Out Magazine

Mar 99

Writing the Book of Matthew

By Elise Harris

Who Owns Matthew Shepard--The Activists Who Never Knew Him Or The Family Who Thinks He Was More Than A Poster Boy For A Federal Bill?

Elise Harris Looks At The Making Of A Martyr

It was snowing in the early afternoon on October 16 in Casper, Wyoming. Family and friends of Matthew Shepard milled around outside St. Mark's Episcopal Church, waiting for his funeral to begin. The media circus had already started: Photographers gathered around as Kansas minister Fred Phelps and his clan brandished placards reading AIDS CURES FAGS and No TEARS FOR QUEERS. Dateline NBC trucks were parked outside. CNN was on the corner. Good Morning America was down the street. Alex Trout, 22, who had moved to Laramie four years before Shepard, entered the church vestibule. A dramatic, angry young man, Trout had spoken a lot to the press in the days following Shepard's assault and become a media magnet. A family member pulled him aside. "Excuse me, Alex, you're not allowed in," the relative said briskly, adding that he should go over to a nearby church where the service was being piped in.

Trout walked down the steps toward his friend Walt Boulden, 46. Boulden, a social worker and doctoral student, knew Shepard much better and spoke about him much less. Six years earlier, a 15 year-old Shepard had come out to him. Now Trout and Boulden took deep breaths and muttered a few choice words to each other. A few friends of Shepard's looked on. Not being political, they had declined to speak to the press, and called Walt and Alex media hounds out for fame. Shepard's mother would later call to say that it was just about privacy from the media. It was nothing personal.

Why were they being cast out? On October 8, the Laramie Daily Boomerang reported the brutal assault of a University of Wyoming student. Afraid that the crime would be covered up, Boulden and Trout called a friend at the Casper Star-Tribune. The reporter drove to Laramie and took on the case. By October 9, the Associated Press was calling Shepard a "gay student" and the assault a hate crime. It was a slow news week, halfway between the Clinton- Lewinsky scandal and the midterm elections, and the story blew up.

By the time Shepard died on October 12, his name was known around the globe, and Boulden's and Trout's phones were ringing. Boulden's years of activism against domestic violence and sexual abuse prepared him for the deluge. "People don't care until someone gets murdered," he says. With his friend's murder, Boulden saw an opportunity for activism that would not come his way again. He and Alex were quoted on 20/20 and in the Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, and The New York Times. They were flown by gay lobbies to Washington, D.C., for a candlelight vigil with an improbable Greek chorus, Sen. Ted Kennedy, Rep. Barney Frank, and actresses Ellen DeGeneres and Kristen Johnston. Of all deaths used by the great tragedians-accident, suicide, betrayal--murder is most likely to elicit rending of clothes and gnashing of teeth. Murder is a crime; it occurs in the public square; it unscrolls millennia of religious law and criminal justice and primeval impulses toward vengeance. The private space of mourning and the public one of protest are very different things, said Shepard's family, who seemed to feel that Walt and Alex had made their choice between the two.

The chorus continued. After a dozen candlelight vigils in other cities, New York activists planned a "political funeral" to express their rage and grief. (Political funerals have long married grief to anger, taking place in ancient Pome, Palestine, Greece, South Africa, and Argentina.) It wasn't a great time for political speech in New York, and only after police hauled off 130 protesters in vans did the waiting 5,000 march down Fifth Avenue. At one point, penned on a side street, the crowd faced bucking police horses charging them, and pandemonium ensued. For all of its noisome, familiar rhetoric, the event was buoying, because gay men and lesbians took a public space denied them and many others. The jail cells filled with Stonewall and bar-raid vets, and the ghosts of AIDS activism past swirled overhead. This politics addresses wrongdoing alone; it replicates and reverses the terms of the crime.

"It was not only about Matthew Shepard but also about the bigger picture of homophobia and violence," says Suzy Lee Kern, one of the organizers of the New York demonstration. "People are going to use that figure. We didn't really know that much about him." Yet many of Shepard's friends felt that his absence was exactly the problem with angry, politicized responses. "He was not some 'victim of a gay bashing'; he was Matt," says Jim Osborn, who runs the campus gay group, the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered Association, to which Shepard belonged. "He should not be used as a political bandwagon to jump on without realizing that he was an individual who had friends who loved him and miss him very greatly.

Now, on the eve of the trial of one of Shepard's accused killers, talk to any of Matthew's friends-Mark Shughart, Romaine Patterson, Brian Gooden, Basil Hart, and others--and they will rush to present a catalog of the many small truths of his being: He was a smart, friendly, fun-loving 21-year-old. He had a history of depression and anorexia. In North Carolina, his parents paid for his $775-a-month apartment while he worked occasionally in a video store across the street and met with a therapist about his eating disorder. He often spoke of a boyfriend named Lewis Macenze, whom he dated while living in North Carolina, and who friends say could be controlling with Matt. He'd had several black lovers, Lewis among them. In Casper he cut class a lot, was a member of a gang of friends who called themselves the Fantastic Eight, and went to parties and a public park where local gay men and lesbians hung out. He admired his father, Dennis, and was out to his family, though there were tensions between him and some of them. He dated a lot; during his time in Denver, he saw a 35-year-old African-American pharmacist, a 35-year-old deaf-mute, and a 23-year-old crystal-meth dealer.

Shepard loved fashion, malls, and dancing, Madonna and Janet Jackson. He was extremely concerned about his appearance and what people thought of him. Gooden recalls that he would try to butch it up a bit, asking, "Does this [shirt] look gay?" He was a bit of a spat, 5 feet 2 inches, had delicate bone structure, and weighed about 105 pounds. He had been gay-bashed several times, was frequently harassed (one friend remembers him tearing up after someone said, "Look at the faggot"), and often felt unsafe. He was considerate, a good listener, and kind. Patterson remembers him befriending a homeless man, taking him to lunch on a regular basis, and giving him a backpack to carry food in. He could also be spiteful: His snippy comments once hurt a friend's feelings so badly that they didn't speak for two weeks. He frequented Internet chat rooms as Matt6926; the message on his profile reads "Peace." (His account is still open.) He had roller-coasterish mood swings and would disappear for a few days at a time, isolating himself, feeling suicidal. He collected colored glass bottles, liked to eat at Taco John, and lived on coffee and cigarettes. He was "love and joy in one package," says Shughart.

Activists and the media tried to tidy Matt up, make him clean and plastic. But he shouldn't have to be a saint in order to gain sympathy. When the trial begins, that process will no doubt reverse, and he'll be dragged into the muck. Both images are false, as if Shepard could only be the flat symbol of sacrifice or the hidden partaker of sins of the flesh. W.H. Auden wrote that suffering takes place in "some untidy spot/Where the dogs go on with their doggy/Life and the torturer's horse/Scratches its innocent behind on a tree." And it's precisely Matt's vulnerability, his need for animal kindness, that his friends' reminiscences champion.

Next to life's rich banquet--even if it's takeout from Taco John--the activist cry sounds tinny and canned. Matt Shepard became a blank screen for our projection and identification, much like Brandon Teena, another foxy 21-year-old who had little chance to sculpt a life before being killed for passing as a boy in Nebraska in 1993. Their youth, their whiteness, their soft skin, how much more lovable they are than someone already compromised in our eyes. Most of what we think we know about Shepard we have conflated with our own experiences of homophobia and violence. At vigils came the sound bite of false redemption: "it could have been any one of us."

Here's a quiz: Do you know the name Fitzroy Green? How about Peter Garcia? Green, who was Jamaican, was a process server for legal firms. Last August he went out, picked someone up, and was murdered in New York City. Garcia was a Citibank analyst who lived with his mom; he was killed by a pickup at a Manhattan hotel last May. Few gay men and lesbians know the names of the dozen who make up the rest of the profiles in the New York City Gay & Lesbian Anti-Violence Project's 1998 antigay homicide folder.

"Just don't forget who Matthew was," Shepard's mother, Judy, said carefully to Romaine Patterson at his funeral. At my father's memorial 10 years ago, a cousin sat in the pew behind me. She heaved and wailed. I turned and glared at her, thinking, What is her problem? She barely knew him! Family is when someone's life is your life. A death in the family means ongoing, daily absence, a phantom limb on the body, dreams about entering rooms in the house you forgot existed. Behind you, to paraphrase writer Blanche McCrary Boyd, lies a numinosity you can't quite interpret. From here on, every December 1, Matt's birthday; October 6, the day of his assault; October 12, the day of his death; every Christmas and Thanksgiving, rage and regret, nausea and loneliness will surge up again for Judy and Dennis Shepard and Matthew's brother, Logan. This is simply not true for the rest of us. The gay and lesbian activist community is clearly the loud, unwanted guest at Matthew Shepard's funeral. "We must not let Matthew Shepard die in vain," lamented those at- tending the vigils, while his family had to accept that he'd already reached the place of absolute fact where reasons have no power.

So you want to be a member of the funeral? Here are your responsibilities: Don't let tragedy end with catharsis. Anger is not activism. Real change can't happen within an "us-and-them" dichotomy, the same mentality the murderers had. It is far easier to insist that you are but a passive victim--or to have delusions of invulnerability-than to admit that we can be both agents and victims at the same time. Let Matthew Shepard rest in peace; it is your life that needs to not be lived in vain.

This month the trial of Shepard's attacker Russell Henderson begins. It will revive a host of unpleasant questions. Will our progressive leanings trump our sense of victimhood as the prosecutors ask for the death penalty? Will the Human Rights Campaign successfully duke it out with the Family Research Council, which is planning to argue that between AIDS and domestic violence, gay men and lesbians do greater damage to each other than do gay bashers? Trials are inherently polarizing events, literally about picking sides, not about possibility. It will be a time when we see that they hate us, they really really hate us. But outside the courtroom there are strange and unexpected connections, conspirings, and border crossings between the nations of homosexual and homophobe.

Take Chastity Pasley, who worked at the University of Wyoming's campus-activities center and helped out Jim Osborn and the LGBT Association with whatever it needed - coffee, chairs, Xeroxes, petty cash. Pasley was named as an accessory to Matthew Shepard's murder for providing an alibi for her boyfriend, Russell Henderson, and getting rid of his bloodstained clothes. Osborn says he and his friends always worried for Pasley; rumor had it that Henderson beat her. (In a chilling, clarifying turn of events, Henderson's mother was found dead by the side of a road in early January, days after her husband, a convicted batterer, filed for divorce.) Osborn knows in his heart, he says, that Pasley was probably frightened into providing Henderson with an alibi. In late December Pasley changed her plea from innocent to guilty.

Pasley is expected to turn state's evidence when the trial begins. Who knows what curious flower will grow from that root? ·

OUT Senior Editor Elise Harris reported on the post-gay movement last September.