Choreographer Matthew Bourne’s version of the ballet Swan Lake made its American debut in 1998, two days after the murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay man from Laramie, Wyoming. At the same time that national news outlets and political protests martyred and vilified Shepard, the media coverage about Swan Lake centered around Bourne’s nontraditional casting of men in the roles of the swans. The extremely emotional and polarizing public debate about Shepard contrasted with the intellectualized and carefully constructed public conversation about Bourne’s ballet. This revised version of Swan Lake includes a prince and male swan dancing together and mirroring a traditionally romantic storyline, and as a result the reviews of the production focused on the homoerotic themes and debated whether it ought to be interpreted as a “gay” ballet. At the time of Bourne’s Swan Lake’s premiere and Shepard’s death, mainstream audiences in the U.S. had already been introduced to homosexual themes in the arts. Even though the cultural acceptance of homosexuality had the potential to increase across the country, other anti-gay movements and groups challenged the progress that gay rights was making. This paper examines the reviews of Bourne’s Swan Lake and the contemporaneous discourse surrounding the brutal crime committed against Shepard. The public dialogue about each of these two events, with themes of homosexuality and personhood, unfolded in very different ways. The artistic medium of ballet allowed a provocative conversation about Bourne’s dance which was both related to and distanced from the emotionally charged discourse surrounding Matthew Shepard’s murder. This paper contends that the arts’ ability to open up nuanced and provocative public conversations about political issues promotes and enables a kind of cultural change that is distinct from that created by debates sparked by current events and the news media.