was staying with Coyote in Laramie. Although I personally love drama (my only complaint as an Anglo-Saxonist is that there are no plays) I hadn't really read any of Wilder's work before. My previous survey courses preferred the work of O' Neill and Arthur Miller, and so Wilder was squeezed out.

I found that I enjoyed Our Town more than I thought I would. Wilder takes a blank stage and fills it with all the imaginary geology, history and even shop fronts of a tiny New Hampshire town; then he populates that specific space with a strange allegory of individual lives. The Webbs and the Gibbs could be any two families in America, even though we know exactly where (on stage at least) the Stage Manager positions them. The Stage Manager even gives geographic coordinates for Grover's Corners; but its people are individuals only in how they relate to one another-- cousin, child, neighbor, parent, spouse-- and it is those relationships in the course of their lives that Wilder is interested in.

But the reason that Our Town worked as an embodiment of the universal human experience was because it had an aura of utopia-- it seemed to be a "good place" [eu-topia in Greek] that reflected all the best parts of the American dream (and some of its problems) at the turn of the previous century. But, more importantly, for all its specificity and regional connection to New Hampshire, it was a "no-place" [ou-topia] that had no specific cultural coloring other than the ones which Thornton Wilder wanted it to have. Grover's Corners was a symbol; it was a specific but fictional community existing at coordinates well off the map of America which could hold all of the nation's ideals and faults in the same space and reflect them back on the culture as a whole. That was Wilder's genius: the landscape is American and it's real, but the specific location is not.

But Laramie, Wyoming is neither of these things, really; it has too many of its own idiosyncrasies and small town problems to really be a utopia in the sense of a good place (although it is very good.) And it is a real location. I know that was part of the appeal for using Laramie as a backdrop for the national dialogue on homosexuality for Kaufman, but I'm interested in the complicated mess it makes of things as I think about TLP. In what way does the factual location of Laramie, Wyoming complicate the kind of theater that Kaufman's striving for? In what ways does the town resist any translation into a symbolic space, and is it a good idea at all?

I would hereby like to submit charge number three in the Airing of Grievances:

3. Laramie is not Our Town.

We need to understand that this is, in some ways, an unfair question. Of course Laramie isn't Grover's Corners; it was never supposed to be. But it's still a natural enough association I want to look at the consequences. I don't know if this is going to be a real "grievance" by the time I'm done here, but I'm interested in what comes of it nonetheless. And so, on to the analysis!

After all, not to create only, or found only,
But to bring perhaps from afar what is already founded,
To give it our own identity, average, limitless, free...
--Walt Whitman, "Song of the Exposition"

These lines stand at the beginning of Moisés Kaufman's Introduction to the Vintage edition of The Laramie Project, and I think they make a nice point about the difference between Our Town and The Laramie Project in an interesting way. Tectonic's model for The Laramie Project proposes to "import" the world of Laramie into the universal world of the theater. When that act is symbolic, such as when the Stage Manager re-creates a now-lost slice of Americana, no harm is done, really; Grover's Corner can exist wherever one endows the stage with its presence. And yet, when the place is real, when it finds itself transported to the universal stage under the auspices of a national company, that same action feels like an appropriation. It feels colonial.

For example, in Our Town, Wilder used his experience of life in a variety of rural areas to re-create the life experiences of that society; he used the specificity of a place, New Hampshire, to re-created the feeling of situatedness, of "place"-ness of that old American existence. Wilder didn't bring from afar; he manifested what was right in front of him, a place with its own identity and secure sense of the way things are. And if the outsiders disagreed with them, as the tense conversation between Mr. Webb and the audience makes clear, that's fine; at least, he would say that Grover's Corners was doing what it felt was the best it could. In that way, at least, one can see some nice resonances between Wilder's, and Whitman's prospective visions of America: it has a sense of place and belonging within the map of the United States.

But Whitman's vision in "Song of the Exposition" is extremely Eastern; it's a song for the Union rather than the western territories which lay off its nether borders, for the new world of industry and law than for the lawless outer reaches. It's about finding the self in the exotic; it's an experience with the Other, for, as Whitman's poem continues, "these also are the lessons of our New World." As a colonial enterprise, the New World looks back on the Old World as dead and decayed, and it looks forward to the Frontier for wildness, freedom and inspiration.

Those who seize onto the New World look to that frontier and project themselves into it. And this is exactly the experience that I think Kaufman and Tectonic Theater provide, in contrast to Ben Brantley's easy comparison of the two plays in that quote above. We can never escape two very important things in The Laramie Project when we consider the space where Laramie exists:

1) Laramie's real location in the West with its own history complicates the attempt to transform its space into a universal experience, and

2) the narrative, by necessity, will always be framed by these "outsiders looking in," bringing this play, "perhaps from afar" from the Old West to the urban world. How does that change the way we see Laramie as a "real" space?

For one, as Amy Tigner as long since pointed out, the specificity of Laramie as "place" has a lot of other valences attached to it because it is located in the heart of the Old West. The way that Tectonic invokes this space with its limitless, blue sky on the Vintage cover, the crested wheatgrass in a box on their stage, and the rolling projected clouds in Act 2, all reinforce Laramie as both a pastoral place and a piece of the Old West. It also reinforces the idea that Laramie is a by-product of an "old" world which is already passing by and needs to be replaced.

And, as both Amy Tigner and Dr. S, my old Renaissance professor at my university would say, the power of the pastoral is that it's not home. It's not the city but somewhere else, more of a blank slate than an actual location. Old West and pastoral imagery, traditionally speaking, are supposed to act a mirror of what the self doesn't want to claim as their own or as a field where they project their own desires. Moreover, in Western pastoral, Tigner shows that it's often used as a stage to address urban concerns and violence. They are bringing this story from afar, where it was already founded, but giving it their own identity.

That recognition, as Tigner explains, means that Laramie isn't "just" Laramie in TLP. It's Laramie and everything that the urban world wants to disown and inspect at a safe distance from the self. It's both a symbol and a real place, and I wonder how much dissonance that creates in TLP. The pastoral space invites us to fill this space up with our own expectations, about cowboys, religion, values, and community, but since it's a real space, Laramie's physical reality sometimes has to bear the burden of assumptions that don't really fit. As much as I truly appreciate the Tectonic members' personal reflections about coming to Laramie in the play, that "chicken-fried steak" comment by Kaufman reinforces the idea of Laramie's foreignness: this location both matches our unconscious assumptions of the Old West and models some audience members' reaction to the "strangeness" of Laramie. In the case of The Laramie Project, the Stage Manager isn't presenting us this play. It's the Audience members, those who grill Editor Webb about vice and social justice in Grover's Corners.

And, when we look at The Laramie Project in relation to the rest of the nation, is it the Old World or the Frontier? That's an easy question to answer if you think about one more similarity between the two plays: both Wilder and Tectonic wrote plays about a way of life slowly passing out of existence. In Wilder, that way of life is already gone; in Laramie, it's slowly ceasing to be. Is Kaufman and company putting forth Laramie as the dying traditionalism of the Old World which needs, inevitably, to be supplanted by the mores of a more accepting and progressive New World ideology? I don't know if that's true or not, but that bears a little bit of thinking about.

In any case, it's hard to be "Our Town" when, after twelve years of TLP and predatory media coverage, you've become "That Place." And, it might be a little unfair to force a little community to become "Our Town" at all when it comes at the expense of their local or personal identity. For Tigner, that situation leads to other tensions, such as whether or not we should call the representations in the play "people" or "characters." And, that question lays bare the ambivalent conversation about whether this play is "history" or "fiction." We can't quite call this play a history because of the limited, outside perspective of the "historians" and the crafted, symbolic nature of the narrative.

And yet, we also need to realize something else: Our Town can't be the primary model for Kaufman. Wilder's little community, even though it's located in both New Hampshire and the Mind of God, is socially powerless to change from the inside. Let's look at a way in which Kaufman deliberately breaks away from Wilder's influence to do something much more interesting.

* * *

"They don't understand. Do they?"

EMILY:
Do any human beings realize life while they live it?-- every, every minute?

ST. MANAGER:
No. (pause)
The saints and poets, maybe, they do some.

EMILY:
I'm ready to go back. (109)

As the square row of mourners and their umbrellas at the beginning of Act 2 in TLP tell us, Kaufman and Wilder are operating on the same frequency. Both of them display a funeral and divide the action of the stage into two parts, roughly reflecting those who "get it" and those who don't. For Wilder, these are the living and the dead; for Kaufman, they are the survivors and the protesters. Both use the burial, chairs, rain, and umbrellas to underscore the seriousness of the scene. The only difference here is that Matthew Shepard's survivors take the place of Thornton Wilder's dead, and that, in my opinion, is what makes all the difference.

Unlike at Grover's Corners, the dead in The Laramie Project can't speak. Their revelation
is handed over to the living, who are still capable of change if they choose to.

I happen to find the end of Wilder's play rather touching (if not approaching a little cheezy), but it presents a huge problem for the politically minded dramatist: socially speaking, the play is a closed loop. Emily Gibbs steps out into the graveyard to realize that she never really knew what it meant to be alive, but now that she is detached from life, she can benefit no one with her revelation. When her husband falls at the foot of her grave, all she can do is turn to Mrs. Gibbs and ask, "They don't understand, do they?" Since revelation and humanity are severed from each other, nothing ever really changes in Grover's Corners-- except with the saints and the poets, maybe.

This is exactly what Kaufman's kind of theater tries to avoid; real, human connections and the possibility for change are what drives his work, and Wilder's text suggests that these things are essentially impossible. Although Wilder can tap into a deep, universal human truth of the human condition in Grover's Corners, that truth cannot change the society. All that Editor Webb can promise his fickle audience is that Grover's Corners tries to address social justice issues the best it can. That's not good enough for a theater company that wants to engage and reform those social problems. Tectonic Theater is fairly fundamentally Brechtian in outlook. Wilder is not.

The only way that Kaufman and company can do that is if the play's central revelation is passed onto the living rather than the dead, if social change really can exist in a community. For Tectonic, if they want to take this conversation beyond the characters of the play and out into the public discourse, they need to have real people and situations to which the audience can connect. And they also need to make their audiences compare their own communities with a community which is moving through some serious self-doubt. The name "Matthew Shepard," and the place, "Laramie, Wyoming" are integral for Tectonic's goal of addressing social justice issues surrounding the LGBT community. The only way to embody the reality of this crime in their audience's minds is to make this community like any other small town, but at the same time show that homophobia and violence have an indisputable place. Things like this do happen, the play says, and here's one place where they did, right next to this fence. Homophobia cannot be real until it has "a local habitation and a name,"so to speak, in a culture which has traditionally ignored gay-targeted violence.

So, in a way, the use of both Wilder and Brecht in their production really is an innovative way to introduce the world to Laramie, Wyoming. To what point, however, does mixing these two theatric styles breed social tension? And how much does Tectonic's use of Laramie as a pastoral space complicate Laramie's identity as a real space? What does it mean to Laramie, Wyoming when Tectonic Theater takes their story, perhaps from afar, and they give it their own identity? And, how much are the elements of that pastoral identity native to Laramie, Wyoming's sense of itself, and the interviewers merely picked up on what was already here?

Perhaps this is just one more part of the bigger puzzle about the ambivalent reaction I sometimes get from my students when they watch this play. Some can sympathize with Laramie because it's just like "home," regardless of whether they're from Kentucky, North Carolina, West Virginia, or California. Others are appalled that things like that can still happen "out there" without thinking about the homophobia in their own backyards. They can't respond to the play's call for social change at home because "home" is not like Laramie at all.

In any case, that connection can be quite real; sometimes Laramie quite literally becomes "Our Town" and forces others to reconsider the silent disapproval of and violence against the LGBT community in their midst. That's the reason I feel like this can't really be a "grievance" in the normal sense. When this play "clicks" with a community, it's life-changing experience, and I wouldn't trade that for anything.

And with that, I would like to leave you with the Newark production of The Laramie Project and 10 Years Later. Both of these clips come from "Not in Our Town":

(Vaguely) Related Posts:

A Sense of Place: Further Thoughts
Fences
Some Thoughts on Myth
On Myth and Bull$%!t
The Buck Fence and Place
Specters of Laramie in Tucson, Arizona

Works Cited:

Brantley, Ben. "A Brutal Act Alters a Town." Theater Review. New York Times 19 May 2000. Web.

Tigner, Amy. "The Laramie Project: Western Pastoral." Modern Drama 45.1 (2003): 138-86.

Wilder, Thornton. Our Town. 1939. New York: Harper Perennial, 1998. Print. Picture credit: The images in the article were taken from various performances of Wilder's Our Town:

From a Washington, DC performance. Picture taken by JoJoRuf, via Flickr.
From a Saline High School performance. Picture taken by cseeman, via Flickr.
An Exeter performance. Picture taken by Wesley Chen, via Flickr.
From a Cathedral Theater performance. Picture taken by Andy Bowman, via Flickr.

Both videos were produced by The Working Group, via YouTube.

Advocate article by Greg Pierotti on TLP and "10 Years Later"

2011-03-02T07:00:00.000-05:00

In the middle of all this personal angst about how the members of Tectonic related to the larger Laramie community, I nevertheless feel a certain amount of personal connection to two of its members: Stephen Belber and Greg Pierotti. Perhaps it is because these two writers and actors of Tectonic Theater have both been willing to lay bare their own experiences with Laramie, their struggles and mistakes, and how the play still haunts them. Maybe that's also the reason I've found it so hard to find a similar personal connection with Kaufman. In contrast to Belber and Pierotti, Kaufman usually positions himself as the artistic theorist or architect, and perhaps that distant, forensic persona makes it harder for me to relate to him.

In any case, if you want to see why I tend to sympathize with Pierotti, he has a great article in the Advocate you should really check out. In a real sense, the first article is telling his own story, and how Matthew Shepard and researching TLP changed his life. The series ballooned into, so far, a seven-part exploration of the two plays as the company prepared to put both on tour last fall, and the whole thing is a fantastic read. You can get Pierotti's perspective on everything from how the Tyler Clementi story relates to TLP to safety on college campuses to the problem of making snap judgments-- about gays and lesbians, but also about Christians, and he's very up front with where his own snap judgments lead to. Please forgive me if I label the whole series a "must read." For those who want to see how Tectonic-- in this case, Pierotti's view, at least-- sees the world, it's quite valuable. And it will challenge your assumptions about Tectonic Theater and the way they operate. The links to all seven parts are below!

On the Road with Laramie, Part 1-- August 10, 2010
On the Road with Laramie, Part 2-- August 25, 2010
On the Road with Laramie, Part 3-- September 14, 2010
On the Road with Laramie, Part 4-- October 6, 2010
On the Road with Laramie, Part 5-- October 18, 2010
On the Road with Laramie, Part 6-- Jan 11, 2011
On the Road with Laramie, Part 7-- February 8, 2011

Even 4chan Can't Stand the WBC...

2011-02-26T15:12:00.000-05:00

Wanna see something just hilarious? Click on the image below to read the whole thing.

The image screen capture is courtesy of the blogger Joe My God. I've decided to put our differences aside for one day and give him a high-five for snagging this. Thanks, Joe!

Apparently, Cindy Phelps Roper got just a little mouthy about the purported Internet attack on Westboro Baptist Church and Anonymous has finally had enough. Shortly after proclaiming on a live, on-air radio program that God made the Internet just so WBC could spread their rant to the whole world and (more or less) invoked the protection of God over their servers, a spokesperson from Anonymous (on the same radio program) took their website down in about 45 seconds with a "swift and emotionless b%&#%slap" courtesy of 4chan.

As of 3:00 EST today, I tried to get on the WBC servers, and all their sites are STILL down. Yowza. If you like brimstone served with a side of poetic justice, you can see most of the radio interview on YouTube courtesy of the David Packman Show. If you want to skip Cindy Phelps-Roper grinning like a zombie and being her generally unlovable self, however, the money shot starts somewhere around the 8:00 mark.

I know I shouldn't take joy in the suffering of our enemies. But I did a little dance for joy when I saw this nonetheless. Oh well.

This Just In: I'm Not Flunking Out!

2011-02-25T00:33:00.000-05:00

Well, I heard back officially yesterday: after writing what I thought was the most unintelligent, incomprehensible piece of oh-just-forget-spelling-I-want-to-SLEEP examination I thought possible, I have actually passed my field exam in the Renaissance! STOP THE PRESSES! I have been declared competent! I'd like to thank God, my husband, my exam coordinator, Prozac, the guy who discovered caffeine, and my therapist.

But do you know what this really means??? I am officially cleared to teach your children British Literature I.

Muahahaha!

A Winter Sunset in Laramie

2011-02-22T23:58:00.000-05:00

So, it's been a week since I turned in my second field exam, and I'm finally feeling like I'm "recovered" from the experience. Due to some medical quirks, stress just tends to wipe me out physically, and when I turned in my exam I went back home and slept for eleven hours. So that was my convenient excuse to sit on my butt most of the following week and do nothing.

Well, I didn't exactly do nothing. In the last week I went to two SEC basketball games with my husband, a choir concert, and a friend's birthday party. I finally got to go to my liturgical prayer group, get back involved with the LGBTA, and even do a little curling. After months of doing nothing but school nonstop, I feel like such a hedonist. And I discovered that it feels pretty nice.

The only thing I'm missing in this sudden glut of Appalachian spring are the sunsets. Normally, we have simply amazing sunsets here in the evenings, full of blazing deep oranges and fuschia, but they haven't been living up to expectations recently. The afternoon clouds roll in like the tide and stifle the twilight sky. So, that naturally means I'm longing for some wide, open vistas with color. So, I thought I'd share the ones I keep sticking on my computer while I'm supposed to be working.

I'll start from north-central Wyoming, not terribly far from where some of my relatives live:

That's still not as deep as it looked from the top of this pasture. My dad and I were just speechless at how vibrant the pink clouds looked.

This is from Bosler as I approached Laramie from the North back in January. The sky had a nice, deep set of salmon and yellow to it:

Sometimes, even Bosler can be pretty. Both summer storm-clouds and twilight skies suit it admirably. A little farther down the road I stopped and snapped this one:

This one is from Laramie, about eight miles or so north of town. Yes, the color vibrance has been adjusted in this photo, but not as near as much as you'd think. That tiny purple streak along the very edge of the horizon wasn't showing up as well as I could see it with my eyes. I hope you enjoy!

The Texture of Memory Is Corduroy

2011-02-14T07:00:00.024-05:00

[Jackrabbit is nearing the home stretch on her field exam! In the meantime, here's part two of that conversation regarding cognitive literary studies and The Laramie Project. If I have any brains left after the exam, I'll rejoin you shortly.]

So, in my last post I shared a personal anecdote that created a little doubt about Jed Schultz's version of events regarding his parents' ambivalence to his acting career in The Laramie Project. He claims that his duet from Angels in America was the first time his parents hadn't come to support him, but my friend "Andie" can remember lots of times that they didn't come to events because of scheduling conflicts. So, whom do I believe? Now that we're almost ten years down the road... I believe them both. Perhaps I don't believe that they both represent objective reality. But I do believe that both versions have story truth, and without any way to determine the objective facts, that's what I have to settle for.

Here's what I mean: I thoroughly believe that this moment was the first time Jed felt disappointment in his parents; it's also the first time he had to break away from their authority and suffer the consequences. I believe that his dismay and disappointment is real. And, as for "Andie?" I believe that her memory accurately represents her childhood recollections of paling around at school and church together with Jed because both of them had extremely busy parents. Now that the objective truth can't be discovered, I have to settle for story truth. He remembers the disappointment. She remembers the strength of their childhood relationship in the face of parents who couldn't always be there.

So, story truth isn't the same as objective truth, but it has value nonetheless. It's not a distinction we're normally willing to make, but it's an important one for understanding how we should approach the truth of The Laramie Project. If we treat this play as only forensic, verifiable fact, two things will happen. One is that people will discover that a lot of it's not "true" and want to reject what it has to tell us. The other is that they won't understand the depth and complexity that this play has to offer. We have to understand that the texture of memory is uneven and full of gaps, layers and crevices. We have to feel the textures of memory more like it's corduroy than silk.

For instance, when the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission were charged with defining the terms under which they would operate, they ultimately defined "truth" in four different ways. Let's deal with just two of those right now:

Factual or "forensic" truth: "The familiar legal or scientific notion of bringing to light factual, corroborated evidence, of obtaining accurate information through reliable (impartial, objective) procedures, featured prominently in the Commission’s findings process." (111-112)
Personal, or "narrative" truth: in the Commission's words, the TRC "sought to contribute to the process of reconciliation by ensuring that the truth about the past included the validation of the individual subjective experiences of people who had previously been silenced or voiceless. The Commission sought, too, to capture the widest possible record of people’s perceptions, stories, myths and experiences." (1:112-113)

What the TRC recognized when they sought to create a comprehensive memory of Apartheid was that the word "Truth" had too many legitimate meanings to be just one thing, so they looked at different "facets" of what the truth contained to get a better idea of the whole. So they realize that the truth has different objectives, values and social utility depending on how they approach it. But what they may or may not realize (and this is unclear from what I've read of the TRC report) is that those different facets of truth might contradict one another. (You get some idea of this in Wynand Malan's minority position, but it gets shot down by the rest of the committee. Antjie Krog, however, explores this problem in her book Country of My Skull with a lot of complexity.) Those textures of memory we talked about earlier-- those that lead to factual truth and story truth-- creates a rough pattern that doesn't merge in with the whole. In this case, the texture (truth) of memory is rough and uneven. Its cords don't mesh together to make one clean, even fabric of truth. It's truth with a knap.

So, aside from Jed and "Andie's" personal recollections, are there any other places in The Laramie Project where we can see that "narrative" truth, the one that includes "individual, subjective experiences" doesn't agree with the forensic truth? You bet. Here's a list of a few other places where you can see storytelling clashing with objective truth in The Laramie Project:

You remember Doc talking about that limousine ride down to Fort Collins? Turns out there was another passenger in that car that night-- Tina LaBrie. According to the early reports, she and Matt were friends, and she tagged along down to Fort Collins so they could chat while Matt visited that gay bar. You'd never know it listening to Doc, however. Was Doc the cheerful listener of the eavesdropper on that trip?
Oh, and another thing: Doc also claimed in news interviews to be extremely well acquainted with both McKinney and Kristen Price. Yet, you don't get any real sense of that listening to his story in TLP, do you? Instead we hear all about his relationship (such as it was) with Matt.
As I've pointed out before, Stephen Mead Johnson's recollection of going out to see the fence makes it sound like Matt was left in the middle of nowhere, but that characterization ignores the fact that Matt was left on a road next to a house under construction. That fence marked the property line. It's a big property, granted...
Although it's a pretty clear example of slander, we should also consider Sherry Johnson's portrayal of Matthew Shepard in the play which she had created from scraps of forensic truth about Matt: she believes he's a lush, a flaming, flaunting homosexual, a spreader of HIV.

And there are a few other things that, while not captured in the text, the forensic truth gets masked by the story truth:

In the original Tectonic Theater performance that I watched, the meeting between Amanda Gronich and The Baptist Minister was staged as a face-to-face meeting. Yet, the text makes it pretty clear it was a phone conversation. Why is this important? Because in the performance, Gronich offers her hand to The Baptist Minister and he refuses to shake it. She wanted to make it clear that The Baptist Minister was rejecting her, so they staged the meeting as far more personal, and his rejection as much more physical.
As Stephen Wangh has pointed out in one of his articles, Kaufman directed the actor playing Dennis Shepard in the film to break down a little as he was reading his statement. Wangh points out that this did not factually take place, as far as any of the other actors he talked to could remember of the proceedings. As Wangh makes clear, Kaufman wanted to make this a turning point, where the Shepards say goodbye to their son, an important part of the forgiveness process. Yet, if you read that statement... how much forgiveness do you read in it? I just don't see it, especially at the line "I will never forgive you for that."
Amy Tigner makes an interesting point about Aaron Kriefels in her article on American pastoral and The Laramie Project: in the course of their interview with the boy on the bike, he made some homophobic statements that don't make it into the actual text of the play. When asked about this, actress Mercedes Herrero said that they didn't want to make him sound "out of line" (qtd. in Tigner 145). Tigner takes that phrase "out of line" to mean "out of character."
In the second act of The Laramie Project, Katherine Connolly expresses her horror at the reading of the charges at McKinney and Henderson's arraignment, claiming that the last thing said was the line, "Said defendants left the victim begging for his life." Actually, when you read through the criminal complaint against all four of the defendants, that statement is actually closer to the middle, which makes sense; in the timeline of events, the theft of his belongings and intent to burglarize his apartment were their final criminal activities.

If we take each of these details and consider them only from the perspective of forensic truth, you get the impression that The Laramie Project is potentially riddled with half-truths, personal bias, and bad memories. And if you only look at forensic truth, you'd probably be right. But most of these other moments hide an interesting kernel of narrative truth behind them, if we just take the time to "validat[e]... the individual subjective experiences of people" within the play. Those stories, and not necessarily forensic truth, are the driving force of the play.

To take the most biased example, let's look Sherry Johnson. When we talk about credible versus non-credible witnesses in The Laramie Project in my class, Sherry's view on Matthew Shepard's character always comes up:

Now, I didn't know him, but... there's just so many things about him that I found out that I just, it's scary. Know know about his character and spreading AIDS and a few other things, you know, being the kind of person he was. He was, he was just a barfly, you know. And I think he pushed himself around. I think he flaunted it.

Everybody's got problems. But why they exemplified him I don't know. What's the difference if you're gay? A hate crime is a hate crime. If you murder somebody you hate 'em. It has nothing to do with if you're gay or a prostitute or whatever.

I don't understand. I don't understand. (64-65)

When I ask my students whether or not they think Johnson is a reliable witness, I always get a resounding "no." My students point out things like, "Come on, Jackrabbit. She didn't even know him, and look what she's saying about this guy. She's spewing gossip." Or, "How can I believe somebody who says something as awful as that?"

"Okay, that's fair," I tell them, "I think she has the factual truth about Matt Shepard wrong, too. But do you think she's at least sincere?"
"Well... yeah. I think she's totally being honest," a student once said. "I mean, she has to know how this sounds to these theater guys, right? This sounds horrible, but she says it anyway."
"So, you think Sherry Johnson is incorrect," I observe, "but you think she's sincere. What's the difference here between those two ideas?"

We usually get into some interesting conversations at this point. If you look at Sherry Johnson's story carefully, you can see a clear case of what Schachter might call "the sin of bias." Her story is based on at least some factual, forensic truth: Matt was openly gay. He was HIV positive. He was in a bar the night he was beaten. And he did in fact leave the bar with two other men. But Sherry has no other way to put this information into a sensible narrative other than to take the worst connotation of everything. To be openly gay is to "flaunt it." To be HIV positive means you must be "spreading AIDS." To be both of those things and in a bar at the same time makes that person a "barfly." We can see how her story truth-- a narrative that can assume no good of an openly gay man-- obscures the forensic truth of Matt Shepard.

Sherry Johnson is someone whose voice isn't normally taken seriously. And at the same time, we shouldn't discount her narrative truth. If you put her distasteful opinions about Shepard to the side, you see a real person sincerely trying to make sense of something that doesn't fit her view of the world. She's trying to understand why some stories of tragedy get remembered and why some, those that have wounded her personally, are so easily forgotten by everyone else. She's struggling with the notion that all people are morally responsible beings and that should account for who's remembered and who's not, but that notion doesn't seem to be true anymore. She can't make her traditional views of a just world fit around the Shepard case, and she doesn't understand why.

And, if you look at the wider context of the play, a lot of people were asking this same question-- not about the state trooper so much as about the Kristin Lamb case. An 8 year-old girl was murdered about a month before Matt Shepard and her body was found in a landfill outside of town. After the Shepard story broke, a lot of people had the same reaction as Johnson-- "wait a minute, why is he on the national news when Lamb was a clear innocent?" (If you do a search for Lamb's name, it almost always appears next to Shepard's in anti-hate crime law press releases and right-wing organizations.) If we look at Johnson's narrative truth, we can see a major question that was on the town's mind, one that the play does well not to try and answer too hastily, for the answer (I think) has more to do with the nature of narrative and collective memory than it does justice in a moral universe.

Say what you want about Sherry Johnson's plight. But if we focus on her narrative truth as having value, then Sherry becomes more than just one distasteful opinion among many. We see a woman confronted with the hard facts of memory and tragedy, and she's at a loss to make Matt's murder, and its aftermath, fit into her once coherent view of the world. If we look at her from the perspective of her narrative truth, Sherry Johnson becomes a sympathetic figure. And she becomes, in a weird sort of way, a success story. The fact of Matt's murder has torn her careful view of the world apart, and she has to confront the possibility that she doesn't have everything figured out. I just wish I knew whether that confusion and frustration led to positive growth or not. I'd like to assume the best of her. But knowing the depth to which these notions are often ingrained makes me think otherwise.

You can do this with most of the other discrepancies in TLP if you want. Catherine Connolly's belief that the reading of the criminal complaint against the murderers ended with Matt begging for his life has nothing to do with proper order of sentences. It's about horror. Those words resonate with the horror you feel when you hear the criminal complaint, and they're repeated twice. And Gronich's decision to stage a face-to-face meeting with The Baptist Minister is the only way for her to physically demonstrate the degree of rejection she felt from his words. It's a little unfair to TBM because it isn't forensic truth-- but it is accurate to Gronich's first-hand experience. We have no choice but to see this "moment" from Gronich's eyes. As for Connor? To be honest, my students always focus on him as a witness of "questionable reliability," and I have to agree. But it's also hard to tell whether those omissions were on his part or Tectonic Theater's. (He does do the same thing in a Newsweek interview, however.) Depending on who crafts that story, what kind of narrative truth can we find from Doc's story? I'll let you know when I figure that out.

So, when it comes to the textures of individual memory in The Laramie Project, you can't just pick out the uneven, snarled threads as distracting or unimportant. To do so is to destroy the fabric of the garment. We have to have a clear understanding of how all these threads play a part-- how all of them matter-- and how they may occasionally snag on one another.

PHOTO CREDIT:

1) "Not Quite Right in the Brain," a collage by Deborah Leigh, via Flickr.

2) "Corduroy and Blue," taken from pacbat's Flickr Photostream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pacbat/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

3) Corduroy close-up, taken from efflorescos' Flickr Photostream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jenessalynn/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

SOURCES:

Miller, Mark. "The Final Days and Nights of a Gay Martyr." Newsweek 21 Dec. 1998. Web.

The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission South Africa Report, vol. 1. 1998. Available online at http://www.doj.gov.za/trc/report/index.htm.

Thernstrom, Melanie. "The Crucifixion of Matthew Shepard." Vanity Fair, March 1999. A non-authoritative edition available here.

Tigner, Amy L. "The Laramie Project: Western Pastoral." Modern Drama 45.1 (2002): 138-186.

Wangh, Stephen."Revenge and Forgiveness in Laramie, Wyoming." Psychoanalytic Dialogues 15.1 (2005): 1-16.

The State of Wyoming V. Aaron McKinney, criminal complaint. Digital version viewable here.

A short note:

Okay, so why did I pick corduroy? Somebody asks. I'm almost ashamed to admit this...
When I was a kid in Montana, we studied Helen Keller so many times from second to seventh grade that we couldn't stand it. Somebody in our school system loved that story so much that The Miracle Worker was part of the curriculum practically every year. Because we were terrible, hateful (that is, normal) little children and we we bored to tears of the story, we especially liked to tell a lot of mean "Helen Keller" jokes making fun of deaf-mutes. They're all pretty atrocious, but there's one that I still secretly love:

Q: What is Helen Keller's favorite color?
A: Corduroy.

I am so sorry. I normally hate Helen Keller jokes, but the synaesthetic trick that this joke relies on has always thrilled me. So, when I started thinking about titles for "colored" memories for these posts, the first "color" that came to mind was corduroy. And when it comes to studying memory, our normal instincts and ways of "seeing" the world can be pretty misleading, so maybe the analogy is a good one. Perhaps the colored perspectives we should be looking for when we study memory are, in reality, textures. I have thereby commandeered this horrible joke from the forces of evil for the purpose of good.

Feeling the Textures of Memory in TLP

2011-02-11T07:00:00.023-05:00

[Hello all! I'm starting my Renaissance field exam this weekend, and so while I'm tearing my hair out over Christopher Marlowe and John Donne, I've written a couple of posts to bide the time while I'm away. Hope you enjoy them!]

As is pretty obvious at this point, I am fascinated by memory and how people create their sense of identity from their experiences. When I teach my research course here at the university, we use autobiographical memory as a theme that we study and learn research techniques about. In particular, we spend time learning about how frail memory actually is, and how those memories we use to define ourselves get molded to fit how we see the world. If you look at the two previous blog series about my own memories of this event, that's really clear, too: my memory is riddled with inconsistencies which are often dictated by the stories I want to tell-- or want to hide-- about who I think I am.

No memory can be told without a narrative, but the contingencies of storytelling-- of audience, of intent, overall meaning, interpretation-- will invariably rework the material of memory into something else, something with a different texture than before. And those who listen must take that narrative and reverse-engineer it to glean information, to re-create an idea of what that original, "pristine" memory once looked like. They try to flatten out the textures of memory to make it what it once was. And I think many would argue that such an exercise is folly. Instead of trying to flatten out those textures, a better tack might be to run our fingers over them, feel its knap and inconsistencies as part of their makeup.

But there is also the invisible audience-- the imagined audience on the horizon somewhere-- the narrator's family, colleagues, the new government. And every listener decodes the story in terms of truth. Telling is therefore never neutral, and the selection and ordering try to determine the interpretation.

--Antjie Krog, in Country of My Skull, 107

In my class, we spend a lot of time talking about cognitive literary studies, which is a critical marriage of psychological and biological studies of cognition with literary analysis. In my class, we focus on the limitations of how memory works, and in the first unit they discover the holes in their own memories by exploring a personal memory of their own. By the time we get to The Laramie Project, they know about narrative schemas and common slips of the memory; we've discussed Schacter's "seven sins of memory" and how they can cause distortions in how we recall events. Heck, they've seen the gaps in their own memories, even. And yet, I still marvel that, when we get to The Laramie Project in class, they are so willing to take every person's personal stories as factual representations of forensic reality rather than individual, highly contingent recollections of personal experience.

So, naturally, my response as an educator is to mess with their heads. Just like I poked some holes in my own recollections of events at the time Matt was murdered, I do the same to specific memories in The Laramie Project with the class and watch their naive optimism about the solid reality of memory crumble. For instance, here's a personal recollection I share with my students in the middle of our Laramie Project unit:

I had attended the November 2000 performance of The Laramie Project when Tectonic Theater brought it to Laramie, Wyoming. I was a freshman in Laramie when Matt Shepard was murdered, and like a lot of students on campus, I was curious about how the group would portray an event that we had all lived through two years ago. When I went, the audience was full of people who either were interviewees for the play, or they knew some of the people who were involved. My friend "Andie" and I were in the latter group. I knew most of the people from the college in one way or another; I knew Romaine and Jed, though, from high school speech and drama. "Andie," however, was a Laramie native— she knew Jed, Zubaida, and McKinney and Henderson quite well from school. She and Jed had been attending the same church for years. When we got to the theater, the audience was already fairly packed; I found a seat on the far left-hand side of the stage, and "Andie" took a seat directly behind me.

After about twenty minutes into the performance, the actor playing Jed approached the front of the stage and recounted the first time Jed and his parents had a major disagreement over the subject of homosexuality. In the middle of the scene, the actor spoke these lines:
“And when the time came I told my mom and dad so that they would come to the competition. Now you have to understand, my parents go to everything—every ball game, every hockey game—everything I’ve ever done. And they brought me into their room and told me that if I did that scene, that they would not come to see me in the competition… they felt that strongly about it that they didn’t want to come see their son do probably the most important thing he’d done to that point in his life” (12).
At that point, "Andie" leaned over and socked me in the arm.
“Pssst— hey, Jackrabbit!” she hissed. I leaned back to talk to her.
“Huh? What?” I asked.
“That’s not true,” she whispered.
“What? What’s not true?”
“That his parents came to everything. They missed tons of stuff because they work odd hours. Especially sports." My eyes popped open in surprise. “You’re sure?” I asked her. She jerked her head back and nodded.
“Yeah. We did a lot of that stuff together. His parents simply did not show up to everything.”

Needless to say, I was surprised at first because of the implications: as far as I could tell, that meant that Jed willfully stretched the truth or simply didn’t remember correctly, or that "Andie" was wrong. I knew both "Andie" and Jed well enough, and I wasn’t willing at the time to pick between them—so I kept my thoughts to myself and didn’t argue the point.

That wasn’t the only time that "Andie" punched me in the arm to point out discrepancies, either— she distinctly remembered several events differently from the interviewees in the play.

Watching my students read this passage is extremely entertaining, in a sadistic sort of way; they start to fidget about two minutes in, and by the time they finish reading that passage, some of my freshmen are positively squirming.

"So," I ask them, "What are your reactions to this?" I usually don't get an answer, so I'll press, "Does this matter to meaning of the play?" Eventually somebody ventures a comment.
"Well, yeah, he's lying," one student responds. "These guys want to change hate crime laws because of this story, and we can't trust what even Jed says."
"He's not lying," someone else will counter. "Maybe he's just... exaggerating."
"He's not doing either," one girl snaps back. "It's not that his parents came to everything that's important. It's that this is the first time they refused to come see him in something. That's a big difference."
"But that's not what he says," the first kid insists. "He says they came to everything. It's not true."
"But why would he remember all the times they couldn't see him in a hockey game and feel disappointed? That's not going to stick out. What sticks out for him is the first time they didn't want to come."
"So, is he just not remembering right or stretching the truth, then?"

At this point, there's usually a few freshman grumbling off to one side-- my snarky, combative students, the ones I can trust to take the next interpretive leap. One student raises her hand.

"Um, not to be a pain," she says, " but why should we trust that 'Andie' remembers this event any better than Jed Schultz does? We don't know her. What if she has some kind of ulterior motive?"
"Yeah, she went to the same church as Jed," someone else says, "and maybe she's just mad about how Jed talks about it. How can we trust her?"
"For that matter, Jackrabbit," somebody else adds, "why should we believe you?" That first student, the one ready to reject Jed's testimony, leans back in shock. This had apparently never occurred to him. I look around the room and see that same look of confusion on most of the other faces. Objective accomplished.

"Okay," I tell them, "now you're catching on. You really have no way of telling who's got the story right. What do we do with three competing versions of the same memory? Why doesn't Jed's or "Andie's" stories line up? For that matter, why trust mine? How, then, do we navigate between them and pick the 'right' one-- or should we?" What then follows is a careful scrutiny of how we decide what details we recall every time our memories become stories, how they get colored, which memories we suppress, and how at the end of the day, sometimes nobody's version of events lines up, but everyone is still telling the truth. We slowly start talking about how the truth of memories lies not so much with their objective reality as their cohesiveness as a narrative: we get to the idea that memory truth is often story truth. And in this case, maybe "Andie" and Jed are telling two different stories rather than getting things wrong.

Is this little exercise a little unfair to pull on a bunch of freshmen? Maybe-- but it points out something critical about how we create meaning out of memories: we have to approach them as stories, and as such we usually do so with a little suspension of disbelief. When we create meaning out of our lived experiences, we have to trust that the narratives we tell ourselves about our memories are the factual truth. Most of my students resist this collapse of truth into narrative; nobody wants to think that our reality is determined by stories rather than facts. And yet, it's our perception of reality-- or in our case, Jed Schultz' perception, or Reggie Fluty's, or Sherry Johnson's-- that steers our lives, our identities, our perception of right and wrong. And those memories of this event are just as frail or subject to alteration as Jed's-- or Aaron McKinney's.

Or mine.

PHOTO CREDIT: Brain scan, by Digital Shotgun, from his Flickr photostream.

This moment of ambivalence brought to you by: Iconography!

2011-02-09T07:00:00.009-05:00

Okay, since I'm slaving away on studying for my second field exam as we speak, I didn't want to leave everyone without at least something to chew over while I'm away from the blog. So, without further ado, I'd like to introduce a work by Father William Hart McNichols, a priest, former Jesuit, and very talented Catholic iconographer (check out his other work at that link above).

The work is a prayer card depiction passion, dedicated to "The Memory Of The "1,470 Gay and Lesbian Youth Who Commit Suicide In the U.S. Each Year And To The Countless Others Who Are Injured Or Murdered." I love the sentiment of this prayer card, but... Whatever. Let's see what you all think.

Ready? Discuss.

Interesting developments in the Kato case...

2011-02-08T00:35:00.000-05:00

Not to harp on current events, but there's been an interesting development in the local coverage of the murder of Ugandan activist David Kato. It makes me think back to a certain 20/20 special with Elizabeth Vargas, actually. The very beginning of the article briefly characterizes his death as an "iron bar" robbery, but it mainly focuses on Kato as "evil gay person," in a sense justifying his death as a consequence of his personal life. The international outcry is simply dismissed.

The piece is being run by the Uganda Daily Monitor, and their newest piece is called "Unmasking David Kato." It crossed my radar because at least one of their sources is publicly decrying the paper for completely falsifying information-- the blogger GayUganda. Apparently, the paper took a trip to his blog for information, and GayUganda is crying foul. To make matters even worse, Kenyan papers are picking up the same information and spreading the story across international borders. Actually the post from the Daily Nation seems much worse than the Monitor story to me.

GayUganda reports that he's unsure what to do about the libel in this case. I'll be interested to see what he decides to do, but in any case, it's interesting...

To Egypt With Love

2011-02-07T19:43:00.002-05:00

I just love Democracy. And I really love democracy when extremely disparate groups come together and join in peaceful, public demonstration in support of it. And, this afternoon on my campus in Appalachia I had a chance too see how awesome that can be.

A very disparate, grassroots group of students started planning six days ago for a rally in honor of the Egyptian push for democracy, which was put together by both domestic, international, and even Egyptian undergraduates. The turnout was very good, and other than one local reporter pushing a couple of students on some tendentious questions about the Muslim Brotherhood's involvement in the Cairo demonstrations, it was all extremely positive. I saw students and faculty from secular, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim associations all in attendance, side-by-side. I ran into some of my former students and my minister friend all in attendance.

One of my co-workers teaches a class on space, resistance and public discourse, and last Friday her students largely told her that they didn't think people could just get together and proclaim their views in public like this. I saw her taking surveys and interviews with some of the participants just to show her students that, yes, they can publicly call each other to action. Here are some pics of the event for you!

And Much Study is Wearisome to the Flesh...

2011-02-06T22:58:00.003-05:00

I came across a little gem in a 1960's study guide on Milton that I just had to share. Do you ever get the feeling you're living in a completely different world in the 21st century?

Adam's sin, according to Milton, is "uxoriousness,' the excessive love of one's spouse...Most twentieth-century readers would not agree with Milton's condemnation of passion, but almost everyone should be able to see with Milton that one can love one's spouse too much. For instance, if the husband of a communist spy loves his wife so much that he becomes a spy, too, even though he doesn't believe in communism, most of us would think that he loved too much...

Look out, Adam, that chick is a communist!

Sorry, between the chauvinism in that statement and the Cold War, I just found this hysterical.
Back to studying for me...

Arguing with the Voices in My Head

2011-02-06T00:11:00.008-05:00

This is Bart Ehrman. I found him to be a
human being, contrary to popular opinion.

So, there is an event that has been weighing heavily on my mind recently, and it's keeping me from studying on my exam. A week ago Thursday I was in our university auditorium setting up my camera to take pictures for a Bart Ehrman talk. (Sometimes I think I must be the most tolerant evangelical in the world. The pictures were a personal favor for a professor.) I roped my minister friend into helping me set up beforehand, and we chatted quietly as he helped me get the tripod leveled:

"Did you hear about Uganda?" He asked me.
"No," I answered with a grunt. "What's up?"
"Some gay rights activist was killed today, and people are blaming Christian missionaries for it..."
"Who was it? What was his name?" I asked, and my minister friend just shrugged; he couldn't remember. I leaned over onto the empty tripod to kill the nausea rising in my stomach. I was pretty sure I knew who the victim was before I checked the news reports later that night-- it had to be David Kato. I grimaced in rage.
"...Maybe I shouldn't have told you," my friend answered, and I shrugged it off for the moment. We had to finish setting up.

I watched Ehrman laugh through my camera lens while I checked the lighting and he shared some gossip with the facilitators. His lightheartedness against my anger made me feel like were on two different planets. I had to mentally check out of much of the lecture to sort through what my minister friend had told me, which made me feel bad. Ehrman was an earnest, likeable fellow in his own way, and he treated me very well; I just had other things to think about.

If you've never heard of him, David Kato Kisule was a remarkable and troubled human being. A Uganda native, he had worked hard on a local, national, and international level to improve the lot of an LGBT population routinely denied even basic rights in a nation where well over 90% of the population strongly disapprove of homosexuality. He proved to be a vocal and stubborn representative for Ugandan gays, and that openness left him constantly threatened, battered, and harassed. And, in spite of the psychological toll, he continued.

The political wildfire started a little while ago when a few fundamentalist groups whom I rather dislike held a conference in Kampala about the so-called "homosexual agenda" and protecting the society. After meetings with two of the conference organizers, particularly Scott Lively [oh, barf it's the Pink Swastika guy], the legislature proposed a bill to marginalize the gay population even more: prison time for gay marriage, restrictions on housing, and allowing the death penalty to those gays labeled especially "pernicious." The international community cried foul; activists helped fuel the outrcy against it, and the bill was tabled.

David Kato, from Uganda. He was also a human being, contrary to popular opinion.

About four months ago, Kato's picture showed up on a local paper's front page as part of a huge campaign to "out" people. His picture, name, and personal information were all included-- with a hundred other people's-- under a banner that read "hang them." Kato and two others filed suit against the paper's editor for invasion of privacy and won. He only had time to celebrate their legal victory for about three weeks before his friends found him dead. He was beaten with a hammer. I love that newspaper editor's response to Kato's death: "When we called for hanging of gay people," he protested, "we meant ... after they have gone through the legal process... I did not call for them to be killed in cold blood like he was." Well, gee, mister, I guess that makes things all better, doesn't it?

So, yes, I was disheartened to hear of Kato's death. But there is something about this story that resonates deep in my bones. It's not necessarily the brutality or the links to Christian terrorism that bother me (although I want to give Lively and a few radical ministers a kick in the head).

What bothers me is that David Kato Kisule died in a land of red earth. The words I hear coming from that land of red earth are echoing the voices in my head from when I was nineteen. I know what those words led to in my own red-soiled land, and I don't like it. I hear the echo and want to argue back.

I mean, listen to the narrative here: An out gay male from a culture suspicious of gays is found bludgeoned with a blunt object. The police focus on two suspects. At the murdered man's funeral, a preacher goes on a homophobic rant, and the mourners try to block him from the proceedings. One of the two suspects, when arrested, pulls out a "gay panic" defense. A certain part of the religious community uses his death to rant about the "gay agenda," and the LGBT community organizes in response. The international community intervenes, but a lot of people treat the problem like it's "way out there" and not their problem. And in the end, the larger straight community is unsure what to do, personally and legislatively, in response. Many of them then call the killing a robbery gone bad.

With a change of location, this narrative could just as easily be about Matt Shepard, and I personally am concerned with how much that past tragedy is scripting others now. I mean, let's compare notes: (WARNING: Lively is beyond offensive. Read at your own risk!)

Giles Muhame, editor of the paper sued for outing gays:
"When we called for hanging of gay people, we meant ... after they have gone through the legal process," said Giles Muhame. "I did not call for them to be killed in cold blood like he was." (source: CNN)

Scott Lively:
"It has since been reported by the New York Times that the local police do not believe this was a hate crime but a robbery. This has not deterred the Times, and the rest of the "mainstream" media from using this crime to advance the "gay" narrative that all disapproval of homosexuality leads invariably to violence and murder of homosexuals. This is propaganda, not journalism and it is a false premise." (source: bleh.)

Okay, now compare it to these regarding the Shepard incident...

Fred Phelps:
"You don't kill anybody. Not just you don't kill a fag, you don't kill anybody, because our laws prohibit it. But that's not what's going on here. this has become a cause célèbre for the "gay agenda..." (source: NPR)

Scott Lively (again):
"Matthew Shepard was just another self-identified “gay,” but on October 12, 1998, he was murdered by two men. He wasn’t killed because he was a homosexual, it was a matter of robbery. And the robbers obviously weren’t Christians. However, the timing was right for the “gay” scheme, and so Matthew Shepard became the new martyr of the homosexual movement: a symbol of “gay” victim hood at the hands of the evil Christians." (source: *gag*)

It's kind of fascinating to watch David's story follow such a similar form as Matt's, and especially the way that the story's being framed. It also makes me a little nauseous because it makes me wonder how much that previous narrative might help push international discourse in the same direction. How much has Matt Shepard's story set the terms of discourse for incidents like these? And, is there anything we can do about it?

There is one narrative in particular that I noticed, too, but I'll let the blogger Gay Uganda explain. He has been trying to sift through the news to understand what is going on in the Kato case:

Have just heard it on Capital FM. Apparently, the guy who was staying in David's place, the guy who was working for him has been arrested. At Mukono Police station at the moment.
And, from what I heard, he has confessed to the murder, reporting that Kato forced him into having sex, so he killed him.
True, false, I don't know?...

...yeah, in Uganda, putting the blame on the big bad homosexual works all the time. [Homosexuals] are evil, they are bad, they are terrible. They deserve hanging.
So, I killed him because he attacked me, or he made advances. Homosexual advances. So, I hit him twice with a hammer...

Gay Panic Defense? I believe that is what it is called. And, in Uganda, we [gays] are so vilified, it can work. Terrible as it seems. That is a fact.

Gay Uganda (who also lives in Kampala) is recognizing a pattern within the Kato murder investigation, and "gay panic" is the phrase he settles on to define the way that authorities or perpetrators shift blame to the gay victim and justify their victimization. When Matt died, his murderer called it "gay panic." The name, at least, stuck. But does the influence go no further? I hope not. I hope McKinney didn't serve as a role model for such dreck.

Then there's the robbery narrative, which both the Kampala police and Scott Lively put forward. Lively has long been involved in the Laramie story because he has long harassed and mocked the LGBT movement. Not long after Matt's murderers were tried, Lively stuck his nose into the debate and had the temerity (or the insanity) to compare Matt's rise in the media world to how the Nazis adopted Horst Wessel as an icon. (Oooh, Nazis. Way to jump the shark there, Scotty.) At the same time, he also blamed Matt's murder on a simple robbery. Not surprisingly, that's the exact same excuse he used to distance himself from his direct complicity in the Kato murder. He went to Kampala to fuel this kind of homophobic outrage; whether Kato was a direct victim or collateral damage of his hate campaign is simply a matter of degree regarding his guilt. It's like he's turned this into his M.O. anytime somebody says he's complicit for the results of the violence-laden homophobia he preaches.

And, so: where are we now? It's an interesting puzzle, but it's one that I'm a little too partial to consider correctly. Of course I see shadows of Matt everywhere; his absence is burned into my memory like a cut-up photograph. And yet, the story we all tell about his murder has obviously shaped the discourse on gay rights, homophobia, and violence. What has that narrative contributed to this new story of a Ugandan activist beaten to death just three weeks after he won a suit in court? Perhaps the Shepard murder's legacy is inscribed in our language, with terms "gay panic" or "gay agenda." Maybe that narrative has lent us narrative schemas that the culture at large now uses to make sense of similar issues. Or, maybe Scott Lively has simply found a cheap, dirty way to eschew any responsibility for the human casualties of his hatred and ignorance.

On the whole, the David Kato story isn't like Matt's much at all. Kato died in a city of over a million people, in his own home. He was possibly murdered by a man living under his own roof. At the moment, nobody is really sure what happened or whether to trust the main suspect's confession. Kato lived in a society with much more than a homophobic subtext; it's the majority opinion. And, as much as I try to downplay the religious role in my own community, the direct involvement of Christian fundamentialism in Uganda is clearly making people suffer. It's all really a matter of where you focus, and how you read the signs.

So: did Matt change the way we talk about hate crimes and homophobia? Is it for good or for ill? Or, am I just seeing part of a much older narrative of violence and denial? Has the Laramie murder unwittingly developed a strategy for nay-sayers to ignore LGBT suffering?

I don't know. I just don't know where to go with this. Any suggestions out there???

NOTES:
If you're interested in following David Kato's story, there are some great sites out there from African sources you can follow:

Gay Uganda: a gay blogger from Kampala who was familiar with Kato:
http://gayuganda.blogspot.com

Behind the Mask: an African organization providing LGBT news, resources, and activism:
http://www.mask.org.za

Gay Rights Uganda: Just what it sounds like:
http://www.gayrightsuganda.org/

PHOTO CREDIT:

1) Bart Ehrman, by me.
2) David Kato Kisule, from Abolire la miseria della Calabria, via Flickr.
3) A NYC protester of the Uganda anti-homosexuality law, from the International Women's Health Coalition, via Flickr.

It's crunch time-- and I'm getting crunched

2011-01-26T00:41:00.000-05:00

So, I've been a little bit too silent here over the last couple of weeks, and it's just because I'm so busy. I have a field exam in Renaissance literature coming up in early February, and I'm not studied up for it yet. And so, yours truly is stuck at the library, surrounded by magisterial works of Renaissance criticism, and I feel zonked. Actually, I keep taking naps.

So, I hope you'll be patient with me for just a couple more weeks, and I'll give you a taste of the UW campus in complete snow, chat about the wonderful community spirit among the UW faculty, and, yes-- the Airing of Grievances will continue.

So, until then, I shall give you a visual piece upon which to meditate. Wyoming may be cold and dry, but it has a secret: I found Narnia there this winter. Take a look for yourself:

Unfortunately, I didn't bump into Mr. Tumnus, nor did I see Aslan. But, then again, I hear he comes at the end of our eternal winter and melts it into spring. That will happen sometime in May, knowing Wyoming weather.

Specters of Laramie in Tucson, Arizona

2011-01-13T22:09:00.005-05:00

I had been back on the UW campus for less than twenty minutes when I found out about the Tucson shooting last week. I was checking the news in the Union building when the alert popped up on my laptop screen. The next morning, my brother Coyote and I spent most of the morning before I headed to campus and he headed to work watching the press conference. I only hope that the Tucson community can continue to stand together and support each other as they bury their dead, and that they remain unified in the face of the media speculations about 'toxic rhetoric' and political cheap shots aimed at the other side.

During that same time, I spent a lot of time on the microfilm scanners in Coe Library reading civic commentaries of a different sort, and I started to see discursive echoes of the current Tucson troubles in the Boomerang and Branding Iron archives. As journalists and ordinary citizens grappled with the trauma of Matt's beating, I saw them asking similar questions about politics and rhetoric in 1998: to what extent is the national discourse to blame? How much is the local community to blame? To what extent should politics and this tragedy coincide in national discussion? Should political parties be held accountable for their words and policies that might encourage such behavior? Is the community to blame for the actions of the perpetrator(s), and how should we remember the victim(s)?

And, now I see that the people of Tucson, Arizona are grappling with similar questions about their identity as a community in the old West. CNN recently posted an article titled "Tucson Battles Wild West Image After Shooting," looking at everything from the desert landscape and tourist kitsch to the political climate in this Arizona town. The tone of the article sounds extremely familiar to me:

...Tucson sees itself as an oasis of progressivism and diversity in a state that's gotten a national reputation for bigotry and anti-immigrant hate speech. It's the kind of place that hosts mariachi festivals, celebrates Cesar Chavez and asks cars to pull into parking spaces backward, for the safety of bicyclists.

But after the Democratic congresswoman was shot and six were killed Saturday during a political meet and greet at a supermarket on the northwest side of town, this place of golf courses, taquerias and cactuses started to look at itself anew -- examining not only the causes of the shooting but the borders residents put between each other. (par. 5-6, emphasis mine)

This same formulation shows up everywhere in the 1998 archives. This same article on Tuscon even shows the town struggling to understand the shooter's place in their community as well, in almost the same words as Laramie once struggled to place McKinney and Henderson:

[Others] see the accused shooter, Jared Loughner, as mentally unstable. The event, they say, was an aberration -- not a reflection on this unique town, where the hot, dry air attracts arthritis patients seeking relief.

"It's the nicest place on Earth, as far as I'm concerned," said Mark Gardner, a New Yorker who spends the winter in Tucson because of the warm weather.

Gardner is like many who end up in this city of retirees, immigrants and transplants -- where chain stores are dressed up like pueblos and corduroy-textured cactuses line the roads, their stumpy hands outstretched like hitchhikers. He came to Tucson with romantic visions of the American Southwest.

What he found wasn't far off. (par. 11-14, emphasis mine).

There is also speculation about whether or not the society at large should bear some of the guilt for the Tucson rampage, a question which was asked, often unfairly, of Laramie as well. At the same time, the question itself is legitimate: is there such a thing as social or societal guilt for a member who acts alone? From a religious perspective, that question has an interesting answer, and one that Stephen Prothero explores in regard to the Tucson killer this week on CNN's Belief blog. He confesses, "I can't help thinking we have at least a spattering of blood on our hands." Despite the controversial nature of that comment, I find part of myself wanting to agree with him. Not just about Matt, but about Arizona, too. Maybe we're all somehow a little more fallen because of what happened, less innocent. Maybe our social connection to the killer and victims made us all somehow present in Tucson, just as I was once in Laramie, and perhaps that comes with some kind of social or metaphysical guilt attached. I don't really know.

So, once again the national discourse is repeating itself, but it has settled upon a new political lightning rod from all the dry, electric static surrounding the nation's new hot-button topic: immigration. Could the Tucson shooting find itself becoming the next symbol of social turmoil in the national discourse?

I don't really know how to answer that yet, as this story is still just forming, but these events certainly show the same potential for that to happen. In Laramie, that discourse created an extremely ambivalent response as some people cringed back from the old West motif and claims of intolerance while others took it to heart, indicting the culture. Some then used that self-scrutiny to make Laramie, and the nation, a better place, and others rejected the notion altogether.

Maybe we know better now how to take these questions, these stories, and use them to create unity and social growth. Or, maybe nothing's changed. I don't really know how to make anything positive out of this observation, other than to note how social discourse and national memory seems to be following the same pattern. What will be the outcome for national discourse, and what will happen to the Tucson community?

PHOTO CREDIT: Images of the spontaneous memorial at Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords' office and at Oracle Road, Tucson, Arizona. Taken by Search Net Media, available via Flickr.

Back to Laramie

2011-01-09T21:41:00.002-05:00

The first snowfall, for me, has always marked a season of forgetting. The snow wipes the landscape clean, covering each groove and bump of topography with the same agnostic blanket of white. The snow hides the comforting marks of law and order painted on the roads and masks the threshold between surfaces, lawn, sidewalk, street, or gravel only discernible by the press of your boot when it strays off the path and into the pale.

As we peer through the falling snow, we are no longer allowed a context to know where we have been or where we are going next; all it offers us is the trace of where we have been just a few steps before and the nagging suspicion we're actually just walking in circles. We cannot turn back, retrace our steps in this season of forgetting, this season of snow. In seasons like this, we can no longer look without to make the world make sense; instead we have turn our gaze within, retreat into the den of our minds for introspection until the storm breaks. Perhaps that's the reason I have loved the snow all these years: this season of forgetting is a good excuse to look within and explore a different landscape.

I came back to Laramie a couple of days ago, but this is the first snowfall I've seen since I arrived. In an attempt to beat the storm front threatening to crawl through the Shirley Basin, I left for here two days early to stay with my brother Coyote. I haven't seen him in six months. He's gained some weight and is doing okay, but I've seen him look better. Coyote abandoned the lease on his old den behind somebody's garage in west Laramie for a different apartment just south of the campus, but that doesn't mean he's in a nicer place. His new digs have the peeling plaster and musty smell of a flophouse, but, hey, at least he has a bed now-- and at least I can wear flip-flops in the shower while I'm his guest. As I've watched Coyote over the last few days, he seems to be wrapped in the same forgetful snow as the rest of Laramie; after a raft of health problems, he cut his semester of school short and has to wait before he can apply for more college funding in the fall. I look at his woes and feel helpless to do anything: he needs a secure income. He needs to eat more protein. He needs to stop concealing whatever-it-is that makes his hide twitch with fright when I look him in the eye. I boil with frustration, but I can't see through the static field of this snow around us. Whatever it is he needs, I can't help him find it.

For a different group of students I see downtown, the snow allows a different kind of forgetting. At the bar and grill across Grand Avenue, a rambunctious group of coeds were doing "train shots" every time they hear the rails rumble just outside their window. (At that rate, they're not going to remember anything by morning when their classes start.) For them, the snow's amnesia brings no need to withdraw into the self; they know their present circumstances, the warmth of liquor in their bellies and the press of friends on their shoulders, and for the present, that's enough.

Forgetting has come to community as well, but for the town it comes in different forms. According to yesterday's Boomerang, the definition of marriage statute which failed in the Wyoming legislature in 2008 will be resurrected for a new vote in the upcoming session. That didn't take too long, unfortunately, and I'm disappointed. On the bright side, Dr. Connolly is still in there to lobby against it, and hopefully we can expect a similar result as the "no" vote on the statute which she witnessed two years ago. It's a shame that this particular bill didn't die and get covered up in the snow.

And, on another ambivalent note, it seems that yet one more bar has succumbed to the Fireside curse. A couple of different establishments have sprouted up and died at the old Fireside in the last ten years, but now it seems that the doors are closed for good. A "For Sale" sign sits in the window of the old building, and the once-prominent vintage sign jutting up from the roof has been removed, too. That sign may have been repainted, but it was the last recognizable vestige of the old Fireside and now it's gone. Nor will this building ever likely be a bar again; Coyote told me that they sold the state liquor license from the old Fireside property to Wal-Mart.

But not all forgetting in the cold midwinter is permanent, damaging or sad-- just melancholy. For instance:

Hiding somewhere under that snowdrift is Matt Shepard's memorial bench. Every winter, the students must forsake the benches in Prexy's pasture and around A&S for a warmer places to study, and for a time the snow makes them forget that the benches were ever there. When the snow melts and all are ready for spring, however, the students will seek this place out, as they have for the last couple years, to feel the warmth of the sun on their faces again. The snow can't really make anybody forget-- not forever, at least, and not unwillingly...

Just for fun...

2011-01-07T02:14:00.000-05:00

I saw these somewhere west of Meeteetsee, Wyoming last week. They're jackrabbit tracks near the base of an eagle's nest.

I hope you're having a better break than I am! The flu fairy or something came to visit me this week. Lots of tea and crackers for me...

The Airing of Grievances, Charge 2, cont.

2011-01-05T16:19:00.005-05:00

Being the Second Charge,

Regarding the Bed of Procrustes

I had known about Anna Deavere Smith by the time I was a sophomore in college, but I never really sat down and read any of her plays until last year. I'd often heard the comparison between Smith's amazing work and what Tectonic Theater had done with The Laramie Project, but it took my growing interest in documentary theater and ethnography to finally make me pick up Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992.

What I found just about knocked me off my feet when I read it. I could remember the LA riots and the Rodney King trial back when it happened, but it wasn't something that really made an impact on a 12-year old celebrating her birthday in Montana. Now that that 12-year old is 30 and studying lit, however, Smith's recounting of the event is quite compelling. I read in Smith's play about everyone from disgraced cops to gang members to old Korean business owners layered together, and it was electrifying. The voices were messy, sometimes following completely different story lines, but they were woven together by Smith's solo performance and a common bewilderment about what went wrong. And, at the end, we have the voice of Twilight Bey, a gang member who spoke of hope in the confusion with such clarity that I marveled at him. When I get back home I want to read through Fires in the Mirror, although the one I'd really like to get my hands on sometime is Let Me Down Easy.

What really fascinates me is the organic way in which these disparate voices seem to come together in Smith's work. Sure, Smith is a very creative editor, but she felt no need to jettison side narratives that didn't seem to really fit into the whole, like the story of the gang peace talks or the shooting of a young black girl by a Korean shop owner, both of which fill in the richly complicated background of community tension that existed long before Rodney King was beaten. I almost feel that she's willing to sacrifice continuity for texture. Some of these voices clash; some don't fit. And, many of the voices that couldn't fit in the original performance were re-added in the print version as part of her series On the Road: The Search for the American Character. Smith seems to prefer to keep rather than cut.

Now, it could just be that familiarity breeds contempt, but I feel like that there's an unruliness, a slip to Anna Deavere Smith's work that fits the real world pace of painful revelation. That's an unruliness I don't feel with The Laramie Project, which feels more unyielding and tight like the suspension on a sports car. I sometimes wonder what had to be chopped off or didn't get noticed when Tectonic wound the plot of this play like a precision watch around the religious narrative.

Last time, we looked at that story line-- the religious factors contributing to Matt's murder-- which maybe, like Procrustes, Tectonic stretched out to make it fit on their theatrical bed. What I'd like to explore today are some of the other stories which maybe Procrustes chopped off to make this story run in that direction. I'm not sure which of these (if any) are really important, but let's see what possibilities we run into!

Well, I suppose if we're going to talk about chopped narratives, we might as well start this discussion with the 800 pound gorilla in the room. During the same couple of weeks that Matt Shepard was beaten, two other tragedies made it into the paper's Letters to the Editor, both of which certain members of the Laramie community didn't want to get buried in all the press coverage of the Shepard beating. One of these stories, minus a name, made it into The Laramie Project in Sherry Johnson's testimony. The other story was never mentioned at all.

That second story was the brutal murder of Christin Lamb, an 8-year old girl who was killed in July of 1998. Lamb's murderer, James Eric Peterson, came to trial at the same time that the Shepard beating broke into the national headlines. Incidentally, this was the first story that reporter Tiffany Edwards covered when she started up at the Boomerang, and she wrote about that experience after the premiere of 10 Years Later. Beth Loffreda addresses this same issue in her book Losing Matthew Shepard, along with another murdered girl I knew nothing about-- poor Daphne Sulk.

The FRC (Now part of Focus on the Family), as far as I know, first used Lamb to criticize the Shepard coverage on a national level, and from there her murder spawned a lot of insincere Internet screaming about Matthew Shepard and the politics of media coverage. (If you have a strong constitution, you can see some examples here and here.) Why pass laws and cause media hysteria over Shepard's murder, many people complained, when poor Christin Lamb died just as horribly? When the Shepard-Byrd hate crimes act passed last year, the same story resurfaced. Christin Lamb became a mascot for religious conservatives and right-wing groups whether her family wanted her to be or not, and while I'm sure that the Lamb family wants their little girl to be remembered, I don't think that these political stooges are quite what they had in mind.

Okay, so I am absolutely not going to suggest that Tectonic should have included something about the Christin Lamb murder; I don't envy them the job of editing that play one bit, and I'm trying hard not to play backseat driver on that account. Nevertheless, I am interested in what might have changed if they had. The possibilities of the Lamb story piques my curiosity mostly because of this passage:

SHERRY JOHNSON: But, the other thing that was not brought out-- at the same time that patrolman was killed. And there was nothing. Nothing. They didn't say anything about the old man that killed him. He was driving down the road and he shouldn't have been driving and killed him. It was just a little piece in the paper. And we lost one of our guys. (64)

What Sherry is referring to is the tragic death of Chris Logsdon, a local patrolman; that was the other story which some people struggled to keep alive in the Letters to the Editor section. As an officer's wife, when Sherry can't understand the media reaction to the Shepard murder, she defaults to the story most personal to her, and that's Chris's death-- not Christin's.

This comparison between Chris and Matt makes sense to Sherrie, but probably not to many readers of TLP. Matt was bludgeoned to death; the patrolman, however, was killed by negligent homicide. Matt was targeted for violence; Logsdon died in an accident. There's no element of sexuality inherent to vehicular homicide, either. The only resonance to this story with Matt's is the one personal to Sherry; that patrolman could have been her husband. When this story stands alone, we have to judge Sherry by her bias against Matt rather than her own personal struggles to understand the murder, and so the play makes it look like the people who question the media frenzy just don't get it.

But now let's add Christin Lamb back into the equation: what do we gain? First, this was the story that many people were talking about in the same breath as Matt's death, and it caused a variety of community responses. We see that the tragedy for this community didn't automatically start and stop with Matt; rather, he came as part of a complex of tragedies which the Laramie was still trying to figure out when McKinney and Henderson delivered the knockout blow that sent us reeling. We would have had a complicated nexus of personal tragedies, all of which fueled Laramie's individual reactions to Matt's death and the media circus which had followed.

What would it look like if we could see other Laramie residents like Sherry trying to sort out this chaos by looking at Christin or Daphne's stories? It's hard to say, but it might have looked something like the Korean shop killing in Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. When Smith interviews members of the LA community torn by the riot, she also covers the killing of Latasha Harlins, a black teenager shot in a convenience store; this murder set the subtext for a lot of the racial angst before the riot. There is no clear "real story" in Smith's retelling; her witnesses tell biased versions in which they blame the other side and the media for racism. The shooter, Mrs. Du, only received a $500 fine, and the black community cried foul:

[CHARLES LLOYD, lawyer for Mrs. Du]

[Latasha's] five-six, one-hundred-and-fifty-two pounds,
and she beat the hell out of this lady...
Boom! (hard, loud.)
Looka there in the face
Boom! (hard, loud.)
Latasha knocks Mrs. Du down, the lady throws the chair,
picking up a gun now!...

They made it political!
If Latasha had been killed by a black woman it wouldn't have
been
in the black the papers,
it's such a common occurrence! (40-41)
. . . . . . .

[GINA RAE, community activist]

There were two children
who were eyewitnesses to Latasha's death.
And they both testified
that Latasha
begged Mrs. Du to let her
go and was not trying to steal orange juice
and died with two dollars in her hand.
Her last act was two dollars in her hand.
If-the-white-media-does-not-decide-to-print-something-that
happens-to-us,-we-don't-know. (48)

A section of Koreatown destroyed in the LA riots.
Was it targeted because of Latasha Harlins? (Smith 39)

Like Kristen Lamb and Matt Shepard, at first glance the story of Latasha Harlins and Mrs. Du has nothing to do with the beating of Rodney King or the riots that followed. But that subtext helps us understand the racial tensions in LA which eventually exploded on the night of April 29th. These tensions in LA make so much more sense when the audience sees that the riot was not really just about what happened to Rodney King. It's much larger than that one incident of injustice and more complicated than just white vs. black or rich vs. poor. We understand the King beating and riots as a flash point from a systemic failure rather than a single, definable event.

So, if we turn back to The Laramie Project, if we put the media backlash in the context of the Lamb murder and not just the death of the highway patrolman, we can understand a little bit more the environment that led up to Shepard's murder. A lot of people were already traumatized by Christin and Daphne's murders, and for many of them, the overwhelming media presence after Matt died could have been the last straw.

For others who were turned off by the issue of Matt's sexual preference, Christin became the easy place to justify their outrage. Here was a true innocent, they'd say, just 8 years old, who was also brutally assaulted, murdered, and then disposed of in a landfill. In comparison to Matt, there was no seeming taint of to the victim due to sexuality, and that made her the perfect foil. And so, for some the ambivalence was genuine, and for others, it was just a safe place to funnel their resistance. Beth Loffreda makes this exact point:

[T]o some, like Jim Osborn, the comparison of Matt to Kristin and Daphne sometimes masked a hostility for gays: "They became incensed-- why didn't Kristin Lamb get this kind of coverage, why didn't Daphne Sulk get this kind of coverage? That was the way people could lash out who wanted to say, fuck, it was just a gay guy. But they couldn't say it was just a gay guy, so what about these two girls?" (Loffreda 26)

As I've mentioned before, and as Loffreda probably explores in a lot more detail in her book (I'm not through all of it yet), wondering why some people's tragedies are remembered or perpetuated in the media is a legitimate question for those left behind. Why Matt? Why not Daphne, or Chris or Christin? And yet, when Sherry Johnson is our only voice asking that question, we can't understand her point because her only example makes no sense. We can't see the disparity among those asking that same question, and since we don't see that larger context, we don't understand where Sherry Johnson or others like her come from when they grapple with Shepard's murder.

There is no doubt in my mind that someone had talked about the Lamb murder to the theater company, but I completely understand why maybe Tectonic didn't want to even touch this story. You can't even bring Christin's name up anymore without invoking the political and religious perspective which co-opted her as their spokesman against gay rights. As an innocent child, the story of her death is both horrific and compelling, but it happened three months before McKinney and Henderson met Matt at the Fireside lounge. Besides, what if Christin Lamb was mentioned in the text: would it have given audience members an "out" just like it did for some Laramie residents? Perhaps her tragedy was simply too dangerous to tell alongside Matt's. When we look at Sherry Johnson, she discredits herself at the same time she tries to voice this concern because of her personal bias; she thus represents those who resent Matt's posthumous fame in such a way that the company doesn't have to worry about legitimizing their opinions.

I guess that's what I miss in TLP when I turn back to Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992: that ambivalence, the tension and slippage that comes when voices clash with no clear resolution and no clear relation to the main plot. You can't figure out who to believe when Smith brings up the story of Latasha Harlins because her voices won't dialogue, won't see to reason, won't give up their prejudices. It was a dangerous move to show black community members vilifying each other and treating Koreans like stereotypes in a play about race and identity in America. Nevertheless, I would argue that the depth and richness one sees in that LA community's tumultuous identity is worth the results. In comparison, if this is indeed the "story of the town of Laramie" as Kaufman envisioned, then the story didn't really just start with Matt; it's more complicated than that, and I would have been interested to see what that context would have looked like on the stage.

* * *

So, while there are a lot of other story lines I think would have potentially enriched the backdrop to TLP, let me talk about just one more. When I teach TLP, I also use it to teach research methods, and so I have them research news articles on the Shepard story through various archive databases. There is one story that somebody finds on LexisNexis every semester, and it electrifies the classroom when they share it: Cindy Dixon.

This is Russell Henderson's mother, whom Russell was estranged from back in 1998. On January 2nd, 1999, two days after her abusive husband filed for divorce, a depressed Dixon left a bar while severely drunk and apparently hitched a ride from a stranger; that man, Dennis Menefee, Jr., was charged with sexually assaulting her and then kicking her out in the snow several miles out of town. Dixon tried to walk to safety, but she froze to death before she made it, about 1000 feet away from somebody's driveway. Hear any familiar echoes? Yeah. Creepy. Anyhow, the following December, Menefee plead guilty to a lesser charge and only got nine years in prison.

One strain of the earliest news reports made it sound like Dixon, dead drunk, just stumbled out the door in the middle of the night and died because she didn't have enough sense to wear a coat, but in reality, she couldn't have walked anywhere from four to twelve miles out of town in a wind chill of -30 degrees Fahrenheit. Menefee left her there. When some reporters (like the New York Times) didn't mention that the police were treating her death as a homicide in their reports, they ignored the fact that Henderson's mother was callously murdered and sexually assaulted. Many national and international papers were only interested in covering Dixon's death as far as it concerned the Shepard trial, so follow-up reports about Menefee's trial for her assault and murder are a little scarce. Personally, I think that Dixon was denied her victim's right to a voice.

I really commend Tectonic to returning to this story in 10 Years Later because we needed to see (at least, I did) Henderson's understanding of his own crimes and how he found remorse for his victim through his own loss. In the first play, however, Tectonic chose not to broach that story at all. It was a dangerous story, after all; it risked instilling too much sympathyy, and, as Kaufman has often said, this wasn't supposed to be a play about the killers. Perhaps it was better not to muddy the waters around the victim/perpetrator divide with a story that crosses both of those boundaries.

And yet, try to read this courtroom scene knowing that Henderson's absent mother was murdered just two or three months before this point, knowing that Ms. Thompson just lost her daughter to violence:

MS. THOMPSON: ...Your Honor, we, as a family, hope that as you sentence Russell, that you will do it concurrently two life terms. For the Russell we know and love, we humbly plead, Your Honor, not to take Russell completely out of our lives. (83)

RUSSELL HENDERSON: ...Your Honor, Mr. and Mrs. Shepard, there is not a moment that goes by that I don't see what happened that night. I know what I did was very wrong, and I regret greatly for what I did. You have my greatest sympathy for what happened. I hope that one day you will find it in your hearts to forgive me... (83)

Okay, granted, Russell doesn't sound too sincere here. And yet, how hard would it be, at that point, to then wholeheartedly agree with the judge when he rules,

Mr. Henderson, this Court does not believe that you really feel any true remorse for your part in this matter. And I wonder, Mr. Henderson, whether you fully realize the gravity of what you've done. (83)?

Maybe, at the time that the first play premiered, Tectonic felt that audiences (and perhaps themselves, too) weren't ready to actually feel pity for one of the murderers, and on that note they might have been right. Maybe. I don't really know what to think. All I know is that Kaufman made a similar decision not to include information about Aaron McKinney's dead mother because he didn't want to get into other motives besides the ones that he felt intersected with the larger community (Wangh 11). Although I would probably agree that the death of Aaron's mother probably didn't intersect with the larger community, Cindy Dixon's murder did.

Okay, so Cindy was never mentioned in the first play. How would this play have been different if she had? For one, I think it would have been a dangerous move; it would've put the play in danger of flying off its intended course. It wouldn't have been just about the town of Laramie anymore; we would have had to focus somewhat on the perpetrators and on their humanity rather than just on how the community reacted to them. We would have been asked to feel pity for their losses, too, and that's a hell of a lot to ask of an audience already watching a gut-wrenching story about a brutal murder. Maybe the whole thing would have collapsed into ambivalence, and that great social action generated by Tectonic's play would have been blunted by some sympathy for the devil.

From another angle, though, Cindy's story would have made the play more about Laramie. As the play itself makes clear, every tragedy has a profound impact on a community's identity, so Cindy's death was a trauma to Laramie, just like Christin's, Daphne's, or Matt's. The only difference was whom those shock waves affected the most. Just because the impact zone of Cindy's murder started with Russell Henderson and his grandmother doesn't make it any less of a part of the Laramie story. It just doesn't feel right to me not to explore this death which impacted the trajectory of the Shepard narrative in 1999.

And yet, I'm not sure there was any real way to integrate it without pulling the play off its intended course. I don't think I can gripe about this one too much though, because Tectonic eventually did come back to Russell, and the story of Cindy's murder. They obviously saw the importance of it to the story of Laramie when they came back to it in 10 Years Later, too. And they were right, too; the scene where Russell recounts his understanding of Matt's death through his mother's is just heart-rending. Would that knowledge of Cindy's death have ripped the first play apart?

Okay, now that we've discussed these two stories and whether they could/should have reasonably been worked into the first TLP, here's the grain of salt: remember how the bed of Procrustes worked, and that it goes both ways. I may be arguing that Tectonic has chopped the community narrative to fit their notions of what happened, but there's a flip side, too: maybe I'm just trying to stretch these other stories out to fit mine. I have to keep that in mind, and I don't know-- what do you all think?

Related posts:

The Eds, Take 1
The Eds, Take 2
Aaron McKinney's Tattoos

WORKS CITED:

Kaufman, Moisés and the Tectonic Theater Project. The Laramie Project. New York: Vintage, 2001

Loffreda, Beth. Losing Matt Shepard: Life and Politics in the Aftermath of a Gay Murder. New York: Columbia UP, 2000.

Smith, Anna Deavere. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. Dramatists Play Service, 2003.

Wangh, Stephen A. "Revenge and Forgiveness in Laramie, Wyoming." Psychoanalytic Dialogues 15 (2005):771-778.

Photo credit:

1) Anna Deavere Smith, taken by Clif1066tm, via Flickr.

2) LA Riot damage in Koreatown, by danagraves. Via Flickr.

We Do Things Differ'nt Out Here...

2010-12-30T20:53:00.000-05:00

One thing I constantly have to remind myself when I come home is that the Rockies run on a different set of rules from everything else. The pace of life is different, for one. In the winter, the tempo of existence depends completely on the weather, so one makes plans and travels over several days. When the snow started here last night, everything ground to a slow halt, and we sit with friends and drink coffee and "bullshit" each other, as my mother Goose might say. When the roads melt off and all are ploughed, the pace of life will quicken back up to a regular, but still lazy pace. Those differences stand out more and more every Christmas I go back and try to pick up the rhythms again.

For instance, my parents and I headed out to the grocery store, but they stopped by the old A&W to grab a cup of coffee first. A bunch of people that my Papa Fox knows all meet for coffee twice a day-- 9AM and 3 PM-- and they come religiously. We piled out of the car in the parking lot, and my father left the car unlocked and running while we sat. Mama Goose introduced me to one of her friends and her son. The server brought out the coffee pot and filled us all up. My mother pulled out a twenty to pay for the coffee and promptly got the stinkeye.

"I'm ignoring you," the server said to my mother.
"What, my money's not good enough for you?" Mama Goose asked with a grin. The server sniffed at it.
"Stinks," she answered. My mom scoffed and put her money back. So, we all got free coffee as we talked, and that restaurant owner got to show her unusual brand of appreciation to her regular customers and loyal friends. The small business owners don't always focus on the bottom line, it seems; things run different out here.

Also, did you know that not every person in this country has to get searched to get on a passenger plane? Not to mention carriers or locations, but when we brought my grandfather in late at night to board his flight back to Montana, the TSA agent had already been sent home and the only passenger coming in for hours was old Grampa Wolf. The agent for the flight took and scanned his bags, walked him by hand to the gate, and took him through a side door out to the plane, no pat downs or anything. We gave him a hug right in front of the only gate in the airport, and out he went, without ever entering the secure boarding area first.

I'm sure that there's someone out there who'd freak out at the thought of an unsearched person boarding a plane, but around here it makes a lot of sense. They were picking up a single traveler, an 87 year-old man who caught the very last flight out. The plane had no connections to anywhere else and only twelve minutes to get back in the air. There might be two TSA agents in the county, so why keep them there for another three hours to search one person with no carry-on bags? He was in no danger of entering the larger flight system, and once his ID was verified and his bags checked, there was no reason to make an old man with bad balance and Padgett's disease completely undress for a hand search. We just do things different here.

So, why such a nonchalant way of relating to others? I suppose what really makes things different is that there are no strangers...

This is how Wyoming field trips happen.

2010-12-29T17:01:00.002-05:00

Well, after a brown Christmas, I finally made it to my parents' house in Wyoming a few days ago from Casper. My grandpa Wolf was down here for a few days, and we drove to a town with an airport to fly him back home to Montana. After the flight took off, however, the airport decided that the runway was too slick to land a plane on, and so my 87 year-old, crotchety, snappish, OCD grandfather had to spend the night with four other passengers in Billings, MT.

So, now it's the next day, and northern Montana is supposed to get slammed with all our late Christmas snow by 3 PM. So, with the blizzard bearing down upon them, the airline tried to sneak them all back into Lewistown before the snow hit. They packed my old Grampa Wolf up onto a plane, circled the Fergus County airport five and a half times, and had to turn back. Only, now Billings is too nasty to land, so he's been diverted. To Sheridan, Wyoming. In the northeastern corner of the state.

Oh, la. So, my mother's hair is standing on end, and Papa Fox and I are debating whether or not it's worth tromping through Ten Sleep Canyon to try and snatch him up before the snow heads south. Either way, we'll be driving through snowstorm by six o'clock.

At the moment, it looks like Papa Fox and Jackrabbit will be headed out to outrun the storm, so wish us luck! I've wanted to see the Bighorn Mountains for quite a long time-- but I just didn't want to see it with four inches of snow on the ground...

[Update...]

Well, just as we were about to head out the door and scream down the road towards Sheridan, my mother finds out that the airplane isn't staying in Sheridan. It's heading back to Billings, where they couldn't land before but now they can, and they had a 20-minute window to get him home.

Naturally, they missed the window of clear weather. That means that, after a full day of travel to three different destinations in two states, Grampa Wolf is back in Billings, at the same hotel he had left that morning. Outside my window, the snow falls in thick, thick cushions over everything in sight.

Grab the hot cocoa and kick back, Grampa. I don't think you (or any of us) are going anywhere soon...

Merry Christmas from Jackrabbit

2010-12-25T02:43:00.002-05:00

Okay, so it's time for a cessation in all this Festivus angst and spread a little more holiday cheer. Since I haven't really had much of a chance to take some good, wintery photos yet while I'm back in Wyoming, I culled some of my best of the previous year for you. So, wrap up, grab some hot chocolate, and enjoy the winter chill compliments of Jackrabbit.

To give credit where credit's due, these pictures are a mixture of shots taken both by me and my talented niece Kestrel. She's really quite remarkable. For a hint, most of the really good ones are hers.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and be blessed, y'all. Love is born this season.

The Airing of Grievances, Charge 2

2010-12-23T02:40:00.004-05:00

Being the First Part,
Regarding the Straw and the Plank

A couple of years ago, my Ph. D program requirements led me to take a class on composition and ethnography with our program director. Part of the requirements of the class was to do a short qualitative analysis on some kind of literacy topic, and if there's one thing I've figured out from going through the rigmarole of IRB supervision and preparing for a qualitative study, it's that you should always distrust the self.

That may sound paranoid, but it makes a lot of sense for a discipline that requires the researcher to observe and interact with people or cultures. If you are an outsider, you might have different values or ways of understanding that hamper your ability to understand what's valuable or important in the culture you study. You might not know what to look for beneath the surface. If you grew up with the people or cultures you're studying, however, sometimes that can give you blind spots or make you reluctant to draw negative conclusions. Both of these possibilities require the researcher to stop, look at their own motives and cultural values, and understand that those worldviews or personal experiences will color their observations.

Hell, let's be honest-- the first nine months of this blog were basically just a really, really long bracketing interview to hash out my motives for studying this play. The last thing I can do is just assume that I've got it all figured out and that I'm completely on the clear because I never am. I always have motives. I always have to accept that objectivity is impossible for me due to my personal connection to the play and events, and the best I can do is to mistrust my own conclusions and force myself to look at all the angles. And I will still screw up.

And so, how does this apply to Tectonic Theater? Some of them (like Stephen Belber) show themselves to be pretty ambivalent and angsty about this process, and boy, do I appreciate that; it means they're concerned about their relationship to their interviewees. Nevertheless, I think that, as a company, sometimes they believe in their mission so much that they just know what they're doing is the right thing. That's where maybe they slipped up a little when it came to giving a full, well-rounded portrayal of Laramie: they immediately saw the right answer and ran with it.

And so, I would like to proceed to the second charge in the Airing of Grievances, which is related to the first:

2. Failure to Maintain Self-Loathing

Okay, so that's a little harsh, but "Failure to Maintain Self-Referentiality" or "Failure to Bracket" just sounded too academic. Basically, I'm just saying that maybe they believed in their mission a little too much or didn't stay suspicious enough of their own motives to question if they were getting too focused on the wrong thing. So, here we go, and let's see what we find-- just remember, ladies and gents, to keep a healthy self-doubt about your view of western culture and Tectonic's motives, too!

* * *

If there's one thing you learn quickly when reading about Tectonic Theater, it's that Moisés Kaufman really believes in the kind of theater his company produces. Kaufman's interview, "Moises Kaufman: The Copulation of Form and Content," for instance, gives a fascinating look into the broad structural scheme of his theatrical work, and it's neat. It's also fascinating to see the passion he has for his work and how much thought he puts into his critical and performance theory; that theoretical grounding has a direct effect, I think, on how this kind of social theater can can turn the voices of those in crisis into a call for social change and promote dialogue.

For instance, Kaufman says in his prologue to the first Laramie Project:

At these junctures the event becomes a lightning rod of sorts, attracting and distilling the essence of these philosophies and convictions. By paying careful attention in moments like this to people's words, one is able to hear the way these prevailing ideas affect not only individual lives but also the culture at large. (v)

The brutal murder of Matthew Shepard was another event of this kind. In its immediate aftermath, the nation launched into a dialogue that brought to the surface how we think and talk about homosexuality, sexual politics, education, class violence, privileges and rights, and the difference between tolerance and acceptance. (vi)

So, as we zero in on the flash point of Matt Shepard's murder to see how this little society (and the nation) dialogue about homosexuality, the townspeople reveal a lot of cultural attitudes. We learn about a society where people who don't fit the cultural mores are vulnerable. We learn about attitudes about class, where those who step out of the normal modes of the traditional marriage aren't embraced, and where religion is an important moral compass. And yet, the most important one to the resolution of the play is religion, and we don't get much of a sense of how so many of these other factors really play in.

This isn't really my idea-- it's Stephen Wangh's, an original dramaturge for the first play:

In the end, it was this last influence [religion] that became a central character in our story, because Laramie, like many places in the United States, is a God-fearing town, a town in which the voices of Christianity speak with great authority. Later in the play we learn that Russell Henderson had been a Mormon, and that after his conviction he was excommunicated by the Mormon church. Then we hear the Baptist minister tell us that Aaron McKinney had attended his congregation. (Wangh 2005, p. 12)

Wangh then goes on to ponder,

In retrospect, perhaps we playwrights of The Laramie Project should have asked ourselves if we were avoiding something uncomfortable by not pursuing further the religious stories in Laramie. Did we avoid those stories because we were not ready to confront our own prejudices against this society’s holy protagonists? (Wangh 2005, p. 12).

Okay, for full disclosure, I did attend (and was also baptized and married in) the Baptist Minister's old congregation, although he had long since moved to Texas when I was there. I'm hardly an impartial witness here, so please take all this with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, I really think that Tectonic Theater focuses on these religious factors of homophobic violence over every other factor. Sure, religion is an important factor for how our western culture has treated gays and lesbians, and it's good to bring that up.

But there are a ton of others, all of which were put under the microscope after Matt died-- and with the exception of a nod to the class issue, there's no real exploration of the others. They don't talk about the homestead mentality, or the way masculinity is defined or enforced, or the way that community's conservative sexual ideals makes the LGBT community vulnerable. They don't talk about the way that class and sexual preference are often linked, and how the community pushes its gay members to either side of the class spectrum to be judged.

Is this actually a problem, I should ask? I really do think so, because this approach is flattening out the narrative of social turmoil that contributes to violence. Kaufman is so damn sure that religious intolerance is the focal point of gay-targeted violence that he's simply not interested in exploring the other influences. This leads him to minimize other factors that have just as much, if not more, to do with Matt's murder than religious intolerance and Laramie's resistance to the gay-bashing narrative.

For instance, in one conversation with Kaufman, Stephen Wangh says he pressed Kaufman about flattening out Aaron's motives for his actions-- specifically about the "gay panic" defense and the story of Aaron's childhood:

“The play that we wrote,” [Kaufman] replied, “is not the Aaron McKinney play. This play is about the life of the town of Laramie. So the decisions were made in the intersection of McKinney and that town.”

“But,” I persisted, “don’t you believe that Aaron’s childhood history has something to do with his murder of Matthew Shepard?” He responded,

The fact that his mother was murdered at a hospital because some idiot doctor malpracticed has something to do with it. The fact that his father was a truck driver who came in on the weekends has something to do with it. The fact that he was attacked by a bully has something to do with it. What else has something to do with it? The fact that he was poor, the fact that he went to a horrendous school system,* the fact that he lived in a society in which the kind of thinking that inspired this murder is accepted and encouraged, [and the fact] of the church he went to saying that homosexuality is a sin. (Wangh 2005, p. 11)

Okay, so Kaufman accepts that there are many, many factors that led to what Aaron chose to do, which is great because that's what his methodology requires. Nevertheless, he chooses to focus on religion, and this leads to some sloppy shorthand that, frankly, I think distorts both Aaron and the community at large. For one, I'm not sure we can actually claim that The Baptist Minister or his church had a lot of influence in Aaron's life. In an evangelical worldview, and by TBM's judgment, Aaron was "unsaved." He was an outsider of that community, he wasn't a member, and he might have gone just because his girlfriend did. There is only one religious figure we know that McKinney speaks fondly of, and it's Father Roger in the second play. Kaufman just making an automatic leap from McKinney to TBM that might not be reasonable (as is my impulse to separate them, honestly). None of these assertions are supportable, so I'm not sure that focusing on this particular "intersection of McKinney and that town" represents Aaron's personal demons very well. And I'm not sure it represents Laramie's, either.

I suppose that there are a lot of reasons they might have chosen that focus. If you follow a "keep it simple" approach, I suppose picking one strand of social turmoil makes sense. Or, since many of the antagonists in this story are religious, it makes this the obvious thread to focus on.

Or, maybe Kaufman and others in Tectonic know the brutal, chilling force of religious intolerance so well or so personally that, when they bumped into the Baptist Minister and then saw Fred Phelps setting a new bar for scumbaggery at Matt's funeral, the religious current resonated with them so much that it kind of took over their writing process. As a result, perhaps they made two bad assumptions about what they witnessed here: first, that our society is deeply religious, and secondly, that the Baptists/evangelicals represent the most common kind of Christianity out here. And while that conclusion might resonate with Kaufman and other Tectonic members based on their own experiences, and while it might highlight what they feel is the strongest threat to LGBT acceptance, it's distorting the larger picture of the community as it grapples with this act of hate.

For one, I don't think that we're a religiously entrenched society in the traditional sense. Westerners do tend to be socially conservative, and often their values are the same as (or are based on) religious values. In general, though, we're independent enough that church might not be a central community focus, and matters of faith are often deeply personal rather than a social concern. (The LDS church is the obvious exception to this because of the huge social ties between the family and the ward, and on that note, Kaufman probably is right.)

For another, what kind of religious heritage is it that we have out here? According to Stephen Mead Johnson, the Mormons and Baptists are "like jam on toast down here" (21). He's only half right, however. Putting the LDS church aside for the moment, which admittedly has a powerful presence in Wyoming (47k adherents and representing 97 out of every 1000 residents), my experience suggests that Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian and, yes, Catholic are much more common religious traditions in Wyoming than Baptists. According to the ARDA, Baptists only make a tiny, tiny percentage of the total population in Wyoming. And from 1990-2000, the decade of the Shepard murder, many Baptist denominations were shrinking.

In Albany County specifically,** the numbers recorded for the year 2000 are pretty interesting. Out of every 1,000 residents of the county, 125.8 are Catholic. 65.8 are LDS. 21.3 are Evangelical Lutherans, and only 7.5 are Southern Baptist. And what about all evangelical Baptists together? It's about 13.4 per 1,000. The Baptist Ministers of Laramie therefore find their adherents outnumbered by the Father Rogers' a little more than nine to one. And if you add up all the religious Christians with the a-religious, I'd be willing to bet that the numbers are still only fifty-fifty at best.

I see that pattern a lot out West: a sense of morality and social order originally from a religious tradition, but now more entrenched in a secular understanding of community and family. Sure, we argue a lot about what's moral. But we also spend an inordinate amount of time discussing what's "natural," what's "masculine" vs. "effeminate," "offensive," or "appropriate." We also tend to speculate about a person's "family," "class," or "work ethic" at the same time we talk about their indiscretions (like Shannon and Jen do about Matt). If we're interested in the story of Laramie rather than just the story of Russell and Aaron, why aren't we exploring the turmoil in these non-evangelical voices-- or non-religious values-- more than we are?

Picking "The Baptist Minister" as a villain in our intellectual struggle in Laramie might make therefore sense ideologically for TLP, but I'd argue that he's not the most representative sample of western homophobia.   What the ranchers in TLP have to say about "nature" and "flaunting" and "what animals do" is indicative of a kind of homophobia that now seems to be more a matter of community values, the intersection of sexual conservatism with gender roles, or family ideology. Those other issues besides religion, the ones that Kaufman mentions in the prologue to TLP or in that conversation with Wangh, really matter. We need to see how these beliefs have a cause and effect in Laramie just like Tectonic did with the religious narrative, but those narratives get choked out by the religious narrative by Act 3.

This point is important only because it means that Kaufman and perhaps the other actors (Belber gets a pass from me) may have not remained conscious of their own motives enough to question whether their explanation for homophobia reflected Wyoming's reality completely, or perhaps their personal views on the origins of homophobia distorted the full picture.

If you study enthnographic inquiry, you'll find that self-evaluation and questioning of the researcher's motives is a critical issue right now because qualitative researchers are realizing how much their own prejudices can distort their observations. How much meta-narrative is good for ethnographic study? They ask. What happens when a researcher doesn't question her motives? Can making the research process too self-referential also invalidate your reading of the people you study because you end up studying yourself? (That's a fair question, Jackrabbit...) How involved can/should you get with your population? Where's the balance? These are important questions, doubts, and second-guesses surrounding the kind of work that Tectonic Theater is doing here.

Now, I totally respect Kaufman's decision to limit Tectonic members' presence within the play, and their reasons for doing so are quite valid. Nevertheless, I have to wonder if their decision to focus the narrative a little less on themselves and their own doubts about their own motives so they can focus on Laramie more clearly might have obscured their ethical place in Laramie's universe.   Maybe they did all these things I'm griping about and just left it out of the text. Maybe, then, they just needed to explore their own motives more in the text so they could bracket them as they listened to Laramie's story. And maybe I'm being completely unreasonable.

And, honestly, the main reason I'm worried about this is because I have to worry about it with myself. Think about my position here: I started out as one of the many agnostics in my western society. I had a religious conversion in college and immersed myself in The Baptist Church. I have a personal love and respect for Father Roger. My own views on same-sex desire have gone through the wringer as I've tried to balance my religious sensibilities with my previously secular worldview. I've also had a gay Christian friend commit suicide and am now an active ally in the LGBT community at my college.

Can I be trusted to make any objective observations about Wyoming's religious traditions, or The Baptist Church, or any of this? Whom do I want to absolve? In what ways could I be trying to absolve myself? Why did I pick up on the religious narrative in TLP and focus on it, just like Kaufman and company did when they wrote it, and what does it mean about my own blind spots? Honestly, I can't properly see the stalk in Tectonic's eye because I know there's a plank in my own-- and I can't pick it out. I'm not sure I can bracket it out, either.

I find it impossible to write about any of this without a healthy amount of self-loathing. In some ways, I feel that's important to knowing one's own motives and how they distort your perception. But maybe, just maybe, I just want to spread around the angst like holiday cheer. After all, solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris-- misery loves company...

Related Posts:

Faith As Landscape in Laramie, WY
The Religious Codes of Tectonic Theater: Using Your "Inside" Voice
Scatter Plots: Of Angst and Ethnography
Tectonic in a Mirror
Revenge and Forgiveness in Laramie, Wyoming

*A NOTE: Okay, so I'd like to stick up for my Plainsmen alumni friends and point out that Kaufman's making that "horrendous school system" comment off the cuff, and I personally think he's wrong. Education can be surprisingly egalitarian in Wyoming out of necessity. The vast, vast majority of high school students go to LHS. If Aaron is a victim of that "horrendous school system," so is Zubaida. So is Jed. And so are the kids of a lot of professors and UW staff who might be wont to gripe about the school district to some like-minded friends... Just take it with a grain of salt is all I ask.

** ANOTHER NOTE: If you really want to get a sense of where things were headed leading up to the Shepard murder, the ARDA can show you the amount of change in the county and the state from 1980-2000. It tells an interesting tale: guess who was closing churches and shrinking in that ten or twenty year period? You can actually see all the church splits...

WORKS CITED:

The Association of Religion Data Archives (the ARDA.) Dept. of Sociology, the Pennsylvania State University. Web. 20 Dec 2010.

Kaufman, Moisés, et al. "Introduction." The Laramie Project. New York: Vintage, 2000.

Wangh, Stephen. "Revenge and Forgiveness in Laramie, Wyoming." Psychoanalytic Dialogues 15.1 (2005): 1-16.

PHOTO CREDIT:

An old church in Wyoming, from antirobot's Flickr photostream. Available under a Creative Commons 2.0 license.
I have no idea where this church pic is from. It sort of looks like Rock River to me, but that's because Rock River looks like everywhere else on the plains...

Life among the prairie parishes: Time reports

2010-12-20T07:00:00.001-05:00

When my grandmother was born in Garniell, Montana during the Depression, she lived on a farm; the nearest actual town was Judith Gap, in the middle of the Montana breadbasket, and the nearest church was therefore about ten miles away. Her family had a choice of driving to Moore and be a Catholic or Methodist or go to the Gap... and be Catholic or Methodist. The nearest town with any other denominations were all the way in Lewistown. My grandfather grew up on the other side of the Gap in a staunch Lutheran family. I think they went to the Methodist church.

These tiny parish churches and prairie chapels were sometimes a county apart and had only a handful of families in attendance. Now, their numbers are shrinking as those families commute for services or stop going altogether.

Time ran this interesting short piece about the traveling pastors who serve these tiny farming communities in Minnesota. Apparently Blogger isn't fond of flash videos, but this displays remarkably well in full-screen if you choose. In any case, the plight of these pastors is very similar to what we see in Montana and Wyoming as well...

Good Riddance, DADT...

2010-12-18T18:24:00.002-05:00

Photography by Jason Pier, at: www.jasonpier.com.

Well, it's finally happened-- and not via the courts as I expected. After a wacky year of bizarre surveys, court decisions and President O seemingly backing off on his campaign promises, and John McCain having a conniption fit, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" might finally become legislative history. CNN is reporting that the Senate voted by a margin of nearly two to one to end the military policy. Although it rather shames me to know that the bill would have failed after the lame duck session was over, I am quite grateful to the eight Republicans in the Senate and the fifteen in the US House who voted for it.

Was this a "Hail Mary pass" like the Washington Post said? Sure it was. The bill is less than two weeks old. Does the bill contain some compromises? Yes. But, when the smoke cleared, the decision that most people could see was the right conclusion happened.

What I find especially interesting, however, is how the news sites are covering the vote. For two examples, you can see CNN and Fox News' coverage at the two links above. I especially like how each of them frames the names of the eight Republican senators who voted for the measure.

I'm sad about the DREAM Act and that Republicans are too worried about the "message" the bill sends to make a humanitarian gesture to kids who didn't have any choice over coming to the States legally. But, hey, I'll take progress where I can get it!

Oh, and I'm typing this post less than ten feet from my in-laws, who very much don't support the repeal. Especially my ex-Marine father-in-law, who means well but can only compare Marine culture to his own experience in the sixties and seventies. I don't think he understands how much of a non-issue this is for my generation and younger. Yay, fun!

PHOTO CREDIT: Jason Pier, who provided this photo via a Creative Commons License. You can see his entire Flickr photostream here.

Remember to always drink responsibly, boys and girls...

2010-12-14T23:28:00.002-05:00

Most of the time, I really love living in the South-- well, at least this part of the South. But every once in a while I see something that just sets my rage a-flaming. You know, like this:

So I go to pick up my prescriptions this afternoon, and this is what I run into-- a freaking drugstore serving forties and ping pong balls together in the same cooler. It wasn't like it was just the one spot, either-- every other door had a hanging display of em'. Nothing says encouraging responsible alcohol use on my party campus and the high school three blocks down the street quite like one-stop shopping for all your beer pong needs.

You can't blame this on just this CVS, however. The drugstore three blocks down the road is a Wallgreen's, and they do the same thing. Ladies and gentlemen, I don't want to say that this is the reason for the alcohol abuse culture I see with my students... but it sure ain't helping.

Links: Morning Has Broken- Una Vita Spezzata

2010-12-13T07:00:00.003-05:00

Well, it seems as if my Flickr ticker on the blog has yielded another loose Laramie narrative running free, this time in Italy. The photo you see here (and which showed up on my blog a couple weeks ago) is from a concept performance called Moring Has Broken- Una Vita Spezzata, which debuted in Firenze, Italy back in November around the same time that we were having Thanksgiving back stateside. The performing company described it as a "reportage" moments and excerpts from both The Laramie Project and Judy Shepard's book The Meaning of Matthew.

As you can see from the photo at left, the staging is extremely minimalistic, it focuses on the abstract, and... well, it's in Italian. (If my Latin doesn't fail me, that sign says "The shining lights of Laramie.) Unfortunately, I can't find any information about the content or staging of the performance, so I can't really speculate about the content. I'm fairly intrigued, however, by the idea. By calling this a "reportage" they claim to be relaying news in an abstract sense, but their main texts are a memoir and a play. So, if anything, it's a reportage of first-hand accounts, creatively rethought. I wish I could find a little video clip of this, but there's nothing up on that, either.

There are, however, some nice stills of the performance if you want to get a sense of it. You can view most of the set on a Flickr Photostream here, including a poster for the event, but if you're the sort that prefers your Internet searching to have a soundtrack, someone involved with the production set them up as a slide show with some old school Cat Stevens as a YouTube video.

And, there is contact information via a Facebook event if you'd like more information here (and have better Italian skills than I do.)

The Airing of Grievances, Charge 1

2010-12-10T07:00:00.219-05:00

As it turns out, my brother Coyote, who still lives in Laramie, also has an angsty relationship with The Laramie Project. I had already sort of known this, of course; both he and my sister were living in Laramie back in 1998, too, and back in my "I hate this freaking play" phase in the Deep South, he and I had a few conversations about that.

But until this summer, I thought that his complaints just stemmed from his own personal knowledge of the incident. Coyote, you see, knew both of the killers and Matt Shepard through various channels even though he didn't have any kind of deep relationship with any of them. He was much better friends with "Sascha" and several other members of the LGBTA on campus. And, since our conversations had mostly revolved around that social set, I had always thought that his main gripe against the play was just the "accuracy" issue.

As it turns out, though, I was wrong; his dislike was more complicated than I had given him credit for. Over dinner one night at a fancy bar and grill (where I was buying him his obligatory steak dinner), Coyote told me that he had watched the HBO version of the play and had some extremely pointed comments about its message. He said he didn't like what the HBO version had to say about what Laramie was like as a community, and he didn't think that the message had any balance. He was also surprised that I didn't completely disagree with him. "On the whole, though, don't you think this play has done some good nationwide?" I asked him. "I mean, people are actually willing to talk about issues like this now..."

"Well, sure, yeah," Coyote said. "I can totally see where this play has done a lot of good. But, come on, Jackrabbit-- why did we have to be the ones to pay for it?"

"So, you mean you feel like telling Laramie's story comes at a cost?" I asked him.

"Hell yeah," He answered through a mouthful of steak. "This sort of thing happens all over the country, but I don't see any of them having to relive this story every time somebody puts on a play." He waved his fork at me for emphasis. "We can't escape it. We can't even answer back to it. How fair is that?"

I couldn't keep my jaw off of the floor when he said that. I had sort of been wondering the same thing for months: does the simple fact of telling Matt's story in the context of this community cause social damage? Like Coyote, I know the kind of social good this play has engendered on the macro scale; but I also wonder, like him, what kind of unintended cost the microcosm of Laramie has had to absorb as a result.

And so, I hereby must proceed to the airing of my first grievance in this Festivus season:

1.Contributing to the Delinquency of Narrative

Or, I could call it "Transporting an Underage Story Across State Lines," I suppose. The point is this: in disseminating this story, Tectonic has left many in Laramie feeling like they have no control over their own identities, leaving some people to feel vulnerable or exposed, a point I've discussed before. That may not necessarily be a bad thing, but let's work out the details to see where it leads...

So I'd like to take credit for this point, but I can't. "Joe," the actor from the Pacific northwest who talked with me before the premiere of 10 Years Later back in 2009, was the first person to explain it to me in those terms. We were just sitting down to chat when I felt I needed to clear the air. "Look, I have to be honest, Joe," I told him. "I know you're involved in the reading of this play and all, but I'm not sure I'm actually on board with what Kaufman did here. This play actually makes me feel really ambivalent. And nauseated." Joe nodded his head.

"I totally understand where you're coming from. I'm pretty ambivalent about this play, too," he replied, and I stared at him a little in disbelief. "Say again?" I asked. He smiled in sympathy.

"Nobody wants to lose control of their own story," Joe told me, "and that's exactly what happened. Laramie is defined by this narrative now, and losing control over something that defines you is a frightening thing." And at that moment I realized that this actor who has spent his entire career transporting narratives had just found a name for my ambivalence: it was a kidnapped story.

Or, let me see if I can put it another way. Let's say that the narrative in question was something like the parade in The Emperor's New Clothes, where somebody points out that Laramie, Wyoming is parading through the nation in nothing but its birthday suit. That's all well and good, and perhaps pointing out their nakedness, ultimately, was the right thing to do. Only, now imagine that everybody is in their birthday suits, and the story of Laramie's nakedness gets spread all over the globe.

And so, for the rest of its existence, Laramie must forever wander through a land of bare skin, covered from neck to ankles but still knowing it's naked under those clothes, forever pointed out as the "streaker" in every social setting. And every time that Laramie protests and points out that everybody else is naked and it's covered, they scoff and say that Laramie is deeply misguided and in denial. Now that's awkward.

Okay, so a Hans Christian Anderson story isn't exactly the most useful analogy, but it points out the narrative difference here between the way that many non-residents of Laramie have talked about Laramie's reaction to the Shepard murder and the two plays which followed. "They're just in denial," the papers proclaimed after 10 Years Later. "They don't want to face facts." Or, as Carl Sullivan put it in Newsweek, "Tired of being known as the hate-crime town, many Laramie residents seem to have concocted a revisionist version of what transpired... Residents could accept that Laramie might be home to drug crimes (what town isn’t?), but mindless hate? No way." That town's been facing facts for twelve years now, I want to answer back. Of course some people lapse into denial, but how much soul-searching have you had to do about hate crimes in that same time period?

Dude, like, it's all her fault. Don't look at me...

Instead, maybe we should think of this not so much as a narrative of embarrassment and denial so much as an Adam and Eve story. Once a fatal, tragic deed gives them a permanent view of themselves outside of their own perspective, they realize they are naked-- and the knowledge of that lost innocence and their inability to shed that external scrutiny will follow them forever.

So, what might that self-consciousness look like for Laramie? Just for some idle speculation, here are a few ways I think that it might manifest itself:

First of all, I think that putting this story out into the open has the nasty side effect of making Laramie self-conscious about its own identity and forcing it to become a meta-narrative. While that makes for some good Postmodern fiction, that neurotic self-consciousness is a painful way to exist for more than a short period.
Secondly, there is the idea of "stealing" Laramie's narrative of self and spreading it around with a critical commentary/ interpretation attached to it. Not only does it contain Laramie's story of itself, it's embedded in a narrative that has to explode these myths by necessity. Like it or no, Laramie's name in The Laramie Project always comes with a judgment attached-- maybe not so much from Tectonic Theater judging this community but because the community is judging itself. That invites the same kind of judgment and scrutiny from the audience.
Taking a concrete, substantial place and abstracting it into a myth is painful because the elements of the legend and reality will never completely line up. Life's not easy when you're a living symbol; just ask Birmingham.
Losing the false (but comforting) belief that communities, like people, wield their own identities and forge their own destiny.

This is something I've talked about, both the good and the bad, in that conference paper I did (and of which you can see a rough draft, complete with typos, here.) When you look at this list, what you see is that the only thing that Laramie really lost was a false sense of stability and an essential identity they could control. That is, their only real loss is a loss of innocence, but one which would have massive repercussions on the community: "And their eyes were opened, and they knew that they were naked." That sense of stability instead dissolves into a realization of how capricious and in flux one's sense of identity really is. (Do I sound a little like the folklorist in 10 Years Later? I suppose maybe a little...)

Is this an actual harm perpetrated on the community, however? I guess I'm ambivalent on that point. After all, what this mostly amounted to was a wake-up call to the community about difference and exclusion, and becoming self-aware of these things is important if you're striving for equality in your community. The main difference is just that, while Laramie has been forced to sit at the altar of reckoning in the national consciousness, very few other towns have had to do the same thing. Sometimes this play helps individuals, like Rob DeBree, become self-aware of these problems by presenting them with Laramie's story. And sometimes you get the opposite effect. "Look, Laramie's got no clothes," someone proclaims as they watch the story. But they don't realize they're naked, too, because they haven't had that damaging sense of self-consciousness visited upon them. And there's nothing more disturbing, Plato might say, than living among people with their eyes shut tight.

On the whole, I really do think that it's is a pretty darn good thing that happened; at least, good has come out of Tectonic's interaction with Laramie. (I don't want to call it a felix culpa, however. I read Patristics, after all!) I've pointed out before how destabilizing that sense of community and identity in Laramie was important for giving those at the community's edges-- the LGBT, the religious minorities, the poorer residents-- a clear voice and an ability to to define the same community which had pushed them to the corners. You can't do that without forcing somebody to give up a little control, to get a little vertigo. And every time you push to take back or rewrite a narrative, somebody's going to push back.

I also believe that taking this story to the nation-- eventually-- was the right choice, even though it's had some interesting consequences; I mean, look at all the productive national dialogue the story has spurred! And yet, maybe we also need to recognize that putting this story out for national scrutiny and judgment came at some kind of cost. Laramie had no way to speak back to this narrative of self anymore, and they realized they couldn't control how people viewed it. Perhaps it's even possible (like it was in my case) that some felt that their only choices were to either unquestioningly accept TLP's portrayal of the community or to disavow it altogether.

Which leads me to the actual reason I wanted to address this as an actual grievance rather than just a commentary on the play's influence:

Not acknowledging the consequences of forcing that self awareness on a community when it makes some of them want to bury their heads in the sand.

In the national news, Kaufman and company wrote a short piece in Newsweek describing the climate in Laramie at the time of the premiere of 10 Years Later where they addressed the robbery narrative as a "real cause of concern." The article continues as follows:

So why has this distortion of the truth become so prevalent? One hypothesis is that because Laramie was portrayed in the media as a backward town where hatred and bigotry were rampant, forcing the citizens to question their identity as an idyllic community, a "good place to raise your children." "And when we have a theory about who we are," says Laramie resident Jeffrey Lockwood, "and the data goes against that theory, we throw out the data rather than adjust the theory. We are hardwired as human beings not to contemplate our own complicity in things."

I suppose that I agree with Lockwood-- having to question one's own self-image is painful, and sometimes that leads to negative reactions like hostility or denial. But I have to ask: What has been the most important catalyst for that response? Let's let Jeff Lockwood be our guide: "we're hardwired as human beings not to contemplate our own complicity in things." Just as parts of Laramie don't want to ponder the societal guilt they carry after Matt's murder, maybe Tectonic Theater doesn't want to consider that just maybe all the work they've done for gays and lesbians on the national level, and even in Laramie, actually helped push some parts of Laramie over the edge and into full denial. That's the double-edged sword of forcing self-awareness: the person or society in question can choose to resolve the tension or ignore it, but they can't just dwell in that indecision forever. How many people has this revelation helped, and where has it made things worse?

After all, what has kept this story going? Sure, the story of Matt's murder and the trauma it forced on the Laramie community is compelling in of itself, but the media alone is not the biggest driving force in the last seven years or so. Elizabeth Vargas' special only ran once or twice, as far as I know. It had a perceptible, negative impact when it first ran, but now I mostly see references to it lurking about in the same dingy, disreputable corners of the Internet where I also expect to run into Cindy Phelps Roper and Paul Cameron sharing a beer. Each of these have certainly made an impact on the Laramie community, but would it really be as lasting or pervasive as it has been?

Let's face it: it's Tectonic Theater that really keeps this story circulating in the national consciousness. Since 2000, this play has been produced thousands of times, hundreds every year, across the globe. Many times, those productions create controversy in those communities and draw media attention. They're often tied to social or political activism in that community as well, to raise the same issues that the play focuses on. HBO runs their movie version of The Laramie Project often enough to keep it relevant. And the result is a huge social awareness about how Laramie exemplifies a need to change the culture when it comes to its outsiders.

So, if there's any "media coverage" that has forced some Laramie residents to deny that the act was a hate crime and eventually embrace the robbery version of Matt's murder, we have to be fair: The Laramie Project has been the single biggest piece of media coverage of Laramie's disgrace. And so, in some real part, I think that Tectonic Theater has to acknowledge that their effort to portray this community in turmoil has also contributed in some part to the same backlash they condemn in 10 Years Later. I can totally understand if that's a seriously uncomfortable possibility for Tectonic to consider, but then again, we can sympathize; it hasn't been comfortable for us, either.