Voices: Matthew Shepard’s brutal murder is still a warning to us all

I was 11 when they murdered Matthew. The windswept prairie outside Laramie, Wyoming where he was found – bloodied, beaten, bound to a wooden fence – by a cyclist was a far cry from the dilapidated duplex I shared with my family in Dayton, Ohio. Nonetheless, I identified the tousle-haired young man who they said was attacked for being gay. Every time his angelic countenance flashed across the television screen a recognition stirred deep inside me. He was me. I was him.

October 12 will mark the 25th anniversary of Matthew Shepard’s death. In the ensuing quarter-century, the LGBTQ community has made remarkable progress, even as we continue the struggle for equality and liberation. As we look ahead to Pride Month, a time for parties and protest, it is important that we reflect on this milestone and what Matthew means to our movement today.

Standing only 5’2” and red lipped, white skinned, and blue eyed, he epitomized the cornfed innocence of American boyhood even as a young adult of 21. Middle-class and middle-American, he reminded many a white suburban mother and father of their own precious brood, especially those with a boy who was perhaps just a little too slight and sensitive for 1990s masculinity.

It is worth contextualizing Matthew in the era he came to define. Matthew was attacked only five months after Ellen DeGeneres boldly announced “Yep, I’m Gay” on the cover of Time magazine, breaking the glass closet for TV stars. The Birdcage had been in theatres the year before, showing a loving if slightly dysfunctional gay family in a positive and affirming light with one of Hollywood’s most beloved talents, Robin Williams, as its lead.

Matthew’s murder in 1997 brought to the forefront of the national consciousness the violence and everyday hate lesbian and gay Americans face. The FBI’s own data reports nearly 1,400 victims of anti-gay violence just that year. Meanwhile, a working paper on President Bill Clinton’s second term released by the ACLU in 1999 found that while his record was far from perfect, Clinton “advanced lesbian and gay rights further than all of his predecessors combined” while noting that he regularly championed a gay-inclusive federal hate crimes bill. That bill would not become law until 2009, when President Barack Obama would sign into law a hate crimes prevention bill commonly known as the Matthew Shepard Act.

Since then, some writers have sought to undo the narrative and recast the meaning of Matthew.

Originally, one of his killers – Aaron McKinney, who along with Russell Henderson was convicted of Matthew’s murder – claimed he had acted out of homophobia when Matthew put his hand on McKinney’s leg. “Guess what, we’re not gay,” Sgt Rob Debree quoted McKinney as saying to the New York Times just over a month after Matthew’s death. “You’re going to get jacked. It’s Gay Awareness Week.”

Yet in 2004, McKinney and his girlfriend at the time of the murder both told ABC News that they had made that up, and that Matthew’s murder was not a hate crime. A 2013 book by Robert Jimenez posited that Matthew was a drug dealer who knew his killers, a claim that Rob Debree – the chief detective on the case – called “truly laughable.” Debree also stated that the book is full of “factual errors and lies.” Even Wyatt Skaggs, Russell Henderson’s defence attorney, told the Bay Area Reporter (one of the oldest LGBTQ news outlets in the country) that Jimenez is “a reporter who doesn’t know very much.”

Other reviews also called Jimenez’s credibility into question. “Jimenez never qualifies how credible the sources are, or validates their closeness to Shepard, or evaluates the potential motivations for their accounts,” Alyssa Rosenberg pointed out in a scathing review shortly after the book’s publication. That did not stop Guardian journalist Julie Bindel from framing Jiminez’s book as undoing a classist narrative that pitted the “affluent” Shephard against “us simple folks with the piece of straw hanging from our mouths, spitting tobacco and shooting pop cans from the front porch,” as Ray Hageman, who both Bindel and Jimenez claim covered the case for Wyoming radio, told the Guardian.

This effort over the past decade by some to dismiss the significance of Matthew Shephard is not, I suspect, without agenda. His murder was an inflection point in the struggle for LGBTQ acceptance and equality, galvanizing the modern gay rights movement movement around a young and innocent martyr. His story is thus an obvious target for those wishing to discredit or diminish that movement. This is despite McKinney himself never claiming to have known Shepard prior to the murder and all credible evidence suggesting the facts as established in 1998 are indeed the facts.

Regardless of their motives, no one – even those operating in good faith – can be allowed to rewrite history with hearsay and innuendo. Matthew Shepard is too important, both as an individual and as a symbol. His place in American history is sacrosanct, as demonstrated by his 2018 internment in the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, “where he rests in safety alongside Helen Keller and other saints of God,” the Cathedral’s website states.

The lessons we can draw from his life and his death demand honest reflection from every American. The hate that Matthew’s murder spotlighted still exists today. Just last year, five people were killed by a far-right gunman in an anti-LGBTQ attack on a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado. In 2018, 19-year-old Blaze Bernstein, targeted for being both Jewish and gay, was killed by a former classmate who is a neo-Nazi.

Data from the FBI shows there were more than 1,300 anti LGBTQ hate incidents in 2021, the most recent year available at the time of this writing. That is almost as high as the 1,400 incidents found in 1997, the year Matthew Shepard was murdered. There is no reason to think this will improve anytime soon, especially given that 2023 has set the record for anti-LGBTQ legislation across the country. This includes at least four in Wyoming.

A silver lining is that the state’s own version of Florida’s nefarious “don’t say gay” law failed to pass, meaning perhaps Matthew Shepard can be taught in history classes in his home state. Will he? I doubt it. As Susan Stubson, a member of the Wyoming Republican Party, recently wrote in the New York Times, “Christian nationalists have hijacked both my Republican Party and my faith community by blurring the lines between church and government and in the process rebranding our state’s identity.” She is right to be concerned. A state nicknamed the “Equality State,” whose motto is simply “Equal Rights,” still does not have a hate crime statute on the books, 25 years after one of its most famous sons was murdered for being gay.

It is as if Wyoming has forgotten Matthew Shepard. Perhaps they have, or at the very least prefer to, his death being an inconvenient reminder of the price of hate. The rest of us cannot forget what happened on the high plains outside Laramie all those years ago, when an innocent young man was so badly beaten that his limp little body was mistaken for a scarecrow. We cannot forget for Matthew’s sake, but also for the sake of all the young people who Matthew reminded us of. Young people like Blaze Bernstein. Young people like me, sitting in that dingy duplex, watching the news and wondering if it could happen to Matthew Shepard, could it happen to me.

No child deserves to feel that fear. No parent deserves to know that pain. No American deserves to lose their life simply for being LGBTQ. In an age of rising homophobia and transphobia, may Matthew Shepard remind us of what hate can do – and what a community and a country rallying together to fight injustice can accomplish in the name of one of our own.

Today, as it was 25 years ago, that name is Matthew Shepard.

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