In 1999, a year after his son Matthew had been brutally beaten to death in a gay-hate crime that shocked America, Dennis Shepard stood up in a Wyoming courtroom and read a profound and emotional speech during the sentencing of one of his son’s two killers.
The grieving father imagined his murdered son breathing in sagebrush and pine on his last day of life, and hearing the “ever-present Wyoming wind for the last time”. He spoke of his love and pride for the 21-year-old university student, who was extroverted, fluent in several languages and studying foreign relations and political science with plans to work in the US state department.
Dennis and his wife, Matthew’s mother Judy, had brokered a deal announced to the court that morning that saved the convicted man from the death penalty. Facing the killer, the parents would “show mercy to someone who refused to show any mercy”. “I’m going to grant you life, as hard as that is for me to do, because of Matthew,” Dennis said.
Three months later, the playwright Moisés Kaufman and Tectonic Theatre Project premiered the verbatim theatre work The Laramie Project. The play, which has since become one of the most performed in the US, draws on hundreds of interviews to examine the impact of Matthew’s murder on the city of Laramie, Wyoming. In the denouement an actor reads Dennis Shepard’s courtroom speech, word for word.
Now, Dennis and Judy Shepard, who run The Matthew Shepard Foundation full-time with Matthew’s younger brother Logan, are heading to Australia, where Dennis himself will deliver his speech as part of a staged reading of The Laramie Project at Sydney’s City Recital Hall, just before the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia (Idahobit) on 17 May.
It will be only the second time Dennis has performed in the play, directed by Dean Bryant. He will be joined in the reading by performers including Tony Sheldon, Casey Donovan, Zindzi Okenyo and Benjamin Law.
Kaufman, who was present in the Wyoming court trials, knew what the final scene of The Laramie Project must be when he heard Dennis’s speech, which he regards as an “epic moment in gay history and human history”.
“They say the last plays of Shakespeare are all about forgiveness, and they say it took him all his life to write about forgiveness because it is the most difficult thing to achieve as human beings,” Kaufman says.
“When Dennis gave that speech and looked at his son’s killer and he said he granted him life in the name of somebody who no longer lives, to me, that was the most hopeful thing, because it means that the only end to violence will be forgiveness. That violence cannot be fought with violence.”
But 25 years on, Dennis begs to differ. “There’s no forgiveness in either one of us,” he says, sitting alongside Judy in Washington DC. “We still believe in the death penalty. I personally believe I’d like to have torched him [the killer being sentenced]. But my smart wife, she convinced me otherwise. And in this instance, it was the right thing to do: to put both of them in prison, with two consecutive life sentences, so they will never see daylight again outside of those cement walls.”
Judy adds: “I think what it ended up being [was] forgiveness for us [from] ever having to face those two again in court, or read about them in the press. It was just over. There would have been some mandatory appeals if there had been a death sentence. We just had to revive [ourselves] for our younger son, Matt’s brother. I just didn’t want his whole life to be about this.”
Last year the US president, Joe Biden, noted hate crimes against the LGBTQI+ community were on the rise. “It really worries me,” says Judy. “We thought we were on a really good path. I think all of us working for a better life for the community thought, ‘If only Hillary [Clinton] had won the 2016 election, things would have been very, very different.’ She was all about protecting and advancing the community – women, everybody.”
Dennis adds: “[Donald Trump] enabled all the haters to come out from underneath the rocks and now the language he used and that they use has become so commonplace that you don’t think about it any more. That in itself is a travesty. That kind of language and those kinds of attitudes need to be put back away.”
He partly also blames social media. “If you and I were in a room talking, it’s easier to discuss the issues and not use hateful language. But the cowards and the haters – Judy calls them the underwear crowd, because they sit in a dark basement in their underwear, writing all these things and it’s out there for ever. It’s really devastating to the young [LGBTQI+] people. It terrifies them and they give up, and we don’t want that.”
Donovan, who will perform in The Laramie Project, is likewise wary of social media’s impact on LGBTQI+ people. “We’re never going to escape the haters, but we can limit the time we spend giving them the energy,” she says.
“We live in a society that is very fast, our attention span is very minimal, so human connections and conversations in person are very important … I hope The Laramie Project will celebrate Matthew’s spirit as a beautiful soul and someone that was going places.”
For his part, Dennis is steeling himself to give his courtroom speech again. “I know it will be hard,” he says. “Luckily, those around me will give me the support I need.”
The Laramie Project will be staged at Sydney’s City Recital Hall at 7.30pm on 14 May
