via metafilter, requiem
Ten years ago today gay college student Matthew Shepard died after having been savagely beaten, left alone for 18-hours and found tied to a fence five days prior on the outskirts of Laramie, Wyoming. America was stunned by the vicious hate crime. As his mother, Judy, pushes for passage of the Matthew Shepard Act, advocating for federal hate crimes legislation, and directs the Matthew Shepard Foundation, folks in Laramie ask: "...how has the town changed since 1998? ...how do we measure that change?" And yet 10 years after Matthew's death the 1969 United States federal hate-crime law has not been expanded to include crimes motivated by a victim's actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability due to a veto threat by President Bush.
Matthew's mother remembers him ten years later [video | 06:17].
Matthew's mother remembers him ten years later [video | 06:17].
But also, I was thinking just now how Matt Shepard's murder seems to have effected me so differently from so many other queers. I guess Mathew's was somehow the first public homophobic murder. He was the first one that anyone besides us cared about, so I know his death meant a lot to people. Like, not only was it horrific, but it was actually recognized as horrific by the straight world, and somehow I think a lot of us felt his death more because of that - the way a community feeds off of its own energy.
But I had this weird cynical reaction when he was killed. Of course I thought it was awful, but I somehow felt so angry about the reaction. Like, where the fuck was 60 Minutes or the 10 O'clock news or whatever for the last 30 years? Why did they suddenly care?
Now that 10 years has passed and a lot has changed for queers since then, and I'm not so young and dumb, I can see his death in its simpler, more terrible terms.