Finding My Trans and Gay Brothers

Brandon Teena and Matthew Shepard

I recently embarked on a long journey across the United States with a good friend. There were a couple of important places I wanted to visit, namely Lincoln, Nebraska, and Laramie, Wyoming. Lincoln is the city where Brandon Teena lived and was murdered in 1993. Laramie is where Matthew Shepard went to college and was also brutally murdered in 1998. If you want to learn more about their lives, click on the links in their names to go get info that is well vetted. This post is not a factual article of their lives or stories but a personal examination of my time with them on my journey.

Matthew Shepard was a college student at the University of Wyoming. There is a bench on campus dedicated to him. It was covered in tiny offerings, each partially obscured by snow and ice. It’s early March, and the plains of Wyoming are a harsh environment. I stood long and quiet to gaze at this place built for him, for the beauty of his memory, and for all the connections that have been made to him by others who came before me.

When Matthew’s torture and murder hit the news in 1998, I recall the horror I felt, the gutted, viscerally painful response of my body. The news and trial afterward provided little relief to those of us who followed it. There were candlelight vigils and prayers and songs on the radio, but nothing erased that void inside me. He was a 21-year-old man who had been killed for being a loving creature, for being himself, for being gay.

The site of his murder is cold and desolate. I’m not the only one to make that pilgrimage, and I can imagine the current homeowners of the surrounding houses looking on in baffled curiosity at those of us who come and stand out in the icy wind to stare at gravel, at a quiet road, at an empty field. The fence we was hung on is no longer there, and the roads were renamed to prevent people like me from finding them. My friend said he felt at peace there, but I did not. I felt cold and alone. I felt like hanging out there on a fence for hours and hours, bleeding, dying, was the worst punishment a human could endure, and I cried for his pain.

I would have sat there in the cold wind with him forever if I could have.

Brandon Teena was brutally murdered in 1993. He was a transman just like me. I could have been him. When I touched the paint of his mural in Lincoln, Nebraska, I made a connection across generations and states and time and distance to connect with my brother. His life force still feels bright and resilient. I can feel his joy. He was a young man who knew himself in a world that refused to see him.

We drove to his grave. It was deeply painful and angering to see they had deadnamed and misgendered him. I left my partial vial of T with him there. Maybe he wouldn’t have transitioned even if he’d had the chance, but it’s nice to think that I could share some aspect of my transition with him, and maybe it would help him.

We all share this pain.

Brandon and Matthew were there when we departed, each of them now one of us. I extended the offer for them to ride with us on our journey, and they accepted. Their laughter carried us across long stretches of still fields and pastures.

We can still save them. Or at least I want to try. But maybe they have been waiting here for us – for me – for a long, long time. Maybe Brandon wanted to save me. Maybe Matthew was waiting to comfort me at that side of the road.

We are such creatures of pure joy and love, transboys. We long to play and laugh together, to make stupid jokes and sing the wrong words to songs in a key that breaks with our fledgling male voices. It is freedom we all seek, and together we create it for one another. I can easily imagine Matthew laughing alongside us, taking joy in our love of ourselves and each other.

We are all waiting to help our brothers along this road.

If I am reaching back thirty years to take Brandon’s hand, did he also reach back for his own big brother? I will never know that man’s name – or the one he reached back to find – but together we connect and grip tight, a daisy chain of boys hand in hand carrying ourselves through the roads and headlights of a Nebraska or Wyoming night, its sky filmed in cloud. There are stars above it, and my brothers can see them.

Your trans friend,

Robin