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Russell, Aaron and me | page 1, 2
When I go to Laramie to write about this murder, I have just jumped into a new relationship that makes me feel as though I've plunged into the ocean. I am nauseous, and it's icy cold. My new girlfriend makes me feel so open sexually that I feel in peril. It's too hard to be that open and that vulnerable. It alternately hurts and makes me feel queasy, as though all my nerve endings have been sliced open. It's also beautiful, there are hot colors everywhere and I even feel that sick, enormous hope that worthwhile things will happen and this one will stick around. The girls I get involved with always make me want to kill them in direct proportion to the love and pleasure that they make me feel. I'm not a murderer, but I am, like many of us, someone who can get enraged by joy because of what it lays you open to. My rage at these girls doesn't come from homophobia, but from that older, other thing that causes it, the bare and naked fear of sex and love. When I date, I am afraid of being obliterated, annihilated, crushed like a flower under someone's shoe, and that's exactly what boys feel when they start to be afraid of being gay. What no one will admit about the Matthew Shepard slaying was that it was a murder about love as well as rage, there was sweet longing in it as well as the furious urgency to squash that longing. Russell and Aaron were motivated by beauty, not just disgust, and they picked the most beautiful place in town to kill him in because they could not not express that longing, that inner sweetness, in something. Everyone goes to this prairie to commune with beauty and that is what Russell and Aaron, in their agitation and torment, are trying to do as they lug that beautiful boy up there. They do not know what to do and so they hit him with the pistol and they hit him again and there is a flower they are trying to obliterate and maybe if they hit him enough times they can.
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