No Resurrection This Time

By now most people on this campus, and probably around the country, know the gruesome story: Matthew Shepard, a first-year at the University of Wyoming at Laramie, was lured by two men out of town. They tied him like a scarecrow to the fence of a ranch and beat him to death because he was gay. I know Wyoming somewhat: it can be a violent place, and most people I've met there don't like homosexuals. But the deliberate savagery of this murder, a hate crime, shocked people, because, for the most part, they have what the writer William S. Burroughs '36, adopting a century-old slang word for honest thieves, appropriated to his own purpose. They're Johnsons--folk who mind their own business and let others do the same.

I knew a student from the University at Laramie who was working as wrangler at the ranch where I was staying in Wilson (a town where "Church" means going to the Stagecoach Bar on Sunday evening). The first time I met him, he was picking the hoof of an Appaloosa named Darcy I was about to ride. The name seemed incongruous to me. Eric looked up slowly from under the hat and drawled, "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune," etc. A racist outfit called Aryan Nation once tried to set up shop in Eric's home town, he told me. Everybody got together and ran them out, then went on about their business. Aryan Nation is strong in parts of Idaho, but Wyoming is, or was, different.

South of there, in Colorado, Christian Coalition types got together several years ago to defeat a bill that would guarantee the plain civil rights of homosexuals--you know, you can't lose your job or your home because you're gay, that kind of thing. They misrepresented it as special treatment, and put it about that gay people have a hidden agenda (like the Protocols of the Elder Zion that anti-Semites cite) to destroy the American family. They--we, I mean--are sinful, immoral, sick. The Christian Coalition had Kenan Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. '53 come out from Harvard, Veritas glittering from his escutcheon, to testify in support of their crusade, and they won.

The neo-conservative movement (let's call them Neo-Conmen for short) has made gays its scapegoat: Andrew Sullivan, a devout Catholic and old-fashioned Republican who is also gay, wrote a good article about these neo-conmen and their witch-hunting in last week's Sunday Times Magazine.

I am sure Irving Kristol, Harvey Mansfield, Midge Decter, Minister Neuhaus and company deplore the murder in Laramie; nor should I wish to curtail their First Amendment or academic freedom.

But I am convinced that their ideology, and the ruthless campaign in Colorado in particular, helped to create the climate in which this astonishingly sadistic assault occurred.

As I said, most folks in Wyoming may not like homosexuality, but they are neither fanatics nor fools, and they tend not to interfere in other people's personal business. Now not every anti-Semite was a Nazi, either; but without the thousand small literary and social cuts inflicted by anti-Semitism, Hitler's wave of extermination against the Jews of Europe could not have been successful. Dehumanize people enough, and someone will take up the challenge and kill them. It really does happen that way.

Who am I, nearly an old leftist, certainly no paragon of virtue, to stand in judgement of anybody else? Involvement in history and retreat from engagement make us accomplices. And yet, the ideas of the neo-Conmen are so smugly, so self-righteously and militantly stated, their entire stance is so triumphalist, that little fellow-felling with these people is possible. They do not seem to acknowledge their human frailty or fallibility. They are not making Americans more cozily familial or deeply religious or keenly responsive to the needs and obligations of society. They led to a fence outside Laramie--and then, what? Is this Pat Buchanan's war for the soul of America? Manliness, perhaps? Or are the older paradigms more telling: Pogrom, Crusade, Massacre of the Innocent, crucifixion?

If any lone innocent ever died the way Jesus did, it was Matthew Shepard. He could have been my student, my son, your brother or friend. But after this crucifixion there is no resurrection, no redemption--only the books Matt will never read, the paintings that will hang an eternity without the light of his eyes to touch them. His teachers will never hear his voice in a seminar room.

In his novel Bend Sister, Vladimir Nabokov has his hero, the philosopher Adam Krug, attempt to escape with his little son from a communo-fascist state in Eastern Europe to America. Krug imagines David growing into a teenager, playing the strange game of baseball. He imagines him as a man of 40. When David is killed by thugs, Nabokov himself cannot bear it: Krug goes mad, sees his creator is a benevolent artist, and the book ends.

I imagine the great master, sitting in his apartment in Craigie Circle here in Cambridge, standing up at a lectern as he always did, writing on a summer night with the moths at the window, then looking at his son Dmitri, whom he had saved from the Nazis in his own flight from wartime France, whose future he foresaw, whose childhood he shaped into a memory of joy. Then, blinded by tears at his own creation, the great Russian humanist rescues his Krug, since David's death is not to be borne.

This I remembered, as a teacher mourning Matthew Shepard; but then I recalled also that Nabokov lost his own brother, whom the Nazis arrested and killed because he was gay. Literature, unlike philosophy, is not a consolation. When in Armenia they mourn a child, parents cry, "May I be the one to bear your pain!" They can't and Heaven can't hear the howl. Oh, Matthew Shepard, tsaved tanem.

James R. Russell is Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies.