The Scarecrow Christ

Paul Middleton deals with the contested homosexual martyr Matthew Shepard. Matthew Shepard, a gay twenty-one year old political science student at the University of Wyoming, was robbed and brutally beaten by two other men on the night of Tuesday, 6 October 1998. The men tied him to a fence after the attack, while he was bleeding profusely in freezing temperatures. He died a few days later, on 12 October 1998, and was called a martyr in Time Magazine, just a week after his death. Middleton examines the popular martyr-making process in respect of Matthew Shepard, arguing that both the making of the martyr and the reaction it provoked reflect American ‘culture wars’, because martyrology is conflict literature, foremost about the conflict between the story-tellers and their opponents. Ironically, both LGBT activists and right-wing religious groups have in some ways sought to undermine Shepard’s martyr status by focusing on his life rather than his death. Such efforts, as Middleton argues, had a limited effect because in martyrologies any interest in the lives of their heroes is incidental, merely setting up the scene for a significant death.

Considering Matthew Shepard: normative and anti-normative queer spatial narratives and the politics of performance in choral music

I present a cultural geographical analysis of the recent choral composition Considering Matthew Shepard. I explore the cultural, musical, and emotional geographies of this piece of music, in terms of its content and my experience of rehearsing and then performing the piece as a member of the choir. Drawing on cultural geography, musical geography, and queer theory, I argue that the memorializing of Matthew Shepard’s killing through this musical setting both repeats and challenges the normative popular and academic framings of Shepard’s murder and, more generally, queer critiques of the memorialization and historicization of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer pasts. I explore this by examining three spatial themes in Considering Matthew Shepard: its representations of (1) Wyoming, (2) the fence (where Shepard was left by his assailants), and (3) universality. I also point to what musical geographies might gain in looking more closely at choral music performance.

Dying to Be Normal

Through an examination of publicly mourned gay deaths in America, Brett Krutzsch counters the common perception that LGBT politics and religion have been oppositional to one another. Dying to Be Normal reveals how gay activists have used religion to bolster the argument that gays are essentially the same as straights, and therefore deserving of equal rights. Krutzsch’s analysis turns to the memorialization of Matthew Shepard, Harvey Milk, Tyler Clementi, Brandon Teena, and F. C. Martinez, as well as to campaigns like the It Gets Better Project and national tragedies like the Pulse nightclub shooting to illustrate how activists used specific deaths to win acceptance, influence political debates over LGBT rights, and encourage assimilation. Throughout, Krutzsch shows how, in the fight for greater social inclusion, activists relied on Christian values and rhetoric to portray gays as upstanding Americans. As Krutzsch demonstrates, gay activists regularly reinforced a white Protestant vision of acceptable American citizenship that often excluded people of color, gender-variant individuals, non-Christians, and those who did not adhere to Protestant Christianity’s sexual standards. The first book to detail how martyrdom has influenced national debates over LGBT rights, Dying to Be Normal establishes how religion has shaped gay assimilation in the United States and the mainstreaming of particular gays as “normal” Americans.

“The Place Where Two Discriminations Meet”: Race, Gender, and the Threat of Violence

Chapter 4 highlights how transgender women and queer people of color have been more frequent victims of violence than white gay men even though their murders have received less attention. The chapter turns to three films that address what most news outlets overlooked. In particular, Chapter 4 explores the 1999 film Boys Don’t Cry about the murder of transgender man Brandon Teena, the 2009 film Two Spirits about the murder of gender-variant Native American F. C. Martinez, and the 2014 film Out in the Night about an attack on seven African American lesbians in 2006. The chapter further demonstrates how much of the activism surrounding Harvey Milk, Matthew Shepard, and Tyler Clementi, as well as the It Gets Better Project, ignored issues of race, class, gender presentation, and religion that many LGBT people have endured despite proclamations that acceptance comes with the march of time.

The “Crucifixion” of “Anyone’s Gay Son”: Matthew Shepard

Chapter 2 investigates why Matthew Shepard’s death evoked outrage throughout the United States, especially from heterosexuals who had been unmoved by the vast number of gay and bisexual AIDS deaths. In particular, chapter 2 illuminates several ways that secular gay activists used Christian rhetoric to promote social acceptance. Gay activists commonly presented Shepard as a practicing Protestant who lived, suffered, and died in ways analogous to Jesus. In so doing, gay activists exalted Shepard as a more legitimate Christian than those in the Christian right. Ultimately, the chapter makes evident how Christian ideals shaped secular gay activists’ strategies for assimilation at the end of the twentieth and start of the twenty-first centuries.

Gay, Rural, and Coming Out

This case study details the events surrounding a gay student’s “coming out” in a small, rural high school. Through the eyes and experiences of the student, his teachers, classmates, and community, we hear the story of how the school and community dealt with an issue they had never before actively considered. Through qualitative interviews, the former high school principal describes reactions and lessons learned as the student made his sexual orientation known, attended prom, and was awarded one of three Matthew Shepard Scholarships given in the state. The unexpected way in which events unfolded in the school and community were nearly as surprising as the revelation of the student’s sexual orientation. The experiences reinforce the importance of school climate, meaningful relationships between students and staff, the sometimes hidden challenges of high school, and provide valuable considerations for all educators.