Our Town
By listening to the residents of Matthew Shepard’s hometown, The Laramie Project hopes to learn something about our own heart of darkness … and light
by D.L. Groover

The Rock in the Road

Pedaling his mountain bike, University of Wyoming freshman Aaron Kreifels was having a good workout late Wednesday afternoon, October 7, 1998. His thighs burned. He had made it to the top of Cactus Canyon, but twilight was setting in, the temperature dropping. Riding back down, he took whatever trails looked easiest. He kept getting stuck in sand. He wanted to turn around but kept pushing forward. Although near the subdivision of Sherman Hills, on the outskirts of Laramie, he wasn’t sure where he was. That’s when he hit the rock. He flew over the handlebars and landed, surprisingly unhurt, in the middle of the dirt road. Brushing himself off and checking his bike, he noticed a shape near the rough fence that bordered the far back property line of a distant house under construction. A scarecrow, he thought distractedly, someone’s put a scarecrow there for Halloween.

But as he walked his bike along the side closest to the dark figure slumped down against the fence, instead of straw, he saw hair on its head. The chest of the formless shape slowly moved up and down. The ground was black with blood. The grotesque shape had a face. The only clear patch of skin was where the tears had washed away the blood. Aaron Kreifels had found Matthew Shepard.

Watershed, November 1998

Matthew Shepard doesn’t appear in The Laramie Project, but he infuses every line by his presence and every heartache by his absence. This is Laramie’s story–how the citizens of this very all-American town in this very all-America Wyoming react to a most horrific, senseless crime of gay bashing.

When Moisés Kaufman, award-winning gay author of Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde and artistic director of NYC’s form-breaking Tectonic Theater Project, first heard about Matthew Shepard’s murder, he knew instinctively he had found his next subject. Within a month, he and his company of 10 actors would travel to Laramie and interview anyone who would talk to them about Matt. Over the next year and a half and six more visits to the town, the group talked to more than 200 residents and amassed 400 hours of tape recordings. Out of this gargantuan amount of raw research, the Tectonic Theater gleaned, edited, and honed their new theatrical documentary into a razor-brilliant dissection of this clarifying moment in time when our collective hearts stopped.

"When Matthew was murdered," says Kaufman in a recent conversation with OutSmart, "our initial reaction was the same as a lot of people in the country: Oh my God, sorrow, sadness, shock. In the days that followed the murder, you couldn’t open a newspaper or turn on the TV without seeing a picture of Matthew, or at least seeing the event.... For some reason, this one resonated. This was a moment where we said, Wait a minute, what’s going on?! It was a watershed moment in our culture."

Hapless, Hopeless Young Men

On the road toward humanity, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson took the path of least resistance. These young men, both 21–consciously or not–had committed themselves to living without dreams. Theirs were indeed lives of quiet desperation, filled with roiling frustration and volcanic outbursts of rage. Broken homes with messy divorces, petty criminal acts, heavy drug and alcohol use, the mire of poverty, low-rent girlfriends, the crushing weight of endless grimy boredom coupled with the mocking self-knowledge of no future–all coalesced into their strong bond of friendship. Both high school dropouts, neither would ever go farther than Wyoming state prison. Neither of them could dream any wider.

Once, Henderson might have soared. He was actually a good student: on the honor roll, an Eagle Scout, a Future Farmer of America. But his demons–a neglectful alcoholic mother, restrictive pinched Mormon grandparents, probable boyhood sexual abuse–caught up with him and he was too timid to defend himself.

Together, these two made a lethal pair.

Matt Galloway, bartender at the Fireside, remembers the two as scruffy and gruff, with dirty hands, who paid for their $5.50 pitcher of beer with dimes and nickels.

Unfortunately, Matt Shepard, nattily dressed as usual, was seated at the bar that night. Easygoing and garrulous, Matt could talk to anyone, and usually did. Earlier that evening he had attended a meeting of U.W.’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered Association, which he had joined two weeks prior. According to friend Romaine Patterson, Choo-Choo (as Matt’s closest friends called him) was stoked about school and heartily enjoyed helping LGBTA with their preparations for Pride Week. After the meeting, when he couldn’t convince anyone else to go out with him to the bar, another friend drove him home and watched him walk safely into his apartment.

No one knows why he later decided to go out by himself. Matt showed up at the bar at 10:30 p.m. By midnight, he had left with Henderson and McKinney.

The Director With his spiked black hair, cool downtown style, and effusive charm, Rob Bundy, Stages’ artistic director and director of The Laramie Project, might be a grown-up Bart Simpson, occasionally tweaking the nose of his older sister, the refined, Tony-winning uptown Alley, with his provocative productions and imaginative stagings.

Last August, he directed The Laramie Project at the prestigious Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York, and he’s chomping to have another go at it and present it to Houston audiences.

"It’s really a play about hope," Bundy explains in his office filled with Stages memorabilia. "For the gay audience member, it talks about how a community awakens to understanding that the ‘other’ is not so foreign. It’s presented in human terms–this enormous sense of hope because the whole nation suddenly woke up and said, This is wrong. For the straight community, it was a quote/unquote Mom and Dad who were saying our son was brutally murdered because he was different. I think that welcomes the straight audience to look at Matthew Shepard as actually one of [their] own children.

"It asks the question what happens when bad things happen in good communities. It’s about a community coming to terms with and learning how to accept that we are like this–[realizing that] the whole ‘live and let live’ mentality is as flawed as the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ mentality. It is this really beautiful journey from grief into hope. When the Tectonic Company came in and started interviewing people, it gave them an opportunity to start to articulate their thoughts and feelings about this event. In doing so, the community was able to heal."

"Hey, guess what? We’re not gay and we’re gonna jack you up!"

A surprised and frightened Matt sat between Henderson and McKinney, handing over his wallet as commanded. But they beat him anyway. First with fists, then the butt of McKinney’s .357 Magnum. The undersides of Matt’s arms would be covered in bruises from trying to ward off the blows. By the time they drove out past the sleeping subdivision, the front seat was splattered with blood. Matt never had a chance.

Matt pleaded, but to no avail. They tied his hands together behind his back and then tied him to the fence rail. They kicked him repeatedly. McKinney kept beating him with the gun. They took his black patent leather shoes, in case he freed himself and tried to escape. They mocked his pleas to stop and hit him some more, cracking open the back of his skull. They left him for dead.

Dry Statistics

The latest national report from the FBI, released November 2001 and covering the previous year, shows a two percent increase in hate crimes. Defined by the American Psychological Association as "violent acts against people, property, or organizations because of the group with which they are identified," hate crimes have held steady at around 8,000 per year.

In Texas, even with our newly passed James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Law, the crime rate dropped, but the number of hate crimes rose from 267 reported in 1999 to 286 in 2000, an increase of seven percent. Texas is one of 42 states with a law that recognizes hate crimes as a category. Wyoming, the Equality State where Matthew Shepard lived and died, does not. Half of all reported hate crimes last year were committed against blacks.

The Texas State Department of Public Safety has released these figures: Aggravated and simple assault: 31 percent of hate crimes. Intimidation: 27 percent. Race: 56 percent. Antigay: 17 percent. Religious bias: 15 percent. The remainder were ethnic or disability bias.

The perpetrators of 55 percent of hate crimes were white, 10.5 percent were black, and 32 percent were of "unknown race."

Eighty-four percent of hate crimes were against individuals, with 8.5 percent against religious organizations.

Quo Vadis Matthew?

The death of Matthew Shepard galvanized the world unlike any other gay-bashing murder. Moisés Kaufman sees it in almost political terms as a defining moment for America, one whose cascades of meaning flowed together at the most opportune moment.

"There were several things that contributed to this. One is the symbolic nature of the crime: It was a crucifixion. And you can’t do that in this culture without getting an incredible amount of attention. He was young and a student, very pretty to look at, a very good-looking young man. In that sense he was camera-ready; we could all identify with him. So that his being murdered meant something very, very different than an African-American drag queen who goes home with someone and gets murdered at home. This was a victim that all of America could very quickly digest.

"But we were ready for this to resonate. If the exact same murder had happened 10 years ago, we weren’t there yet. Our awareness and our consciousness as a nation is slowly evolving. And now we’re ready to understand and think about things that until now we weren’t ready to do.

"I’m very interested–and the company’s very interested–in what we call watershed moments: moments where a certain culture is faced with itself. Like the trials of Oscar Wilde, when an event happened of such magnitude that it served as a lightning rod. If you listen at moments like that, you can hear the ideologies and the beliefs and things that form a certain culture at a certain time. If you read the transcripts from the trials, you can hear how Victorian men and women were thinking and feeling and processing their lives, not only about homosexuality but about Victorian society, about education, about class, about religion.

"So the idea was that if we went to Laramie and we listened to the town, we might capture something about where not only Laramie, but perhaps the entire nation, was at the end of the millennium. Not only in relationship to homosexuality, but in relationship to class, education, violence, religion–all the ideological pillars of our culture."

"The play is very uplifting," says Chris Jimmerson, artistic director of Unhinged Productions and co-producer of Laramie. "You come away really believing that, as a culture and a society, we can move past our hate. Actually, what happened to Matthew may help some people: seeing how this one event very personally affected a lot of people besides the direct victim of the event."

"This is such an all-American play," says director Bundy, "–both the good and the bad, the open and the closed. It’s all there. It’s not hoity-toity poetry onstage. It’s the residents of Laramie, Wyoming, sharing their thoughts and feelings in their own words. This is not a straight-bashing play, either. All the characters on both sides of the issue are so fairly rendered that it allows the audience to identify with them, understand them, and really see them. It’s very nonjudgmental, which is really important. It’s something I strive to honor."

I give you life in the memory of one who no longer lives

Matt Shepard was not perfect, as his parents constantly had to point out to counter the martyrdom backlash, especially during the media frenzy in the weeks after his death. He did rash, foolish things to mask his fear and insecurity, usually to his own bemusement. He was a little skinny guy, 5’2", 105 pounds, size 7 shoe. But everyone who ever met him remembers his beaming smile and gregarious nature. He was a very likeable, winsome young man.

And he was strong, his character sound. Twice he was beaten up by straights who thought he was coming on to them. Once, on a summer holiday in Morocco before high school senior year, he was accosted and raped by a street gang. But he had the fortitude to report his humiliation to the police. When he left the country, the local police were so impressed by this stalwart young American student that they gave him souvenirs. And lately, he had met an older man from Denver over the Internet. After weeks of lengthy correspondence in which they had gotten acquainted and secure with each other, Matt invited him to Laramie for their first weekend together. Brian was to arrive October 9. Matt was lying in the hospital unconscious that day, dying.

For 18 hours he was tied to the fence on that windy Wyoming high plain, under blazing stars, then unrelenting sun. He was bleeding to death, his head bashed in, suffering hypothermia during the near-freezing night, before Kreifels literally stumbled onto him. At the hospital, the doctors couldn’t operate because his head was so mangled. How he managed to hold on for as long as he did–until his parents arrived from Saudi Arabia to say their last goodbyes–is yet one more example of Matthew’s incredible will to live and his love for life.

Matthew Shepard’s story is first among equals of those who have suffered senseless torments because of sexual orientation. He means as much to the world as he does to the characters depicted onstage in The Laramie Project. He may never have craved the attention nor the notoriety from victimhood, but he has it now. He is our symbol of hope, as blazing as the canopy of stars over his broken body. And we will never forget.