October 7, 1998: The First Time I Came Out

 

 On the night on October 6, 1998, Matthew Shepard went to a bar in Laramie, Wyoming. He was 21, a college student, and gay. Just before midnight, he left the bar with two men, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson. They took him out of town, and in the very first hours of October 7, they beat him, tied him to a fence post, and left him for dead. During the beating, they pistol-whipped him across the face, an act of violence so severe that it fractured Shepard’s skull.

 That night, the temperatures on the high plains outside of Laramie dipped below freezing, as is common at that elevation in early October. It would be several hours before a cyclist, out for a ride, spotted Shepard. He originally thought Shepard was a scarecrow. Shepard was air-lifted to a hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he would die on October 12. The fracture to his skull would be listed as the primary cause of death; doctors were unable to relieve the swelling in his brain. However, the hours of exposure on that fence post almost certainly contributed to his death. He never regained consciousness in the hospital. His last conscious moments were cold visions of a dark plain below him. If he died surrounded by his parents, in a way he had already passed on to whatever it is that comes next. He left this world out there on that fence post; he left this world alone.

 The sheriff who first responded to the 911 call from the cyclist noted that, though his face was smeared with blood, she saw tracks of tears on Shepard’s cheeks. He had been conscious after they left him. He had wept.

 I had a cross country meet at the University School of Jackson on the evening of October 7. I was a junior, and while I would not be the top placer on my high school team for every meet that year, it was the year during which I was, overall, our top runner.

 To understand this story, it is important that I stress a point that is too easily forgotten now, twenty-two years later. We didn’t have smart phones in our pockets in 1998. My family had a computer with immensely slow dial-up internet, and I certainly never used it to check the news. My news sources were the local newspaper, the Jackson Sun, and because I was always a bit too curious about the world, even when I was much younger, I made a point to watch the nightly news, both the local news and national news every day if I could. The hour of news from 5:00-6:00 and the morning paper were my only regular media for news consumption. But most news was local, and the mid-sized city where I grew up in West Tennessee is a long way from the high plains outside of Laramie, at least geographically speaking.

 On the morning of October 7, I did not know what had happened in Wyoming. Matthew had not yet even been found.  

 I always wore my warm-ups on meet days, especially for local meets. We ran the JC-M Invitational early in the season, and since I was a student at JC-M (Jackson Central-Merry), obviously that local meet was a big deal for me. And then, in early October, we had the USJ meet, our other local event before districts and regions. On this particular day, some of my friends from JC-M, Northside, and USJ all decided to come over to the meet (USJ had moved up to McClellan road the previous year) to cheer me on. Very high school; very Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda.

 That reference fits here, sort of. I had long since figured out that I was gay. It was an unnecessarily anxious process of moving away from being convinced that  homosexuality was sinful or something and worrying about what it would mean to say I was gay because that kind of thing wasn’t kosher in my high school or my hometown. I mean, folks knew about Muse Park and the gay cruising that went on there; when my cross country team went there to run on the trails for workouts, the endless homophobias of the white guys on the team were enough to chase anyone, however confident, into the closet. Folks also knew about the gay club on the north side of town called “The Other Side.” And more than a few folks had determined I must be gay—the short running shorts didn’t help my attempts at denial. I’d been teased and picked on for as long as I can remember, partially the normal bullying of anyone singled out for contempt, partially maybe because I was showing but didn’t realize it yet, even as early as when I was 5 and 6 and through my days in high school. Being a top local athlete didn’t spare me.

 One guy on my team had managed to tell a whopper of a joke one day at practice when we were loading up in cars to drive to Muse Park to run: Why did Phillip cross the road? To get to The Other Side. It was a killer. Everyone laughed, including me. Best defense mechanism—join the laughter, even when it’s scary as hell.

 And because the gods have a sense of humor, the guy who told that joke was also the first person on whom I had a fuck-my-life head-over-heels crush. My crush was so enormously overwhelming that I couldn’t deny it. It wasn’t just a curiosity, nor a “phase.” Nor something I could shut off nor ignore. Mind you, later, once I came out, I went all emo before emo was cool over this guy—who had absolutely no interest in me at all. Basically, I was a moron about my first “love.” But sweet God in heaven, it was still everything!—he was a friend and we hung out sometimes, and when we did I was just like, “%^&*#@*&%#$@!” (Translation: stupidly smitten).

 For this story, it doesn’t matter that he was straight and wasn’t interested (this post isn't exactly the telephone scene in The Boys in the Band). It matters that I finally realized what it meant to have a crush on someone and admit it to myself. That got me. That made me think, okay, this is real; this is the truth. In fact, it was a truth so big that all I wanted to do was tell my friends about it. And that meant coming out.

 So back to that meet on that night in early October. I had gone home after school for a minute, but I’d also given rides to some friends on the team. We pilfered the pantry for bagels and fruit. Then we all went over to the meet up on the suburb side of town. I didn’t check the news. There were no iPhones nor constantly updating timelines on the not-yet-invented Facebook. I had just finished a day at school and was headed off to an afternoon and early evening cross country race, back when we weren’t plugged into the happenings of the world all the time.

 I ran well. My running journal (yes, I kept a running journal) is filled with embarrassing comments to myself about how awesome I had done (“Don't you know it” with an arrow pointing at my time *embarrassed eyeroll*). The weather was beautiful—early Fall in West Tennessee, cool but not cold, dry with the leaves just teasing you that they will change pretty soon and fields of corn and cotton in their first days of harvest. My “crew” of friends—none of them athletes, much less runners—came to cheer me on and hang out. As the sun set and we waited on awards, we were all cutting up and carrying on (and thanks to John Howard for claiming that second phrase for queer identity). Included in this group was this guy I was just smitten for. And I just kept thinking, “Damnit, I hate not telling my friends. I just want to tell them. Just so they know. I have this crush. He’s so dreamy. Damn Damn Damn I just want to talk to someone about it!”

 The meet ended; I drove home. I was 16, a few weeks shy of 17 (hums along “You are sixteen, going on seventeen . . .”). Once I got home, I called my friend Celia—we did have a cordless phone even if we only had one landline. I retreated to my room. I took a deep breath. I told her, “So yeah, you know that guy tonight on the team. I just . . ..”

 And I came out to my friend. It was the first time I had ever told somebody.

 (for a moment of levity, please consider checking out this Broadway Backwards performance. It’ll make you smile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQE2ycuoyM0&feature=youtu.be&ab_channel=BroadwayCares%2FEquityFightsAIDS).

 Oddly, I do distinctly remember following the developments about Matthew Shepard during the weeks after the attack against him and his death. I read about the gay kid in Wyoming who was beaten and left for dead. I heard the word “hate crime” used to describe what happens to gay people for the first time. I heard the early debates and conspiracies spouted by so many people who will go to any length to deny humanity to LGBTQ+ lives. I have a loving family who is very accepting, but at the time I wasn’t out to them, and I was mortified by the thought of talking to them about it, convinced it would be a problem (I was wrong). So, I snuck in chances to read the local paper and its 100-word AP stories on the “Nation” page past “local news.” I was glued to the national nightly news to hear updates, but I tried not to be caught paying attention. I definitely didn’t ask if anyone else was keeping up with what was going on.

 This was also around the time I started to notice the high number of opinion columns and letters to the editor in the local paper arguing that homosexuality was a sin, gay people not worthy of protections, hate crimes not relevant to the violence directed at gay lives. Jackson, Tennessee is not a town known for its liberal thinking. In fact, when tornadoes pummeled the city in January 1999, more than a few people blamed the death and destruction on the city being too far from God, especially in its embrace of homosexuality—which was news to a local gay kid, no doubt. Like, this is too much tolerance? Then what on earth does intolerance look like?

 Well, the fate of Matthew Shepard, for one thing. Or what happened in the aftermath, especially as Westboro Baptist Church used Shepard’s death and the national media attention it received to raise their own national profile. At one point, church leaders proposed putting a monument up at the site where Shepard was tied to the fence post saying “On October 6, 1998, at this spot, Matthew Shepard entered hell.” Good country people, these folks, eh?

 I remember all of that. I feel it in my bones as part of the composition of my very being. This is the gay world I inherited and these its terms. But—and I can’t stress this enough—I never associated any of this with my actual coming out experience. I came out. I have memories of the following days—telling Celia, telling Natalie—my two best friends—then telling a few other folks, trying it on a bit, seeing how it felt. I told Natalie a couple weeks after the USJ meet, right around my birthday, while we were—and I’m not making this up—driving together to the local Judgment House as part of our church group. That immediate coterie of friends who came to the meet, who were my crew! I told them on so many cool October evenings, and it felt marvelous and new and true and amazing.

 And every one of them. Every one. They told me it was totally cool. It was great. Most of them sort of knew already. Celia and Nat even told me I was loved. My coming out experience to my friends in October 1998, beginning on October 7 after that USJ cross country meet, was magical. I was—I am—blessed. And so thankful.

 And so, I guess that I just couldn’t hold it in my head that my experience was so magical while, simultaneously, something so terrible could have happened at the same time.

 I did not come out of the closet because I was thinking of Matthew Shepard. He was found on that fence post in Wyoming on October 7, 1998. I came out that evening in Jackson, Tennessee, completely unaware of what had happened in that distant college town. In the following days, I led two gay lives, which I managed to separate: the scared gay kid confronting tragedy; the scared gay kid finding acceptance and love.

 I would be in college at UT-Martin before I really began to face the legacy of Shepard’s death. When my campus gay-straight alliance decided to honor Day of Silence by writing coming out stories that we planned o read at our Break the Silence rally, I started to put the two events together. I was writing about coming out; I realized I had come out for the first time in early October 1998. Then I remembered, hey, that is when Matthew died.

 Day of Silence was the pinnacle event for my campus gay-straight alliance, our most visible day of the year. It is a day meant to honor those whose voices (whose lives) have been lost to hate directed against the LGBTQ+ community. One year—again, different time, different internet—I wrote a letter explaining the meaning of Day of Silence, printed hundreds of copies, and walked to each campus office, with another member of the alliance, to hand-deliver them to the administrative assistants to ask that they put one in each faculty mailbox under their care. Some folks literally chunked the letter in the trash before we even left their offices. One woman read the letter, listened to our spiel, and chortled—actually fucking chortled—because of course protesting violence against LGBTQ+ people is funny, especially when two students would so brazen walk around campus basically telling the world they are gay themselves so please would you consider helping us distribute our letter? *chortle chortle* We did all we could do; we stood there in silence and politely asked how many copies she’d like.

 One October, just before another election, in a year when 13 states took active steps to outlaw same-sex marriage, I went with the other members of the alliance to the big intersection in town by the McDonald’s and the Walmart—Martin is a delightfully Southern town, so these landmarks will have to suffice for location. Someone had put up a giant Kerry/Edwards sign. Their slogan that year, boilerplate campaign language: “A Stronger America.” Except the sign had been defaced to read “A Gayer America.” Right out in the open. We took pictures with it—joining the laughter, even when it’s scary as hell.

 And one time, we all got together to watch The Laramie Project released on HBO. Later, for an event sponsored by the campus chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, I got to be part of a public reading of scenes from Angels in America. I met openly gay professors. I met other gay students (and bi and trans and allies) both in the group and out of the group. One day in an English class, I explained how William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! is obviously a gay story because Faulkner, like all the great Modernists, was gay so of course he’d write homosexual desire into the story, even if it seems mildly closeted, plausible deniability and all. The professor gave me a look and rebutted, “But Faulkner wasn’t gay.” And we all know how that conversation eventually turned out.

 And then one night, I got to thinking about it—No, not about Faulkner. About that night in October when I first came out. I didn’t talk much about it when I started to realize the timing. It’s a little intense to realize how close ships pass in a night, and would that the captains turn there, in the dark, from the high lonely view of the pilot house, and see, there, alongside them, the single light of another vessel. If you don’t look around, maybe the other ship passes undetected, and you wake up in the morning and think, “My, my, what I would give to know that my ship is not alone in this big, big sea.”

 But I kept those old running journals, complete with their embarrassing commentaries. So, one night, I dug them out and started looking—and I had the internet available at this point, so I Wikipedia’d the timeline of Matthew’s death. My running journal for 1998 was from Runner’s World, part of a package deal that came with the subscription my parents had gotten me the previous Christmas. And there it was. The race. The date. The proximities sit with me still, perhaps will sit with me always. I don’t want to forget it or disguise it. It is what it is; and, when I think about what it means to be alive and out of the closet; when I think of the endless times we must come out, over and over, in so many settings both banal and, also, scary; when I think about what it means to be brave and feel like I am just not up to it; when I think about saying no to requests to speak at queer events on campus or in the community; and when I think about what I can do to do the most good—well, I think of Matthew Shepard.

 I wonder, in the vast stretch of land between the two ranges of American Mountains, in the enormous drainage basin of fly-over states and middle-America, if a tear were shed above the plains of Laramie, how many eons of geological time would it take that tear to travel down the Laramie River to the North Platte, the Platte, the Missouri, the Mississippi, and pass by Jackson, set on the banks of its own little tributary for that old father of waters measuring the profundities of time. I don’t know. I just know it’s all one earth, we are all just human. That will have to be enough.   

 On the night on October 6, 1998, Matthew Shepard went to a bar in Laramie, Wyoming. He was 21, a college student, and gay. Just before midnight, he left the bar with two men, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson. They took him out of town, and in the very first hours of October 7, they beat him, tied him to a fence post, and left him for dead. During the beating, they pistol-whipped him across the face, an act of violence so severe that it fractured Shepard’s skull.

 The next morning, I got up and went about my day like your average 16-year-old high school student, only I had a secret, and I was just so desperate to tell it to someone. I had reached a point where I couldn’t keep it to myself anymore.

 During the day on October 7, a cyclist found Shepard and called 911. The sheriff who responded found him unresponsive, but in the blood smeared on his face, she saw the tracks of his tears.

 Later that evening, I ran a cross country race, hung out with friends, and finally decided I was going to say it to someone—I’m gay. Here’s this part of me that matters, and I want to share it. I want to speak it. I’m always scared of how people will react to it—all this time later, how much have we changed? But I said it that night to a friend who told me it was okay and even awesome and that she was glad I’d finally come out.

 Over the next five days, Matthew Shepard would lie in a coma until, on October 12, he died.

 Over the next couple of weeks, I’d tell more of my friends, turn 17, and be a total moron about my first crush, like everyone should have a right to be.

 I have, today, now been out of the closet longer than Matthew Shepard was alive. As Faulkner might say it: More people have lived to 20 than 21. At 38 I’ve had 22 years out of the closet to the 21 he had on earth. Far too may queer people have lost lives and lifetimes to silence. To hate. To fear. To closets. It would be nice if that could change.

 ______

 If there is a moral to this post, if you’ve made it this far through it, maybe here’s what to take away—

 We celebrate National Coming Out Day on October 11. For National Coming Out Day, seek out a queer person in your life. You don’t have to ask them to tell you their coming out story or any story. Or anything. Just maybe consider sending them a little low-key message: Hey, it’s National Coming Out Day. In case you need to hear it: you are loved.