Don’t laugh off Laramie homophobia

This past week in stereotypical news, a bunch of football players heckled and openly harassed actors in a production of “The Laramie Project.”

The play centers around Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old who was murdered in a brutal anti-gay hate crime in Wyoming in 1998.

Throughout the play, about 20 Ole Miss football players and other members of the audience “used derogatory slurs like ‘fag’ and heckled both cast members and the characters they were portraying for their body types and sexual orientations,” according to the Daily Mississippian.

The university spat out the obligatory apology and head football coach Hugh Freeze tweeted Thursday morning: “We certainly do not condone any actions that offend or hurt people in any way. We are working with all departments involved to find the facts.”

It seemed to drop out of the national sphere.

I wasn’t going to care about this. Honestly, there’s a lot of dumb hate-speech out there toward the gay community — you have to pick your battles.

But then John D. Sutter, CNN Opinion columnist, piped up.

In a piece entitled “Gays for Ole Miss,” Sutter asks that in an ideal 21st-century world, we would laugh off the incident because it is so far away from our standard perception.

I’m all for this.

I’m the one who just wrote a piece entitled “Keep saying ‘faggot.’”

Spending too much time on bigotry gives it more power. It shows that we are drastically affected — it shows that bigotry works.

But we’re not at the point where we can laugh off homophobia yet. Thankfully, Sutter realizes this.

However, Sutter’s next best solution is to root for Ole Miss and their football team, winning over ignorance by wearing LGBT paraphernalia to Mississippi football games.

But supporting the players and showing them the gay community essentially doesn’t recognize their stupidity may not be the solution.

What we should be doing is pushing for real education rather than flippancy.

Part of the problem is the fact that the “Laramie Project” hecklers failed to realize that what they were disrespecting wasn’t simply the act of being gay, or homosexual sex, etc. What they were dishonoring was someone’s murder — a real human being’s end.

It’s too easy to group homosexuals as “the gays.”

It’s the classic way we’ve always allowed bigotry phrases like “the blacks” or “the Asians” take away any human aspect. They’re now a s ubgroup, on a completely different level.

So going en masse decked out in LGBT gear to a football game won’t dismantle this point.

Sutter claims that many in Mississippi simply refuse to acknowledge that gay people exist. He wants to expose the homosexual community to the state of Mississippi.
I say we need to show Mississippi the real life stories that make up the community.

Instead we should be focusing on real education. The hecklers should be fully made aware of the human being that Matthew Shepard was and the human beings that make up the gay population.

One day we won’t have to fight and make a big deal out of homophobia.

But that day isn’t here yet.

­— sjostrow@indiana.edu
Follow columnist Sam Ostrowski on Twitter @ostrowski_s_j.