The Grandfield Project

It’s interesting to consider what kinds of events are likely to awaken a town from its “dogmatic slumber,” forcing the citizens to reflect on their local culture and the values they’re endorsing. I want to consider two towns, both driven to engage in such reflection. The towns are connected, and their struggles similar. In many ways, the struggles of one town were caused by the struggles of the other—but only indirectly, through the influence of a play.

The first is the town of Laramie, Wyoming. I have a thread of a connection to that town, since my uncle went to the university there. At the time, it seemed an innocuous little western town, one that few people had heard about. But my uncle enjoyed his time there. He thought it was a nice, quiet place, a friendly town and a good place to go to college. Once, in the ’80’s, I was passing through Laramie with relatives and we bought a T-shirt sporting the words, “Where the hell is Laramie, Wyoming?” We gave the T-shirt to my uncle, who groaned good-naturedly as he held it up.

That T-shirt wouldn’t be funny today. Laramie is no longer an unknown college town somewhere in Wyoming. In the public consciousness it’s become something else: the place where Matthew Shepard, a college student, was brutally murdered by two young men--Laramie natives--who targeted Shepard because he was gay. According to the evidence, they relentlessly beat him with a pistol before tying him to a fence post. Shepard was in a coma when he was discovered, but later died from severe head trauma.

And in case that wasn’t enough to shock a quiet little town out of its routine, Shepard’s funeral was picketed by the gay-hating congregation of Westboro Baptist Church. They carried signs bearing such messages as “Matt Shepard is burning in hell” and “God hates fags.” Fred Phelps, pastor of Westboro (whose congregation is made up mostly of Phelps’ relatives), also sought unsuccessfully to erect monuments in Wyoming indicating the date at which Matthew Shepard “entered hell” for defying God’s law.

These events and the trial that followed brought the town of Laramie into the national spotlight. And the citizens of Laramie, or many of them, couldn’t help but reflect on the meaning of these events. How could a quiet little college town give rise to such hatred and brutality? Was this act of horrific violence an aberration, or was there something in Laramie’s culture, something dark, that helped to give it birth? What did it mean that Laramie was no longer this unknown little community, but had become the scene of one of the most publicized hate crimes in American history?

It was this internal questioning that became the focus of the play (made into an HBO movie) called “The Laramie Project.” The play drew on news reports and extensive interviews, and it depicted a town’s efforts to understand itself in the light of such a horrific defining event. “The Laramie Project” has been widely used as an educational resource in schools and other venues, largely because of its capacity to inspire critical reflection on ideological hatred, homophobia, hate crimes, and the role that community attitudes can play in giving rising to explosions of violent hate.

Recently, a teacher in Grandfield, Oklahoma, decided to use “The Laramie Project” for just such a range of purposes in her “Ethics and Street Law” class. In addition to showing the HBO film, she had students work on developing scenes from the play that they’d then film and show each other in class. The teacher, Debra Taylor, had sought and received approval from the principal to pursue this activity.

Much of what happened next is a matter of controversy. What isn’t controversial is that Ms. Taylor was instructed by the school superintendent, Ed Turlington, to stop teaching the material. She complied, but not before pursuing one final activity: a kind of “funeral” for the play in which students went to a park across the street from the school and released balloons containing favorite lines from the play. This was, reportedly, a way to help students find closure after the disappointment of being told they had to stop work on the play.

Ms. Taylor was subsequently suspended, and shortly thereafter resigned under pressure.

Other details of the case are more contested, including the reasons why Ms. Taylor was instructed to stop teaching “The Laramie Project” and the justification for her suspension and forced resignation. I’ve immersed myself for a couple of days in various online reports and articles on the subject, but what really captured my attention was an online conversation—often angry and full of venom—that emerged among Grandfield students and other Grandfield natives in the form of comments on an Austin-based web article by Frederick Reinhardt.

The article was a brief, early report on the events surrounding Ms. Taylor’s suspension, but the hundred-plus comments that followed offer a portrait of a community in conflict, a town that, like Laramie, had been awakened from its dogmatic slumber and forced to reflect on itself and its values (although many of the comments were really an effort to shout the town back to sleep, to end the process of reflection). I don’t doubt that this online exchange could be effectively mined by a talented playwright to create a script. We might call it “The Grandfield Project.”

According to several Grandfield High students who posted on the site, the recent events in Grandfield were largely driven (surprise!) by homophobia. A number of students reported that Superintendent Turlington came into the classroom of his wife, an English teacher at the school, and delivered a “rant” against gays in which, among other things, he blamed them for AIDS. At least one student indicated that the action against Ms. Taylor first occurred only after the superintendent’s wife, Mrs. Turlington, heard from some students that Ms. Taylor was teaching a “gay play.”

Officially, the administration claims that the decision had nothing to do with homophobia and everything to do with offensive language in the play--and Ms. Taylor’s termination had everything to do with insubordination.

Given the number of students who have corroborated the superintendent’s alleged classroom rant against homosexuals, my inclination is to believe that this event actually occurred. And for a number of reasons, it seems to me unlikely that the bits of profanity in “The Laramie Project” were really what inspired a moratorium on teaching it. After all, the play does not celebrate the profanity that its characters, for reasons of authenticity, occasionally use. As a number of Grandfield students noted, they hear far worse in the school cafeteria. And there’s profanity at least as bad in numerous works of literature that are routinely taught in classes without commentary or intervention.

I’m not a playwright, and I’m hardly qualified to even attempt to create “The Grandfield Project” from the substance of the comments posted on the Austin-based site. But after reading through the angry name-calling, the urgent story-telling, the impassioned pleas and the harsh accusations, I emerged with my own picture of what happened in Grandfield, Oklahoma. For what it’s worth, I want to share it.

This is, of course, a bit presumptuous, given that I don’t know any of the players involved. But sometimes what is needed is an outside perspective, someone who can look at the tangle of individual stories and perspectives that make up the fabric of a story, and can stand back far enough from it all to see the pattern. And I’m not exactly unfamiliar with the kinds of interpersonal dynamics I find myself observing as I pore through the blogged monologues of Grandfield students and residents. My version of the story emerges as I bring these personal experiences to bear on this messy tapestry of conflict and accusation and impassioned narrative.

To start, I should say that, while I doubt Superintendent Turlington had carefully read “The Laramie Project” before he made his decision, I suspect he knew something about it. He surely knew it had something to do with Matthew Shepard, that gay college kid who was murdered. He probably had some suspicion that the play didn’t just condemn the acts of the murderers, but was trying to make a broader point. And I suspect Ed Turlington knew or guessed enough about the play to find it a threat to the kind of ideology he embraced, one which was strong in his community, an ideology which he wanted to preserve.

In “The Laramie Project,” pervasive cultural homophobia emerges as a dangerous force that can help to spawn brutal violence. What does such a message say about those who vilify gays and lesbians as a group, who blame them for AIDS, who endorse an “in-group/out-group” dichotomy according to which part of being a good citizen involves being straight and seeking to marginalize those who are not?

The play is intended to deliberately challenge the bright line that so many of us draw between cultural attitudes and individual actions, between widespread community sentiments and the extreme actions of a few.

When someone says, “I’m condemning those sick people who practice this AIDS-producing lifestyle offensive to God, but I don’t think anyone should beat them up or kill them,” the play responds in the following way: “Hate is a volatile power. It is something that flows in the bloodstream in a community, and one never knows when and where it will concentrate itself, when and where it will become so potent that it explodes outward with deadly consequences.”

When someone says, “I’m condemning the sick, depraved things that those sinning homos do, but of course I love the sinner,” the play replies in the following way: “The line you wish to draw is hard, especially when being gay is as much an identity as it is a pattern of behavior, and especially when condemning this behavior amounts to saying to gays and lesbians that they are denied any legitimate expression of their unchosen sexuality.”

In short, my theory is that Superintendent Turlington sensed or suspected that Ms. Taylor was teaching a play that challenged the legitimacy of some of his community’s values, calling into question an ideology that he and many in his community endorsed. At least on some visceral level, Turlington knew that the play’s message accused him and others in Grandfield of fostering the conditions that breed hate crimes.

And because he saw neither himself nor his community as evil, he responded with defensiveness and outrage…and expressed those feelings in two ways. First, he went to his wife’s classroom and preached to her students the very ideology that the play was challenging. Second, he exercised his authority as superintendent to shut down the teaching of the play. He was, in a real sense, “defending community standards” by stopping something whose message was, in effect, that at least some of his community’s standards were dangerously wrong.

It would be a mistake, I think, to treat the message of “The Laramie Project” as a blanket condemnation of Laramie or communities like it. But it is quite possible that the superintendent made this mistake. Mr. Turlington’s love of the town in which he lived may have become wedded to his own attachment to certain community values, and he may therefore have treated an attack on those values as amounting to an attack on Grandfield.

The truth is, of course, more subtle. Like most communities, Grandfield is surely a rich mixture of virtues and vices, wisdom and foolishness. To say there is a streak of ideological homophobia in Grandfield, just as in Laramie and so many other places, is not to say that the citizens of Grandfield approve of brutal violence against gays and lesbians. And it’s certainly not to deny the reality of neighborliness, of a widespread mutual concern, of community traditions that give many a sense of belonging, of institutions that help support families, of real friendliness and solidarity.

Rather, it is to say that these virtues do not extend to everyone. It is to say that if you’re gay in Grandfield, OK, you’ll feel as if you’re standing at the margins, looking in like the little match girl in H.C Anderson’s fable: alone in a dark alley, cold and hungry, while just beyond the wall a family gathers for the Christmas feast.

If you’re gay in Grandfield, you’ll never fully experience that sense of belonging that others take for granted. You’ll know that the community can’t fully accept you as you really are. You’ll know that the full experience of Grandfield’s friendliness and neighborliness comes with conditions of membership.

Mr. Turlington was a defender not merely of the community, but of those very conditions of membership. He thought that the marginalization of gays and lesbians was a good thing. It was something to be defended.

And how did Ms. Taylor respond to this effort to defend these “community standards”? By treating what Turlington had shut down as a loss to be grieved. What Turlington called bad and wicked, Ms. Taylor called valuable. And she invited her students to do the same. With a ritual in the park, she invited her students to say along with her, “Mr. Turlington is wrong to think that this play is evil, and to believe that the homophobic values in this community are worth defending even at the cost of shutting down an activity aimed at inspiring critical reflection.”

And this was the “insubordination” that inspired her suspension, the threat of termination, and ultimately her forced resignation. Other things she might have done—taking students off school grounds without the proper paperwork (even if taking students to the park in this way was a common practice), allowing students to use iPods and pop popcorn while engaged in class projects, leading a class activity that involved the play after she’d been asked to stop teaching the play—these were merely excuses. The real problem was this: Ms. Taylor didn’t merely tell Superintendent Turlington and all those who supported him that they were wrong. She invited her students to do the same.

And many of them did. And, of course, they were right to do so.

And I don’t mean they were right to challenge Turlington’s allegiance to a homophobic ideology. I do think that, but that’s not what I’m referring to here. What I’m referring to is this: When people use their position of authority to shut down critical reflection on community values, they are using their position of authority to shut down one of the most crucial aims of education. If there is one thing that the best teachers teach, it isn’t some piece of knowledge or even an ability to read or do math. It is, rather, the willingness and ability to engage in sound critical reflection, a kind of thinking that does not take established norms (or their rejection) for granted but raises critical questions about pervasive ideologies.

After all, it is only through such critical reflection that we have any hope of improving the world.

The reason why a number of Ms. Taylor’s students and their parents have become so vocal in their opposition to what happened is precisely this: As they see it, Ms. Taylor was challenging and inspiring these students to learn and think in new ways. And the school superintendent shut that down. Rather than facilitating their education, he used his authority to block it. They are angry because that is the very opposite of what a school administrator is supposed to do.

And so battle lines have been drawn between those who support Turlington’s efforts to defend community values against the threat posed by a play, and those who condemn him for using his authority to pursue agendas directly at odds with the goals of a public education.

This, then, is my version of the story, a version I’ve teased out of a hundred and eleven passionate and often vitriolic comments, posted in response to Frederick Reinhart’s short article. It’s only one version, and I’d be fooling myself if I thought it was the whole story, or if it didn’t leave out important truths. But it’s a story that I think will resonate with at least a few of those who live in Grandfield and are therefore participating in the more complex story.

And it’s not the most flattering story. And that, of course, is the point of all of this. Communities often have a shared mythology about their town and what it’s like. And most of the time, that story goes unchallenged. But then something happens, and the happy myth is threatened. Outsiders start to scrutinize the community and tell new stories about it. People both inside and outside the community reject the myth or modify it, and the members of the community find themselves forced to ask whether these alternative stories have any truth to them.

It happened in Laramie. And, thanks in part to a play about what happened in Laramie, it is happening now in Grandfield, Oklahoma.