The UK Conversations, Part II: A Lack of Hope

So, in my last post, a member of a play company in the UK, "Andrew," had asked about the overall feel of the landscape.  This was Andrew's second question to me: 

I'd be interested to know if the public at the time Matthew was in hospital were at all optimistic for his recovery. I think the doctors and family were pretty clear from early on that he would die of his injuries - did other people less closely connected to the case know that?

Dear Andrew:

 In all, I'd say that Matt's death took no one by surprise.  Everyone, naturally, was praying he would pull through, but there never seemed to be a lot of conviction to those prayers; we all seemed to know that he wasn't going to live, or if he somehow did, that he would never be whole.  You can feel that mood throughout the footage from the Newman Center's vigil: there's a flicker of hope he would survive, but like the candles, it was a small raft of light that couldn't burn forever.  If memory serves, Matt died later that same night. 

There were a lot of reasons for that despair: the media footage was dismal, and the news floating around campus was equally bleak.  Tiffany Edwards' first article on the crime from October 9th feels two steps shy of an obituary.  The school newspaper's coverage wasn't any  better.  Both of them talk about "severe head trauma" and his "critical" condition.  Even without the media coverage, basically everybody on campus had a news source somewhere, often within one or two degrees of their own acquaintance.  The faculty advisor for the LGBTA was one of the honors English professors, so there was a stream of gossip running through the freshmen honors students.  His faculty advisor was also a very popular professor in Political Science.  I think that Matt's family was also keeping in touch with his friends, and they too spread the word around.  Off campus was a slightly different story, and one I can't speak to with much conviction.  But my impression is that their mood was the same.  So many people were involved in Matt's care before he was moved to Fort Collins— nurses, EMTs, police, employees at the jail-- and naturally they talked about it.  The arraignment was public, too, and the statements made there were devastating. 

But there was one detail that stood out to those of us who grew up in the Rockies: it was the second week in October.  If you remember, I told you that the weather tends to force itself into every corner of how we live our lives, and one of those areas is our awareness of the cold.  Laramie, Wyoming sits on a sub-arctic desert plain at 7200 feet.  We have over a mile less sky above our heads than most of the United States.  Even in the summer, the nights can be cold enough to cause hypothermia; in the winter, night exposure can be lethal.  The man who killed Russell Henderson's mother, for instance, didn't need any weapon besides than a frozen county road and her stolen coat, but he murdered her just as surely.  When someone goes missing under those circumstances, we tend to keep hope on a pretty short leash. 

I vaguely remember, when I heard that McKinney had stolen Matt's shoes, I thought something like, "Oh, so I guess that's the end of it." He was left under a thin October sky without so much as a pair of shoes to keep out the frost, and for that reason I knew he was going to die.  It's strange to say this, but at the end of the day it was the theft of his shoes that convince me that Matthew's murder was a cold, calculated act.  I can't really explain why.




Jackrabbit

Scholarship: Social Impact of the Shepard Tragedy in Academia

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.

This moment of ambivalence brought to you by: Iconography!

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. 

Arguing with the Voices in My Head

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.

Links: Morning Has Broken- Una Vita Spezzata

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.)

UW's Web archive collection for Matthew Shepard

 The University of Wyoming has collected a web archive of information relating to the murder of Matt Shepard and the political aftermath through the Internet Archive.  The information is collected and stored via archive-it.org. 

You can access their link pool here and check out what they've amassed.  It ranges from LGBT activism to WBC home movies.  If you're more interested in the social issues surrounding Shepard, it's a good resource.

The Eds, Take 2

So, in 10 Years Later we had an interesting insight into the tense weeks surrounding the tenth anniversary of the Shepard murder.  On the one hand, the Boomerang staff did a wonderful five-part series on where Laramie as a community stands a decade after they found their values severely challenged in the national spotlight.  They dedicated that bench on the A&S plaza in Matt's memory.  We see the LGBT community in Laramie developing a new presence on the campus and keeping dialogue alive.  Those were all great things (and you can read about most of them if you search the Boomerang's online archive.  Links are on the "Bibiliography" page to the right.)  

On the other hand, we also got an unsettling glimpse of a community in deep denial.  We saw both intentional and unintentional forgetting of Matt's name and a fear for some kind of permanent change.  We saw people who still deeply resented the stigma that the national spotlight cast on the town.  And then there was this. 

The second editorial in the Boomerang ran on the tenth anniversary of Shepard's death, and it is the editorial that is specifically mentioned in The Laramie Project.  It's also the editorial to which Jonas Slonaker tries to respond, but they wouldn't run his letter.  For some reason, you can't find the copy for either of the 10th anniversary editorials on the Boomerang website archive even though other editorials are available there, but an hour or so on the microfilm machine right before the library closed yielded my very own copy.   Man, I love public research institutions. 

There are a few interesting things to note on this second editorial piece, which is entitled "Laramie is a Community, Not a Project."  First of all, there's no byline on this, so it seems that the Boomerang was putting this out as its official position rather than just the editor's personal view.  The email listed for responses is for the actual publisher, too, rather than just the editor. 

Secondly, the amount of snark right at the end where they're pushing the robbery motive is just... well, baffling.  But I guess even journalists have a right to have an opinion, and at least it's on the Opinion page.  My experience is that small town newspapers are a lot more strident when pushing personal opinion than most, so perhaps I shouldn't be as surprised as I am to see how blunt it is.  

But, with that said, this opinion piece is not entirely bad.  The first several paragraphs are actually a fairly good summary of the community reactions, and it's useful for that.  And the editorial is very right about one thing: Laramie is more tolerant than most other communities in the area.  That should be kept in mind.   However, I definitely would challenge the publisher about his dismissal of this as the problem of "a few questionable characters."  It's not.  Those people don't define Laramie exclusively, but they are still a part of who Laramie is, and you can't just reject McKinney and Henderson because they make us feel guilty.  Whether we like it or not, Laramie does share some societal guilt for what happened to Matthew Shepard because we are part of the society which shaped them;  ignoring that solves absolutely nothing-- and unless we learn to embrace the McKinneys and Hendersons in our communities as a part of who we are and try to transform their hate with love, it's only a matter of time before this happens again. 

In any case, the Boomerang's had their say on the matter.  And I'll be happy to let the rest of y'all know about it.

The bench: Matthew Shepard's memorial and its landscape

In The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later,  we learned about the Shepard memorial bench on the University of Wyoming campus, which is parked at the front of the Arts and Sciences building.  (That's A&S there at the right.)  In addition to holding the university's main concert hall venue, A&S is also home to the Political Science department (Matt's university home) and a lot of administration.
A&S holds a privileged location on campus, too: of all the enormous buildings which ring Prexy's Pasture, the functional center of the university, A&S occupies the entire western end, and the pasture in front of it sometimes feels like a grassy mall leading up to its front steps.  (The bench is basically right behind that maroon van.) 

So, without any further ado, here's the bench, with a closeup of the plaque:

It really is a sweet gesture, I think. It gives Matt an important place on campus to permanently commemorate his life, and it's both right in front of the A&S college and in a high traffic area when the A&S auditorium is being used.  I especially like the positive message of the plaque.  It commemorates Matt, not as a victim, but one who made a positive impact.  After so much bad press after his murder, I think reminding the campus that Matt was a person, and one who has made a positive difference on everyone there is important.  And, doing it on a piece of furniture means that people will actually interact with the memorial is a great way to set the right tone. This isn't a cumbersome monolith that forces an ambivalent memory upon a campus still covering its scars. Rather, it invites remembrance to those who stop to enjoy its presence.

So, yes, I rather like the placement and wording of the Shepard memorial, but if someone took a brisk walk around camps and even around town, she would realize that Shepard's commemoration is hardly unique.  For instance:

 Here we have an identical bench dedicated to former UW president Phil Dubois and donated by the Trustees. It's located a little farther up Prexy's pasture, on the side nearest to A&S.   

This one is dedicated to former president Dubois' mother (complete with crow droppings from the flock of crows roosting on A&S):

This one was paid for by the Dubois family, as she passed away in 1999.  The former Mrs. Dubois has her bench only about seventy-five feet from the plaza in front of A&S, sort of between A&S and Merica Hall just to the south.

There are lots of these benches around campus, and I'm willing to bet at least a dozen of them have memorial plaques, to everyone from beloved former professors to admins.  (I think one I saw was for a donor, but I have no idea, really.)  So, at this point I bet you're thinking, "Wow, the Shepard memorial bench isn't unique at all!"  I'm afraid so-- in fact, these benches are not just a campus phenomenon.  Here's one dedicated to Cal Rerucha, the former DA who prosecuted both McKinney and Henderson in 1999-2000:

You can tell from the picture that these are not the same kind of benches; I think they're part of a city rather than a university project.  These benches, which sit on the north (Ivinson Avenue) side of the county courthouse, are not really reserved as memorial markers, judging by the presence of a bench with a plaque for Wal-Mart stores (I think it's the one just past the upper left-hand corner of this photo.  Rather, they're more like tiny billboards.  I think that's the point of the Reruchas' plaque on this one: it simply names himself and his wife as "attorneys at law."  What better place for a lawyer to hang out his shingle than in front of the courthouse, eh? 

So, I guess there are two different ways to look at Matt's bench in the context of the surrounding environment.  The negative one might complain that Matt's memorial isn't really all that special, and the only way they managed to get on campus was to sneak it in under a campus beautification project.  It's almost like saying, "Okay, we'll actually let you mark the campus with his memory, but his memorial can't draw attention to itself..." Honestly, I suppose that's how I felt about it when I first wandered about the campus that afternoon, but I think that there's a second, positive way to think about the bench. 

What helped me change my mind?  On the way back to my car one afternoon, I was walking back towards Prexy's in the direction of my car when I saw this fellow chatting on the phone:

Seeing this student casually tracing his hands down the bench as he talked on his phone made me stop to think: what are the chances that this kid will look down and see the plaque? Maybe he will, but he might not, either.  Even though this student's act of remembrance isn't what most people think when they try to picture commemoration, this interaction with Shepard's memory on his own terms shows how the bench incorporates Matthew's memory into the very fabric of UW's landscape.   This is unlike a normal memorial marker, like the one for the Challenger explosion on the west side of campus.  When I lived on campus, the Challenger astronauts' stone and bronze marker only really got any attention when someone used it as a hole for Frisbee golf.  Then some of us felt a little queasy about the idea of slapping the Challenger astronauts in the face with a golf disc, and eventually we moved the hole.  After that, none of us really even noticed it anymore. 

 In contrast to the Challenger memorial, Matt's bench gets a lot of daily interaction because it's designed for interactive experience.  As students look for a quiet spot to read and bask in the sun, they seek it out.  And, since it's part of a larger network of memorial benches to other beloved people, the bench presents who he really was to the campus:  someone who was a part of the UW community and whose life has indelibly left its mark on us all.

One evening after photographing Old Main, I stopped to have a seat on the memorial bench myself.  As I sat in the lengthening shadows of A&S, I could gaze upward to its highest floors dressed in sandstone, or the huge, stately pines which dominate the green spaces on the north side.  To my left was Prexy's Pasture, with its diamond pattern of walkways leading to the family/unity statue in the center, and the flagpoles for the university, state, and nation beyond.  It's a good place to sit and ponder, I decided, and as students do that, they meet with a little piece of Shepard's life.  And every time we do, we remember a little piece of Matt.

Twelve years later: tu benedictus in die natalis sis, Matt...

Another October the 12th is passing, which means one more year to look back on Matt's lamentable death, one more year to get all moody and self-referential, and yet another opportunity to lapse into a misanthropic grouch-fest and hate the whole world because it's such a downer.  I seriously need a more positive way to remember this person whom I had never personally met but who has changed the course of my life in ways I didn't expect.  I need to find a way to commemorate this day in a way that does justice to him and celebrates him in a positive light, not simply as a victim. 

So, where can I go for a different perspective?  Since I'm a medievalist, I guess that my natural impulse is to look backwards to the past for insight, and so pondering my problem eventually brought me to thinking about medieval memorial practices.  In medieval Christian society, for instance, monasteries often kept a calender or roll of their brothers and associates (called a liber vitae or "book of Life") in order to remember their passing.

Although a name in a Liber vitae was an act of commemoration in of itself, sometimes calendars of names organized by death date were used so the community could read their names aloud during the prime hour service as they performed the "work of God" in the cloister.  In those lists, the death date of a person is recorded as their dies natalis-- that is, their "birthday."  It makes a lot of sense from a medieval perspective, as Christianity often talks of that as the day that we are finally and truly freed from the bondage of sin and attain our real home with God when the soul is "born" in heaven.  It's the date of our heavenly birthday. 

This kind of commemoration was important in the monastic setting because it reinforced the sense that their brotherhood was an eternal bond, and that those who passed should continue to be recognized as a part of their community.  It reinforced that death really cannot sever their social, religious and personal ties, and that the departed who served the community in life are still a benefit to their abbey.   

And so, in my struggle to find an appropriate way to remember this day,  I think I'll do it with a celebration of Matt's continued presence and life within my community.  From here on out, this will no longer be for me a time when I'm forced to revisit a horrible, brutal crime that has scarred so many and ended a human life; instead, I'm going to mark this day as Matt's dies natalis, to recognize the part he still plays in my communities: in Laramie, in the states, and in the lives of those who loved him.  Is this the sensible approach that everyone will accept?  Probably not; all I know is that it helps make all of this make sense to me. 

Happy 12th birthday, Matthew Shepard.  You are still very much a part of us all.     

---

PHOTO CREDIT:

Okay, so I couldn't find a picture of a liber vitae under a CC license, so the above picture is a leaf from Yale University, Beinecke Library MS 923, an unusual travel foldaway calendar and prayer book, which is available for CC use via the library's Flickr photostream. This text lists the feast days and/or dies natalis of popular saints (marked with giant, stretched out N's) in October.   The pic of Matthew's memorial is mine and very much free for use.

If you'd like to see what a liber vitae looks like, you can follow this link to one of the more famous manuscripts from the time period I work with.  On this single page of the Durham liber vitae, there's literally dozens of names written in hands at least three centuries apart, and it's remarkable.  

On a side note, October 12 marks the dies natalis for two of the more famous Anglo-Saxon saints:  Wilfrid, who tended to stir the muck, and Edwin, who was the first Anglian king to take up Christianity.  One of the most famous passages of Anglo-Saxon prose comes from his conversion, as recounted by Bede in his Ecclesiastical History 2.13.

Research for TLP and Matt Shepard: Comm, Journalism and Soc. Sci.

Due to the nonfictional nature of The Laramie Project and its engagement with both the underlying historical event (Matt's murder) and the social issues surrounding it, I've come across a lot of scholarly work regarding the play, the movies and the historical event in other disciplines.  The media onslaught has naturally piqued some curiosity in the Communications discipline, but I was surprised at some of the others-- psychotherapy, for instance, and education.  I've compiled a list of the more interesting ones for you below. 

A couple of the trends are quite interesting.  Note, for instance, that five of the articles are psychoanalytic approaches to the play that attempt to understand the nature of forgiveness; one of the authors in that list is Stephen Wangh, one of the authors of The Laramie Project.  Two others are looking at the play as a tool to foster LGBTQ acceptance in a social setting, and one tracks the impact of such violence on communities.  The Pace article is pretty neat-- it tracks a small handful of Matthew Shepard Scholarship winners in their college careers. 

And, my favorite topic-- the unhinged media coverage of Shepard's murder and the aftermath-- also makes a showing here in the bibliography.  The complete list is just after the jump! 

Vanity Fair: "The Crucifixion of Matthew Shepard"

In March 1999, Vanity Fair did an interesting and thorough coverage of the Matt Shepard murder that includes a lot of interesting information from central figures who didn't get a lot of press later-- Tina LaBrie, for instance, and Matt Mickelson, the bartender who served both Shepard and his killers on the night he was beaten.  But the real reason I started reading it was for the illustration you see at the left.  To be honest, the first time I saw this layout in the magazine, it literally stopped me in my tracks.

As far as I can tell from this point, Thernstrom's article is the most detailed of all the earliest coverage of Shepard's death in the first six months of the case.  The details it contains are interesting for a lot of reasons-- first because it was the general public's closest look at the case for a long time to come-- but also because you can see a lot of the mythmaking of the Shepard story starting to crystallize.  Thernstrom's article contains the early facets of what would become the Shepard "narrative" later on-- the comparison to the murder site and Golgotha, for instance.  And you can also see all the details that fall out of the storytelling later-- like the actual location of the fence, or LaBrie's involvement in that limo ride to Fort Collins.  

Vanity Fair itself does not have a link up to this article online (their online archive doesn't go back 10 years), but the magazine itself is pretty easy to locate for those of you who want to track it down in a public library.  For those of you who can't find the hard copy, there is a less-than-authoritative (and probably less than legal) version of the story floating about on the Interwebs.  Beware the typos.  In the long run, you're better off digging out the hard copy. 

Source:

Therstrom, Melanie.  "The Crucifixion of Matthew Shepard."  Vanity Fair Mar. 1999: 209-14, 267–275.

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.

A Little Bibliography: Op-ed statements on the Shepard beating

Matt's beating and murder in 1998 couldn't have come at a more timely point in terms of stirring up some seriously wicked national debate on GLBT rights.  When you look at some of the national discourse at this time-- questions about DOMA, Trent Lott's comparison between homosexuality and kleptomania, the ex-gay movement's advertising campaign--  Shepard's death was like dropping a piece of hot slag in the middle of a munitions plant.  That's where my frustration with the politics surrounding the Shepard case comes from: once everything exploded, there was no easy way to sort the productive from the non-productive dialogue, and for every passionate and reasoned call for change, there were so many others just spewing about their own brand of incandescent hate on both sides.

In a real way, even though I adore him as a playwright and I understand the source of all that fury, Tony Kushner's response to Matt's death was just as frustrating to me as Trent Lott's: neither seemed to think far enough beyond their own concerns to see the real human beings on the other side.  The fulminate rage in Kushner's rhetoric in his editorial makes me flinch.  For all his condemnation of those "savor[ing] the unsavory details" of the Shepard murder, Kushner just seems to me to use Matt Shepard as a grisly trope, a blunt object he can hit back at the Republicans with in retaliation.  If you're arguing for human rights and the equal dignity of all people,  I don't see the point of slapping somebody upside the head with a real human being.  I have the same problem with anti-abortion activists driving around in trucks with pictures of butchered babies on the sides: neither approach provides space for compassion, understanding or forgiveness-- and it certainly doesn't uphold the dignity of the real human beings whose lives are at stake. 

In any case, a few of the more notable responses I have attached here as a short bibliography if you're interested.  From a literary standpoint, obviously those by Kushner and Vidal will be of the most interest.  But the one that piques my own curiosity is Paul Capetz' meditation on the church as a ground of reconciliation between gays, lesbians and straight Christians.  His response is provocative, unwavering, and, knowing what has happened within the Presbyterian church (my current church home) since this was written, it's an interesting bit of prophecy.  He also recognizes the humanity on both sides of the debate and speaks in love even as he calls passionately for change.  Please, no matter your personal conviction, give his argument a fair read.  Full bibliography (with references to Wyoming letters, too) after the jump...

Lost in Translation

You'd think that, as a literature major, I wouldn't be as resistant to symbols and abstraction as I am. I live in the realm of abstraction; it's a comfortable place, they know me here. I'm getting a degree in it, even. I'm so used to dealing with the realm of the metaphor and story, actually, that it can be really hard to turn that part of my brain off sometimes. "Will you just sit back and enjoy the movie?" my husband occasionally smirks at me. (Other times, he's worse than me. We laugh it off.)

It's not really myth or symbol itself that bothers me. It's seeing that process of myth-making firsthand that's been so disorienting. When a deceased person passes from a living, imperfect being to a myth, to me it almost feels like an annihilation of the individual who once lived but now can't speak for themselves. And yet, I'm a medievalist, for crying out loud, I've read saint's lives.  Sanctification, many times, is a process of forgetting; when the imperfections that made them a mere person are gone, then someone writes a text to exemplify their holiness. And that's how you make a saint in the early Middle Ages: forgetting, coupled with a narrative. No wonder that some of my favorite holy people are often the tenacious ones, the royal pain in the asses who spoke for themselves or left a record of their frailties: Perpetua, Augustine, Boniface, Leoba; Thomas á Beckett; Julian; John Donne. 

Abstraction anxiety?

---

And a lot of it is my feeling that the media is portraying Matthew Shepard as a saint. And making him as a martyr. And I don't think he was. I don't think he was that pure.

-- Sherry Johnson, in TLP (2001): 64

---

Although thinking of what has happened to Matt as a translation to sainthood is admittedly anachronistic, the process that Sherry dislikes above is nevertheless a good fit: forgetting, coupled with a story, makes Matt something more than human and less than human at the same time. He's a symbol or a myth. When that happens in a story like TLP, where's the real person? To where, and as what, does he get translated to?  And I also wonder: where does that very human impulse to translate the flesh and blood of a real person to symbol come from? Sherry Johnson fears that impulse, I would say, for all the wrong reasons; she merely believes that Matt isn't a good candidate based on the slander and hearsay she's picked up around town. I'm just as hesitant, but I'm more concerned about the ethics of making a man into a myth in the first place. Is it fair to the deceased? Or, is it what they would want?

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.    

Fear, Loathing, and "The Laramie Project": Narratives

After the 2006 production of TLP at my college campus, I continued to teach the play; but, but following that traumatic evening, my pedagogy changed.  For one, I adopted instead a much more autobiographical focus in my classroom.  Our department allows us to pick themes for our 101 and 102 English classes, so I picked autobiographical memory for mine.  Actually, "Memory and Atrocity" might have been a better name for my class; in addition to TLP we generally read Maus and study the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa (a "semester of depression," one student quipped).  I've taught Jane Taylor's Ubu and the Truth Commission alongside TLP before, which had unpredictable but interesting results.  (Comparing TLP with autobiographical theater in South Africa is a rich, rich field of study I'm trying to research-- but more of that later.)

In my course, we read TLP as a reservoir of a crafted, collected (as opposed to collective) memory of Matt's murder, and we talk about the strengths, pitfalls, and limitations of memory to capture a specific moment in time.  We read TLP to look at the collective understanding of Matt's murder, the whys and hows of how people remember, and why personal memory is such a powerful tool for social change.  This would ultimately be good training for me, psychologically speaking, because I would have to face this play one more time:  the October reading of The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later.

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

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.

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!