In October of , Matthew was lured from a bar, brutally beaten, and left tied to a fence outside of town. He was found 18 hours later, and died days later having never regained consciousness. He was murdered because he was gay. The productions are to showcase our students, our auditorium, the district. The Laramie Project is performed by dozens of high schools across the country every year.
On the evening of 6 October , Matthew went to the Fireside bar, a local hangout that was purportedly gay-friendly. It was karaoke night, and locals rubbed shoulders with workers calling in for a swift drink on their way home.
In the truck Matthew was robbed of his keys, wallet and shoes and beaten repeatedly by one or both of the men. He was then taken from the truck, pistol whipped up to 18 times on the head, and kicked between the legs. Matthew was tied to a fence, set on fire, and left unconscious. Fifteen hours after the attack, student Aaron Kreifels was out riding his bike when he discovered Matthew tied to the fence, barely alive.
He initially mistook him for a scarecrow. The first officer at the scene was Reggie Fluty. I spoke to Waters, who has since retired from the police, having seen him praise The Book of Matt on social media. They contacted the Associated Press and a number of local gay organisations that same day.
Boulden later said the assault was identified as a hate crime by a policeman. Stephen Jimenez is an award-winning journalist and gay man. 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 complicates the original story of two strangers walking into a bar and targeting Matthew — someone they did not know — because he was gay.
Although McKinney has never acknowledged that he knew Matthew, Jimenez found a dozen sources that had seen them together. The young, unemployed men had not had easy lives. McKinney had spent much of his childhood alone, left by his mother with his grandparents, who locked him in the basement to keep him out of trouble.
I saw them hanging around with Russell. Five days after the attack, on 12 October, Matthew died. The funeral was attended by more than 1, mourners — and picketed by the Westboro Baptist Church, led by Fred Phelps, a defrocked minister and founder of GodHatesFags.
They were like the identity politics of criminal law. This is what gave some other groups the idea that hate-crime legislation was a good thing. Those false tales struck fear in many people and cast a pale over decent, honest folks in a State where a handshake means more than a contract. One of the most honorable moments in all of this was when the students dressed as angels quietly marched to the courthouse, sheets for wings, and blocked the view of hate filled idiots that wished to further their own agenda.
I remember being so proud to sit close with my K-9 partner and protect those students, should things go wrong. It is an effort he, and we, can be proud of. I hope that this message gets past the moneyed gatekeepers of the community, who are often heavily involved in maintaining this systematic oppression of gay youths. The problem is that McKinney and Henderson have admitted that they targeted Shepard because he was gay. No, not because of a gay panic defense. They admitted that they targeted Shepard specifically because of his sexuality.
A deeply thought provoking piece. While gay hate crimes are indisputably horrific, is it not drug use and sexual assault that are the true catastrophes in gay America? Hating an individual over a drug deal is not the same as hating a whole class of individuals. Some of us insist on thinking beyond what the orthodoxy says. There may be other aspects to the crime, but to pretend that it had nothing to do with Shepard being gay is to ignore reality. Wow — on its face, this is quite remarkable. Without exception, all witnesses and all authors have agendas that are their own and thus their stories are limited to versions of the truth.
A drug deal gone bad and a hate crime are not mutually exclusive. While events prior to the night of the murder have impact on the murder, they do not change how the events occurred that night.
Not only did he kill Shepard, he blamed Shepard as the instigator of the events leading to the murder. What difference does it matter whether McKinney and Shepard had had consensual sex in the past?
Or both, seems most likely. Or both. As indicated in this column, The Book of Matt makes it clear the killing was more complex than an out-and-out gay bashing, but that does not change that the killing was indeed a hate crime. Although they published no less than 9 articles on my book, their so-called debunking is a total fraud.
They never offered a shred of evidence to refute my findings. Those of you who continue to say that Russell Henderson stated an anti-gay motive are misinformed and mistaken. I invite you to produce one actual court document or police report to prove that allegation — not rumor or hearsay, but an actual verifiable statement. Since Media Matters claims to be an expert on the case, ask them to produce that evidence. In none of these statements did Henderson ever express anti-gay animus of any kind.
The fact that Russell Henderson never had a trial with the opportunity to tell his side of the story is one of the troubling legacies of this case. If Matthew were still alive, he would be appalled by that injustice.
In the LGBT community, we should all be concerned about justice. I have no problem with criticism of my book — I welcome it.
But guys, at least form an opinion based on your own reading, not on what a bunch of spin-meisters like Media Matters tells you. Just go to the library and read the book for free like John Stoltenberg did.
He had the same reservations and concerns some of you do. As for the claim that my sources are anonymous, there is a list of named sources in the book. You simply cannot have it both ways regarding Russell Henderson. Henderson acted as an accessory in the murder and that makes an accessory to the hate crime too. Fine, your investigation leads to new information and different views of previous information. I suppose you believe that Dan White, in addition to committing revenge murders of George Moscone and Harvey Milk was not also an anti-gay hate crime against Milk?
Intertwined motives do not erase or render any one motive as less significant. DeBree, an experienced policeman, insists the crime in no way fits the pattern of a robbery or a meth binge attack.
There is nothing hidden anywhere in this case, beyond the motivations of the people who want it to be about something other than homophobia, and that only barely. Any confusion as to the facts of the case has been deliberately sown by people with their own reasons for doing that. I have no idea what Jimenez actual interests here are. But his work is to journalism as so many other crappy bar stool conspiracy theories are.
We have all seen lately how automatically that reflex to blame the victim springs into action in certain quarters when it comes to the violent death of young black males. The hated other always bring it upon themselves. I knew before I began writing it that concerted efforts had been made to refute and denounce The Book of Matt in order, it would seem, to scare people away from reading it. The reason I knew was because those efforts had worked on me.
My purpose in writing this essay was not, however, to refute those refutations or denounce those denunciations but rather to speak my truth—that reading the book changed and opened my mind. Inspired by it, I hoped to frame a new conversation that I believe needs to be had in two larger communities that I belong to: the one that cares about theater and the one that cares about rescuing young people from sexual abuse, prostitution, and drugs.
In a context of compassion and care, that of course matters—but it ought not be the criterion for our concern. I honestly doubt it.
There is a mythology that has grown up around Matthew Shepard that has prompted some good theater and served some good social purposes; I do not dispute that. But what struck me when I read The Book of Matt was how these three life crises all converged and overlapped in Matthew, and how sad that made me for his sake. Just…horribly, terribly sad. Will others who read The Book of Matt have identical epiphanies? Of course not; everyone who reads it will read it differently; maybe some after reading it will continue to quarrel with it.
But I predict that rejection of the book out of hand will become less and less supportable and defensible as a principled position the more people read it for themselves. I see.
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