The Laramie Project

[opengoal]

I was watching The Laramie Project when I was writing my jounral entry on the HKLGFF. It's an HBO movie so I'd dreaded it wouldn't do justice to Matthew Shephard, the college student brutally beaten to death because he was gay. But thankfully, the film was moving and thought-provoking.


It's about a theatre company coming to the town of that tragedy to interview the people there as background work for a play about that incident. The townspeople didn't actually appear in the film (they were played by actors) but what they say really made me think. Many of them say the town is "live and let live". But then they'd use words like "people of that persuasion" and euphemic ways of saying they had it coming.

I felt rather guilty when I heard Matthew's seriously injured body was strung upon a fence post and that the person who found him thought he was a scarecrow at first. Because immediately I got the image of Clark Kent strung up as scarecrow in the Smallville pilot.

Matthew Shepherd died in 1998. The film was made in 2002. In the film, when the theatre people and pro-gay people were sort of looking to the future, they talk about the play Angels in America and how the hate crime bill still couldn't get passed in Wyoming. I thought about Clinton who condemned the perpetrators and pushed the hate crime bill, and then I thought about George W Bush and the continuing crimes against humanity in Iraq.