I can’t recall exactly when I became aware of the brutal attack on Matthew Shepard. It must have been pretty soon after the story caught on with the media because I can remember seeing a spokesperson on TV from the hospital where Matthew was being treated for severe head injuries giving updates regarding his condition. I related to Matthew’s story immediately. He was gay, and, like me, he was from a rural state. He also chose to continue to live in that state once he became an adult and to go to college there. I was from West Virginia, and I went to WVU. A year before he was attacked I had underwent head surgery to have a brain tumor removed. I was keenly aware of how any kind of trauma to the head could change your life. I had been cut open by highly trained professionals under general anesthesia, and yet I had to live with pain, facial paralysis, and serious balance and hearing impairments, so I cringed all the more at the idea of being repeatedly struck in the head with the butt of a gun while fully conscious. And I worried what kind of hell would be in store for Matthew if by some miracle he should happen to live. But of course he didn’t live. Several days after he was attacked, Matthew Shepard escaped the clutches of this world, and I hope that he now resides in one free of hate.
I followed the story closely, so I’ve been aware of certain facts for some time. I knew that Matthew’s father was in the oil business. I knew that Dennis Shepard worked in Saudi Arabia. I knew that Matthew went to high school in Switzerland. I knew that, while still in high school, he was gang raped when he and several classmates visited Morocco. I knew his rapists stole his shoes after they had taken their turns violating him. I knew that, oddly enough, his murderers also stole his shoes the night they assaulted him. I knew that his murderers, two young men close to Matthew’s age, picked Matthew up in a bar in the college town of Laramie, Wyoming. I had heard the details of that night laid out may times. Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney pretended that they were gay, convinced Matthew to leave the bar with them, persuaded him to get into McKinney’s pickup, and then they drove him to a secluded spot, robbed him, and then McKinney became violently abusive. After Henderson tied Matthew to a fence, McKinney struck Matthew in the head several times with the butt of a gun, and then the two young men left him there to die alone. Matthew was out there for 19 hours before someone spotted him. By that time he was in a deep coma from which he never awoke. His face was covered in blood except for tear tracks under his eyes. These details have been seared into my brain.
I was taken aback when I saw pictures of Matthew taken before the attack. He looked like such a sweet and unassuming young man. I could not imagine why anyone would want to hurt him. Then I heard how small he was – just 5'2" and not much more than 100 pounds. Since he had been tied to a fence and left to die, images of Christ sprung to mind. His face was angelic, and he seemed to have taken on the sins of the society in which he lived without complaint. It was hard for me not to view him as a martyr. But Judy Shepard, his mother and author of The Meaning of Matthew, insists that we should not see her son in this light. According to her, the tragedy of his death does not lie in the fact that a perfect young man was murdered. She reminds us that Matthew was a flawed human being just like the rest of us but that he was deserving of respect, and he should have been able to live his life without fear of violence. What happened to him should not happen to anyone, no matter how imperfect they are. Mrs. Shepard makes a good point. But I think there’s a part of me that will always see an angel when I run across a picture of Matthew’s pretty face.
Judy Shepard writes of Matthew’s childhood and how she and her family have struggled to come to terms with what happened to him in a straightforward, no nonsense style. And she does not offer much in the way of intellectual speculation as to why her son was gay or why anyone would hate him. But the lack of flourish in Mrs. Shepard’s book serves her message well. She comes across as honest, her words deeply felt and sincere.
I knew the Shepards were from Wyoming, but since Dennis Shepard worked in Saudi Arabia and Matthew attended high school in Europe, I got the impression that this was a well-heeled, globetrotting family. But Mrs. Shepard lets us know that Matthew spent most of his life in the small town of Casper, Wyoming. Mr. Shepard didn’t get the job overseas until Matthew was in his mid teens. So Matthew was a small town boy who had been given a few opportunities that broadened his horizons. Following his high school career, he returned to the States and lived in the south for a while. Then he returned to Casper before deciding to move to Denver. And finally he chose to attend college in Laramie.
Mrs. Shepard suspected her son was gay when he was still very young. But she kept her thoughts to herself, and she admits to hoping that she was wrong. She writes of how Matthew called her early one morning while she was in Saudi Arabia and broke the news to her. Mrs. Shepard responded by asking Matthew why it took him so long to tell her. He asked her how she knew before he did. After Matthew’s death, others asked her when she figured it out. She once claimed that it was when Matthew dressed up as Dolly Parton for Halloween two years in a row. Some have criticized her comments and claim she was advancing a stereotype. Mrs. Shepard admits that this answer was pat and that she can’t really pinpoint an exact time when she started to suspect. But I personally have no problem with her comment. Of course lots of people like Dolly Parton – gay and straight, as well as young and old – but I’m sure that Mrs. Shepard sensed that Matthew was relating to Dolly in a way that many little boys wouldn’t. And there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging this. As strange as it may seem, many gay men are fascinated and drawn to certain female celebrities, such as Dolly Parton. And this interest often starts in childhood even though gay boys generally grow up in isolation from one another, so it's not merely a matter of being socialized into the gay subculture.
The transition from childhood to adult freedoms and responsibilities can be difficult for many young people. Nevertheless, Matthew had done well in high school, despite having ADD. And he was a social success. Matthew was not shy at all, and he had no fear of going up to strangers and starting conversations. He made friends easily. But it seems the rape got to Matthew. He tried to attend college right after graduating, but he soon dropped out. And he had serious problems with depression and post traumatic stress. Mrs. Shepard claims that Matthew did not take his medications as prescribed and that he often drank too much. Relatives visited him in Denver and found him living in a dirty, disheveled apartment, and it seems he had begun to neglect his personal hygiene, too. Matthew admitted that days would sometimes go by when he would not leave the apartment or talk to anyone. The boy seemed to want to move forward, but he couldn’t get any traction. When he decided to attend college in Laramie, his family thought he was at last on the road to recovery. But then an odd thing happened that made everyone worry about his mental health. The Shepards came back to the States for a vacation with their sons, and while on the road, they rented out a couple of motel rooms. Mr. and Mrs. Shepard slept in one, and Matthew and his brother slept in another. But when the Shepards went to their sons’ room the next morning, Matthew wasn’t there. They’re younger son informed them that he was at the police station. Turns out Matthew was so restless he was unable to simply pass the night in that room with his brother. Instead he went out to a bar, and he ended up leaving the bar with a heterosexual couple and the bartender. The group went to a remote location, got out, and when the couple started kissing, Matthew tried to get the bartender to go with him to the other side of the vehicle. Matthew later claimed he only wanted to give the couple some privacy, but the bartender thought Matthew was making a pass, so he punched Matthew. Apparently he hit the boy hard enough to knock him out for a few seconds, and this somehow triggered a flashback to Matthew’s gang rape in Morocco. When he came to, he thought he had been raped again. Later when he got back to the motel room, he was still very upset, still convinced that he had been raped. He even called the police and told them that he had been raped. It turned out that he hadn’t, and his family was understandably perplexed by his behavior. Why couldn’t he just spend the night with his brother? Why did he insist on drinking so much? Why did he insist on going out with strangers? Why would he think he had been raped when he hadn’t?
Since Matthew had such a vivid flashback of what happened to him in Morocco over three years before, and since it was so overwhelming that he was unable to reality test it for several hours, I have a strong suspicion that Matthew was very seriously ill. I think he was much too ill to be living alone. Of course I don’t fault the Shepards for going back to Saudi Arabia after this incident. They had their own lives to lead, and Matthew was nearly twenty-two at this point. But I think it’s a shame that he was left to his own devices, a young man who had been having trouble for years. He sometimes couldn’t manage to shower regularly or take his medications daily. He was experiencing flashbacks that, at least on one occasion, morphed into a delusion. And he was self-medicating with alcohol. I’ve had my own problems with depression and post traumatic stress, and I was very ill when I was Matthew’s age. I know that someone like Matthew can engage in self-destructive behavior that is baffling to others. Depression and anxiety can cloud your judgement. Young people have an especially hard time dealing with serious mental illness, such as major depression, because they have little experience to help them put things in perspective. Depression can rob you of your hope, and if you’ve never went through a full cycle, you have no way of knowing that the pain you feel will come to an end.
While Matthew was being treated for his injuries in Fort Collins, it was revealed that he had contracted HIV. According to Mrs. Shepard, Matthew’s doctor concluded that he had been infected fairly recently given the large viral load detected in his blood. Mrs. Shepard reports that she found cold remedied in Matthew’s apartment in Laramie, indicating that the virus may have already started to affect Matthew’s health. Of course by 1998, HIV wasn’t the death sentence it had been back in the 80's, but if Matthew had lived, he would have had to learn to take his medications in a timely manner, which is something he had trouble with in regards to his antidepressant and antianxity medications. Mrs. Shepard admits to being puzzled and disappointed by Matthew’s HIV status. She accepts that her son was a sexual person, but she had hoped he would be more careful. She says he was very worried about HIV after he was raped and that he got tested regularly for a long time after that. But I suspect his mental health may have had a role in Matthew contracting HIV. He may have stopped caring about himself enough to insist his partners wear condoms. Depression will do that to you. And given Matthew’s propensity to go out to bars by himself, and for going home with strangers, it’s easy to imagine that he may have been raped again. I’m not saying there was anything wrong with Matthew’s desire to socialize in bars, or even his willingness to leave those bars with people he had just met. Young people, both gay and straight, have a strong desire to have a good time and meet new friends, and of course they have sexual appetites, but partying with strangers does carry with it a certain amount of risk. Given that Matthew was so inclined to talk to strangers, and given that he liked making new friends, I wonder if his rape somehow robbed him of some of the trust he placed in humanity in general. And I wonder if meeting strangers and going home with them was a way to reassure himself that people could be trusted.
Knowing that Matthew had been struggling for several years makes his untimely death seem all the more sad. He never got a chance to work through his issues. We can only guess how far this bright, friendly young man would have gone. Mrs. Shepard claims he was doing well in Laramie despite his difficulties. He was going to class and keeping his grades up. He had also joined an organization for gay students, and he was helping them plan for National Coming Out Day. When the phone rang early one October morning back in 1998, Mrs. Shepard assumed that it was Matthew. He often called her in Saudi Arabia without regard to the time difference. I can only imagine the shock when it turned out to be a doctor informing Mrs. Shepard that her son had been attacked and that he wasn’t expected to survive.
Of course the Shepards returned to the States as soon as possible, but before going on to Fort Collins, they first had to pick up their younger son who was attending high school in another city. Mrs. Shepard writes that it was while they were in the airport meeting Matthew’s younger brother that she saw newspaper headlines about what happened to Matthew. And in the days that followed the attention from the media and well-wishers from across the country and around the world only grew. It would have been hard enough to deal with the fact that a loved one had been so gravely injured by thugs, but it’s difficult to imagine what it was like for them to become household names at the exact same time. We have all seen the media focus singular attention on a particular person or family, pluck them from relative obscurity and make them the center of a national discussion. Mrs. Shepard, in her book, helps us see this process from the other side. She admits that she doesn’t know why Matthew’s case became such a huge story. Of course what happened to Matthew was of the utmost importance to her and her family, but why would people who had never met Matthew be so interested in him? Mrs. Shepard speculates that maybe the news media simply was in need of a good story, and Matthew filled a vacuum. Whatever the reason, I’m not sure I would have been able to handle the stress as well as the Shepards did. The fact that a loved one had been bludgeoned and was in a coma would have been hard enough for me to process, but if I suddenly started getting phone calls from the President of the United States at the same time, I might conclude I had lost my mind.
We all know that the media attention attracted Fred Phelps who attempted to capitalize on Matthew’s death by coming to town with his God Hates Fags signs. Mrs. Shepard states in her book that she had never heard of anyone protesting a funeral before. I’m pretty sure I had never heard of such a thing either. But aside from that nasty surprise coming on top of an already excruciatingly painful event, more bad news was coming. Mrs. Shepard informs us that Matthew’s death lead to two other deaths in a round about way. His elderly great uncle drove through a snow storm in order to attend Matthew’s funeral, and he had a heart attack and died while in the church. And then three weeks later, Matthew’s grandfather died. Seems he had cancer, and the stress of coming to terms with the attack on his grandson, the hospital vigil, the media attention, and helping clean out Matthew’s apartment pushed the man over the edge. How sad.
The Shepards caught a break when Russell Henderson decided to accept a plea bargain the following spring, so they didn’t have to deal with a trial until that fall. But then the shit hit the fan. Aaron McKinney did not deny that he killed Matthew, but his lawyers decided to put up the most insulting defense imaginable -- gay panic. They tried to argue that McKinney’s violent assault on Matthew was at least in part understandable because Matthew had made sexual advances. They also tried to paint Matthew as a sexual predator. The bartender who socked Matthew the summer before he started college in Laramie was called to the stand. And another young man who was in the bar the night Matthew was attacked also testified. He claimed that Matthew had made him uncomfortable by sitting down at his table, flirting with him by luridly licking his lips, and then saying something about head before leaving. Like Mrs. Shepard, I find this bar patron’s account hard to swallow. He made it sound like Matthew was some silly, overbearing tart. I think it’s much more likely that he suspected Matthew was gay and then read all kinds of suggestive things into his mannerisms and actions. And he readily admitted that he didn’t catch everything Matthew had said when he heard the word “head.” He just assumed Matthew was offering sexual favors. But so what if Matthew had been flirty and direct? What’s wrong with simply saying “no thank you” or even “fuck off” to an advance? I don’t think punching someone who weighs no more than 110 pounds is warranted. I certainly don’t think murder is justified. McKinney claims Matthew put his hands on his leg while he, Matthew and Henderson were in the truck. So what if he had? Henderson and McKinney admitted that they tricked Matthew into thinking they were gay. Maybe Matthew got the impression that these boys were interested in him. I don’t see anything wrong with a 21-year-old man hoping to have a little adult fun with a fellow consenting adult. The problem with the “gay panic” defense is that it implies gay men should never make a pass at anyone unless they know beforehand that such a pass will be welcome, and it attempts to validate violent reactions to unwelcome passes from gay men. The “gay panic” defense sends a clear signal: gay men should remain in the closet and know their place, and if one reveals himself to a straight man, that straight man has a right to kill him. What insane bullshit.
I’m glad that the jury didn’t fall for this nonsense, but it’s too bad that the Shepards had to listen to such blather about their murdered son. But it seems Mrs. Shepard held it together pretty well throughout the trial. She claims that the only time she lost it was when they brought out Matthew’s clothes tacked to a display board. It was understandably hard for her to maintain emotional distance because the clothes made everything personal. She had seen Matthew wearing those clothes.
Mrs. Shepard admits that it was hard for her to understand why anyone would want to hurt Matthew, let along kill him, or protest his funeral. The level of hate directed at her kind and loving son was unfathomable. But it seems she also had a hard time understanding the extraordinary sympathy of strangers. On the one hand, she did appreciate it, but on the other, it was puzzling. And I get the sense that in the beginning she was more than a little suspicious of it. She writes of attending one of the vigils for Matthew outside the hospital. This was before her face had been plastered all over the news, so she was able to go incognito. When one of the speakers mentioned something about a political issue that was of importance to the local gay community, she felt that Matthew was being used. Of course since she was Matthew’s mother, and since he was still in a coma at that point, the only thing she wanted to hear about was Matthew. But as time passed, she began to see things differently. She says that eventually she came to accept that even though the thousands who showed an interest in Matthew’s case didn’t know her son as she did, they were relating, at least in part, to the person Matthew had been in life. I wonder if she started to see the bigger picture when she began reading the notes and emails sent to her from parents wanting advice on how to come to terms with their gay child or young gay people who just needed to tell someone about coming out to their parents and getting kicked out of the house.
Some of the people who sent notes also included donations that were meant to help cover Matthew’s medical expenses. These donations amounted to nearly one hundred thousand dollars. Since the Shepards didn’t need the money, they decided that it should be used for a good cause that Matthew would have approved of, and that’s how the Matthew Shepard Foundation came to be.
Mrs. Shepard spells out three primary goals of the organization – stop the hate, work toward legal equality for gay people, and help educate the public on the needs of gay youth. I greatly appreciate the work the organization is doing, and I especially appreciate the focus on gay youth. I’m afraid that once gay people escape their childhoods and establish their independence, they often never look back, at least not with the intention of trying to figure out how things could have been done differently. But my interest in psychology long ago lead me to believe that the gay community will never be whole until the majority of us comes from supportive, nurturing families.
Judy Shepard writes that she never imagined that she would become a public speaker, but in the years since Matthew’s death, she has spent a huge amount of her time traveling the country telling audiences about her son. She also states that she still hangs Matthew’s stocking up during the Christmas season. That made me cry. I cried many times while reading Mrs. Shepard’s book. But I found the experience richly rewarding. I feel like I know and understand Matthew in a way I didn’t before. I’m sure I would have liked him if I had ever gotten the chance to know him. I admire his mother a great deal. She says that she still has not gotten over losing her son and the only way she can cope is by not picturing or imagining the pain and suffering he went through the night he was assaulted. But despite this, Mrs. Shepard has found a way of turning her personal grief into something positive.
The Meaning of Matthew by Judy Shepard at Amazon
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