From the Archives: Matthew Shepard Is a Friend of Mine – Part I…by Marie Cartier

This piece was originally posted on November 2, 2013.

Matthew Shepard died October 12, 1998 – fifteen years ago.  This month I have already attended three events memorializing his death. The first was a screening of the Emmy-award winning teleplay The Matthew Shepard Story  (starring the amazing Stockard Channing as Judy Shepard), where I served as the moderator for an impassioned question and answer session for the monthly meeting of Comunidad, the Ministry of Gay and Lesbian Catholics group where I serve on the board at St. Matthew’s in Long Beach, CA. 

I also recently attended two productions of Beyond the Fence produced by the South Coast Chorale, in which my friend Robin Mattocks performs. This musical created by Steve Davison and others moved me to tears several times—and I know and teach the story of Matthew Shepard every year at this time—I have already done so four times this month. I attended with a friend the first night and because I am a professor the director let me come to the Gala the next night where I met Matthew’s real life best friend Romaine Patterson.

Romaine is described in the casting call for this show as “a 19 year old lesbian in a leather coat, fun loving, strong best friend (in other words—a butch dyke). Romaine was a featured panelist at the event. Romaine was also the one who created the “Angel Action” — the wall of angels which effectively blocked the Shepard family from having to walk by Fred Phelps and his band of religious homophobes at the trials of the murderers of Matthew. Phelps and his ilk held signs aloft with slogans such as “Matt dies! God laughs!” and “Fags burn in hell!”  The Angel Action activists wore wide white wings that extended, due to an ingenious construction, that created wings a few feet above the heads of the wearers (mostly Matthew’s college friends) and hid the protesters behind the wings of angels. The Angel Action launched in 1999 has been copied all over the world.

So, this story of Matthew Shepard  is not just a story for me (or for most people). It is also an event that happened, and helped shape our lives and our activism and our commitments to social change. It is an event we memorialize, and in so doing, re-commit to those promises we made back in 1998 when we chanted and marched and sang and lit candles—never, never again can this happen. Never again. I remember being in the street in West Hollywood walking with those lit candles in 1998—hoping against hope in those 5 days that Matthew Shepard lay in the hospital that somehow the killers did not do their worst—he would not die –this skinny 5’2” blonde boy who was apparently doing the amazing gay activism of working on National Coming Out Day in Wyoming. But I, along with the rest of the world, watched and waited—and Matthew died—a victim of hate—and brutal beatings that left him tied to a fence post for 18 hours and then in a hospital room for 5 days. The whole world waited and watched. And then Matt died. And we mourned and then we changed—we worked towards making anti-hate legislation include hatred against gays because of Matthew Shepard’s death.

It was desperately sad and crazy-making and  revolutionary that it took this horrible event to finally say that hatred towards gays was a hate crime—and it took many years and lots of work for that to happen.  The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act (lest we forget that that same year on June 7 a Black man was tied to the back of a truck and killed in Jasper, Texas and this death galvanized the hate crimes legislation as well.) passed on October 22, 2009 and was signed into law by President Barack Obama on October 28, 2009 as a rider to the National Defense Authorization Act for 2010 (H.R. 2647). The measure expanded the 1969 United States federal hate-crime law to include crimes motivated by a victim’s actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.

But this year is an anniversary year of Matt’s death. It is the 15^th year of his murder. And so this is the year that a new book has come out. Steve Jimenez, also a gay man, has written a book that says the murder of Matthew Shepard may not have been a hate crime because Matthew’s killers may have known him well—so well that maybe one of them was also a sometimes lover. Matthew may have been involved in drugs, specifically crystal meth  (not just pot smoking as has been documented previously). One might well ask, as I did, why is this book coming out at an anniversary year? Some say it sheds all the aforementioned “new light” on the case of Matthew Shepard. Some say it does not prove anything.

And so the questions begin—is the Matthew Shepard we thought we knew, the one we memorialized and mourned, the one who actually lived, or is he a fiction? Was he really that blonde skinny five foot two, 102 pound innocent or was he a meth dealing lost boy hanging around and having sex with dangerous folks —that’s what happens when you live like that—type of kid?  Because according to this new book Matthew is not the almost impossibly perfect poster child of gay rights–a gay white college boy working for gay rights activism who was slaughtered by two men and left to die—a crucifixion type death that took five days, 18 hours of which were spent on the cross.

It matters, right? What really happened, who Matt really was – right? I was there with the candles when I heard of his death, as were so so many others. And it matters to us—right?

Part II coming tomorrow…