| The Laramie Project may be most people's first exposure to the
"Rev." Fred Phelps. Phelps is a local crazy if one is local to the Kansas towns
of Lawrence or Topeka. You see, he really hates gays. I mean he really hates them. He show
up on the KU campus every now and then and just start screaming at anyone who looks the
least bit light in the loafers. Every year, the Queers and Allies Association hold their
"Pride-Out" celebration and the whole Phelps family comes down to pass judgment
on and to scream at those in attendance. They never stay very long since Q and A have a
fund-raiser which normally garners about $1000 for every minute they are there. All of
this has garnered Phelps a great deal of local press but not much personal gain: He has
been disbarred from the KBA and has not been able to sustain a church membership of any
concern. But he did get national attention in the fall of 1998 when he packed up the
trailer and took the whole family to protest the funeral of Matthew Shepard in Laramie,
WY. Shephard, a gay UW freshman, had been beaten and left for dead as the result of a hate
crime. And there was the "Rev." Phelps at the funeral, focused soley at the
Shephard family, screaming that their son was rotting in hell. When I heard Phelps was
to be portrayed in Project, the HBO film based on the play of the same name, I
was expecting a one-sided demon. (Which is what he is.) But I didn't even get that. Here's
what I got instead: A gay theatre group (including the director of this film, Moises
Kaufman) travel to Laramie to document interviews with locals in order to do a play about
the Shepard murder. All the town folk (who include famous faces such as Laura Linney,
Steve Buscemi, Christina Ricci, Peter Fonda, et al) display various levels of horror and
dismay at the incident. Some knew Shepard and talk about the night he was kidnapped,
beaten, and left for dead. The playwrights meet the first cop at the scene (Lois Smith)
who finds out that she was exposed to Shepard's HIV-positive blood. There's Shepard's
doctor (well played by Dylan Baker) who breaks down at a press conference while trying to
read a statement by the family. The film even gives us a somewhat overdramatized
courtroom, where the judges seem to act as triers, jurors, and executioners of Shepard's
murderers. The play is written using the transcripted interviews and makes it debut in
Laramie the following year.
On the surface, The Laramie Project sounds like neo-Capote: This is an
examination of the town and how a brutal event makes its inhabitants re-examine themselves
and their values. We don't even get a glimpse of Shepard so that our focus is left
squarely on the people that he affected. But the filmmakers create a grave error by
including themselves and the interviews in the film. The story never really becomes about
the town of Laramie, but about these people seeing the town of Laramie. And this viewpoint
is skewered. Almost everyone depicted is gay or pro-gay. Now, I've driven through the town
at least a half-dozen times and I can assure you that it's the most conservative college
town I've ever seen. Did these people not interview anyone that was a gay basher? Sure, we
see "Rev." Phelps but he's not from Laramie. The big question that most of the
natives ask is how one of their neighbors could do such a thing. They don't know, the
filmmakers don't know, and I sure don't know. It seems that the source of gay hatred in a
town where a gay hate crime occurred would be the first place to start asking questions .
Find out about the hate and the ignorance and follow it down the breeding chain. But I
think that this group of writers were insulating themselves from something they did not
want to be exposed to. They may have interviewed someone that really hated homosexuals,
decided it was too troubling, and then put their focus on the "sensitive" side
of the town. Well, that's biased and that shows a group of people attempting to be
objective who live in a world of self-denial. It doesn't make for good reporting, and it
doesn't make for a good film, either.
My experience was also affected in the fact that I was watching it with a buddy of mine
from the South who didn't know much about the case. His comment was pretty dead on,
though: "It's bad when someone is murdered. But this happens to blacks all the time
in Tennessee. Still." Hey, there are still parts of the world where women are
executed for walking out into public with their faces are exposed. I want to explain my
argument about race and gender vs. sexual identity in the civil rights movement but I
might get lumped into the Fred Phelps category myself. (Besides, being called a homophobic
on-line film critic may not be good for readership.) I guess that's happened anyway since
the film shows Phelps wearing blue, crimson, and white that make up the school colors of
KU. Geez, it's bad enough that I'll be a graduate of the same school as this guy but then
they have to use our beloved colors to identify him like Adolph Hitler's mushtache or
Darth Vader's helmet? K-State is just as close. I say drape the bastard in Wildcat purple
next time.
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