Remembering Matthew

Content warning for transphobia, homophobia and violence.

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The older of my sons - we’ll shorten his name to E, to respect an anonymity he doesn’t really give a crap about - is seventeen years old, and has just left school.

E is funny and kind and wry, and smart about the world around him. He has opinions, lots of them, and that makes his mum smile, because in my day kids like that weren’t allowed voices. Of all the things E loves, he perhaps loves the theatre most; took drama every year he could at high school. Every year, his drama class put on a play.

The school theatre is cheerfully makeshift, cheaply painted, a curtained-off space at the back of the main hall. Plastic chairs squeak under the weight of parents who’ve come straight from work. Handbags are stowed beside feet in work shoes, phones switched off.

Photocopied programmes handed out at the door list the names of kids and their roles. Later, they will be tucked away with pride, into the boxes and drawers where parents keep the precious mementoes of children growing up.

The small stage is supercharged: lights, costumes and props, and the energy and anxiety of lines learned and credits to be earned. Of kids finding their voices, and in doing so, taking their place in the world. They will not be kids much longer.

Yes, my son E loves the theatre. Over those years of drama class, his hair has got shorter, his clothes baggier, his voice deeper. And as they did, his heart became lighter and his own smile more prolific. It was the smile of someone doing, being, what they were meant for.

E is transgender.

Last year, E and his drama classmates put on The Laramie Project. Maybe you’ve heard of it.

It tells of things that seem far away, from a different time and place altogether, and yet are far too close.

It gives voice to truths I never wanted my kid to hear.

It is the story of Matthew Shepard, a young man not much older than my own son, and the Wyoming town in which he lived and died.

I never set out to revisit the past, but I feel like it’s revisiting me.
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Two things reminded me of Matthew Shepard recently.

The first is ugly. It is the vulgar foment of hate brewing against transgender people, in too many corners of a chaotic world. We will come back to this, although I wish we didn’t need to.

The second is, perhaps, healing. By coincidence, this October marked the twentieth anniversary of Matthew’s death.

His ashes were laid at Washington National Cathedral. Hundreds had come, people who knew Matthew and people who did not, some who were not yet born when Matthew died.

They had in common that a young man who never made it to age twenty-two - someone whose legacy is almost as old as his life was long - shaped the world in which they live.

The bishop who presided was the first in the US to be openly gay. He committed Matthew to God. He said of Matthew, said to Matthew, ‘You’re safe now’.

I remember the first time I heard about Matthew Shepard.

Matthew and I were born in the same year, if in different parts of the planet. In the year of his death, we were both twenty-one, and studying at university.

If the world was a decent place, Matthew would be like me now: early forties, maybe with a mortgage and a job, perhaps with growing kids and growing waistline. All those commonplace things of midlife a person should, by rights, live long enough to enjoy or regret.

The world is not a decent place.

I learned about Matthew on campus, from a friend - also a young gay man, who talked about it with something between sheer bewilderment and the deepest kind of injury, an injury so unfathomable that there was not yet space for anger.

My friend talked, with words that seemed from far off, like a barren field in Wyoming. Matthew, tied to a fence. Matthew, called a faggot as he was beaten and tortured. Matthew, pleading for his life. Matthew, left to die, in a remote place and under a desolate night sky, for eighteen hours.

There was not yet space for anger, but the anger would come.
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To tell the truth, even in 1998 - the year of Matthew’s death, and three years before my first child E would be born - gay people and transgender people were new to me. I understood they were, well, theoretically possible. I mean, I even knew some. Some of my best friends were … oh, jeez. Never mind.

I guess what I’m saying is when things are new, it can take time to understand them, not just with your head, but also with your heart. For me, at least, there was a journey to be undertaken.

I grew up provincially, in the days before the internet, in the shadow of an old, weatherbeaten church, oddly placed by a road to nowhere in particular, and which always felt cold, even in summer.

It was easier to know your neighbours back then, even if the injunction to love them was not always observed.

The difference between women and men was as simple as plates and crates, as well as the genitals we were taught to be ashamed of.

Most other difference was to be avoided.

The world seemed so big as to be sometimes frightening, even if my own world was small.
In the mid-eighties, Homosexual Law Reform struck into that world with the force of a cataclysm only an Old Testament God could think up. Unnatural. Disgusting. Make it lawful, and you’ll see, there will be paedophiles lingering outside the school gates - or so declared the announcer on the local radio station.

To his eternal credit, my dad rung up talkback and took the p*ss out of the guy. Making the point that the debate was less than well-informed, with a faked naivete, my dad outlined his dilemma: a young daughter (me) being taught by a heterosexual teacher.

Openly heterosexual!

Apoplectic at an ‘H’ word he didn’t understand, the announcer declared I needed to be removed from school at once, for my own safety.
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For my own safety.

I reflect on what it means to be a child, what it means to have a child, for a child to be safe.

When you watch The Laramie Project - as a film, or spoken on a stage, maybe even by kids like my own - it is not the overt hate that shocks you most; although, from the poison of the pulpit to the bigotry of the bar, that is more than shocking enough.

No, the thing that is more deeply disturbing is the more subtle disqualification of gay people from the category of ‘fully human’. It is the voices who insist we are all the same, so long as ‘the same’ means ‘like me’. It is the claim that ‘they’ are free to do what they like around here, so long as it’s what everyone else does.

These are the tactics of dehumanisation. I saw my kid speak them on a stage - and it struck me, like a blow to whatever part of me the soul resides, how timeless these tactics are.

Deny transgender people access to a toilet or a changing room, claiming they are dangerous. Shrug it off innocently when their inability to access public places locks them out of public life.

Make some bureaucratic change to some bureaucratic rule about gender definitions. Shrug it off innocently when transgender people no longer fulfil the definition of citizen, of human being.

In Aotearoa, for our transgender whānau, the words may be a little different, but the tactics of dehumanisation are the same. I walk through my own city, past the posters pasted on concrete walls, the messages scraped out in chalk. I see the ‘opinion pieces’, couched in their oh-so-reasonable language, with their fake concern at medical mistreatment of my child.

It is a drama that is stale, a script that is ugly, played out by voices of malice. And when it comes to hate, the distance between the stroke of a pen and the blow of a fist is never as great as you think.

I want to be able to tell my kid, and all the rainbow kids like him, wherever they are, ‘You’re safe now’, like the bishop told the memory of Matthew.

I don’t know that I can.
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I am no expert, lord knows: only a mum. I am cisgender - meaning the gender I identify with is the one assigned to me at birth. To be otherwise is still hard for me to imagine. Sometimes I make mistakes. I told you I was walking a journey to understand, and I know that journey is still incomplete.

And so I cannot ask you to walk in E’s shoes, as I haven’t done it myself.

But I can tell you this, as a mum, with whatever meagre expertise that affords me. I have tied those shoes, when E was too little to do it alone. I have read him books with female fairies and male adventurers, and little in between the two that might affirm the dignity of difference.

I have held him when he cried because he knew he wasn’t like other kids. I have told him things will be fine - reassured him with everything I had, because that is what a parent, or even just a decent human being, does - when I did not know it to be true. I have had my heart pummelled to a million jagged pieces by the ‘civil’ bullying of adults; the carefully chosen words that were nothing less than knowing injuries inflicted on a child.

And I have quietly rejoiced at the school that eventually embraced E, treasured him, and nurtured him into the young adult that stood up, spoke loud, spoke the truth, on a stage.
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No one gets it right all of the time. I’m on a journey, and maybe you are too. That’s cool. Sometimes, it’s setting out on the journey that’s the hardest and the bravest bit.

If you’re like me, you hear or see remarks from time to time. Sometimes, the remarks are blatant. More often than not, they are casual. Someone leans over to you, remarks how it never used to be like this. We’re all so PC now. Everyone has to argue about everything, everyone’s so uptight. Snowflakes. No one can take a joke anymore. It’s all about saving the vegan gender-neutral disabled whales.

They lean over to you, with their punchline; talking a little quietly, like there’s some sort of club for the rejectors of human progress, and you’re being offered a special discount membership.

This sh*t is hard, and I don’t have all the answers.

I do know that it’s OK to ask someone their pronoun. Please don’t worry that it makes you look ignorant or disrespectful. The opposite applies. It shows you care, and you want them to be welcome.

And we have all felt the paralysis of surprise at hearing a hateful remark, and thinking only two hours later of the perfect comeback. Here’s one you can try, easily, and feel safe: ‘I know this lady who’s got a seventeen-year-old transgender son, and their whānau is doing awesome’.

The other week, I had a coffee with an old friend, someone whose kindness I admire and treasure. She asked me about E, his gender stuff, how he was doing. She was worried she wasn’t using the right words. I said to her, she had the right heart. Get that bit sorted, and learning the words is easy.
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Matthew had an interest in politics, wanted to change things. He should have changed things, with his intellect, with his passion, with his aspiration for the world around him. With a long life of accomplishments. That was not to be.

But change things, he did.

About halfway through The Laramie Project is an interview with a guy from the town, no one in particular, a fifty-two year old gay man who, in his own words, had ‘seen a lot’. In the weeks after Matthew’s death, on the day of Laramie’s homecoming parade, the guy recounts how he couldn’t join in the part of the parade marching for Matthew: his leg was in a cast.

From the south side of his apartment, stuck indoors, he watched as the parade passed. Behind a banner bearing Matthew’s name, a small group of people marched.

At the end of the street, the parade made a u-turn, returning in the opposite direction. The guy, in his cast, moved from one side of his apartment to the other, now looking through a north-facing window. And he saw something he found extraordinary. In the ten minutes that had elapsed, the group marching for Matthew had grown by a factor of five, now a crowd; more people behind his banner than in all the rest of the parade.

The guy says, ‘I thought to myself, thank God I got to see this in my lifetime. And my second thought was, thank you Matthew’.

As in Laramie, as in Aotearoa. Each time another voice joins us, we grow stronger.
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Yeah, the stereotype is true: the rainbow kids, like E and his mates, gravitate to the theatre. It’s a place of kinship, a place a kid can just be. I think that’s why it makes E so happy. Matthew liked the theatre too.

The Laramie Project was written in 2000 by a bunch of young people in a theatre troupe, with the urgency of young people who need to speak, who demand to.

They - through Matthew - have given voice to so many others. From the policewoman who laboured alone over Matthew’s broken body in the field, trying desperately to find an airway amidst the blood, to the town’s Catholic priest who burns for justice and grace in Matthew’s name, the voices in the play are unexpected.

Sometimes, they are unexpectedly beautiful.

Still, sometimes when you tell people your kid is transgender, you hold your breath. You just don’t know what reaction you’re going to get.

E’s Nana, recalling another time and a place and a weatherbeaten church, said ‘There was a time when I would have struggled with this, but E is family and love is love’.

Voices off the stage, and part of the bigger and messier drama of every day, can be unexpectedly beautiful too.

When I sat in the theatre, on my plastic seat, amongst the parents and friends of kids on stage, I could hear that some people were weeping quietly, eyes forced ahead at the stage, programmes in shaking hands on their laps. They were weeping for Matthew, and for every kid like him - for every kid that might be him, maybe even our own.

I asked E later, what it was like for a group of young rainbow kids telling a story like that. He said that, at first, it was hard. And then he reflected and said, ‘You can’t stay sad forever’.

And you can’t. Think about it like a parade that swells in size, voices that grow in number, a play where you get to change the final act.

I said to you the world is not a decent place, but I believe that it can be.