A film festival is more than a festival, for there are many community members who see it as a place they can find as home, Russell Roots, director of the Utah Queer Film Festival (UQFF) says.
During the 21st Utah Queer Film Festival, which will run Oct. 25-27 at the Rose Wagner Center for Performing Arts in downtown Salt Lake City, there will be many activities that provide the essential comforts of acceptance, peace and home to a community that often finds itself in places where a sense of home is not just discomforting but even dangerous and, in the extreme, menacing and life-threatening. Films offer the springboards for discussions throughout the festival, but there also are performers, workshops and social events to round out that experience of a queer film festival as home.
One of the newest events this year amplifies that quest for home: Life After Laramie: A Matthew Shepard Memorial Concert (Oct. 27, 2:30 p.m.). Presented as a response to last year’s 25th anniversary of the October 1998 murder of Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming, the concert’s theme is about where queer people find home and how place defines their community. There will be world premieres of short works by four Utah-based composers: Miranda Livengood, Garrett Medlock, Chris Myers and Jared Oaks. Highlights include text and songs written by nationally known Taylor Brorby, whose writings include the books Boys and Oil: Growing up gay in a fractured land, Crude: Poems, and Coming Alive: Action and Civil Disobedience; C.E. Janecek, poet and managing editor of The Colorado Review, and the late Utah poet May Swenson. Performers will include musicians from the Ballet West Orchestra, NOVA Chamber Music Series, Utopia Early Music and the Utah Symphony.
On the night of October 6, 1998, two men lured Matthew Shepard, a gay freshman at the University of Wyoming, from a bar in Laramie. He was kidnapped and driven to a field where he was tortured and tethered to a fence and left to die. Never regaining consciousness, Shepard died on October 12, 1998.
Ten years after the murder, Michael Aaron, QSaltLake publisher, wrote a short column, Sheparding in Change. In 1998, Aaron was working in San Francisco when the news broke, but was frustrated that he could find very little additional information or response there. “I called some friends in Salt Lake to see if they had heard and, yes, the word had spread like wildfire. Days went by and I felt powerless. I seriously considered driving out there, but decided that there wouldn’t be anything for me to do. The lack of response in San Francisco was frustrating, maddening. It was days before any kind of response came out of San Francisco, and it took the form of a candlelight vigil on the wall of the Bank of America building on Castro Street. Nothing organized, just a bunch of candles, bears, flowers and notes and people taking vigil outside. San Franciscans love their candlelight vigils.”
In that moment, Aaron decided to return to Salt Lake City. “I missed the true fight — the fight for things that matter. The fight of middle gay America. … I talked to my then-partner. We still had the house in Salt Lake. There was a new center with a coffee shop a few blocks from the house. I needed to get involved in something again for my sense of self worth.” With that, the publication now known as QSaltLake was born, the longest running and most essential independent news organization for the Utah queer community.
Myers, who is producing the concert, explains, “This concert set out to be more than just a memorial for one person. From the beginning, we wanted to reflect on how the death of Matthew Shepard and others have impacted our lives and communities. There was never any question in my mind that the only way to do this was to showcase stories told from as many perspectives as possible — as many age groups, gender identities, sexualities, and cultural backgrounds.”
Other than the broad theme for the concert, Myers said that matters of style, approach, mood, instrumentation and choice of text (if any) were entirely up to each composer. “None of us had any idea what form the other’s pieces were taking,” Myers notes. “Aside from the fact that everyone landed on vocal music, I think it’s amazing how very different each of the pieces are.” Medlock’s work moves on strong poetic images of sense, place and nature while Oaks’ work harkens to Renaissance sensibilities. Livengood’s song cycle is a compact, cogent amalgam incorporating hints of folk, blues, jazz, and classical and Spanish guitar dance notes, and Myers’ work, as he describes it, infuses “theatrical/operatic elements of my monodrama.”
The composer voices represented for this concert are just as varied in how they connected to Shepard’s story. Myers was in college and Oaks was in high school at the time of Shepard’s murder, while Medlock was a young boy and Livengood was barely two years old at the time. “But Shepard wasn’t the first or only victim of this kind of violence, and it’s remarkable how we’ve all experienced our own ‘when I heard’ moment and felt the impact of anti-LGBTQ+ violence in our lives,” Myers adds.
Each of the forthcoming world premieres is discussed below:
Garrett Medlock, If You Use Your Senses: Meditations on the Death of Matthew Shepard
Medlock, who is about ten years younger than Myers, was not yet fully aware or consciously connected to the events at the time of Shepard’s murder. The first tangible connection came during Medlock’s years in middle and high school when they read The Laramie Project, the 2000 play by Moisés Kaufman. “It was an emotional piece for me because I was not yet out but the story affected me and stayed with me,” the composer says.
Medlock explains that it was harrowing to realize that it was from a not-so-distant past and his growing understanding of what Shepard went through and what he was like. In setting the foundation for If You Use Your Senses, scored for tenor, bassoon and piano, Medlock thought about the place of Shepard’s life in rural Wyoming and the surrounding natural landscapes. Medlock recalled a road trip eastward to Ohio about seven years ago when he drove through Wyoming on the I-80 highway. The composer noticed how the scene of where the murder happened had changed, as a suburban neighborhood had replaced the imagery of the fence where Shepard was brutally tortured. “I was struck by how the physical remnants where he spent his final moments had been erased within a period of barely 20 years,” Medlock recalled, adding that it acknowledged how much the world had changed and how it yet continues to keep revolving.
Medlock considers the work, for which they also wrote the text, within the contexts of the political act of remembering and the act of remembering as art. In a composer’s note, they write the work “was inspired by a sensory imagining of Matthew Shepard’s final moments. I meditated on where and how he was left to die, what I knew about him as a person, and how it might feel to experience death the way he did — as a gradual removal of the senses, a falling away of the consciousness; honing in on each of the senses as they fail brings into focus sensations, memories, dreams, yearnings, and pain.”
In approximately 25 minutes, the cycle emerges in eight sections (Sound, Sight, Smell, Stabat, Taste, Touch, Senseless, Sleep). Medlock’s text is potent in how it transports the listener to that place in Laramie. The opening section is “the chirping of crickets. The howl of the wind. The silence of night and loneliness. One sense taken.” The juxtaposing text in Sight references “mountains of my youth” and “mountains firm as memory” and “dark sheep without a shepherd” and “pine trees shattered, in your multitudes/confused/You watch me, don’t you?/Dont you?” The imagery is more vividly expressed in the first three sections, as each sense is taken away. In Stabat, the fourth section, the mother’s reverent sorrow is expressed in Latin, which translates as follows: “She saw her sweet son dying, forsaken, as he sent forth his spirit,” and, “When the body decays, may the glory of paradise be bestowed upon the soul.”
“A huge part for me is what do I want my audience to feel, to think and to take away from the experience and harsh realities of his death,” Medlock explains. “I want to ensure the audience has the space as individuals to meditate on life and death as well as the separation between hatred and love, along with the tenuous bonds we have with the world and the connection to such harsh realities.”
In the fifth section, taste, the fourth sense, is taken: “A snarl of twisted metal/A crime scene on my tongue.” Then touch — the fifth sense — is taken and Medlock’s text eloquently reverses the physical erasure of the place where it happened: “If you use your senses/you can be anything: A normal boy in the world with nothing to fear who got out/who made it out of his forest of thorns.” The final two sections completes the journey of questioning with acceptance and peace.
The work will include bassoonist Dylan Neff, their husband. Medlock and Neff met while undergraduate music students. The instrumental voices add the relevant textures to the text. Medlock explains that the “bassoon plays many roles: nature, the subconscious, a lover, and even a grieving mother. The piano grounds the moods of the different vignettes, sometimes reinforcing or commenting on the scene, and other times acting as an ambiguous narrator.”
Medlock is a longtime vocalist with Utah Opera and The Cathedral of the Madeleine. Neff is principal bassoonist of the Reno Chamber Orchestra. Nicholas Maughan will play piano for the world premiere.
Jared Oaks, Bleeding (presented in memory of Steve Finau)
“A thought that has haunted me over the years since learning about Matthew [Shepard] is that there are others in our communities who have been harmed or brought to the brink of destruction and self-harm,” Oaks explains. “What are their names? What are their stories? What ruin has been left behind because of violence and society’s disdain?”
With that in mind, Oaks composed Bleeding, but he said that he wrote it for Yvette Gilgen, a long-time friend, whose interests in early music are extensive. The piece includes a part for recorder, which will be performed by Lisa Chaufty.
The work is based in part on a madrigal (Weep, Weep, Mine Eyes) by John Wilbye (1574-1638) and a contemporary poem by May Swenson (1913-1989), a Utah literary figure. Oaks selected Swenson because this poem fits precisely the provenance of this concert. “May Swenson, for me, creates a world and drops you swiftly and gently into it,” he explains, “In this case, however, the world is a difficult, violent one. Still, she finds sweetness and contradiction within this conversation between the cut and the knife. Her words are direct and swiftly syllabic, so I approached the vocal writing with recitative in mind.” Swenson’s original poem opens on “Stop bleeding said the knife/I would if I could said the cut/ Stop bleeding you make me messy with this blood/ I’m sorry said the cut./Stop or I will sink in farther said the knife./Don’t said the cut./The knife did not say it couldn’t help it but/it sank in farther.”
Thus, Bleeding will resonate directly with a contemporary audience and especially one in Utah, as evidenced by countless incidents that not only have affected members of the local queer community but also many others where they endure unjustified shame and entrenched trauma because so often victims are blamed for causing their own harm.
The creative brief for the concert is what Oaks says inspired him to participate and to “write something with the local and broader community in mind, as opposed to something just for me (a musical journal entry, for example).” In his quintessential self-effacing sensitivity, he adds, “If our performance is able to interest or intrigue or make some positive impression on the audience, I will consider that a small offering for those who have endured forms of ostracism, marginalization, or oppression.” Oaks is conductor of the Ballet West Orchestra and Gilgen studied at Westminster University and performs with Utopia Early Music.
Miranda Livengood, Catching Venus
Livengood was just two years old when Shepard was murdered. In college, she became more aware of the story, especially through music. Livengood participated in the 2022 performance of Considering Matthew Shepard, an oratorio by Craig Hella Johnson, by the Salt Lake Choral Artists and directed by Brady Allred.
A Salt Lake City native, Livengood, a trans woman, comes from a musical family: Livengood grew up in Salt Lake City and studied music at The University of Utah; her father, Lee Livengood, is clarinetist with the Utah Symphony, and her mother, Melissa Livengood, is a respected classical pianist.
As with the other composers, Livengood appreciated the creative freedom they had in deciding whatever form or ensemble arrangement they wanted. Livengood settled on a triptych of songs with various bits of jazz, samba, classical Spanish and tango influences, accompanied by guitar and percussion: Satellite Dogs, Constellation Lovers and Voyager. In each song, the distance progressively lengthens by astronomical leaps. For text, Livengood turned to C. E. Janecek, a Czech-American writer, poetry master of fine arts degree candidate at Colorado State University, and managing editor of Colorado Review. Janecek’s writing has appeared in Peach Mag, Permafrost, Florida Review, among other publications. Polly Redd will be vocalist while Livengood and Janecek will handle instrumentals, respectively, on guitar and percussion.
Rather than set the songs as literal narratives, Livengood and Janecek set out to “paint a scene and frame lyrics,” as the composer described it. The poetic references draw strong parallels between the precise dangers that Shepard faced and those of more recent years, which have in particular affected the trans community and many others in the broader queer community.
Satellite Dogs, for instance, portrays the vast cosmic expanse. One stanza reads, “Space is transforming me/I’m more nebula than human/I’m an animal, a rogue machine/Chimera dreams, chimera dreams. The juxtaposed refrain references the sudden event: “Blue marble under my tongue/Do I spit you out?/Do I chew your rind?/I never chose to leave the earth behind.” Livengood says this song has a Seventies vibe that one would have heard from guitarist Joni Mitchell, and “the word play and boogie blues line on guitar feels like jumping into something new but also letting yourself go completely.”
In Constellation Lovers, not only is the sense of community celebrated but also the many different ways that individually we engage with and find passion, fire and love in the community. To wit, one of the stanzas: “Two moons catch the sail/ of the Scorpion’s tail/and the slick tongue/of the Gemini sun/Gemini eyes, Scorpio smile/We’ll be a while, be a while.” This song, according to Livengood, tips its hat to a definitive Eighties song format with a sound that fans of Kate Bush will appreciate.
Voyager, the third song is steeped in the sounds of classical and Spanish guitar, suggesting an interstellar tango, with partners disappearing in the distance. The song opens with “I spun the golden record/I found it floating out in space/I shuffled through the photos/saw people moving through the throng I spun the golden record/and wondered why it felt so wrong/Ten thousand years of starlight the stars were never meant to stay just echoes of their shining,/To whom am I supposed to pray?”
“We are recognizing the balance between mourning and celebration in death,” Livengood explains. “We continue to create a home for ourselves in the queer community and it is something that is hard to guarantee and difficult to completely unpack and remove the baggage of emotional trauma. We will never forget what happened but we also can think about the joy that we can carry forward and within the challenges we endure from clashing and antagonizing cultures and we can still hold onto that joy while remembering him.”
Chris Myers, A Boy Like Me
Myers, a composer who also works for NOVA Chamber Music Series and Park City Chamber Music Society, says that in 1998, he was a closeted college student. “I think I had come out for the first time only a few weeks before the murder, and the news had an enormous impact on me, both emotionally and mentally,” he recalls. “I was a suburban Southern California kid going to school in downtown Los Angeles, so the Wyoming setting may not have resonated with me, but I grew up in a fundamentalist Baptist home and was already struggling with the knowledge that most of the people I loved would not be happy when I dropped my mask.”
Not only did Myers realize that becoming his genuine self was not beset by the knowledge that some people would not be happy but also that they would want to ostracize him from their lives and, more ominously, would wish him dead. He adds, “and that there were places in my own country where I would never be safe or welcome.”
In deciding how to approach the project with the three other composers, Myers said that many who directly knew and loved Shepard had already created tributes and that he and and his colleagues for this concert did not feel qualified or privileged to comment on his tragic loss. “But for me, the most powerful aspect of his story is that he was a perfectly ordinary college kid trying to do exactly the kinds of things a million other college kids do — but doing it while gay cost him his life,” Myers explains. “I think this caused Matthew’s murder to resonate in a way that previous similar crimes of equal horror had not.”
He wrote a piece shortly afterward, which was a choral piece based on W.H. Auden’s Lullaby, in “which he considers whether the cost of love is too high if it provokes judgment, disapproval, and even violence from the entire world — and how we may have to accept and even find beauty in the fact that love forged in such an environment may inherently be more fragile and fleeting than love which enjoys the support of family and community.”
Indeed, all four composers converged quite naturally and instinctively on what constitutes “home, community, and belonging” for the members of the queer community. “Where can ‘a boy like me’ go and be allowed to be his true self — to experience love and connection without constantly feeling the threat of exclusion or even death?”
Reading Taylor Brorby’s Boys and Oil, Myers found the creative resonance in the book, particularly the references and parallels to Shepard’s story. The road to collaboration was fortuitous, as Brorby had served as the Annie Clark Tanner Teaching & Research Fellow in environmental humanities at The University of Utah.
When the two started chatting about the project, it was Brorby who suggested that instead of excerpting some of the text from the book, he would write something new, which Myers says, “was far more than I’d ever hoped for.” They apparently saw eye-to-eye immediately, as the only changes between initial draft and final version amounted to a small number of cosmetic word changes. “It was just perfect,” Myers says. “He’d created a theatrical text with a strong narrative arc infused with heartfelt emotion. Even on my first read, I heard melodies and rhythms attached to his words.”
An excerpt from the middle of Brorby’s text underscores Myers’ description:
I looked for a place, a place for me, in this new reality: I could be taken, because I was different, because I was a boy who liked other boys, a boy on the prairie, that hard place where people can freeze in winter, freeze in their points-of-view, where little changes in small places. But so much had changed for me in that moment since I turned on the news and heard his name. I lived under his same sky, in his same place, knew the shape of the land, and I wondered: Would we have been friends?
In that moment, I saw what happened to boys like me in the place that was home. I searched for cities to find a safe harbor away from the open spaces that I loved. I sought out new beginnings, anywhere, far away from where I was planted.
The work is scored for tenor and chamber orchestra, to be conducted by Oaks, which includes strings, guitar, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and French horn. Medlock, whose work opens the concert, will perform the vocal part for Myers’ composition. Musicians include: Caitlyn Valovick Moore flute / Zac Hammond oboe | Laura Grantier clarinet / Leon Chodos bassoon | Nathan Basinger horn / Alex Martin, Rebecca Moench, Hugh Palmer, Karen Wyatt violin / Joel Gibbs, Whittney Sjogren viola / Walter Haman, Lauren Posey cello / Andrew Keller bass and Miranda Livengood guitar.
For tickets and more information about the festival, see the Utah Queer Film Festival website.