Losing Matthew Shepard the Book

Losing Matthew Shepard

The book Losing Matt Shepard (Loffreda, 2000) tells the story of the murder of a young gay man in Laramie, Wyoming, the trial, and its effect on the country. The author begins the book with a bald statement of the facts of the murder, contrasting the beauty of the locale with the horror of what took place there when two men tied Matthew Shepard to a fence, beat him with a gun, and left him tied there to die. The case is not a completely unique incident, as horrible as it was, for anti-gay violence in the country takes place virtually every day. This case was seen as especially egregious and caused many to question what sort of country this is becoming, what lessons we may be teaching the young that contributes to such violence, and what can be done about it to prevent such violence in the future.

Wyoming is a part of the country that sees itself as separated from the sort of tensions ascribed by the populace to places like New York City. Some may also see New York and Los Angeles as bastions of gay populations while trying to deny that there are any gay people at all in the hinterlands, though clearly there are. Shepard had jus recently joined a group at the university called the Lesbian Gay bisexual Transgender Association (LGBTA), and though this was the only gay organization on campus and in Laramie as a whole, its existence shows that there was a sizeable gay population in the area. Others in the group had been attacked, leading to a view that anti-gay feelings were pervasive and that these might have contributed to the death of Shepard.

The author describes the city and the different groups in that city, differentiated by where they live and by views of what people fro different neighborhoods are like. In this, Laramie is not different from any other city, though the perception of what populations are found in each city may differ. Loffreda notes that a city is not a culture and that moving ten blocks in any direction takes you to very different neighborhoods and very different people: "Cultures -- -in the sense of shared beliefs, attitudes, stories, identities -- -only come at levels much smaller or much larger than towns, in the furtive subcultures beloved by cultural anthropologists or, alternately, in the nation imagined, inflated, and set afloat by media conglomerates" (Loffreda, 2000, p. 33).

She finds that those who called Laramie "hateful" because of this incident are wrong, though she still asks if there is something about Laramie that could explain what happened there. The town exists in the high prairie and can seem deserted from outside, but even near where Matthew was killed, there are upscale housing developments and an area for running and mountain biking. Loffreda details much of the history of the town and the various industries that helped make it a town, notably cattle and minerals. She also notes that the state is cash-poor today, and to a degree, the poor economic conditions in the state might be used to explain some of the frustrations of the men who killed Matthew Shepard, noting that "while Laramie, unlike the ret of the state, might have its university and its close proximity to Colorado populations, it shares Wyoming's difficult economic fortunes" (Loffreda, 2000, p. 38).

Loffreda also finds a view of Laramie as two towns, as stated by the director of Interfaith, a denominational organization giving aid to the poor:

This community thinks they're the most accepting, nondiscriminatory community in Wyoming. But there are two communities here. There is the Laramie community, and there is the university community (Loffreda, 2000, p. 39).

Loffreda explains that the director means the second group to consist of administrators and faculty, not students, but others may not make such a distinction.

Shepard died in October of 1998, and this book was published two yeas later. The two men who attacked Shepard were Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson. The two were tried and sentenced to life in prison. While this has been labeled a hate crime by many people, it does not fall under that definition in Wyoming because sexual orientation is not one of the reasons given for a hate crime, though there was an effort in 199 to pass a law that would include sexual orientation under that heading.

The horrifying nature of this crime was one of the reason for that effort. Matthew Shepard met the other two men in a bar and asked them fro a ride home, as they claimed at their trial. Rather than taking him home, they took him to where they tied him to a fence, beat him, robbed him, and left him to die. They also took his address with the intent of burglarizing his home, but never did. Shepard was found some 18 hours later, unconscious but alive. He suffered a fracture across his head and had severe brain stem damage. His injuries were so severe that doctors could not operate, and he died while on life support. The two men who beat him were arrested shortly after this and had the gun and Shepard's shoes and wallet in their truck. They had been trying to get their girlfriends to give them an alibi.

The trial was marked by a particular effort to blame the victim with what has been called the "gay panic" defense, as Loffreda notes when citing the defense attorney:

Arguing that Matt must have been looking for a sexual encounter that night... The attorney claimed that "five minutes of emotional rage and chaos" ensued after Matt allegedly grabbed McKinnney's crotch and licked his ear (Loffreda, 2000, p. 132).

The attorneys also argued that this so-called panic was exacerbated by the use of meth and alcohol. Clearly, the defense did not work, though it has been raised by others in similar situations.

The Shepard case exposed many divisions in this community and throughout the country. It also revealed specifically a homophobic bent in some citizens, including among police officers, which is a national issue, as Barak, Flavin, and Leighton (2001) note, stating that police officers often tolerate the homophobic attitudes of other offices and of members of the public alike.

The Shepard case put many of these issues I stark relief in a manner similar to continuing racism with the case in Texas where a black man was dragged behind a car. The horrifying nature of such crimes tends to strike a chord with the public and to lead to criminal prosecutions, the rewriting of laws, and a demand for improved education to counter some of the forces of hate that bring about these cases. Loffreda begins her book with the death itself, suggesting the nature of the crime in a recounting of the events. She then seeks to link the crime to the community in which it occurred, or at last to explain it with reference to that community. Ultimately, though, it is not clear that the community as such had that much to do with it, for it would seem that many parts of the country have had similar violence against gays and that localized forces cannot serve as an explanation. Rather, there is something deeper in American life that brings about such actions. Barak, Flavin, and Leighton (2001) find ways in which class, race, and gender inform the law and shape legislation and legal decisions. Loffreda (2000) includes these issues in her book, though she is not always that clear about where she believes each falls in this particular case. The class distinction comes between the working class and the university class, and tensions between these two groups takes place across the country in varying degrees. The influence of race can be even stronger given that race is the one element that is usually obvious between groups. Gender might be obvious when speaking of male and female, but gender includes gay people who could be male or female and who are actually viewed differently by different groups. Some see homosexuality as a genetic fact, as there is some evidence to show, while others insist on seeing homosexuality as a deliberate choice, meaning they see the homosexual in some sense as "guilty" of his or her condition because it was chosen. That would be the point-of-view of many in Wyoming, including perhaps the two killers, who claimed to blame the victim for a supposed pass, though whether this took place at all remains an unanswered and unanswerable question.

One fact that emerges from this is how much the population of Laramie would like to believe that the community is free of prejudice and bias toward either minorities or homosexuals, though it would seem that most would not have thought of homosexuals at all in this context until the Shepard case. The case clearly brought the idea into the open that some in the community hated homosexuals and would like them identified and excluded, while others were happier not knowing and just letting others live. More thought was given to the matter once the national spotlight was turned on Laramie because of the murder. The people were forced to confront these ideas as they also sought to defend the town against those who thought simply that Laramie must have fostered these ideas and must be complicit in the death. Even without that element, the horror of the situation caused many to ask how anyone in their community could do such a thing, a common response in any community where a terrible crime takes place.