MISSISSIPPI: Football Players Disrupt Campus Production Of Laramie Project

According to the Daily Mississippian, members of the University of Mississippi football team disrupted a campus production of the Laramie Project and shouted "fag" during the show.

Cast members of the play, which is about an openly gay male who was murdered in Laramie County in Wyoming, said members of the audience became so disruptive at times that they struggled completing the play. According to the play’s director and theater faculty member Rory Ledbetter, some audience members used derogatory slurs like “fag” and heckled both cast members and the characters they were portraying for their body types and sexual orientations. Ledbetter said the audience’s reactions included “borderline hate speech.” “I am the only gay person on the cast,” junior theater major Garrison Gibbons said. “I played a gay character in the show, and to be ridiculed like that was something that really made me realize that some people at Ole Miss and in Mississippi still can’t accept me for who I am.”

The players are reportedly enrolled in a freshman-level theater course that requires attending a number of school plays during the term. The school's athletics department has acknowledged the incident and emailed an apology to the head of the theater department, but no disciplinary action has yet been announced.

Full Movie: The Laramie Project

Posted to YouTube today in its entirety.

Moisés Kaufman and members of New York's Tectonic Theater Project went to Laramie, Wyoming after the murder of Matthew Shepard. This is a film version of the play they wrote based on more than 200 interviews they conducted in Laramie. It follows and in some cases re-enacts the chronology of Shepard's visit to a local bar, his kidnap and beating, the discovery of him tied to a fence, the vigil at the hospital, his death and funeral, and the trial of his killers. It mixes real news reports with actors portraying friends, family, cops, killers, and other Laramie residents in their own words. It concludes with a Laramie staging of "Angels in America" a year after Shephard's death.

Photo Of The Day: Hater 1 - Protesters 500

Protesters outnumbered an anti-gay hater by 500-1 at a scheduled Westboro picket of a high school performance of the Laramie Project in Louisiana. Westboro didn't show.

UPDATE: Here's an amusing clip of the protesters getting ready for Westboro.

Laramie Project Gets Epilogue

A epilogue called The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later, which gives voice to Matthew Shepard's killer, opens nationwide on October 12th.

A decade after "The Laramie Project" became a theatrical phenomenon, its creators are back with an epilogue highlighted by a riveting prison interview with the killer of gay college student Matthew Shepard — depicting him as candid but not remorseful over the murder. The new production, which opens nationwide Oct. 12 at more than 130 theaters, features a segment based on more than 10 hours of face-to-face interviews with convicted killer Aaron McKinney, conducted by Greg Pierotti, a gay actor/writer who helped create the original docudrama.

According to the detailed notes taken by Pierotti and condensed into the new script, McKinney says he had been drawn to crime ever since childhood, feels sympathy for Shepard's parents and expresses regret that he let his own father down. "As far as Matt is concerned, I don't have any remorse," McKinney is quoted as saying in the script, which was provided to The Associated Press by the production company. McKinney, according to the script, reiterates his claim that the 1998 killing in Laramie, Wyo., started out as a robbery, but makes clear that his antipathy toward gays played a role. "The night I did it, I did have hatred for homosexuals," McKinney is quoted as saying. He goes on, according to the script, to say that he still dislikes gays and that his perceptions about Shepard's sex life bolstered his belief that the killing was justified.

The epilogue addresses the widely publicized lie from the Christian right that Shepard's murder was motivated by drugs, not his gayness.