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Cathy Renna Reflects on Lasting Impact of Matthew Shepard on 365gay.com

Why The Shepard Murder Was Different

by Cathy Renna

Just before 1 a.m. on Oct. 12, 2008, it will be 10 years since the death of Matthew Shepard. There is little need to recount the details the brutal beating and death of the young man from Wyoming who became an international symbol of homophobic hate.

But a decade after his senseless death, it does make sense to look at the enduring impact that Matthew’s life and death have had upon our culture, our community, and the larger political climate.

As we approach a presidential election in which the stakes could not be higher, there may be no better story that exemplifies the state of our movement.

In order to do that, we must look at the unprecedented and never-to-be-repeated media and community response to a gay murder. We also must examine our community’s response in the context of the ongoing epidemic of hate crimes against GLBT people.

It is easy to do the analysis. We have been unable to pass a federal hate crimes bill inclusive of sexual orientation and gender identity. There is still no state-level hate crime legislation in Wyoming. On a sickeningly regular basis, those of us who work in the movement hear about individuals who are killed in hate crimes: Lawrence King, Sean Kennedy, Sakia Gunn, F.C. Martinez, and Amancio Corrales are some recent victims.

Other incidents include the Orlando couple that returned home to find their house in flames and the words “Die Fag” spray-painted on the steps; the recent taunting of an eight-year-old Massachusetts girl by classmates because she has a lesbian mother.

The sense of being “other” is still a constant feature for many of us, even those who try to assimilate as much as possible and proclaim that they’re just ordinary citizens like everyone else.

A more optimistic analysis would say that the waves of cultural visibility we saw in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s have brought unprecedented change.

The world knows who we are in a more substantive manner than ever before, however underrepresented our community’s diversity may be. We can now get married in California and Massachusetts, although the lack of federal benefits is the big hurdle that will take many years to overcome.

It is worth looking at 1998 a bit before we consider 2008 and the current state of GLBT politics and culture. In 1998, the country had already been shocked by the grisly dragging death of James Byrd, Jr. in June of that year. Also in 1998, we had a president who picked up the phone and called Matthew’s parents to offer his condolences. The family of Lawrence King, who was killed in a recent incident, could not have dreamed of getting a call from the current President.

Indeed no such calls have issued from the White House for the past seven-plus years.

Moisés Kaufman, the writer and director of The Laramie Project, remarked that it seemed to him that the country was finally ready to talk about our issues in 1998, after six years of Clinton and increasing community visibility. It’s an argument that has its merits, coming from someone who created the most forceful work of art to come out of Matthew Shepard’s death. Call it a tipping point.

What concerns me is that we did not take the opportunity to build on the moment to benefit more of the marginalized and less visible members of our community. A week after my first trip to Laramie in 1998, I found myself in an alley in Baltimore at a vigil for a young transgendered woman killed in a bias crime. A dozen people and a couple of cameras showed up, certainly not the throngs of people or media that showed up in Laramie.

For the last 10 years, I’ve told the story of going from a Family Research Council press conference on Oct. 9, 1998, to my office in Washington, D.C., and being bombarded with calls and e-mails about this young man who was found clinging to life in Wyoming after a brutal beating that was being described as a possible hate crime. I was working for glaad (the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) at the time, and it was neither the first nor the last hate crime I covered.

But it was certainly the one that got the most community reaction in all those years.

Hours later, I was on a plane to Laramie at the behest of the students in the GLBT campus group. I ended up returning many times to face the media, to cover the trials and the community organizing, and to experience the emotional rollercoaster of this event.

One of the most affecting moments of my life was standing outside the courtroom and talking to the press about the “gay panic” defense that was being dragged out by Aaron McKinney’s desperate lawyers.

I remember saying: “If every straight woman did to straight men what those boys did to Matthew when someone made a pass at them, there would be far fewer straight men in the world.

While this kind of marker—can it really be a decade?—gives us an opportunity to reflect on what has changed as well as what hasn’t, I can’t help being reminded of Matthew and his family for what they separately went through.

The recent murders of Lawrence King and Simmie Williams, Jr. brought up all of the feelings of frustration and made me think of what their lives were like, how their families and friends must now feel, what will happen in the aftermath.

The reality is that our community has gotten better at drawing attention to hate crimes, which the mainstream media sometimes report, but rarely as thoroughly as they should.

Why Matthew’s murder got so much attention is a complicated question, but an interesting one as we gain some distance from the event.

“Why did Matthew’s murder get so much attention when this is such a common occurrence?” asked Judy Shepard, Matthew’s mother, the first time we met in person, at the 1999 glaad awards.

At that time, Judy was in the early stage of what has become a lifelong crusade for justice for GLBT people. After thanking us for the work glaad had done relating to her son’s murder and in particular the media coverage, she admitted to knowing little about the larger GLBT community and was full of smart questions.

Her question about the uniqueness of her son’s case I found the most challenging, but I answered as best as I could. It seemed to me that Matthew was the archetypal “golden boy,” someone the media—and our community—saw as non-threatening, indeed vulnerable, attractive but not overly sexualized.

Unlike many victims of hate crimes, such as those involving gender bending, Matthew could be seen not as “other” but as one of us.

Judy and Dennis, Matthew’s father, are the first to acknowledge that Matthew Shepard wasn’t the perfect young man who came to be mythologized in the media.

A tremendous amount of misinformation about him flew around, but at the end of the day, very few of us were making the point that his death, while brutal, was a common occurrence. The level of overkill, the brutality, and the graphic nature of the murder, which was compared to a crucifixion at the time, made this incident stand out from other brutal hate crimes against gay people.

Having said that, I hope we can still ask ourselves some difficult questions.

Why did thousands of people hit the streets for Matthew and not others? Was it that our more “mainstream” leaders finally saw a victim that looked like them?

There’s no denying the bitterness felt by communities of color, transgendered folks, and others who noted that hate crimes in their community were unlikely to receive this kind of attention.

Luckily for us, Matthew’s family grasped the potential for education in the moment and have now dedicated their lives to working for our community’s safety and equality.

Judy Shepard has spoken to over one million students and others at colleges across the country, testified before Congress about hate crimes, and worked tirelessly for GLBT rights and for the passage of the Matthew Shepard Act, which would add sexual orientation and gender identity to the categories protected by federal hate crimes laws.

The foundation founded by the family recently announced a campaign designed to shed light on the sources of violence and prejudice faced by all people and to replace hate with “understanding, compassion, and acceptance.” (Note that their goal is not “tolerance,” a word that both Judy and I dislike.) Their main focus is youth, and the section of the website called Matthew’s Place is a safe space for young people as well as a resource.

I hope, as we acknowledge the 10th year remembrance of Matthew’s death in October, that we can constructively reflect on what work we still need to do to end the epidemic of hate crimes against our community, how we can better engage allies like Judy and Dennis, and work for the kind of media coverage and legislation that we need to create a culture we can both be proud of and feel safe in.

This issue has certainly not gone away. Recently, Sean Kennedy’s killer only got a paltry three years in prison, which brings up the political unpopularity of aggressively prosecuting these crimes by district attorneys. The situation is even worse when the victim is transgendered, where police at best could care less and at worse are grossly insensitive.

November looms, and it is worth noting that there’s a section on Barack Obama’s website about expanding hate crimes statutes.

It says: “Obama will strengthen federal hate crimes legislation, expand hate crimes protection by passing the Matthew Shepard Act, and reinvigorate enforcement at the Department of Justice’s Criminal Section.” There isn’t even a “Civil Rights” section on the McCain site under “issues,” much less a statement of support for specific hate crimes legislation.

As we ponder the significance of 1998 and 2008, it is well to remember that Matthew had decided to devote his life to politics and activism. It is impossible to know where that might have led, but in dying he became an object lesson for America on the power of hatred and the need for understanding, compassion, and acceptance.

Read the story on 365gay.com