26/06/2002 - 10:55 p.m.

The Laramie Project: The Matthew Shepard Story

I said I'd tell you all about it when I got back. I'm back.

The Laramie Project is the sort of play I want to write. This is why I do what I do. I want to share knowledge and viewpoints and values nad I want to let everyone know as accurately as possible what I think is important and why it is. That's the sort of play Laramie Project is. It's the people of Laramie, telling their story. It's the audience seeing it, what the audience comes away with. Like the director said in the program: the play is succesful if one audience member comes away with a better understanding. Just one person. That's all I want to be able to reach, but with a play, I have the power to reach millions.

What's the play about? You need to see it for yourself. You won't understand if I sit and give you the plot, you won't understand if I tell you everything I know about Matthew Shepard and hate crimes and homosexuality. It is about all those things, but to understand the play, I think you need to see it.

I can't believe that some people can come out of a play and have normal conversation. A good play, a good movie, I can't do that. I need to talk about the show if I'm going to talk. My head is filled with the lines and the thoughts and the ideas I have been presented with, and I feel that it is my job as the audience member to think about it. Even comedies. There's something there, something you're being told. I can't deal with people who don't understand that works need to have a theme. Any good work is about something and that's important to know about, it's the reason the work was written.

For me, this is absolutely this sort of play. It is so full of real character; those are real people who actually exist in Wyoming. They're not just a stereotype, they're probably not that much of an understatement- they're real. It's a study in humanity if it is no more. It's important to see.

As much as I have supported SAGA and other movements, I support them so much more now, and anybody else who just wants to try to live in a world in which people are not treated cruelly based on who they happen to be. I know that they will be judged, I've been judged- when I wear my buttons or stand up for causes my friends are intimately involved with, I've been called the names. I may be straight, but I am aware, even a little bit, of what it's like.

I have a couple of wishes, foolish wishes, right now, for understanding of everyone, for love of who other people are, and it may not be possible now, may never be. But I know that it's stupid to keep going on the way we are. It's stupid to keep hating people. It's ignorance, and cowardice, and I just realised something: this is the same speech I give to my campers who kill spiders out of fear. You don't know, and you don't care to know; to understand. All you know is that you're afraid, and the quickest way not to be afraid is violence, because that's a very strong sort of power, but it's the wrong sort of power. Ten year olds can understand it. So can everybody else.