The Laramie Project is a Docudrama that follows a small town of Laramie in Wyoming. Because it is a docudrama, all of the monologues in the play are the actual words that were spoken by real people. This is not fiction it is reality. And the reality about Matthew Shepard’s death is that it was a hate crime, that was a reflection of where he is from and the ideologies and beliefs held by the people who he was surrounded by. The people in his own community did not only adopt these ideologies, those of America reflected them as well. The Laramie project exhibited some of the nasty qualities of our time and of our generation. Some of the themes of the idea of tolerance vs. acceptance, who becomes worthy of grieving and the brutality of the body…show more content… The use of setting and detail when describing the moment ]Aaron Kreifels found Matthew describes the brutality of the killing, “ [Matthew] was just laying there by a fence…I just thought he was a scarecrow. I was like, Halloween’s coming up, thought it was a Halloween gag… And, uh, got closer to him and I noticed his hair- and that was a major key to me noticing it was a human being (33)”. Aaron did not even recognize that Matthew’s body was a human being. He was beaten so badly that he was not even recognizable as a human being. That is when you know that this was a violent act, more violent than a supposed robbery. He described the scene as looking like a “Halloween gag” meaning that the body was so unrecognizable and so badly beaten that it seemed like an overexageration or caricature of what a murder scene looks like. This is how you know that this was an intentional beating meant to destroy the body. It was out of pure hate and anger. There was no remorse found when this happened. When Aaron Mckinney was recalling the night he said that he, “’Look, I’m not a fuckin’ faggot. If you touch me again you’re gonna get it.’ I don’t know what the hell he was trying to do but I beat him up pretty bad. Think I killed him”. Because Matthew supposedly grabbed Aaron’s genitals, does not give Aaron the authority to kill someone else, to do that damage to the body. At this moment Matthew was not a person, he was just something that exposed the vulnerability to his masculinity. And in a place where interactions are dominated by gender norms, anything that questions these norms are taken as a personal attack to their societal cast they are suppose to portray. When asked what he hit him with he said. My fist. My pistol. The butt of the gun.” Then he recalls hitting him again when Matthew recalled their license plate. Matthew was not supposed to live this attack. The damage done was supposed to be permanent damage, no
