TACKLING HOMOPHOBIA

Performances of “The Laramie Project” in Ellsworth and Bar Harbor have changed some lives. One of them is James Pendergist, a middle-aged Ellsworth insurance agent, who played a half-dozen parts in the play about the torture killing of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student in Laramie, Wyo., four years ago.

Mr. Pendergist recently said, “My whole attitude has really changed since doing this. I don’t tell gay jokes any more. And I don’t want to tell them ever again. One of my characters is a priest. He says that what they did to Matthew is violence, but every time we call each other names, that’s a seed of violence, and it really is. I have to admit, I’ve been telling these types of jokes for years. We need to accept people for what they are, not for what we think they should be. I’ll never get engaged in that kind of ridicule again. This play’s had too much of an effect on me.”

He and others in the cast had tears in their eyes as they portrayed Laramie townspeople, the police chief, patrons of the bar where the torturers accosted Mr. Shepard, the bartender, the college president, clergymen, the young man who found Mr. Shepard tied to a fence in a snowstorm, the doctor who tried to save his life, and the young men who tied him up and left him to die. Tears were common, too, among the audiences that kept increasing as the show went through eight performances.

The transformation of a 57-year-old man who says he grew up in a redneck family is important. But homophobia gets its start among young people, among children who take pleasure in calling someone a faggot, a common epithet in school playgrounds. Teenagers can be uneasy about their developing sexuality and can take it out in banter and supposed humor.

That’s why the director, Charles Alexander Jr., is taking a shortened version of “The Laramie Project” on the road, to some of Maine’s high schools and middle schools. Six schools, including Ellsworth High School, Mount Desert Island Regional High School, and John Bapst Memorial High School, have already expressed interest. Performances would be particularly appropriate in Bangor, where in 1984 three juveniles threw Charlie Howard, a gay man, into the Kenduskeag Stream, killing him.