LGBTQ+ drama. Inspired by actual events. A closeted gay TV reporter in 1990s America covers the defining hate crime of his generation as the life he's been hiding begins to collapse under its own weight.

SYNOPSIS:

BEFORE THE FENCE Written by Joseph Cockrell A Prestige Drama | Inspired by Actual Events

Jasper Allen is twenty-three years old, gifted behind a camera, and hiding in plain sight. As a rising television journalist in late 1990s America, he has mastered the art of telling other people's truths while keeping his own buried beneath a professional mask. When the red light of the camera turns on, so does the man the world sees. When it turns off, Jasper is alone with a secret that his career, his family, and his faith have all conspired to keep.

After years of concealment in the Iowa television market, Jasper relocates to Denver, where he builds a life with Zachary Nagle, a law student who offers him something he has never allowed himself: a love that exists in full rather than in secret. Their relationship unfolds in private, documented only in engraved metal and quiet evenings, while the world outside their condo walls remains entirely unaware. Jasper signs a morals and conduct clause at work, covers tornadoes and riots and town halls with steady professionalism, and tells his colleagues that Zach is a close family friend.

Then Zach is killed in a car accident on Valentine's Day, and Jasper has no public language for what he has lost.

He arrives in Laramie, Wyoming in October of 1998 to cover the murder of Matthew Shepard, a twenty-one year old gay student beaten and left tied to a fence in the freezing darkness outside of town. Jasper reports the story with the precision and discipline his career demands, refuses to put hate on television, stands at the fence where Matthew died, and returns to his motel room at night with a bottle of vodka and the Tag Heuer watch Zach gave him the Christmas before he died. The engraving on the back reads J plus Z inside a small heart. Jasper nearly does not survive Laramie.

But he does. He adopts a dog named Chance. He moves to Chicago. He begins, slowly and without announcing it, to inhabit his own life rather than perform it.

When he is assigned to cover a speech by Judy Shepard, Matthew's mother, something in her words finds the part of him that has been waiting to be found. In a brief interview after the speech, she asks him a question he is not prepared for. The answer he gives her is professional and correct and entirely untrue. But the question stays with him.

What follows is the long, specific work of choosing differently. A reconciliation with the first man he ever loved. A return to Iowa. A backyard. His family at a table. A hand held in another hand. A breath taken before speaking.

BEFORE THE FENCE