Laramie Inside Out

This film was completed in 2004, and over the next decade was screened at dozens of universities, conferences, and community events all over the country. It soon became clear that the core audiences for Laramie Inside Out were LGBTQ people and their allies in small towns, churches, campuses and classrooms in the heartland. I was fortunate to be able to accompany the film for Q&A at most of these events, and to feel the pulse of change coursing through the culture during those years, as the closet was cracking open in every direction. The most memorable screenings were not in New York, LA or San Francisco, but places like Grand Haven, Michigan; Emporia, Kansas; and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

For the first several years after the murder, Matthew Shepard was still a household name for LGBTQ people and, it seemed, most American adults. The Laramie Project was one of the most performed plays in the country for over a decade, and I often met college students who had been in high school productions. Others had seen the HBO film adaptation of the play, and knew the broad outlines of Matthew’s story. Audiences showed up at screenings to get the hometown girl perspective that distinguished my personal documentary from the play, created by the New York based Tectonic Theatre Company. A handful of screenings were programmed in conjunction with productions of The Laramie Project, which made for thought-provoking discussion about how both the play and the documentary film shaped real people into characters.

But as the murder receded farther into the past, there came a moment when the college students at screenings, too young to remember anything about this news story from 1998, had never heard the name Matthew Shepard, and the film gradually morphed from an account of current events into a historical document. The film now takes its place among other documentaries that bring the history of the struggle for LGBTQ rights alive for succeeding generations.

In 2019 I wrote: "As I watch Laramie Inside Out with students these days, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision legalizing same-sex marriage, on the eve of the fifth season of Transparent, the world depicted on the screen feels like a different era. Having come of age in the Obama years, the freshmen in my honors seminar on LGBTQ History through Documentary Film share a matter-of-fact assumption of queer visibility and equality, and take the freedom to be themselves for granted."

But now in 2023, as we approach the 25th anniversary of Matthew's brutal murder, the queer community faces a new wave of backlash. Hard-won rights, visibility and support are once again under attack in the current era of "Don't Say Gay," book bans and battles over school curricula, anti-trans legislation and rising levels of anti-LGBTQ+ violence. The story of Matthew Shepard, and of the social change his murder ignited, provides crucial context for understanding this latest chapter of the culture wars and inspiring today's students to continue the fight for freedom, dignity, equality and inclusion for all.