Gonzaga, Tinky Winky
and Matthew Shepard
11 March
I have just had the best night's sleep of the holiday so far. I think that it was because I slept in a full bed so that I could spread out. So, I've slobbed the morning away before bussing it to downtown Seattle.
At present, I'm lunching at the Copacabana, a Bolivian restaurant where I dined with a youngman named Chris some three years ago. Prices have gone up but the food's still good. Actually, that's a comment I could make about the trip as a whole. Although things are still cheaper here than they are back home, they appear to be much more expensive than they were three years ago.
I spent the afternoon up at the Science Centre playing at being 6. There were a lot of interactive exhibits so I composed some music, built an outside platform for a hot tub using CAD, painted pictures, played noughts and crosses with a large industrial robot arm, checked my blood pressure, heart rate, etc, etc. It was a good few hours. And I travelled there and back by monorail so chalk that up to another mode of transport.
By evening, the headache that had been bubbling most of the day had gotten much worse. I was scheduled to go out for a meal with Rod and Dale and a couple of their friends as part of the annual Food Fight (this is a worthy cause - some 50 restaurants in the Seattle area pledge their evening's profits to an organisation called Chicken Soup which offers food and some home help for people with AIDS and HIV).
I was going to call off but Rod persuaded me to drop a couple of tablets, put on a brave face and give it a try. In the event I have a fabby time and the conversation ranged far and wide.
Everyone seems to have gone mad about College Basketball. It's something called March madness. There's a big tournament in town that leads on to national championships. There seems to be this team called Gonzaga who are the Cinderellas of the tournament and against all expectations are doing well. Dale told me later that they are also a Jesuit College where gay students receive death threats on campus.
Tinky Winky, the Teletubbie, has become a great gay icon over here since being outed by a right-wing fundamentalist for being purple (a gay colour), for having a triangle symbol on his head and for carrying a handbag. I muddied the waters by explaining that Tinky Winky had been created by a gay man who had been sacked from the job for making the character too effete.
We also got to talking at some point about Matthew Shepard.
University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard, 21, was found comatose, burned, his head beaten in by 18 blows from the butt of a handgun, his hands bound beneath him and he was lashed to a wooden ranch fence near Laramie, Wyoming in October 1998. He died five days later.
Two men, Russell Arthur Henderson, 21, and Aaron James McKinney, 21, will be tried for the murder. Two women, University of Wyoming student, Chastity Vera Pasley, 20 and Kristen Leann Price, 18, were charged as accessories to the crime.
The two men had lured Shepard from the Fireside bar in Laramie by pretending to be gay so they could rob him. The two women watched the ordeal throughout. Henderson's girlfriend, Chastity, was a first-year art student at the University of Wyoming whose on-campus jobs included secretarial work for the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered Student Association. Shepard was a member of the association.
Since the autopsy, it has been announced that Shepard was HIV+. It is possible that he did not know and that his HIV status played no part in the event. It will no doubt be used by the lawyers to suggest many things about Matthew's lifestyle. It may also be used to gain post-event sympathy for the two callous murderers.
The incident has awakened America to issues of hate violence. You'll find a plethora of shrines of the Web and there have been vigils, on-line vigils and candle-lit memorials. And yet. The mantle of innocent victim as ever sits uneasily with Matthew. No-one deserves violence but we all sometimes court it.
Matthew was chatted up in a gay bar by two youngmen his own age, both good looking examples of rough trade. What was he hoping for as he got into the back of the truck with them both? A blow-job? A shag? A threesome? Any or all of the above. I've done my share of the equivalent of getting into the back of that truck. A number of people have taken the self same risk with me. You very rarely consider that you are going to end up with your skull crushed to a bloody pulp.
So, grieve for Matthew, yes. But grant him testosterone. We can only fight the violence against the young women who "dress provocatively" and the young men who "climb into trucks" if we accept their quest for sexual gratification and say that it is no excuse for the perpetrators of violence.
Lots of thoughts churning as I climbed into that big bed. The headache was long forgotten.