Friends, or at Least, Friendly Acquaintances

     As I mentioned in the recent post titled "BTW," I want to tell you about my time at the Race Committee Holiday Party. (It was on the last Thursday of Advent, but Hannukah had started, so I guess calling it a Holiday Party is legit.) I should also tell about my evening with the priest I mentioned briefly in the third paragraph of this post.

     On several occasions, for example here, I've mentioned that I'm on the Race Committee at the yacht club I belong to. And in the same place that I mentioned the priest, I also mentioned a guy on the Race Committee. I'll call him "Tim," but don't confuse him with a blogger who doesn't use that name on the internet. He's in his late 40's, I think, and single. He started showing up three summers ago on Thursday evenings when we run some small races. For those races, we are ashore at the club, making signals to the racing boats in the harbor. So it was easy for him to join us. He seemed to be interested in talking to me, and we'd generally sit together at the meal that sailors and committee members would have after the races. After that summer he was made an official member of the Committee. He always responds promptly when I need to send an e-mail to Committee members, and last fall, when I sent one asking if anybody would be interested in sharing a table with me for dinner after a Race Committee party, he accepted almost instantaneously.

     So I've been thinking a friendship could develop. Tim was either at the party when my brother (also on the committee) and I arrived or he got there very soon afterwards. We got drinks and chatted. I was telling him about my theater- and concert-going, and he asked questions that showed real interest, I thought. I mentioned having begun my theater attendance with "The Laramie Project." He didn't know what it was so I explained. I figured that was enough of a hint to give him the idea that I was gay-friendly. But so as not to worry him if he's uncomfortable with "gaiety," I then mentioned some others, and he seemed quite interested in a couple. Just when I was ready to ask if he might like to join me sometime, a couple joined us and sat with us for dinner, and I never got the chance to ask that question. Still, I left the party convinced that he wants to be my friend. I don't think I want to officially come out to him, because he lives in this area and I need to be closeted irl, and I don't want a sexual relationship. But since he has never said anything indicating the least sexual interest in women, I think we can have an unspoken understanding. Now I've got to work up the nerve to e-mail him "out of the blue" and suggest going to the theater some time. If I don't do it reasonably soon, this season will have past, and I'll have to wait until next fall. So, strike while the iron is hot.

   Things didn't go quite so well with the priest a week earlier. There was nothing wrong. It was an enjoyable enough evening, but when he asked what I had been doing, I stupidly decided to tell him about my health scare at the end of my retreat. That got him all worried, even though I tried to assure him that it was really more a false alarm than anything else. So I never got to bring up opera and theater, as I did with Tim. Well, at least I'll probably get together with him for dinner sometime next month, and I can explore the possibility of including shows or concerts in our get-togethers.

     I guess I could sum it all up by saying that this month I made a little progress in my social life, a little progress in developing friendships, but not quite as much as I had hoped for.

"The Laramie Project" & "The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later"

This afternoon and evening I was in Boston for performances by The Tectonic Theater Project of the two plays mentioned in the title of this post. "The Laramie Project" was written by them after the murder of Matthew Shepard. They visited Laramie several times and interviewed a number of people and constructed the play from the words of those interviews, their own journal entries, and written materials about the event. For "The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later" they returned several times to Laramie and conducted more interviews, including interviews in prison with the two perpetrators.

The original play is very moving, as people with a range of attitudes toward homosexuality seem to come to understand that the crime was inexcusable. One Muslim young woman who grew up in Laramie comments that people wanted to say, "This isn't Laramie." But she says, it happened in Laramie, so to say it isn't Laramie is nonsense. But of course, it isn't something most people in town would have done. And it's something not too different from what has happened elsewhere. So if it's Laramie, it's also the United States and the world. But the overall impression, through tears for what Matt suffered, is one of hope, that the people of Laramie have learned a lesson we all need to learn.

The second play is distressing. It seems that in the interim the news program "20/20" had done a revisionist piece putting forward the preposterous notion that Matt's death was the result of a drug deal gone bad. And when the members of the Tectonic Theater Project arrived there for the tenth anniversary, they found that many residents had bought into the notion that it was a drug deal or a simple robbery, totally unrelated to the fact that Matt was gay. The local paper published an editorial in that vein, and would not publish a letter from a friend of Matt's pointing out that the revisionist story was inconsistent with the evidence gathered at the time and the testimony at the trials of the perpetrators.*

Of course, it's understandable that people would not want the crime of two people to forever define the town and its other 26,000+ residents, and that is fair enough. But to deny what happened is unnecessary and in fact speaks much worse about Laramie than the original crime.

Both plays are well worth seeing, in my opinion. They are informative, poignant, and thought-provoking.

* Note added October 2, 2010:  The newspaper in question, the Laramie Boomerang, ran a five part series two years ago, in observance of the tenth anniversary of the murder. There was also an article a few days earlier about the dedication of the memorial bench on the university campus in Matt's honor. I've read the articles, and they contain no suggestion that there was any drug-related aspect to the case. They refer to the murder as an anti-gay hate crime. Much of the articles consists of interviews with residents. There seems to be general agreement that there is greater acceptance of homosexuals now (i.e., in 2008) than in 1998, although homophobia still exists. There is also a general consensus that the problem of anti-gay violence is not a Laramie problem, but a universal human problem.