Pride Month is a time for international LGBTQ+ communities around the world to celebrate hard-won freedoms and commemorate events that helped spark the modern gay rights movement, to remember tragic losses that speak to the need to fight hate crimes wherever and whenever they occur … and to keep fallen individuals in our hearts and minds.
In their Spring 2022 concert, the Stony Brook Camerata Singers performed a stirring rendition of Craig Hella Johnson’s achingly poignant “Meet Me Here” — part of his larger work, “Considering Matthew Shepard,” documenting the murder of a young LGBTQ man in one of the first reported anti-gay hate crimes in 1998.
Stony Brook University Choral Director Shoshana Hershkowitz said the piece, written 20 years after Shepard’s death, tries to answer the question, “How do you move on after something that is so incredibly evil occurs … It’s a call to community and a call to healing for all of us.” As the song says, that healing just might start to take place “where the old fence ends and the horizon begins.”
Hear more of what Hershkowitz has to say, and view the performance, in the video:
— Ellen Cooke
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