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New York Times
October 5, 2013
Every seat in the house was sold out for Friday’s performance of “The Laramie Project,” a play staged by the University of Mississippi theater department about an anti-gay hate crime.
Hundreds of miles away, the Ole Miss football team was preparing to take on Auburn.
The two groups of students, about as far apart as any cultural groups on a college campus could be, became linked this week after football players and other freshmen disrupted the play with homophobic heckling.
University officials are investigating the episode, employing a new bias incident response team developed earlier this year.
The university, despite enormous changes, still struggles with the legacy of its integration in 1962 that resulted in two deaths and dozens of injuries.Since then, the university has made inclusion and racial healing a theme, but problems persist.
In 2012, a student protest against the re-election of President Obama turned disorderly, with some students chanting racial epithets and two charged with disorderly conduct.
Particularly in light of that episode, the uproar over the play brought out a certain defensiveness on campus among some students, but many applauded what they say was a thorough and swift response from the university. The actors themselves were thrust into a national spotlight. Well-wishers from theater communities in Los Angeles and New York reached out to the school in a show of support.
So did the Matthew Shepard Foundation, founded after Mr. Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student, was robbed, beaten and tied to a fence on a rural road in 1998. He was found 18 hours later, barely alive, and died from the attack. The play is based on his death.
“I was disappointed to see that a number of Ole Miss football players and others in the audience decided to interrupt a performance of the play using anti-gay slurs,” said his mother, Judy Shepard. “Using hate-filled words to interrupt a play about anti-gay hate is a sad irony.”
Officials and students at the school, including some who were heckled during the play, were quick to point out that the football players were not the only students disrupting the performance, and said blaming the football program was wrong.
Some said the episode was more about immature theatergoers and the background from which the students came.
“It was a bunch of teenage boys being stupid,” said Ashley Kozich, 20, who had heard what happened but said that not too many people on campus were talking about it. “Probably if it happened at any other school it would not be getting all this attention.”
