1998 was a tumultuous time to be gay on the flat plains of North America’s prairies. Big skies and land as far as the eye could see provided no protection from the unruly human winds that in this so-called modern time often deliver crueler storms of torture than Mother Nature ever could.
Vriend vs Alberta
On Apr 2, 1998 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in the Vriend vs Alberta case that provincial governments could not exclude LGBT individuals from human rights legislation.
The Supreme Court’s ruling was the result of a six-year battle that began when Delwin Vriend was fired from his job as a lab coordinator at King’s University College in Edmonton due to his sexual orientation.
When Vriend attempted to file a discrimination complaint with the Alberta Human Rights Commission his request was refused on the grounds that sexual orientation was not protected by Alberta’s code of human rights. This meant that Vriend could not sue the College directly for discrimination because, in the eye of Alberta’s laws, being a sexual minority was a seemingly justifiable reason to be fired. With that decision, Vriend sued the Government of Alberta and its Human Rights Commission for not protecting him. The issue was not that the college fired him because he was gay, but that the college could fire him because he was gay.
In 1992, Vriend’s case against the Province resulted in an Alberta court ruling stating sexual orientation must be written in as a new protected class under the human rights legislation. However, the provincial government appealed the decision through the Alberta Court of Appeals and had the decision overturned. This meant that Vriend and all other sexual minorities were in the same boat as when he was first fired, a precariously unsafe one that could easily be led by a homophobic captain throwing queers overboard, leaving them with no lifejacket.
This final ruling at the provincial level led Vriend and his team to take the case to the Supreme Court of Canada where within a year the hearing was over and the Vriend camp emerged victorious. In the end all provinces read the Supreme Court’s ruling into their human rights legislation—all except Alberta, which to this day has yet to read it in.
Matthew in Wyoming
I find it hard to write about Matthew Shepard. I don’t know where to start and I need to believe that you already know what happened starting Oct 6, 1998. I don’t know how much detail to go into nor how much of him to bring into it and how much of what happened to share.
With Vriend it’s different. As simple as it is to see that there would be no Vriend vs Alberta without Delwin, the story quickly finds it’s own narrative. Vriend becomes the symbol for the small army of people including Delwin that fought hard and won the case.
With Matthew it is about one young man who could have been and has been countless young people among us. The difference is that most of us escape with a cautionary tale that makes us shake our heads with disbelief later in life. Matthew paid with his life, his head shaking and flinching from the impacts of fists and the butt of a gun. He was tied to a fence on the outskirts of a city that wasn’t even his own, beaten by two strangers who lured him out of the neon danky glow of a bar by pretending to be gay with the somewhat-innocent intent to just rob him. But everything came loose; things got out of hand.
Matthew suffered a fracture that went from the back of his head to his right ear—an earthquake inside the flesh of his head, damaging his brain stem and affecting his body’s ability to control its own heat or make the heart beat.
They left him for dead, without a wallet and shoeless, begging while they went to rob his house, only to be distracted from the task by more violence and subsequently apprehended. A mountain biker found Matthew the next morning, a near-lifeless lump clumped up against the cold autumn earth. He was unconscious and died in a hospital within six days.
If it were not for hearing Matthew’s mother Judy courageously tell the story in the hopes of “making even a small difference,” I am not sure I could even attempt to write about Matthew. But who am I to cower at an opportunity when even his own mother can say the words: Matthew was killed because he was gay. Matthew was a victim of a hate crime even if, at the time, the state of Wyoming was not equipped with the laws to say so.
Find out more. But don’t google him, because hateful websites come up. Instead, search out The Laramie Project at the library, video store or local playhouse. In fact, Victoria School of Performing and Visual Arts is putting on a production this November.
Six months, life and a border separate Vriend’s victory from Matthew’s murder. When viewed together the stories show two men unwittingly illustrating the similarities between the terrain of Alberta and Wyoming and the vastness between rights and realities, intentions and actions. The world did not become a better place when Vriend was passed and it did not stop when Matthew’s heart did. Ten years later, we who still live on the Prairies carry on and so does the world around us.
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