"Considering Matthew Shepard"
Mar. 14th, 2026 09:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsOmaha and I had the privilege of attending Considering Matthew Shepard, an oratorio with an extensive chorale put on by blending three different choruses: the University of Washington Chamber Singers, the UW Chorale, and the Seattle University Choir.
It was… heart-wrenching. It doesn’t try to traumatize the audience with graphic descriptions of the murder, but it does make clear that the killers were brutal and unrelenting, that they upgraded from petty theft and robbery to full-blown murder because Shepard was gay. One of them even said as much.
The opening song, “An ordinary boy,” talks about who he was and includes photos of diary pages in which he lists all of the things he loves. Soloists portray his mother, father, and younger brother in an aria as they describe Matt Shepard as they knew him. The narrative continues with Shepard going to the LGBTQ meet-up on campus, then going to a bar and, eventually, being taken to a lonely road, beaten, robbed, and left tied to a wooden fence.
The fence, of all things, has its own voice as it describes the night as its passed, as Matt’s heart continued beating. Shepard was found 18 hours after his assault, still alive. His heart beat for another eight days, but he never woke up again.
There are three songs following this one: the angry, “What have you done?” (which includes mention of churches that protested at the funeral and displayed signs that proclaimed “Shepard Rests In Hell”); the sad “Prayer for peace” (in which the fence, again, signs about how people came to touch it, leave gifts there, and make of it a memorial), and “Just like you,” in which the choir talks about the two killers and how human they were. They weren’t monsters. It ends with that bittersweetness that’s endemic to all of queer life, queer joy intermingled with the sense that the battle with compulsory heterosexuality will be generations long.
I cried a lot. I lived through those days. I was going through my own coming out, repeatedly, as different parts of me tried to reconcile: kinky, queer, horny, married and also, suddenly, fatherhood. As I watched those sincere, earnest twenty-somethings on that stage, it hit me that they were just as moved by the moment as I was, and yet most of them had been born after Matthew Shepard’s murder, and after the huge battle, after the evangelical church was briefly shamed for being so ugly in face of a young man’s death.
And yet they cared. I wonder how passionate I was about that sort of thing when I was in my mid-20s; that would have been, oh, ’92 or ’93 or thereabouts, the height of the AIDS crisis. I went to quite a few protests in that era, got the t-shirts, did my activism as a Planned Parenthood safer sex outreach volunteer. I wish I had the naivete that went with such passion; these days, my activism is small, targeted, and mostly consists of calling my congressfolks and financially supporting the lesser of two evils.
If you have a chance, go see Considering Matthew Shepard. Just remember to bring tissues.
It was… heart-wrenching. It doesn’t try to traumatize the audience with graphic descriptions of the murder, but it does make clear that the killers were brutal and unrelenting, that they upgraded from petty theft and robbery to full-blown murder because Shepard was gay. One of them even said as much.
The opening song, “An ordinary boy,” talks about who he was and includes photos of diary pages in which he lists all of the things he loves. Soloists portray his mother, father, and younger brother in an aria as they describe Matt Shepard as they knew him. The narrative continues with Shepard going to the LGBTQ meet-up on campus, then going to a bar and, eventually, being taken to a lonely road, beaten, robbed, and left tied to a wooden fence.
The fence, of all things, has its own voice as it describes the night as its passed, as Matt’s heart continued beating. Shepard was found 18 hours after his assault, still alive. His heart beat for another eight days, but he never woke up again.
There are three songs following this one: the angry, “What have you done?” (which includes mention of churches that protested at the funeral and displayed signs that proclaimed “Shepard Rests In Hell”); the sad “Prayer for peace” (in which the fence, again, signs about how people came to touch it, leave gifts there, and make of it a memorial), and “Just like you,” in which the choir talks about the two killers and how human they were. They weren’t monsters. It ends with that bittersweetness that’s endemic to all of queer life, queer joy intermingled with the sense that the battle with compulsory heterosexuality will be generations long.
I cried a lot. I lived through those days. I was going through my own coming out, repeatedly, as different parts of me tried to reconcile: kinky, queer, horny, married and also, suddenly, fatherhood. As I watched those sincere, earnest twenty-somethings on that stage, it hit me that they were just as moved by the moment as I was, and yet most of them had been born after Matthew Shepard’s murder, and after the huge battle, after the evangelical church was briefly shamed for being so ugly in face of a young man’s death.
And yet they cared. I wonder how passionate I was about that sort of thing when I was in my mid-20s; that would have been, oh, ’92 or ’93 or thereabouts, the height of the AIDS crisis. I went to quite a few protests in that era, got the t-shirts, did my activism as a Planned Parenthood safer sex outreach volunteer. I wish I had the naivete that went with such passion; these days, my activism is small, targeted, and mostly consists of calling my congressfolks and financially supporting the lesser of two evils.
If you have a chance, go see Considering Matthew Shepard. Just remember to bring tissues.
