Shepard and TLP Reporting from the "Advocate"

For obvious reasons, the national magazine The Advocate was particularly interested in the Shepard story; they followed it longer and more thoroughly than most of the national media, and the quality of the coverage, from what I can tell, it a lot better than a lot of the other slash-and-type reporting that came out during the trials. Interviews with LGBT locals are also a lot more detailed and give more background information-- plus, they revisited the town periodically to get first-hand reports. Issue 796 has the most information if you need to get just one issue. 

For those that are interested, here is a list of some of the Advocate's best articles on the event.  Unfortunately, their online archive only goes as far back as 2008, so if you want to get these you'll need to find a source.  The Advocate is indexed by Academic Search Premier and Gale Cengage Academic OneFile if you have school access.

• "Back to Laramie." Advocate 1031 (2009): 71-74.  [About TLP: 10 Years Later]
  
• Martin, Michael. "Remembering Matthew." Advocate 1017 (2008): 28-35.  
• "Revisiting Laramie." Advocate 899 (2003): 31.  [Interviews w/ principal people 5 years later]
  
• Gross, Michael Joseph. "Pain and Prominence." Advocate 899 (2003): 26.   [Judy Shepard]
  
• Vilanch, Bruce. "Hallowed Ground." Advocate 815 (2000): 47.   [The Fence]
  
• Curtis, Phil. "More Than a Verdict." Advocate 802/803 (2000): 34.  [Sentencing; M&H's future as prisoners]
  
• Curtis, Phil. "A Town Reflects on Itself." Advocate 796 (1999): 44.  [Interviews with friends]
  
• Wieder, Judy. "The Shepard Family Heals." Advocate 796 (1999): 38.
• Bertrand, Stephen J. "Matthew Shepard One Year Later." Advocate 796 (1999): 36.
  
• Barrett, Jon. "The Lost Brother." Advocate 773 (1998): 26-30. [Interviews]
  

Fences, cont.: Memory, Tragedy and Entropy

The fence is gone.  

I can't really explain my feelings when I found out.  I saw in a photo essay shortly before watching Ten Years Later that the buck fence where Matt Shepard was beaten had been torn down, and I gasped.  From the picture I saw, it looks like it had been replaced with a single-rail,  low, log zipper fence just to mark the boundary, something I hadn't actually seen much out west.   It was a weird sensation; I had never specifically been out to the fence (I didn't want to be one of the gawkers) so I had no personal frame of reference.  And yet, taking it down felt like an affront, or admitting defeat, or something-- I don't know what.  All I know is that I didn't like it. 

My husband and I had a long conversation about the fence that evening when we were getting ready for bed.  When I told him about it, I was a little offended; it seemed like a deliberate attempt to efface Matt's memory from that area.  My husband, however, disagreed.  "Well, why shouldn't the landowner take down the fence?"  He asked me.  "It's his property." 

"Well, because he's just trying to forget what happened there,"  I grumbled.  "That's not right.  There are too many people trying to just forget it." 
"But when does the landowner get to move on?"  He insisted.  "He didn't have anything to do with this.  When can he stop having people show up unannounced on his property, respectfully or otherwise?  Does he ever get to stop having that crime brought to mind when he's on that property?  Does  that spot ever get to be something besides a memorial?"  I gave him a glare.   "Moving on doesn't necessarily mean forgetting," he insisted. 

I still don't know for sure what I think, but my husband has a point.   Just because the fence is gone doesn't mean that Matt's memory is lessened, and it might have honestly been necessary.  Let me see if I can explain to you why...

Online articles about TLP from American Theatre

The Theatre Communications Group has two good articles for research on The Laramie Project.  Their publication American Theatre has two good feature articles about The Laramie Project available for reading online.  One is a background piece about the process of creating the play, and the other is a short explanation by Kaufman himself.

Browse down to the May/June 2000 issue on the link above to find both articles.

Source Citation:

Kaufman, Moisés.  "Into the West: An Exploration in Form."  American Theatre May/June 2000: 17-18.

Shewey, Don.  "Town in a Mirror."  American Theatre May/June 2000: 14+.

Looking at Life through Aphorisms

A fun place to visit on the Internet, I have discovered, is the blog "Out of Context," run by a fellow Blogspot blogger who goes by the name Nothing Profound.  The site is nothing but a collection of funny, quirky, and sometimes profound aphorisms that range from observations on Murphy's Law to short Nietzsche-esque quips that reveal a deep, complicated understanding of major philosophical questions.

I've heard a lot of people criticize the aphorism as a cheap, unthinking way of seeing the world, but I have to demur.  A good aphorism is a way of presenting complicated intellectual problems through the use of a single declaration that contains all its assumptions.  A really good aphorism creates a logical relationship between different ideas with grammatical constructions like parallelism or syntactic play.  A good aphorism makes you think.  Just ask King Solomon-- or William Blake.  The aphorism is a great way to start a meditation, to open up thinking-- not to shut it down.   

Anyhow, Nothing Profound has an aphorism this week that I thought I'd share with you:  

The order you seek is the confusion you feel.

If there is anything that sums up my life at the moment, this is it.  Especially my relationship to The Laramie Project and Matt Shepard's murder.  Where does my confusion stem from, and what am I actually gaining with this inquiry?  To what extent is this search for order create, rather than alleviate my confusion?  And is invoking that sense of confusion the end I'm actually seeking, something akin to Solomon's declaration that increased wisdom leads to increased sorrow?  The more I pick apart this aphorism mentally, the more appropriate to my situation it gets, and the farther down the rabbit-hole it takes me...

Fences

I grew up clambering over barbed wire, buck fences and snow fences as a kid, and in my childhood imagination I played favorites between them. I never liked barbed wire, first because I always ran the danger of a tri-corner rip in my jeans (and therefore my mother's wrath) every time I squeezed through them. It was an aesthetic dislike, too: barbed wire is too impersonal. It's a cheap fence, metal, thrown up and pounded in without the slightest thought other than to carve the wilderness into parcels. A forcible mark of ownership. And, it's hard to climb.

 

Buck fences are more conciliatory, I had always thought. They're made from the wilderness itself, more organic, lying on top of rather than punched within the ground. To me, they suggested a more symbiotic relationship between man and land, a way of showing a stretch of land as  both "home" and "habitat" at the same time.  Snow fences, however, were always my favorite because they don't actually "fence in" anything-- just long, parallel stretches of tall rails that comb the Wyoming wind to steal its snow. You climbed a snow fence just to climb, not to get anywhere.

The fences of my childhood never registered as being something worth any particular comment-- just another part of the landscape-- but living in the South has taught me to look at them differently.  For instance, it had never occurred to me that one's relationship fences might be cultural, that that relationship might need to be taught.  One of my favorite conversations so far at my new college has been trying to explain in detail how a "snow fence" works to a friend of mine from the southwest. I eventually had to resort to pictures. He was enthralled.

Some More Wyoming for your thoughts...

Wind River Canyon, Western side, originally uploaded by Wyoming_Jackrabbit.

I've only been home in the South for a week now, and I'm already pining for the fjords, so to speak. The permanent slick of ice on the roads and dusting of snow here in Appalachia has helped quite a bit, but I find myself thumbing through my photos from break nonetheless.

So, like that awful boss who makes you sit through a Powerpoint presentation of their vacation cruise photos in a business meeting, I feel this insatiable urge to force pictures I took while I was back home on you, too.

We can psychoanalyze that impulse at a later time. (Trust me, I'm angsty and self-referential enough to do it!) But in the meantime, here's a picture from the Wind River Canyon, an impressive chasm ripped right through the middle of the largest Native American reservation in my home state. The land is joint governed by the Shoshone and Arapahoe nations.

I took this photograph about seven miles upstream from where that eagle I shared with you had been fishing on the river.   Don't get too excited about the view, however-- this is a canyon, not a mountain range.  A magpie's view of this same river would reveal a flat plain of golden, snow-dredged wheatgrass prairie as far as the eye can see on either side-- which is majestic in its own right, but not quite the same. 

In any case, I hope this view is more interesting than pictures of your boss in a Hawaiian shirt dancing in a conga line.

Links: Laramie Inside Out

One of the lesser known films about the Shepard incident and the LGBTQ community in Wyoming is Laramie Inside Out, a quite good documentary of Laramie, its people, and the protests that were going on during the trials.  I can't say as I have ever met the producer of the film (she graduated before I got to Laramie), but Beverly Seckinger is a Laramie native and filmmaker with ties to many of the same professors as I do-- particularly the Harrises, Dr. Duncan Harris of English and Dr. Janice Harris of English/Women's studies.  These two beloved members of the faculty have served as sort-of foster parents for the Honors Program students for years. 

You can find out about the film and view a synopsis of it on the film website, larmieinsideout.com.  If I can get up the gumption to do it (I'm still a little chicken), I might check this out from our university library and give you a review of the film later this year, when I have a little more free time.  In the meantime, I'd encourage you to do the same!