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.
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 hometown 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—after 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 not permitted in
daily life).
It’s hard, indeed, to talk about this
joyous young man without 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
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2016).
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