A Day in the Life of an Straight, Conservative, Evangelical Fledgling LGBT Activist

Okay, so today the LGBTA had a fundraising bake sale to get funds to bring in a speaker to campus, and since I've been hanging out with them,  I said I'd help out.  (If you're new, I've talked about how I ended up in this situation before.  Jesus takes me strange places-- just run with it.)  I didn't have the time to sit at a table hocking homemade brownies, so I offered to make some stuff for them to sell. 

(Easter at Home, originally uploaded by jellybeanjill13.)

Anyhow, I make these awesome little cookies (or candies, actually) that sell really well-- you take a grid pretzel, stick a Rolo candy on top, and pop them in the oven at 250 for 4 minutes, just until the Rolo gets mooshy.  Then you slap a pecan half right on top of it and smash them together.  They're like little pecan turtles with a crunchy pretzel base, and they're amazing.  (Try making some and see for yourself.)  I made about eight dozen of them for the LGBTA bake sale the next day.

So, there I am, surrounded by cookie sheets of little candies, putting them in little baggies to sell the next day, and something about the whole situation just struck me as outrageously funny: I'm turning thirty in a month, I'm a hammer-headed evangelical Christian, and I'm baking cookies for 18 year old lesbians.  I turned to my husband, who was desperately trying to get a computer analysis program run for his dissertation research. 

"Um, Honey?"  I asked him.  His eyes drifted up to see me surrounded by little packages of baked goods. 
"What's up?"  He asked.  I held up a baggie full of cookies.
"Am I turning into a homosexual den mother?"  I asked him. 
Silence.  His eyes got a strange light in them. 
"Do you really want me to answer that, Jackrabbit?" He finally said with a grin. 

 "Nah," I decided,  "I guess not." 

"Revenge and Forgiveness in Laramie, Wyoming": Stephen Wang writes on TLP

How on earth does one person forgive another? And, in the face of terrible violence against the self, how does the individual (and a the community) find healing?  These are questions that lie at the heart of The Laramie Project, and questions that, apparently, at least one of the writers struggled with as they crafted their play. 

 Stephen Wang served as a draumaturge and writer for The Laramie Project in its various forms, and he has done some sophisticated thinking at a critical distance from the play about the nature of forgiveness.  This article appeared, along with three commentaries and a reply, in the journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues.  Looking at both the psychoanalytic tradition, the theatrical tradition, and even religious groundings for forgiveness, Wangh gives his readers a fascinating look inside The Laramie Project at the company's understanding of forgiveness and how that, in turn, crafted the play they all created.   What I really like about Wangh's approach is that he's extremely open about how Kaufman and the other writers approached their documentary material, and he's willing to be honest about where the members of Tectonic might respectfully disagree.  Definitely pick up this issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues if you're at all interested in the The Laramie Project, the writing process, or its social impact.  I will probably be coming back to these articles at a later date because I want to read Frommer and Sandage's critiques to see what other insight they might give us.

Sometimes a Fruit is Not Just a Fruit

It seems that my campus has been having some race-related issues recently, which came to a head last week when somebody chucked a banana at a group of visiting African American students and their parents.  I am absolutely steamed.  I found out about it from an e-mail sent out by our university chancellor a couple days ago.  Here's what I read in the Chancellor's own words:

We have had an increase in the number of reported incidents of actions and language that reflect bias on our campus. These actions include derogatory and racist language found in our dormitories. We also had an incident where someone threw a banana at visiting African American students, their parents and guidance counselors. This incident was witnessed by some of our own UT ambassadors.

I am saddened and outraged by this behavior because it does not reflect our campus values or the mission of this great university. We will not tolerate disrespect, racism or bias on our campus.

I have to admit, the more I think about this, the more outraged I get. 
Okay, so it's a college campus full of undergrads, and it is in fact a huge land-grant university in the American South; things can get crazy here. I know that.  I've seen things get crazy here before.  They'd get equally crazy at home, too.  I mean, I've had fruit thrown at me by stupid, hulking boys running on Wild Turkey, testosterone and instinct, too.  Heck, somebody even left a butchered elk leg on the Honors house's front lawn once.  But there's a huge difference in this case.  When a couple PKA frat boys threw that orange at me and the other honors students in Laramie, it was just an orange.  It was rotten and smelly, but just an orange.  When that jerk tossed that banana at a group of black students visiting the campus, it was a symbol-- and in this case, the symbol hit a lot harder than the object itself.   That symbol said, you are one step lower than a human.  It said, you don't belong here with rational creatures. GTFO. 

Right now, I just absolutely burn with shame for those kids and their parents, mostly because a sacred, long-standing illusion about college just got ripped away from them: they can't think of the campus as a safe haven anymore.  I went to high school in Wyoming, and when surrounded by the stupidity, racism, sexism and intolerance typical of your average group of sixteen year-olds, I'd say to myself, only two more years and I can get out.  I had seen friends harassed or pushed into fights, and I'd count down the months: just 18 more months to college...  then I went to college and somebody bludgeoned a gay student to death with a pistol two months later.  I never again had a feeling of having a safe haven at college.  Laramie was a battleground instead, and it wore me out.  Everyone has the right to a space where they can feel safe, don't they? 

I was talking about this incident with a co-worker, an undergraduate, the morning after the letter went out, and his frustration was palpable.  For him, that act shattered the illusion of safety for him, too. "Look," he told me, "I was one of, like, three black kids in my entire high school.  I always kept telling myself that things would be better once I got out of town, and I got to college.  You know, that not every place was like my high school."   He said that he wasn't angry so much as deeply disappointed.

Maybe we don't get to pretend this kind of ugliness in the world doesn't exist when we're on a college campus; maybe we don't get to be that naive, to live in our nice, cushy ivory tower and be more enlightened than everyone else.  But in the words of my co-worker, if you don't get to open up and feel free from that kind of humiliation and bigotry at a university... is any place safe?  Where can people just be ourselves? 

So, I would just like to say to the jerk who threw that banana: if I find you, I'm going to throw something at you, too, but it isn't going to be a piece of fruit.  It's going to be a copy of the student Honor Code.  Oh, and it's going to be wrapped around a dead skunk.  Read into the symbolism of that all you want, you bastard. 

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PHOTO CREDIT:

"it is not a banana," by/from -eko-'s Flickr photostream:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ekosystem/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

"Keep the Dream Alive," by Drew Myers:

Jackrabbit's conference paper on TLP, sort of

A few days ago I posted my initial reaction to presenting something vaguely academic at a scholarly conference; I figured that it was a lot easier to actually post the damn thing to let you see for yourself what I did than to try to reinvent the wheel-- especially when inventing the wheel the first time seems to have consumed a good portion of my sanity.

I have to give this with a caveat or two: first of all, this is not the final draft I presented.  I had to make a lot of handwritten changes to this before presenting, and now I can't find the stupid thing to type them in.  So this is simply a draft-in-progress; as such, it doesn't have any of my citations in it, either.  Besides, that will keep lazy undergrads from plagiarizing this for a research paper.  (For those who were considering it: shame on you, lazy undergrads.  Go to the bibliography page for sources and write your own.)  

So, please treat this for what it is: more of a sketch of my research than anything actually presentable or scholarly in of itself.  You can also view my Powerpoint presentation (oh joy.) to fill in the quotations, evidence and critical background, if you're that masochistic, here.  (hint: right-click the file on that page and click "save," otherwise your browser will try to open a Powerpoint file, with hilarious results...)

So, without further ado, here's a look at Jackrabbit's mediocre first attempt to act like a grown-up and treat The Laramie Project like a scholar after the jump!

Jackrabbit Goes to the Academy: and I survived!

This past weekend was the bi-annual NEXUS interdisciplinary conference at the University of Tennessee, focusing on the theme of "Trauma and Testimony." Yours truly presented a paper on The Laramie Project dealing with testimony and community identity, which went... interestingly.  I wasn't entirely sure I was going to be able to pull the damn thing off, but after a lot of hair-pulling I managed to get a paper written, and the presentation went off with just a few minor lumps, bumps and bruises.

Actually, I discovered that getting this paper together challenged a lot of my previous ideas about why I resent The Laramie Project so much, and that was a good thing.  Essentially, I didn't like what the play was doing to my ability to define my own existence, but I also realized that it's that destabilizing of Laramie's idea of community that allows the LGBT community to speak.  Secondly, I never liked having to allow certain people (who I will not name because of their litigious personalities) to speak for me.  That's the same argument that a lot of TLP haters use about letting gays and lesbians speak out against them, and I have to wonder...  I think that Tectonic did a great thing by allowing my gay friends and neighbors the agency to speak of their life in Laramie, and in doing so they challenge the way that the "majority" have defined the community, and they feel the same press of being "defined" by a society external to their own.  Is that why I'm so ambivalent for this play-- because now I have a vague idea of what it feels like to be a voiceless member of the GLBT community, defined by the center and unable to speak back?

Anyhow, getting to that realization took a bit of personal wrestling.  Due to exams and other concerns, I couldn't actually write the presentation until the week of the conference.  Even though I had loads of time to do it, I kept staring at a blank screen, tapping my fingers, reading friends' blog posts, doing some creative writing.  Finally, the night before I had to give the paper, I stared at my terrifying, blank computer screen and typed out a single phrase:

a strained and sometimes fractious relationship

 I stared at that phrase for about two solid minutes, and once I had the source of my writer's block on the page, the paper I had been writing in my head for the last month and a half sprouted out from under my fingers.  I stayed up all night writing the stupid thing.  

 The other three papers in my panel were freaking awesome, and there's one in particular I might write about, if "Annie" will let me, that is.  She wrote about her family's personal experience with a personal trauma and the weird position families get into, rhetorically speaking, as they try to urge the press to act as an outlet for their personal testimony. Since she's interested in the ability of victims to speak, as am I, it seems like a good fit...

And, Laramie made its presence known in an odd and interesting way once more to me at the conference.  The website for the conference is illustrated with images of trauma and violence of the sort that the presenters research, and this picture was one which one of the organizers (whom I don't even know) had found on Flickr:

Never forget that Laramie, Wyoming is a town scarred by more than just the Matt Shepard incident; every town's psyche shows the scars of a parade of grief.  The roadside memorial which stands at Tie Siding, Wyoming was erected after eight members of the UW cross country team were killed by a drunk driver just a week after the terrorist attack on Sept. 11.  They were traveling to a meet at the time, and the man who killed them was another UW student.  At the time, I had been attending school at my new college in the Deep South for a little over three weeks. 

When I saw this photo on the website, it stopped me in my tracks.  I mean, I was at a conference to talk about how Laramie has tried to speak through a moment of tragedy, and here I was being confronted by one that I haven't even thought about for years.  What makes one tragedy seem so indelibly burned into our collective consciousnesses and others, like this one, must remain silent except for eight pairs of shoes and a peeling marker at a deserted crossroads?  It sometimes seems so unfair, but that's just the strange way that collective memory works.  Somethings remain, others don't, and all will eventually be forgotten.  Perhaps it was good for me to step back a little from the Shepard tragedy and put it in this larger context-- in comparison to those Laramie tragedies whose presence scars just as deeply but whose stories don't get told: James Merritt, Kristen Lamb, Cindy Dixon, the Tie Siding accident, the 2006 double murder-suicide...

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PHOTO CREDIT:

1) The 2010 Nexus logo, used with permission.  You can view the full conference description here.

2)  The roadside memorial at Tie Siding, Wyoming, taken from gregor_y's Flickr photostream:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gregor_y/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

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.

Bibliographic info for "The Laramie Project": Lit Crit and Theater

After the jump on this page is a list of major works that I've been able to find that focus on The Laramie Project to some degree in the MLA Bibliography and the International Index to the Performing Arts.  I tried to stick to presenting scholarly articles that were both in good journals and were of some length.  The IIPA, for example, has a ton more, but a lot of them are just short news blurbs or show announcements.

Note also the number of these that are by TT members, interviews with TT members, or about their practices.  There's not as much on the literary side of The Laramie Project as I had expected, strangely.  The articles vary both in focus and in quality, so definitely check these out for yourself when using them.