Laramie Project: Small Town Violence

Laramie Project: Small Town Violence Run Amuck

Although homophobia is present within many facets of American society, "The Laramie Project" by Moises Kaufman specifically makes a claim that the small town mentality and morality of the Wyoming town of Laramie created the conditions that gave rise to the hate crime that took the life of the young college senior Matthew Shepard. The play accomplishes this by showing how gay life is kept under wraps in the small town where Matthew is a college student. It shows the overpowering influence of narrow-minded fundamentalist religious values in the area, particularly in the lives of Matthew's attackers. It also depicts how the facade of friendless of the town's characters conceals xenophobia, hatred, and resentment of the college students of the University of Wyoming.

While the drama of the Laramie Project could theoretically occur anywhere, because the play is based upon real events, it is also intent upon showing how the culture of Laramie, Wyoming boasted a particularly noxious mix of intolerance and denial that propelled the tragic sequence of events that resulted in the fatal beating of Matthew Shepard. Early on in the play, the audience is shown how difficult it is to be gay and living in Laramie, Wyoming. For Matthew and other gay students to find any semblance of a social life, they must travel far away from the safe confines of the campus.

The townspeople feel, in retrospect, unfairly blamed for the fact that Laramie became notorious in the media for the hate crime. In the words of one of the less aware residents, the town seems defined by an "accident" rather than by its true character. But the fact that a brutal beating is seen as accidental, rather than something real and deliberate, demonstrates the mindset of a town where gay people are ignored at best, and brutalized at worst. A university professor who is gay must conceal her identity in silence; a theater student's parents will not even see his performance in a gay-themed play, because the issue makes them so uncomfortable.

The morality that is prioritized in Laramie is that of a narrow-minded religiosity, rather than openness or tolerance. One of the perpetrators is a supposedly devout Mormon, and Matthew's funeral is disrupted by someone who chants that "God" hates "fags." Matthew's death is shown to be martyrdom, an irony that is imperceptible to the supposedly faithful perpetrators of the crime. The vigil that convenes in hope while Matthew is struggling for life in the hospital is perhaps the only positive example of religious imagery in the play, although of course the hopes and prayers of those who want Matthew to survive are dashed on stage, as they were in life.

But perhaps the most shocking aspect of the play is the superficial 'niceness" of many of the townspeople of Laramie and their inability to come to terms with the fact that a member of the town has committed a hate crime. Just like they deny the existence of the gay scene near the small town, the idea that their attitudes could have played any contributing role in fostering the circumstances that gave rise to Matthew's murder is inconceivable. The character of Laramie as a community is conveyed by the evocative language used by the characters. Their words simultaneously paint a collective physical and emotional picture of the landscape and reveal the attitudes of the individual speaker.

The town of Laramie was almost two towns, a conventional Western ranching town filled with open spaces and conservative Western morality and faith on one hand, and on the other hand, a town that boasted a university with gay professors, gay students, and harbored the diversity that is characteristic of many college campuses all over the world.

In every college town to some extent there are town and gown tensions, as the culture of the students will be in conflict with some of the needs and desires of the year-round residents. But in Laramie this mix of personalities and tensions created a particularly potent concoction. Likewise, there is homophobia everywhere, but the willed collective silence of Laramie in regards to the subject of homosexuality, combined with the town's hatred of the wealthier and more educated college students, plus the additional difference of Matthew's evident sexual orientation, was like adding a match to combustible tinder. The disaffected, depressed residents who lived outside the college community were looking for something and someone to hate, and they found this in the persona of the openly gay Shepard.