never lose your anger
by
Douglas Messerli
Michele
Josue (director) Matt Shepard Is a
Friend of Mine / 2015
Although
I followed the news stories after Matthew Shepard was brutally beaten by two
homophobic men outside of Laramie, Wyoming on the night of October 12th,
1998, I have not been able to read further about him or his death in the
eighteen years since, mostly because I sensed that, even though I was 30 years
older at the time of this 21-year old’s death, I had had too much in common
with the young man. Yesterday, watching Michele Josue’s 2015 film, Matt Shepard Is a Friend of Mine, those
feelings were confirmed, as tears streamed down my face throughout.
I too was afraid of revealing my sexuality
to my own parents—although Matthew’s parents were clearly more open and
understanding than mine. My own experiences in Midwestern Iowa, moreover, were
not so very different from his in Casper, Wyoming, which—quite mistakenly I am
convinced—my family has asserted was named after my mother’s family name,
Casper. Nonetheless, Matthew Shepard’s experiences in Western America are very
similar to mine, even if, decades before he was even born, I had lived in the
context of different cultural perspective.
I hadn’t known that Shepard, in a far more
multicultural experience than my own, had spent his high school years in a
completely other country, Saudi Arabia, and that he spent his last high school
years in an even more multicultural experience in Lugano, Switzerland, where he
met many of the young women and men who speak of him in this film, testifying
to his dynamic personality—despite his small stature and personal doubts—in a
world that allowed him entry into drama and other cultural experiences. I too
sought those same experiences out in my small town life in Iowa, performing in
theater and attending any theatrical events I might be able to encounter. And I
too lived in a remarkably liberating culture my senior year of high school in
Norway, traveling with my family to Denmark, Paris, and Switzerland afterwards,
so that they might gracefully return me to my, now Wisconsin, home. Another
year of high school in the US matured me before entering the University.
Matthew also traveled, to Rome and
elsewhere, and, eventually, in a far more adventurous trip, to Marrakech,
Morocco. Had I traveled independently, as I sought to, I too might have sought
out those locations. But my parents didn’t permit that independence, although a
couple of years later in college, I did run away to New York, involving myself
in many of the pursuits that led one acquaintance to suggest Matthew had
apparently “taken chances.”
Nothing significant happened to me, while
sadly, during one evening walk through Marrakech, Matthew was attacked, robbed,
and raped by six Moroccan men—an experience which, as his friends and family
detail, truly transformed him.
So ends my links with this handsome young
man, who those several decades later attended a college in North Carolina,
eventually leading to a period of living in Denver, where he apparently did not
feel at home, before returning to college, now at the University of Wyoming in
Laramie, Wyoming. I could never have imagined returning to Iowa, although I did
leave New York in order to return to the University of Wisconsin—a very
different place in the late 1960s, surely, than Wyoming in the late 1990s.
Although Matthew quickly became involved
with gay rights at the University, as I too had, it is clear that his life in
Laramie was totally different from mine in Madison—a difference that would mean
everything for a young gay man. Like those I left behind in my home town of
Cedar Rapids, it’s apparent that Matthew Sheppard felt significant isolation in
his college years. And on the night of October 12th he apparently
struck up a conversation at a local bar with two straight men who were
pretending to be interested in his gay sexuality in order to rob him.
Whether or not, frightened by his sexual
advances, they were led to greater violence doesn’t truly matter; they were
extraordinarily brutal, determined to punish him for his own sexuality, leaving
him to suffer their torture in an isolated place for hours before he was
discovered. His wounds were so severe that even his parents could not, at
first, in their rush back for Saudi Arabia to Wyoming, recognize him.
Ultimately, a gay-friendly teacher was invited by family members to help
encourage Matthew, still clinging to life, to let go and die.
What Michele Josue’s film reveals to us—through
photographs, videos, and diary entries—is that this young man was an engaging
youth, dealing with friends, mostly women, in a way that showed him to be a
stunningly out-going and amicable young person who might have been a
significant diplomat (as he claimed he was seeking to be) or an actor (which he
sought to be, perhaps, as a way to play out identities he was now permitted in daily
life).
It’s hard, indeed, to talk about this
joyous young man with simply breaking into tears, as the director does when the
local priest, who comforted one of the killers, Aaron McKinney, argues that he,
too, as human being deserves pardon. Shepard’s remarkable parents, in fact
argued against the death penalty for Matthew’s killers, and have worked
endlessly since to help the cease the hatred that led to their son’s horrible
death.
If Father Roger Schmit painfully argues
for forgiveness, at the same moment he proposes that those who loved Matthew
should “never lose their anger.” Indeed, I have to admit after seeing so many
images of the appealing boy, I too became angry. Why should anyone have had to
suffer the death simply because of being sexually different from most of the
culture in which he had grown up?
This movie, fortunately, refuses to show
that anger, instead reminding us of the love his friends felt for him, and
demonstrating, remarkably, just how much he was loved—perhaps without even
recognizing it during his brief life. Matthew Shepard, luckily, was not one of
the forgotten, but continues to be, even today, a figure who has helped to
change the entire American landscape with regard to sexuality.
Los Angeles,
August 2, 2016
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