text by Taylor Brorby
Commissioned by the Utah Film Center
Composed 2024. Duration: 19’00”
First Performance: 27 October 2024. Utah Queer Film Festival, Salt Lake City. Garrett Medlock, tenor. Members of the Utah Symphony conducted by Jared Oaks.
The Utah Review named the premiere of A Boy Like Me Utah’s #1 cultural moment for 2024.
Instrumentation
solo tenor / 1.1.1.1 / 1.0.0.0 / gtr / strings (minimum 2.2.2.2.1)
Program Note
On Tuesday, October 6, 1998, a young man was left to die, beaten and tied to a fence on the Wyoming prairie. Matthew Shepard’s murderers admitted that they pretended to be gay in order to gain his trust and rob him, but claimed they were justified in brutally torturing and killing him because he flirted back.
Matt was an ordinary college kid doing ordinary college kid things. But doing them while gay cost him his life. And, as happens far too often, LGBTQ+ people were reminded of the risks we face in simple moments that millions of others take for granted.
25 years after that cold night in Wyoming, A Boy Like Me was commissioned for Life After Laramie, a concert presented by the Utah Film Center’s Utah Queer Film Festival to reflect on how that moment — and others like it in recent years — have shaped our lives, our loves, and our communities.
Text
When I heard, I rushed from the kitchen, down the hall, out the door and through the yard, past the chokecherry trees, their leaves in clumps upon the ground, out into a field of whipping wheat. I held out my hands, and awns pricked against my palms. I burst out into a world where I now knew a boy—a boy like me—was left to hang upon a fence. I needed the earth, the entire bright world, to sing back to me.
The sky was streaked with cirrus clouds, pheasants cried in the distant hills, and I walked through the lumpy field to the creek where I often fished. There, on its crisp, golden banks, my eyes traced the edge, where water and land met, where muskrats cruised, where clams shone through muddy water. The reeds, still green, though firing crimson against that tawny scene, swung back and forth as red-winged blackbirds bobbed atop their tips.
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.
Later, much later, my father, in his sadness over me, said that people are killed for being this way. Where, Dad? I asked. Where?
Anywhere.
The boy on the fence isn't far from my mind since I first heard his name on the news. When I see barbed wire or feel the cool breath of autumn, it's him that I'm thinking of—and me.
But I grew up in a landscape large enough to hold what I felt when the world of people pushed me away. There, where badgers roamed, where herons speared small fish in shallow pools, I found my place. I took my sketch pad and tackle box to the banks of that small creek and washed myself in the rivulets of sound—of beaver tail slapping against the water, the screech of redtail hawks, the snap of branches from deer, the coyote's call. That was—is—my home, where I drew the landscapes I loved—and draw upon them still—to make the world as it could be.