New stories of Matthew
Thanks to Summer for finding this project on Kickstarter. Apparently, the filmmaker met Matthew when they were both in high school in Switzerland.
It’s got about one more month to reach its goal for funding. Here’s an introductory clip from Kickstarter:
Matthew, Martyrdom, oh and Lady Gaga
Thanks to Jenny for the find. The above clip is of Lady Gaga doing her version of John Lennon’s “Imagine” at the 2009 Human Rights Campaign’s National Dinner. The singing begins about 2 minutes in and her slightly revised lyrics are below.
There is appropriate criticism to be made about The Laramie Project‘s martyring of Matthew Shepard. We know from our research that there was a much more complex story to be told about who he was. The play hints at his history, it hints at the history of his murderers, but none are fully fleshed out. Much like the town of Laramie, they are forever signified as a crime. From what we heard from Maude complexity wasn’t really the intention from the start.
And yet, there is something to be said for martyrs. They are powerful. Certainly, Lady Gaga’s choice of lyric alteration takes on even greater significance in the context of the election of Barack Obama who signed into law, 3 weeks after this dinner but 11 years after both their deaths, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Law.
Imagine
By John Lennon (additional lyrics by Lady Gaga)
Imagine there’s no Heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
And only Matthew in the sky*
Imagine all the people
Living for today
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday that you’ll join us
And the world will live as one
People of the nation
Are you listening
It isn’t equal if it’s sometimes
I want a real democracy
Imagine all the people
Could love equally
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing in the world
With nothing to hate
And nothing to think
Just people to love
And friends to have drinks
You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one
It’s also worth noting that at this dinner Dennis and Judy Shepard received the HRC’s inaugural Edward M. Kennedy National Equity Award. There was a tribute video about them as well.
And then they spoke … Jacob encouraged folks to watch Dennis Shepard give his first speech at a previous HRC national dinner. If you haven’t had a chance to do so, here’s another opportunity to see how raw their loss remains. And how much their visibility in relationship to Matthew’s absence means for the LGBT community.
Laramie’s absent protagonist
After Tuesday’s class, Jacob reminded me that I have not yet discussed specific North Carolina connections to Matthew Shepard. In an article, “The Thrill of Living Dangerously,” written for the March 1999 issue of Out magazine, the author briefly discusses Matthew’s time in North Carolina, time spent working at a video store and seeing a therapist for treatment of an eating disorder. The larger concern of the Out story is how Matthew’s struggles with depression, addiction, and risky sexual behavior have been absented from the larger national discussion about his death. This absence, while frustrating for someone who wants the “whole” picture, is not surprising considering the way details about the sexuality and/or sexual activity of hate crime victims find their way into public narratives about the crime in ways that lessen the brutality or homophobic origins of the violence. Victims of rape and sex workers who report abuse or violence by clients also suffer this kind of sexualization, a legal strategy and cultural narrative that asserts a victim’s behavior is directly related to their culpability for crimes perpetrated against them. We see a bit of this narrative emerge when Aaron McKinney employs a “gay panic” defense at his trial but again in the 20/20 “documentary” we will watch on February 8 when an entire backstory of drug addiction and risky sex is offered as mitigating factors in the circumstances of Matthew’s death.
In her memoir, The World Was Watching: Living in the Light of Matthew Shepard, Romaine Patterson sheds some light upon the darker sides of Matthew’s life, his alienation from generous but largely absent parents (he attended a boarding high school in Switzerland when his father’s job as an oil safety engineer took the rest of the family to Saudi Arabia). His trauma after being raped and robbed while on a senior class trip in Morocco. If anyone in the cast/crew wants to read Romaine’s book, I have the library’s copy.
But the passing reference in Out was the only link between Matthew and North Carolina until documentary filmmaker and native North Carolinian Tim Kirkman reviewed old footage for his Emmy nominated film Dear Jesse. Dear Jesse is a first-person “letter” to North Carolina’s powerful US Senator Jesse Helms, whose thirty-year Senate career was marked by his position as one of the primary architects of and engines that drove the Culture Wars of the late 1980s and 1990s. Helms’ insistence that AIDS was God’s punishment for homosexuality and that the entire AIDS epidemic could be attributed to gay men even as scientific studies refuted that claim, was just one of his most lasting legacies as a public figure. Helms’ cause and rhetorical strategy continues, one recent example being the remarks made on January 11, 2011 by NC Representative Larry Brown who argued that government subsidies for HIV and AIDS treatment and drugs should be given to those who contract the disease “through no fault of their own” (such as children born with HIV) but that funding should not be provided for those “living perverted lifestyles.”
Dear Jesse was released in the summer of 1998, a few months before Matthew’s murder. This clip, posted to YouTube in 2009 by blogger Joshalot, is of one of Kirkman’s 1996 man-on-the-street interviews at Catawba Collect (Salisbury, NC) with a then unknown Matthew Shepard standing with his self-identified boyfriend. I have only been able to find a secondary source that touches briefly on the origin of YouTube post. What I can say is that this clip is not from the original release of Dear Jesse. It is a section of footage that Kirkman originally cut but then found and included as an epilogue to the version of Dear Jesse that ran as part of the “Reel Life” documentary series for Cinemax and was eventually released on DVD in 2006. As you will hear from his voiceover, in this epilogue Kirkman recontextualizes what was once a random interview with two college students into a realization that this is perhaps the only video footage of Matthew Shepard outside of that taken by his family and friends, one way the larger public might see Matthew in life as a counter balance to how we have been forced to imagine him (only) in death.
What is also interesting to note is that in this clip Matthew seems politically aware about LGBT causes. This is a slightly different portrait of his activism from the one the play implies: that his political consciousness about LGBT issues emerged at the same time as he arrived in Laramie for school. It seems important to remember that while Matthew was a new student at the University of Wyoming, he was actually 21 years old (just about 1 month shy of his 22 birthday) and had taken classes at two other colleges (Catawba College and Casper College) before 1998.