Matthew Shepard was a young gay man
brutally murdered while tied to a fence post in Wyoming on October 6,
1998. His murder spurred outrage and fierce
protests, and was the impetus (along with the James Byrd dragging murder in East
Texas) for both the Federal Hate Crimes Prevention Act, and in Shepard’s case,
President Obama’s professed passion about LBGT equality. Now a new book by journalist Stephen Jimenez,
himself gay, titled The Book of Matt:
Hidden Truths about the Murder of Matthew
Shepard, calls into question the central ethos of the case.
The case played out as one of a homophobic
hate crime. What didn’t come out much in
the media was that the Aaron McKinney, one of the attackers was also gay, or at
least bisexual, and had a sexual relationship with Shepard. Jimenez’s book does not attempt to change the
fact that Shepard was horribly murdered, but, as the Advocate puts it, “may change how we interpret
the murder.”
The
Book of Matt
looks at the culture of meth in Wyoming and its brutal consequences. The Advocate
says:
“By several accounts, McKinney had been on a meth bender
for five days prior to the murder, and spent much of October 6 trying to find more drugs. By the evening he
was so wound up that he attacked three other men in addition to Shepard. Even
Cal Rerucha, the prosecutor who had pushed for the death sentence for McKinney
and Henderson, would later concede on ABC’s 20/20 that “it was a murder that was driven by drugs.”
No one was talking much about meth abuse in 1998, though it was rapidly establishing itself in small-town America, as well as in metropolitan gay clubs, where it would leave a catastrophic legacy. In Wyoming in the late 1990s, eighth graders were using meth at a higher rate than 12th graders nationwide. It’s hardly surprising to learn from Jimenez that Shepard was also a routine drug user, and — according to some of his friends — an experienced dealer. (Although there is no real evidence for supposing that Shepard was using drugs himself on the night of his murder).”
The Advocate
also points out that a former lover of Shepard confirmed that Shepard and McKinney
had sex while doing drugs in the back of a limo. The manager of a Denver gay
bar recounted his shock at realizing that “these guys who killed that kid came
from inside our own community.”
A fact
pointed to by both the book and the article in the Advocate is the force with
which Shepard was murdered, having a gun barrel slammed into his head so
violently as to crush his brain stem. It
could be that this was a hate crime, or a drug crime, or both. The book
promises to get into the facts and elucidate them as much as can be done in a
crime so brutal and full of complexity.
The
Book of Matt:
Hidden Truths about the Murder of Matthew
Shepard (Steerforth Press) is due out October 1 and looks to be well worth
the read.
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