June - theme: Pride Month
The Laramie Project and The Laramie Project 10 Years Later by Moisés Kaufman
I planned to read an Alan Hollingworth book for pride month but we were going away to England and it was heavy! So I found another less fun book to read instead.
This book was, unsurprisingly, depressing and sad.
That's probably all I need to say. A gay kid at the university of Wyoming is brutally beaten to death. This is pretty depressing. A group of theatre people led by Moisés Kaufman travel to Wyoming to interview family, friends and local people. They used these interviews to make a screenplay featuring the people they interviewed.
Even more depressing than the murder is the way the town's gossip twisted the narrative to make it just a mugging.
I struggled to make it through this and it did nothing to uplift the people of Laramie to me. The bright point of this book was the descriptions of the Wyoming landscape, its big sky and the empty tundra.
Although it was hard to read, I think Matthew Shepard's story is an important one to tell.