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Teaching The Laramie Project By Kimberley Gilles

Kimberley Gilles has been teaching for 30 years in high schools and middle schools, urban schools and suburban schools. She won the California Teachers Association 2012 Human Rights Award “for exemplary contributions in the area of human and civil rights” and was named the 2014 National Education Association’s National Teacher of Excellence. Gilles lives in Oakland and teaches at Monte Vista High School in Danville, California.

“‘Live and let live.’ That is such crap. . . . Basically it boils down to: If I don’t tell you I’m a fag, you won’t beat the crap out of me. I mean, what’s so great about that? That’s a great philosophy?”

—Stephen Belber, interviewed for The Laramie Project

C reated from interviews with more than 70 people in and around Laramie, Wyoming, The Laramie Project tells the story of the murder of Matthew Shepard, a University of Wyoming student, and the af- termath. Two young men, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson,

abducted Matthew on Oct. 6, 1998, and smashed in his skull because he was gay.

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After tying him to a buck fence on the Wyoming prairie, they left him to die. The crime, Matthew’s death and funeral, and the trials of his assailants comprise the narrative of the play. The Laramie Project is a portrait of a town and its inhabi- tants. We see the people of Laramie as cruel, compassionate, brave, and every- thing in between. The Laramie Project demands that its audience confront one question: What is there about the sexual orientation of another human being that calls forth so many personal and public passions?

I decided to teach The Laramie Project in August 2010, when I was assigned two sections of English 12. At the high school where I teach, on the outskirts of the San Francisco Bay Area, students who are passionate about English gener- ally choose an English elective that excites them—Creative Writing, Women’s Literature, or Literature Through Film. English 12, on the other hand, is the province of seniors who have never liked English, AP burnouts, varsity athletes fulfilling graduation credits, and refugees from other classes.

I cruised the bookroom shelves, searching for titles that might entice this mix of students to read, think, speak, write, or simply care. There, standing in perma-bound splendor among well-thumbed classics like Macbeth and The Catcher in the Rye, I discovered two class sets of Moisés Kaufman’s The Laramie Project. They had never been used. Jackpot! The book had been approved by the school board and purchased by the school seven years earlier, yet no teacher had touched it.

The Laramie Project is a great play. It draws readers in emotionally and offers a broad range of humanity to examine. Readers respond—and recoil. Furthermore, The Laramie Project is based on source documents, making it of particular value to English teachers trying to deal with the demands of Common Core. It is an astonishing “two-for-the-price-of-one” pedagogical option: nonfic- tion text within the aesthetic framework of a powerful play. I added the title to my list of texts for the following year.

Imagine my surprise when I was unable to discover any curriculum available online. Apparently, high school drama classes across the nation are producing The Laramie Project, but English classes aren’t touching it. Determined to move away from fill-in-the-blank, scantron-bubble thinking, I wrote my own curric- ulum, keeping in mind the philosophy of educator/activist Maxine Greene. She believed that reading literature is valuable because it nurtures empathy. Empa- thy is, in literature and in life, an act of imagination.

I decided to design an arts-based curriculum that focused on imagination more than analysis or evaluation. The arts demand two elements: First, the art- ist must see—not look, not glance, but see. Then, the artist must use the imagi- nation to express what is seen. It is no accident that we say we see something as a way to express that we understand. Seeing and saying would be the fulcrum of my curriculum. I wanted to send young people into the world who had practice seeing, imagining, empathizing, and reflecting.

Centering my curriculum on empathy came as a response to a thread in student conversations that disturbs me. The put-down, particularly the sexual

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put-down, is often students’ wisecrack of choice. Students use a put-down to tease a friend: “Give me the pencil, faggot!” “What?” “Oh, yeah. But Ms. G, he’s a friend of mine. Sorry, Ms. G.”

They use a put-down to describe an adversary: “What a douche!” “What?” “Yeah, I do know what it means. Sorry, Ms. G.”

They use it to marginalize a person: “She’s a slut.” “What?” “Oh, sorry, Ms. G. It’s just that she really bothers me!”

Homophobic and sexist casual cruelty run rampant in the conversations of my students. Homophobic casual cruelty resulted in the death of Matthew Shepard.

How could I help students raised on Call of Duty video games and the nightly news see murder as the ultimate act of silencing?

I knew that the play would provide the opportunity to explore many issues, including capital punishment, the role of religion in American life, and the parent-child relationship. But an undeniable fact remains at the center of the play: Matthew Shepard was gay. Around that fact a range of issues buckle and swirl: the Westboro Baptist Church and its hateful web address—godhatesfags. com, the nature of hate crimes, homophobia, HIV/AIDS, gay rights, the pain of remaining “in the closet,” the pain of “coming out,” the place of LGBTQ people in their churches, their communities, and their families.

Before we began the play, I asked students to create a “spectrum.” Working in pairs, they created long posters with a horizontal line reaching from one end to the other. One end of the line was labeled Intolerance/Homophobia/Misocainea (hatred of new ideas). The other extreme was labeled Tolerance/Activism/Soli- darity. Neutral/Unknown was the midpoint.

As we read, each pair had to decide where the dozens of individuals quoted in the play “stood” on the spectrum of homophobia and write their names on the spectrum line. I told them it was fine to move the characters if they changed and grew throughout the ordeal of Matthew Shepard’s murder and burial, and the trial of his murderers. I wanted my students to pay attention to what actions the characters took, and to consider what characters said and left unsaid. Discrep- ancies between words and actions were rich areas for discussion. Looking across the room, I would see a head shaking vehemently or partners bending over a spectrum with fingers pointing to two different points on the line.

Reflecting on the spectrum assignment, I see room for improvement. Why? The goal I had assigned myself was to move beyond “yes/no” thinking, yet here

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I was demanding exactly that! For example, Father Roger Schmidt, the Cath- olic priest who led the first public vigil for Matthew Shepard, defies placement on a particular point of the spectrum. Human sexuality, human behavior, and human beings are far too complicated to pigeonhole on an imaginary line. I can improve the conversations and thinking my students engage in by insisting they take nuances into consideration.

“Knocking In” Conversation

One of the most important parts of teaching The Laramie Project was read- ing the entire play aloud during class. Conversation was a pedagogical goal, so I invited students to “knock in”—rap on their desks—whenever they chose to comment on a moment that struck them as confusing, noteworthy, or appalling.

The two most thunderous knocks occurred in Act III. Students audibly gasped when they read Aaron McKinney’s epiphany during his interrogation by Det. Sgt. Rob DeBree. After a pause, McKinney says, “I’m never going to see my son again.” Knocks resounded across the classroom.

“You mean, McKinney is a dad?” “How could he kill Matthew if he’s a dad?” “Man, he wasn’t thinking like a dad when he bashed in Matthew’s brains; he

was thinking like a jerk!” “Oh, my God! That means his kid has to grow up knowing what his dad did!” “You’d think becoming a dad would change you. You know, grow you up.” “Becoming a father isn’t the same as becoming a dad.” “True that.” Heads nodded all across the room. Within five minutes of this conversation, knocks again exploded across the

desktops. “Whoa! Are you tellin’ me that Dennis Shepard (Matthew’s father) does not

want Aaron McKinney to die?” “Is he asking the court not to give the death penalty even though he would

love to see Aaron McKinney dead?” “That’s not right!” I had to interject. “Whoa! Whoa! Let’s ask, ‘Why?’ Why does Dennis Shepard

ask the court to set aside the possibility of the death penalty?” Heads ducked as faces turned back to the pages open before them. One girl

answered tentatively, “I think Mr. Shepard wants Aaron McKinney to suffer. I think Mr. Shepard thinks that McKinney having to live with what he did is worse.”

“Yeah, but could you do that?” “I’m not saying it’s right. I’m saying it’s what he did.” Voices erupted around the room. Eric, who is usually quiet, said: “Know

what I think? I think the death penalty is wrong.” We never did get back to reading the play that day. We speculated about

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Dennis Shepard’s possible motives and the morality of the death penalty. Fathers and sons. Life and death. These issues matter to young people. Not one student packed up to leave before the bell rang.

Negative Space

At the heart of the play is a death. Matthew Shepard was silenced—abso- lutely and eternally. I was stumped. How could I help students raised on Call of Duty video games and the nightly news see murder as the ultimate act of silencing? Every marginalized group is silenced in some way. How could I lead students to confront questions of who is being silenced and who is doing the silencing? Who suffers from silencing? Who benefits?

Matthew Shepard was forever silenced because he was gay. How could students “see” this terrible silence? The answer came from the realm of art: negative space, the rendering of what is not there.

School climate committees and workshops on sexual harassment aren’t going to dent the casual and constant homophobia that permeates teen culture and the larger U.S. culture.

I began by asking them to get out a sheet or two of paper. We were going to write. I asked students to consider something that they were looking forward to, an event perhaps. Prom featured prominently in their conversations. Then, I asked them to consider the lives that lay before them, to consider the decades: 20s, 30s, 40s, up to 80. What did they anticipate that they might say in each of those decades? I asked them to write down their thoughts. I told them they needed to generate lots of text. The atmosphere was jovial, cheerful, the walls echoed with chatter and laughter. “I got the job!” “The honeymoon was perfect!” “It’s a boy!” “No, we cannot get a bunny. Would you feed her and clean her cage or make me do it every night?”

Then I asked my students to start including the difficult things they might have to say as those years passed. They grew quieter. “My joints hurt.” “I was fired.” “They think it has metastasized.” The options became more serious. The pages filled.

I asked my students to put down their pens and pencils. I said: “Matthew

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Shepard died in 1998 at the age of 21. He and his family and his friends will never experience the joys and complications of any of those lines you just wrote. They were savagely torn away from him and from all who loved him. All he was left was silence.”

You could hear my students breathing. No one stirred. I sent them back to their pages, but this time I asked them to consider the life stages snatched away from Matthew. I asked them to write all the declarations and questions and ex- clamations that Matthew Shepard was never permitted to express. “I encourage you to think of all the challenges, heartbreaks, triumphs, satisfactions, failures, joys, and complications that life will send us—if we are given enough time. McKinney and Henderson stole that time, that life, from Matthew Shepard.”

Again, students wrote—silently, sincerely. When they had written for another 15 minutes, I interrupted to show them two examples of “figure–ground rever- sal.” This technique uses the art concept of negative space. One example was a pear rendered in white against a black background, the other was the white shape of an airplane against a black background. Layers Magazine has a clear explanation of negative space:

When composing a piece of artwork, we generally work with three elements: the frame, the positive space, and the negative space (also called white space). The frame is the bounding size of the artwork, the positive space is the subject, and the negative space is the empty space around the subject. (Cass, 2009)

I asked students to decide on an image to create with negative space—leav- ing what would have been positive space as blankness. The missing image would represent the emptiness that was left when Matthew was killed, the emptiness where Matthew should have been. Students would create that silence by creat- ing a background of all that should have been—a lifetime of declarations, ques- tions, stories, experiences. Once they had decided on a central image, I taught them how to enlarge a smaller drawing (see Resources).

The space they created was a pair of Doc Martens, shoes that had been removed from Matthew’s feet in an attempt to make the murder appear to be a robbery gone wrong. The space was the gun used to bludgeon Matthew into a coma. The spaces were weeping angels and broken hearts and tears flowing. The space was a boy tied to a fence. They took their pieces of paper home and came back to class with art. I could tell that they had spent hours and hours depicting the silence.

I jettisoned the next lesson plan and decided that we needed a gallery walk. Students placed their pieces on the centers of their desks along with a piece of blank paper. They then circulated among the art, sitting at a desk to study the image and read the background of text. When they had finished, they wrote a note to the artist, quietly rose, and went to another desk to sit and see again. The room was quiet except for the rasp of pens on paper and the shuffling of feet as students moved from desk to desk. After about 20 minutes, I asked them to return to their desks. My students read their classmates’ responses to their art in

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silence. It was eerie and yet completely appropriate. Students then chose their two most powerful lines—one negative and one

positive—that Matthew would never express. They rose, one by one, using a Quaker meeting format and speaking as the spirit moved them. I released con- trol of the flow of ideas. As students felt moved, they stood, spoke their truths, and then sat again. No one agreed or disagreed. Each student’s truth hung in the air: heard, understood, and accepted.

By far the most frequently spoken phrase was “I love you.”

If educators want to tackle one of the critical civil rights issue of our day—the rights of the LGBTQ community—we cannot relegate that discussion to the margins.

Acting with Empathy

When we finished reading the play aloud, students staged selected moments in 10-minute productions. The scenes were polished and daring. The children of Danville became the people of Laramie, the best opportunity I can imagine to practice true empathy. Cross-gender casting was common. Role-doubling was necessary.

Students who habitually sped through their assignments no longer aspired to efficiency. Instead, they aimed at truth. I particularly remember Hassan, a senior whom I had first taught three years earlier. Hassan was a manipulator, a cutter of corners, and a charmer. I expected superficiality from him, but I was wrong. He played both the outraged judge who sentenced Henderson and McKinney, and McKinney as he was interrogated by a detective. In both scenes, Hassan revealed the humanity of his characters. All the students did. Matthew Shepard was a complicated young man who caused his parents to worry. Russell Henderson was an Eagle Scout raised by a devoted grandmother. Aaron McKin- ney was the father of a young son. The true horror of The Laramie Project is that there are no monsters. We are the people of Laramie. Human beings. Murderers and advocates. Bigots and heroes.

So what makes me so hopeful? A different silence. As the school year ended and my seniors prepared for graduation, I be-

came aware of a remarkable shift in the culture of the class. The language in Room 310 had changed. Students still needled one another, but the words had changed. (“Hey, loser! Who are you taking to the prom? Um, yeah, I know, Ms. G. Sorry.”) There were still occasional epithets and put-downs in my class, but

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the habit of using sexual identity to insult others disappeared. Did that disap- pearance occur because I wouldn’t abide that form of hate speech? Partly.

But I have come to believe in something much more substantive.

Curriculum, Not Just Climate

If educators want to tackle one of the critical civil rights issue of our day— the rights of the LGBTQ community—we cannot relegate that discussion to the margins of education. “Character education,” school climate committees, and workshops on sexual harassment aren’t going to dent the casual and constant homophobia that permeates both teen culture and the larger U.S. culture. We need to take a page out of the playbook of the Black civil and human rights movements of the 1960s. As a student in the ’60s and ’70s, I learned that racism was institutionally and culturally unacceptable when we studied Black Boy and A Raisin in the Sun. I knew that African American culture was valued when its music showed up in the pieces our choir sang. I recognized its heroes when they showed up in the persons of Benjamin Banneker, Phillis Wheatley, and Malcolm X. African American music became my music. African American heroes became my heroes. We shared an undeniable humanity.

One of the main ways students decipher what society values is by mastering the con- tent that is presented in schools.

Classroom teachers must include the LGBTQ experience in the story we construct about life through the curriculum we present. Why? Because one of the main ways students decipher what society values is by mastering the content that is presented in schools. Students don’t look to their schools’ mission state- ments, inspirational posters, or posted classroom rules for guidance. They look to instruction.

When that instruction occurs, behavioral shifts will follow. Fewer and fewer students will be subjected, directly and indirectly, to verbal sexual abuse. All sexual orientations will become socially accepted as our young people develop their adult identities. Our LGBTQ youth will be better protected. As a result, I hope they will suffer less abuse, self-loathing, fear, violence, and—the most tragic possibilities—murder and suicide.

Until the contributions of LGBTQ peoples are included in all the disciplines of modern American curriculum, we educators will be guilty of trivializing, mar- ginalizing, and bigotry. I cannot live with that. So, I teach Shakespeare’s sonnets to a mysterious young man and to a dark lady, the poetry of Sappho, and The

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Laramie Project. Authors and characters who are lesbian, gay, and bisexual have a place in the canon presented in my classroom. Why? Because the literature is good. Because teaching literature is about teaching the human story. Because LGBTQ people are contributing creators of that story. To exclude them is to deny the truth.

And I won’t do that.

Resources

Cass, Jacobs. 2009. “Negative space,” Layers. layersmagazine.com/nega- tive-space.html.

EHow. “How to Enlarge a Drawing Using a Grid.” ehow.com/how_12732_en- large-drawing-using.html. Worksheet example: pinterest.com/mimififi/art- class-worksheets.

Greene, Maxine. 1995. Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change. Jossey-Bass.

Kaufman, Moisés. 2001. The Laramie Project. First Vintage Books Edition.

The Laramie Project. 2002. Prod. Declan Baldwin. Screenplay by Moisés Kaufman. Gabay Productions. DVD.

Pear in negative space: marynewman.net/images/Negative%20Space%20-%20 Photogram.jpg.

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