Kansas City, Mo ? A high school theater class’s performance of a play about the October 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard was prompted by a letter from a homosexual student to one of his teachers.

“Tonight I am sitting on the edge of my bed and I’m holding in my hand my father’s pistol, and I wish I had the courage to put it to my head and pull the trigger,” the letter read.

“I would rather be dead than have my peers and teachers at Winnetonka know that I’m gay,” wrote the student, who is still alive.

Reading the words brought shock, sorrow, then rage to Winnetonka High School teacher Sheri Coffman.

“I thought, ‘Why, why did he try so desperately to keep this from all of us?”‘ Coffman said of the popular student who always had girls swarming around him. “Have we really created that kind of atmosphere here that made it unlivable for anyone?”

For two months, Coffman kept a journal of every type of reference to homosexuality she heard students and faculty utter at the school. She filled the front and back pages of three small notepads and knew why the young man, who is still struggling with his sexuality, hadn’t wanted people to know he was homosexual.

The letter, her social experiment and her feelings of anger, even guilt, led to the school’s production of “The Laramie Project,” the play about Shepard, a gay college student in Laramie, Wyo.

The work, which was written and produced by the Tectonic Theatre Project, is a series of monologues, much like a transcript of what Shepard’s family, friends and hometown had to say about his murder.

Coffman’s advanced theater class will perform the play later this month at a Kansas City theater and again in April at the school.

“I think we all came back with the reason the script needed to be done, because of the message it could send not only to us but everyone who would see it,” student Patricia Von Holt said.

“The Laramie Project” teaches the difference between tolerance and acceptance, students said.

Before becoming involved in the production, members of the cast, like their peers, would carelessly use “gay” to mean “stupid” or “lame.”

“I know, for me, I’ve erased those words from my vocabulary and try to erase it from others’ vocabulary,” Cory Dowman said.

Administrators and students alike have been supportive of the students’ work. Coffman said she has not heard from upset parents.