The UK Conversations, Part III: Minority relations

"Andrew," a member of a  UK-based production of The Laramie Project,  had some questions about Laramie life that would help him and his colleagues prepare for their roles.  The third question had to do with out patchy race relations in Wyoming: 

I was wondering if you might have a few words on the prison. I'm playing, as well as Dennis Shepard, Andrew Gomez the convict who met Aaron inside Jail. What was the Latino community in Laramie- very small? Thought of as outsiders, criminals? What jobs did they work?

In order to answer your questions on the jail a little better, I need to clarify: do you mean the county lockup, or the state prison where McKinney and Harrison sent after their conviction?  The one is in Laramie and basically a little side building next to the courthouse, but the other is in Rawlins. 

As for the Latino community, this is a question that I've been asked before, and don't feel super confident in answering, but I'll do my best.  The truth is that Laramie's Latino community was rarely thought about at all, almost an invisible population of sorts.  In fact, when I asked my husband Badger about their position in Laramie, he smirked and said, "you mean, they existed?"  That's a telling comment: even though the Latino population is the state's largest minority, they don't really "stand out," so to speak.   When I was in Laramie, I had almost no interaction with the Latino community per se on the campus, and this is where my isolation from the rest of the town makes it harder to speak with confidence.

If their treatment is anything like some of the other ethnic minorities in Wyoming, however, a lot of their status depends on whether they were born native to the region or not.  If you grew up in the region and understand its mores, you are largely accepted as part of the community, at least to a certain extent.  There's also a class difference, too: many of Laramie's minorities come in as highly educated professionals at the university and therefore have a privileged status in the community.  But those Latinos moving from other parts of the country without those credentials, and especially the 2% who emigrate from Mexico, are very much on the margins.   And, since Laramie's economy is not based on Wyoming's more prosperous mining, farming, and oil industries, that limits the number of good-paying jobs available to a population already pushed to the edges.

My sister Sparrowhawk was a foreman for a road construction subcontractor, and for a while my brother Coyote worked in the same company.  Sparrowhawk often had Latino crew members working as flagmen and maintainers. The rest of her road crew usually comprised of high school dropouts and recent parolees, if that gives you some idea of their relative social standing.  I think that many of them, like Aaron and Russ, also worked in roofing and construction.  As you can imagine, this leaves those families working these jobs in a precarious spot, especially if they have a language barrier working against them.  Construction is heavily seasonal work and often leaves people unemployed for months over the winter.  This marginalization seems all the more stark to me when you realize that the Mexican vaqueros (or "buckaroos" in my lingo) were the first and finest cowboys in North America, but to my very limited knowledge I never saw that many break into ranching around there.  

I have been told that some Native American and Latino families left Laramie after the Shepard murder because they felt physically threatened.  I can't vouch for that, but it makes a lot of sense to me.  As you may know, McKinney and Henderson were arrested initially for getting into a fight with two young men the day after they kidnapped Shepard; the cops found Shepard's identification and shoes in the truck, and that connected them to Matthew's beating.  What you may not know is that the two men McKinney attacked were Latinos.  Tiffany Edwards wrote an article on the confrontation in the Laramie Daily Boomerang after Matthew died: less than a day after attacking Shepard, McKinney pistol-whipped one of the young men, Emiliano Morales, after he slashed McKinney's truck tire.  The victim's father said that "[McKinney] would have done the same thing" to Emiliano that he had done to Shepard if he, like Matt, had been alone at the time.  Laramie Latinos, therefore, might very well have interpreted Matthew Shepard's murder as a warning against them just as much as the gay community did.  I can't confirm that this was the case.  But I could see why it might be true. 

The second reason is that our cultural landscape has never granted much of a place for displaced minorities.  Although Native Americans are also a minority in Laramie, they have a very clear place in the Western mythos; we need them to play a specific role in the stories we like tell about ourselves as a culture.  That doesn't translate to better social treatment, but they are at least recognized.  The Hispanic migrants don't have a historical role to play in our cultural memory, and that causes its own problems.   We overlook their contributions.  We take them for granted.  Sometimes we view them as dangerous.  Southern Wyoming has a very long history of bringing ethnic minorities in to work construction on our transportation lines and then brutalizing them.  If you have some spare time, just look up the phrase "Rock Springs Massacre" and you'll see what I mean. 

That's about all I have time for tonight...  I'll write again soon.   Until then,


Jackrabbit

Aaron McKinney's Tattoos, or the Ethics of Reading Humans as Literature

One thing that I've been wondering about is how little literary criticism has been written on The Laramie Project so far.  When I started thinking about the play, my initial impulse was to write an academic article.   (I've changed my mind since then.)   But when I started to pull together scholarly sources to start my research, I found that there wasn't too much to build from.  I started to wonder: why I can I find so few literary scholars writing about this play?  

For instance, when I did a search in the MLA Bibliography for The Laramie Project, I only got eight hits; six were articles of literary criticism, and one of those is Tigner's.  I tried the International Index to Performance Arts and netted another 4-5 scholarly articles, but they're mostly about documentary/nonfiction performance rather than the play as text.  That seems really strange for a play that has been as popular and culturally important for the last eight years as TLP has.  Just for comparison, Shaffer's play Amadeus had nineteen articles written and indexed in MLAB by 1988.  Why haven't all those gape-mouthed literary professors who teach this text (of whom I suppose I am one) been writing about it? Why are pens so silent in my own professional field? 

Maybe others aren't writing on this text as a literary object for the same reason that I'm a little reticent about writing on this text in an academic forum myself.  I don't like treating actual, living human beings as abstractions (which was probably clear with one of my previous posts).  It's one thing to talk about "Mozart" and "Salieri" as characters because, even though these people are real, the play itself is a total fiction.  I can even do it with Spiegelman's Maus because the conscious meta-narrative and the fictive animal story insulates the reader enough from the unspeakable horror of Vladek Spiegelman's lived reality to give him a more critical eye.  I have a much harder time doing the same thing with a person in The Laramie Project, especially when it's somebody I took classes from or saw in church.

Maybe other critics have the same hangups.  For instance, there are only 36 articles in MLAB for In Cold Blood, and they mostly seem to be focusing on genre or journalistic concerns  rather than treating it as a literary work.  Maybe we're all running into the same question: what are the ethics of reading a documentary work or "faction" (fact-based fiction) as a literary event?  Is it ethical to treat a real, live human as a symbolic construction, whether it be the Clutters, Gary Gilmore, or Russell Henderson?  Do you lessen the gravity of the situation if you talk about Aaron McKinney's failures from a literary, rather than a historical or cultural standpoint?

Or, to put it from a more practical standpoint: am I doing a disservice to Aaron McKinney (and, by extension, Matt Shepard) as a human being if I treat him like a literary construction?   

The Second Casualty is the Truth: Some Thoughts on the Murder Narrative

[Our Spanish door poses a very good question: what is truth, exactly?]
[You may decide for yourself, but the door requests that you check John 18.]

Like I've said before, I did not want to hear from Henderson and McKinney when I watched The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later.   There were a lot of reasons for that which left me conflicted after the performance.  But one upside to hearing them speak, I figured, was that perhaps we'd finally hear the truth come out.  At first, when I started to think over McKinney's revelations in the play, for a moment of two I thought that we had finally heard the truth.  But the more I reflected back on the different versions I've heard and read, I realized that I don't think that was the case.  I started to see more and more holes in the new stories until I couldn't trust their version of events.  And the more I thought about it, I didn't trust what they told us in the 20/20 interview-- and they told us then that they weren't telling the truth when they talked to the cops the first time, either.  The more I mentally sorted through all this narrative debris, I started to wonder: have they ever told the truth?  And if they did, how on earth would we ever know? 

There is an old saying that in war, the first casualty is the truth.  With the two plays of The Laramie Project, we can see a similar principle at work:  Matt Shepard was the first casualty of McKinney and Henderson's rage.  The truth behind his murder, it seems, was the second.  It may be time to finally realize that of the three people who know the truth of that night, one is dead, and the other two, after so many years of rehashing this story for different purposes, have apparently lost the ability to tell us.

At this point, I feel like I can no longer treat McKinney and Henderson as capable of telling me anything about what happened on that night.  If there was ever any truth there, it's lost.  All that leaves me with is to see their stories as just that--  narratives they tell us.  Each narrative is an attempt at a relationship between them and their audience, told for a specific purpose.  Certainly, each narrative contains elements of the truth, but we have so few tools to help us discern what the truth is that the forensic truth of what happened that night might just be gone forever.  All we can do is look at these different narrative strains and evaluate them for their purpose and effectiveness.  What are the advantages to telling each story, and how were these narratives applied?  What were the perpetrators responding to when they told each story? 

A Piece of Rope

I've been thinking a lot recently about what we learn in the Epilogue from Henderson and McKinney about Matt's murder.  I saw some interesting things come out of those two interviews, such as McKinney's sociopathic lack of sympathy and the way Henderson believes he's eternally helpless over his own fate.  Tonight I guess that I'm interested in something else entirely: in the Epilogue, Henderson and McKinney's stories about who tied up Shepard to the buck fence simply don't line up.  This isn't entirely surprising; it would make at least the second time that McKinney has changed his story about that night.  It's easy enough to just assume that they're both lying, but what if one or both of them are sincere?   If we picture that scene eleven years ago, who was holding the end of that piece of rope? 

Getting into the vagaries of personal memory usually makes me want to beat my head against a wall because the more I read into the psychological and philosophical perspectives on memory, the murkier it gets.  Right now, I tend to side with St. Augustine; in his view, all of our experience, past and future, only exist on the "knife's edge" of the present.   Since the past can never exist except as a memory in the present, we can only access them in the present-- by reaching through our current perspective and experiences to grasp at the point in the past.  The past becomes, in a sense, eternally colored by all the things which proceeded from that point and our current, present experience.  When it comes to memory, you really can never go home again; just as our present eternally changes, so does our perception of the past along with it.

But what can this tell us about the extent of Henderson's culpability in Matt's murder?  Probably nothing factual; but we might, however, tease something out about the narratives McKinney and Henderson have told themselves over the last ten years since their convictions.  This single piece of rope, stretched through ten years of retrospect-- tied by whom, and in what manner-- can tell us a lot about the nature of our memories, and perhaps how McKinney and Henderson try to understand their own histories as well.

Failure to Engage: The Robbery Motive

Looking back, one thing about The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later that interested me are the lengths that they went through to in order to try and reinforce that Matt's death was a hate crime.  I mean, they go so far as to get a folklorist to explain why the rumor that it was a "robbery gone awry" is so popular.  Personally, I've never really questioned that it was a hate crime; robbery was a major motivation (come on, they paid for a pitcher of beer with spare change,  and they did in fact rob the guy), but McKinney's confession speaks for itself: he has a deep-seated fear and hatred of gay men, and the force that drove him to stave in a helpless man's skull wasn't the twenty bucks in his wallet.  It was something else.  Matt was kidnapped and robbed because he had a full wallet, but he was bludgeoned to death because he was gay.  For me, it's basically been that simple.  

But, why did TT spend so much time on this?  Obviously it's a troubling trend in the community, indicative of a larger need to try and repress or forget the larger problems that Matt's death revealed.  But there is something about TLP's previous engagement with the robbery narrative that does bother me a little bit, however, and that's what I'd like go over now.

---

"As much as, uh, part of me didn't want the defense of them saying that it was a gay bashing or that it was gay panic, part of me is really grateful.  Because I was really scared that in the trial they were going to try and say that it was a robbery, or it was about drugs.  So when they used 'gay panic' as their defense, I felt, this is good, if nothing else the truth is going to be told... the truth is coming out. "

--Prof. Rebecca Hilliker, in TLP (2001): 91

"Aaron's done that thing 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." 

-- "Jen," a friend of McKinney's in TLP (2001): 61-62

---

Both of the quotes above from the original TLP  are probably from sometime in 1999, and I would assume before the conclusion of the McKinney trial. Both of them bring up the robbery motive. The only reason I bring this up is because in the Newsweek article, Kaufman and TT refer to the robbery excuse as a newer development in the way people talk about the Matt Shepard murder:

"A real cause for concern, however, is the emergence in Laramie of a narrative that has gained many proponents in recent years: one that states that Shepard's murder by two local residents, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, was only 'a robbery gone bad' or 'a drug-fueled murder' and not a hate crime...  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."

 In his post on the play on Newsweek's website, Carl Sullivan likewise claims that "many Laramie residents seem to have concocted a revisionist version of what transpired."  As he goes on to explain, "Residents could accept that Laramie might be home to drug crimes (what town isn’t?), but mindless hate? No way."

Now, forgive me for saying so in direct address, but that's garbage, Mr. Kaufman: there was no "emergence" and it's been popular for more than "recent years."  It's always been here.  People have been talking about the robbery motive from the day of the arraignment and we learned about the credit card and shoes in McKinney's truck.  In fact, the earliest outcry against the robbery motive I can find is Oct. 12 in the Cheyenne Wyoming Tribune-Eagle-- the day after Matt died.  Laramie residents even talked of the robbery motive to your people--  it's all over TLP like half-smudged fingerprints on a water glass.  Rebecca Hilliker didn't invent that worry out of the blue; she'd heard the rumors and responding to a real fear that robbery would be used as an excuse in court.  Even one of your own interviewees, that damn limousine driver, told Newsweek he thought it was a "robbery gone wrong" two months after Matt's death. Those are his exact words.  

I would maintain that this is not a new development; rather, it simply has a new and more devastating purpose-- erasing the memory of an event that's too difficult to address without severe self-reflection.  Robbery is the narrative we're used to telling ourselves because the GLBT population in Laramie is largely invisible and hate-driven violence in our community has largely gone unnoticed.  It was therefore the narrative many of us defaulted to when the attack first happened-- before the media blitz really got underway.   So I would accept TT's assessment of why the robbery motive is so prevalent now; I cannot, however, accept that it sprung up sometime later, in response to the media blitz.  

Why would this motive be so popular in Laramie so soon after the crime occurred?  I don't think it was principally due to homophobia-- at first.  When it first took off, it was actually part of a much larger, longstanding tension between the Laramie community members.  Matt, you see, was relatively wealthy, and he was from the campus.   Aaron McKinney was essentially from West Laramie, and Henderson lived out by the cement plant; they represent the working-class and poverty-line residents of Laramie.  These two parts of Laramie have never really seen eye to eye, and West Laramie in particular has suffered from unfair characterization as being uneducated, crude and intolerant by some of the more so-called "open-minded" intellectuals on the campus.  Pointing out that McKinney was a poor, high school dropout and intolerant and that Shepard was a gay college student just played into the same class antagonism in Laramie that had existed long before Matthew Shepard walked into town.   Then, when the media waltzed in and portrayed the whole town of Laramie as closed-minded and  intolerant, the robbery fable probably gained a lot of ground among others who might not have taken a side. Take a look at Shannon and Jen's interviews: that "moment" is all about this class antagonism (like calling Matt a "rich bitch") and they focus on the robbery and drugs angle too.  In their minds, the robbery angle and their resentment for Matt's social class are linked. 

So, why did TT never directly engage the robbery narrative in the first play?  There could be lots of reasons: maybe it never came up in interviews, or they were too busy establishing the hate crime basis of the murder, or maybe they were even uninterested.  I don't think it can be #1 because, after all, Hilliker spoke of the robbery defense, and "Jen" hopped all over it, too; it's all she could talk about, practically.  I can't speak to whether or not it's because "Jen" actually thinks that Matt's murder was a robbery, or if she's trying to help McKinney by playing up the robbery angle. 

But for the sake of argument, let's go ahead and assume that TT had heard of the robbery argument when they were in Laramie from '98 to '99; it's the only thing that makes sense to me, seeing as it's mentioned in extant interviews and everybody was talking about it.  Why not address that motive more fully?  From an editorial standpoint, I think I can understand why the writing team probably didn't want to touch it.   It's hard to even bring it up without somehow legitimating it as a possibility.  After all, McKinney and Henderson did in fact rob Matt Shepard when they beat him.  That's easy to prove; motivation and personal prejudice, however, are much more slippery matters.  The play has to work very hard to make it clear that Matt's murder was a hate crime, to the point that no other reasonable possibility is even considered.  After all, when you have a play built largely on personal opinion and personal reminiscence, how do you bring up a false motive in interviews without making it seem as reasonable as anything else people say?  I would respond that they did the same thing with the suggestion that Matt hit on McKinney, and that was pretty well refuted by the way they layer other people's testimony in with McKinney's confession in order to discredit his claims. 

 Another possibility-- again, assuming they did in fact know of the robbery defense--  might be that they failed to engage the robbery motive because it fails to engage so many of the play's central questions.  Robbery does not address the issues of tolerance and sexual orientation important to the play's organization; rather, it brackets them and sets them to the side.  That's exactly what makes this narrative so attractive to the nay-sayers: you don't have to worry about self-examination and self-doubt anymore.  It reduces Matt's murder to the simple economics of greed, and there's nothing left to discuss. Thematically, it therefore makes no sense to bring it up in the text of The Laramie Project. 

Could that be one of the reasons that TT spends so much time in the epilogue dwelling on the grisly details of Matt's murder to disprove the robbery motive is because they're fixing a previous oversight?  I don't know if it's true; I just know that that's what I want to believe, because that explanation speaks to a sincere regret I've harbored over the original Laramie Project: I wish that they had more directly acknowledged, challenged, and dismissed the robbery motive back in 2000.    When this rumor was ignored, it grew exponentially because people thought it was being suppressed. If TT had addressed the robbery motive then, it might have kept it from seeming like it sprouted out of thin air, and it would have dismissed an alternative explanation of Matt's death that really needed disproven.  Would have it made a difference?  Probably not.  There's still that awful 20/20 program to consider; that did plenty of damage on its own.

It does raise a larger, more interesting question, however: how much should we see the epilogue as an attempt to finish or "fix" things that Tectonic  Theater felt like they couldn't or didn't do in the first play?  A lot of the new material-- talking to the Shepards, for one, and the killers for another-- sort of have that feeling.  These are all things that they could not reasonably do in 1999, but they can now.  Could the robbery motive in the Epilogue be another piece of unfinished business?   I'd be interested to see what other people think.

20/20's exposé on the Shepard killing online: blech

If you'd like to get a taste of what that 20/20 piece mentioned in The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later actually said, ABC has graciously left the website for the program up so you can read for yourself right here.  I haven't checked this against my transcript of the actual news program yet, but it makes the same argument.  Since this program aired,  Bill O'Reilley has repeated it, Newsbusters has promulgated it, WBC has run with it, congress people have referred to it, and many Laramie people feel this is the true version of events.  Feel free to see what you think.

Not to prevent you all from thinking for yourselves on this one, but I obviously think it's all pretty terrible; the reporting is awful, I'm not sure I trust their motives, and they're a little too willing to take McKinney and Henderson's story as truth (which has changed since the report, I might add).  There are, however, a few important points brought up nonetheless.  Shepard wasn't an angel; he was a kid battling his own personal demons, something his mother's been pretty open about.  The police did focus on robbery as a motive for a little bit.  And McKinney and Henderson really were that lousy of human beings.   Those facts, however, don't change a damn thing about the reality of how or why those two men thought that bludgeoning an openly gay kid for his shoes was a good idea. 

Oh, and I also found a very, very interesting academic article on the 20/20 program as well.  If you have access to JSTOR you can download it:

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

It's heavily over-theorized and a LOT of fun.  Check it out!

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4490600

Fear, Loathing and "The Laramie Project": 10 Years Later, 1500 miles away

The October 12 performance was a watershed moment for me.  For one, it was the first time I had had a healthy interaction with a TLP performance, and it was only the second time I had actually dialogued back with the play-- two plays, now. 

The performance has given me a lot to think about, a lot to question, and especially a lot for introspection.  This blog entry is my first attempt to try and work through what the play experience was like from my observer's perspective.   

I hadn't really slept since the Friday night before the performance.   Adrenaline kept me moving through most of Sunday when I chatted with the cast, but by Monday I was absolutely dragging.  I was actually in the middle of an LGBTA meeting right before I left for the performance site and nervous as heck.  (Yes, I'm a straight, conservative evangelical who's actively involved in the LGBT community-- please, just... deal with it.)  This week, I was catching up with a friend I'll call "Lucas"  while everyone else chatting about the National Coming Out Day activities and were planning on seeing Milk that evening on campus.  "Lucas" and I whispered back and forth confidentially in the middle of the hubbub; he'd had an absolutely miserable weekend.  

"I've got to run to the play," I finally said when I couldn't wait any longer.  "I'll catch you later."  My friend gave me a funny look.
"You okay, hun?"  He asked.
"This play scares the hell out of me,"  I confessed.  Naturally, this confused him.  You see, I had never told anyone in that room except the club president my history before. 
"Why would it scare you?"   He asked.  So I came out with it to my friend "Lucas" right there. He was dumbfounded.  "Lucas" gave me a bear hug to comfort me before I left, and then I slipped out the back door.    

Linked NPR Broadcasts on TLP, the Matt Shepard killing, etc.

During the trial and its aftermath, I always felt that the NPR reporters did a decent and largely balanced job of covering the Shepard murder and its aftermath when so many of the television news networks were going unhinged.  Unfortunately, the NPR audio archive no longer has a good search feature, and finding what you want can be tough.  Nevertheless, with some thorough combing through, I managed to find most of the links I was looking for!

Looking at who was covering Laramie when, I think that really nice reporter who snagged me might have been Mark Roberts, who was a regional reporter for NPR stationed out of Denver then.  Just to give credit where it's due, thanks for being a good role model for media people, Mr. Roberts! 

Owning it: Some Thoughts on Henderson and McKinney

[This was a post I was saving for later, but due to some recent questions from a generous commenter, I thought I'd like to share them now. Thanks, kbxmas for some hard questions! --Jackrabbit]

---

...I'm not going to step away from that and say, "We need to show the world that this didn't happen."  I mean, these people are trying to distance themselves from the crime.   And we need to own this crime.  I feel.  Everyone needs to own it.  We are like this.  We ARE like this.  WE are LIKE this.

--Zubaida Ula, in TLP (2001): 60

---

Zubaida makes an important point about the Laramie community: "Everyone needs to own this crime." It's a statement I've tried to take to heart recently.  Whether either of us like it or not, Zubaida and I both belonged to a community which produced a McKinney, a Henderson, and a Matt Shepard.  It also helped mold the two of us into what we are.  As much as we might value our unfettered individualism out west, communities like Laramie are heavily interconnected, and each person has to claim some knowledge of and responsibility for another.

Another problem is that this realization flies in the face of a western plains ideal: each person is only responsible for themselves and their own.  For that reason, there's a tendency to deny the fact of that interconnectedness of the community when it comes to personal responsibility.  "Why should we have a black eye over this?" many of us might reason.  "I didn't murder Shepard, and I didn't approve of it.  You can't force this on me."  I've heard that same argument from my family on several fronts, and the argument is always the same: I am not the perpetrator.  If I didn't personally do it, then I'm not personally responsible for it.  We don't want to own it even if it's woven into the warp and woof of our identities.   

But, don't we have a responsibility to own this?  Don't we have to embrace our identities so that they don't define us in ways we can't control?