The Laramie Project

Matthew Shepard’s murder was a hate crime. He was killed because he was gay in a society that does not tolerate homosexuality. As a result, The Laramie Project is fundamentally concerned with prejudice, which includes but is not limited to homophobia. Marge Murray tells us, early in Act I, that there is a class problem in Laramie; that there is a divide between those who work at the university and those who work at minimum wage service jobs. Indeed, her own children had been taunted because she worked in a bar. The initial impressions recorded by members of the Tectonic Theatre Company when they arrive in Laramie also suggest the prejudices that exist in America’s urban centers—like New York—about its rural states—such as Wyoming. Such prejudices expose points of difference, of tension between rural and urban society, between rich and poor. However, the most significant difference investigated in this play is that between the heterosexual majority and the homosexual minority, and the terrible, deadly consequences of homophobia.

Many heterosexual people in Laramie don’t consider homophobia to be a problem in their society. They know that gay people exist, they may even know gay people personally, and they do not consider them to be threatened or particularly threatening. Others, however, think that homosexuality is a sin; rather than a legitimate identity, these people consider homosexuality to be a “lifestyle,” something that gay people choose to indulge in. While the theatre company doesn’t attempt to challenge or investigate the justifications behind homophobia, they often center on the fact that homosexuality forces people to consider sex and desire outside of a conventional framework of marriage and children. Within the logic of homophobia, this framework provides sex with a function beyond mere pleasure and intimacy; because homosexual sex cannot produce children, it is not considered valuable to society, and neither are gay people. Furthermore, gay people—like the “queens” that Doc O’Connor refers to—often dress and act in ways that challenge established gender roles, undermining what some people to be their “natural” social place or identity. These tend to be the same people who describe gay people as a homogenous group who conspired to make Matthew’s death into something it wasn’t: a hate crime.

Attempts to deny that homophobia motivated the attack on Matthew also sought to deflect or defer the conversation about homophobia and prejudice that Matthew’s death made so urgent. While Laramie became a focal point for this discussion in the wake of the attack, it had national, if not global, significance. The LGBT people the theatre company interviews in Laramie provide a very different account of what life is like for a gay person in a small town than their heterosexual counterparts. They speak of living cautiously, of hiding their identity from friends and acquaintances, of internalizing the homophobia that characterizes their society. Jonas Slonaker wonders if society would be changed if all young LGBT people stayed in the small towns where they grew up, rather than moving to big cities, where they can be anonymous and open. However, he also acknowledges the difficulty and the danger they would face in doing so. The interviews with Slonaker, Catherine Connolly, Zackie Salmon and others suggest that though some LGBT people might not experience physical violence, the threat of violence is never far away. There is also the discursive violence Father Roger Schmit alludes to; the violence of derogatory language and of the belief that LGBT people are somehow lesser than heterosexuals.

The murder of Matthew Shepard was an extreme expression of the latent homophobia that pervades American society. The desire to have his death categorized as a hate crime was also a desire to name homophobia for what it is so that the difficult process of eradicating it could begin. The Laramie Project offers some hope that this is possible in characters such as Jedadiah Schultz and Rob DeBree who are both deeply moved by Matthew Shepard’s death and have their views on homosexuality changed.