The memory and meaning of Matthew Shepard, 13 years later
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Matthew Shepard
By Jamie McGonnigal
On October 7, 1998, Aaron Kreifels was riding his bike through a field in Wyoming.
He wasn’t expecting that day to be different from any other beautiful sunny afternoon in the vast plains surrounding Laramie, but that day would change many lives.
Aaron spotted what he initially thought was a scarecrow next to a fence. Then he noticed a glisten of blood. The sun sparkled on what he barely recognized as a face.
Aaron had discovered 22 year-old Matthew Shepard, clinging to life.
The young college student was viciously attacked and bludgeoned, and then tied to a fence and left to die. Matthew was targeted because he was gay.
Most of you know what happened next. Matthew held on for five more days and as his parents held his hand and prayed, Matthew slipped away quietly on October 12th, leaving in his wake a new movement for equality.
The outcries for justice and for greater protections were immediate and resonating.
Since then, Matthew’s mother Judy has made it her personal mission to protect all young LGBT people from Matthew’s horrific fate. In founding the Matthew Shepard Foundation, she has created safe spaces in and outside of schools for kids, and worked with parents to ensure their children learn to erase hate from their lives.
But overwhelmingly what you saw in 1998 was a community ready to act, ready to change something. And Matthew’s story was the catalyst for that.
Many of you have seen or read the Moises Kaufman play, The Laramie Project – Matthew’s story as told through interviews of those who were living in Laramie at the time – some of his friends and some who just happened to be riding a bike through the plains of Wyoming that day.
If you think of nothing else today, please consider the importance of telling your story – how your story can change the world around you.
This young man, unbeknownst to him, has changed the world with his.
Jamie McGonnigal is a gay rights activist and Co-Founder of Talk About Equality.
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Sadly, there are still people that claim that it never happened and was nothing more than a hoax to get "special rights" for gays.
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Coming up on 25 years soon. Sadly, while Matthew death was real, the narrative of it - straight-up homophobia - was indeed shown as false.
Matthew Shepard’s horrific death at the hands of redneck homophobes shocked America and changed its laws. Now a different truth is emerging, but does it matter? Julie Bindel reports
[OUT, GAY] investigative journalist Stephen Jimenez...spent 13 years interviewing more than 100 people with a connection to the case. His conclusion, outlined in The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths about the Murder of Matthew Shepard, is that the grotesque murder was not a hate crime, but could instead be blamed on crystal meth...
When [Jiminez] started he was convinced that Matthew died at the hands of homophobes, but he soon discovered that Matthew’s tragedy began long before the night he was killed.
Jimenez found that Matthew was addicted to and dealing crystal meth and had dabbled in heroin. He also took significant sexual risks and was being pimped alongside Aaron McKinney, one of his killers, with whom he’d had occasional sexual encounters...
So: per eyewitness accounts, Matthew & Aaron McKinney were same-sex sex workers together, partied & occasionally had sex with each other.
...the fact that [Matthew] knew one of his killers prior to the attack, was never explored in court. Neither was the rumour that [McKinney & Henderson] knew that [Matthew] had access to a shipment of crystal meth with a street value of $10,000 which they wanted to steal...
Laramie is considered the most liberal town in Wyoming....[Police officer Flint Waters who arrived on scene, said] "...It was fairly well known in the Laramie community that McKinney wouldn’t be one that was striking out of a sense of homophobia..."
But activists & elected officials seized Matthew's killing as a chance to score points, get attention, raise funds, etc.
McKinney & Henderson, though mostly dumb, surely would have been just smart enough to know they were headed for jail in any event & had best play along.
...says Jimenez. “...Nothing in this book takes away from the iniquity and brutality of the crime or the culpability of his murderers, but we owe Matthew and other young men like him the truth."
That truth is: It was drugs. Ie. the inhuman struggle addicts feel, to obtain drugs and/or money.
Matthew got the worst of it, a tragedy.
As to Henderson:
Although McKinney has never acknowledged that he knew Matthew, Jimenez found a dozen sources that had seen them together. One is Kathleen Johnson, the former owner of Laramie antiques store Granny’s Attic, who knew Henderson, McKinney and Matthew...
...“Russell Henderson used to hang around with gay people,” Johnson told me. “Laramie had a big gay population. I knew what people’s sexual orientation was because my best friend’s son was gay. I saw them hanging around with Russell.”
The police did not investigate the killers’ relationship to the gay community.
Again: because Matthew's death got instantly politicized or framed in a particular way. It was done. Who would rock that boat?
John Stoltenberg is a gay-rights activist who lived with the feminist writer Andrea Dworkin until her death in 2005. He’s a long-time supporter of The Laramie Project, but has also blogged positively about The Book of Matt. “Keeping Matthew as the poster boy of gay-hate crime and ignoring the full tragedy of his story has been the agenda of many gay-movement leaders,” he says. “Ignoring the tragedies of Matthew’s life prior to his murder will do nothing to help other young men in our community who are sold for sex, ravaged by drugs, and generally exploited. They will remain invisible and lost.”
Stoltenberg surely means porn actors among others. I get it, that it's uncomfortable to mention all this on a porn site.
Ted Henson is a former lover and long-term friend of Matthew’s. The pair originally met when Matt was growing up in Saudi Arabia. Henson told me he believes that The Book of Matt is “nothing more than the truth” and that he was “never certain” that the murder was an anti-gay hate crime.
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@leatherbear I have not followed this case closely, but two questions that come to mind are...
he was still alive after the beating. do you think they intended to kill him? And if so, why did they leave him alive? Perhaps they thought he was dead? And.. wasn't he TIED to a post? Truly some sick bastards.
What did he die from? Blood loss? Infection? Embolism? Brain Damage? I would hope that if someone was still alive days after a beating, that they would pull through unless they had brain damage.
I was read the last rites about 19 months ago due to smoke inhalation, and burned lungs, and told that I was going to die. When I heard that they were preparing to harvest my organs for donations, I got out of that hospital within minutes, and have since made a 100% recovery.
