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

This piece was originally posted on November 2, 2013. Part I published yesterday.

The day after his death, I went to teach Gender Women’s Studies (then Women’s Studies) and I cried in front of my students and then sang to them because I didn’t know what else to do. So in 1998 I sang a 1975 Holly Near  song to my students, “It Could Have Been Me,” about the Kent State massacres and murder of Chilean poet Victor Jara. “And it could have been me, but instead it was you./ So I’ll keep doing the work you were doing as if I were two…/If you can live for freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom! …if you can live for freedom, I can, too.”

And I have continued to repeat that story and sing that song for fifteen years to different groups of students and to talk about activism and what it means and why it is important every October.

The story goes that the folk singer Victor Jara in 1973 had his fingers cut off…or were they broken…or were his hands cut off? …by the Chilean Junta Pinochet’s regime and the legend goes that he kept singing. Until they gunned him down. Are all the facts true? Some say yes.  Some say no and put energy into debating what parts are urban legend—were his fingers actually broken before they murdered him? Or were they cut off? Or was he “just” murdered?

At this point, you dear reader, as well as I, am asking—does it matter? Victor Jara was brutalized and murdered and his murder became a catalyst for change.  Matthew Shepard was brutalized and murdered and his murder became a catalyst for change.

Here is Victor Jara’s manifesto, and this is his perhaps his last poem, smuggled out of the stadium shortly before his death:

We are 5,000, here in this little corner of the city./How many are we in all the cities of the world?/ All of us, our eyes fixed on death./ How terrifying is the face of Fascism
For them, blood is a medal,/carnage is a heroic gesture.

Song, I cannot sing you well /When I must sing out of fear.
When I am dying of fright./When I find myself in these endless moments.
Where silence and cries are the echoes of my song.

There was a Facebook campaign last year with an image of Matthew—and the tagline “Matthew Shepard is a friend of mine,” riffing on the Facebook ‘friend’ concept. Matthew didn’t live to be an actual Facebook friend—or did he? He feels like my friend. He feels like an icon. He feels like my personal history as well as a story as well as…and like all of that I guess in the end it doesn’t matter to me if Matthew was angelic—because his death created angels. “Where silence and cries are the echoes of my song.” His mother created the awe inspiring Matthew Shepard Foundation, which has done so much amazing work for so long; she became the poster parent for many many parents who needed a poster parent and a symbol of why you should love your gay kids now—because it’s dangerous to be gay—love your kids now. They might not always be here.  “When silence and cries are the echoes of my song.” He became the reason for the creation of Romaine’s Angel Action. She told me the reason she created the action was because it wasn’t right that people like Phelps thought he had God on his side—and gay people didn’t. Creating the angel action said loud and clear—we have God on our side, too. “When silence and cries are the echoes of my song.”

Matthew Shepard was HIV positive; he was gang raped on a college trip in Morocco; he did use drugs—whether they were stronger than pot is not “officially” known—but that he was a pretty heavy pot smoker is well-known; he didn’t talk about his rape easily and it may have been the thing that led him into harder drugs and the thing that led him to date dangerous folks—one of whom may have forced him into unprotected sex which led to the HIV. He had a hard  life—this little angelic looking guy . Can he still be an angel…when silence and cries are the echoes of my song?

I think we probably all have “our Matts”—those gay folk that we know that struggle and are here—just barely. And their deaths, or their beatings, should all make national news and create social justice movements. But, they often don’t. I thank God and her angels for whatever configuration components that led to the sea change in gay activism that came after Matthew’s murder. The cultural capital afforded an upper class blonde college boy allowed the matrix of domination to shift towards allowing gay hate legislation to crack open the dominant paradigm and assign some legitimate language that hopefully can be used for all or “our Matts” who may not have, and usually do not have,  the cultural capital that Matt had.  That is the hope of the legislation.

However, yes, I have, as many of us have had, “our Matts”—and some of them have been incredibly close to me, close to my life. These are the ones people think—well, she/he is not heroic— sad, but not heroic. The person of whom might have been said, I wouldn’t build a movement around their death. After all– they were drug addicts, prostitutes, down on their luck, poor, and did dangerous stuff. Well– personally for me, if this new information about Matt proves to be true—“it doesn’t prove anything” for me in terms of changing the story of Matthew. We built a movement –when silence and cries were the echoes of our songs. It may be makes more sense to me—he was a gay guy in Wyoming in the 90s. And of course he was pre-the sea change of Matthew Shepard activism. How many of us know gay folks, or are gay folks, who barely escaped gay hate with our lives—or didn’t escape? Who live lives of quiet desperation? Who live lives of danger just because it’s so hard? Who are on drugs or are alcoholic because even today it seems like a bar is the only place to really be? Who knows closeted gay folks , like Matt’s killers, who lash out from their own internalized homophobia? Is any of this new information about Matthew Shepard new to gay folks? Or is it new because it’s about Matthew?

A recurring theme in Beyond the Fence was Matthew Shepard’s character continuing to say “I’m Matt,” referring to himself as the real person, the person who lived, not the icon who has died.  Maybe someday Matthew Shepard’s death will be “Our Matt’s” death—in celebration of all “our Matts” and not just Matthew Shepard, the icon. But the day the band stopped playing—around gay hate—is not here yet.

Steve Jimenez—Matt Shepard is a friend of mine, and I have his back…still.