Matthew Shepard



On the night of Tuesday, October 6, 1998, Matthew Shepard, a young, twenty-one-year-old homosexual male, went into a bar alone for a drink at the Fireside Bar after attending a meeting at the University of Wyoming’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Association. Inside, he met two men in their twenties who posed as homosexual men and lured Shepard outside. There, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson kidnapped Shepard at gunpoint and drove to a remote area outside Laramie, a small town of 26,000 people in rural Wyoming. They tortured Shepard and left him to die tied to a buck-rail fence in the cold more than 7,000 feet above sea level.

He was found the following morning by a mountain biker. Transferred to a hospital in critical condition, Shepard, a native of Casper, Wyoming, died on October 12 from fatal injuries incurred during the attack. The town of Laramie later passed a bias crime ordinance in response to Shepard’s death. His killers, McKinney and Henderson, each received two consecutive life sentences in prison.

Shepard was one of thirty-four gay men and women killed in 1998 for their sexual orientation, and his death in particular became a catalyst for calls for hate crime legislation as a violation of basic human rights. Activists defined a hate crime as any crime perpetuated on an individual because of the appearance of particular characteristics or because of one’s apparent membership in a particular group. In other words, such crimes overtly functioned to deny a person’s access to human rights. As of 2000, twenty-one states had passed hate crime legislation that covered sexual orientation in their definition. Of the hate crimes reported to the FBI that same year, those crimes based on one’s sexual orientation accounted for the third highest reason for the crimes, at 11 percent, falling behind race with the highest percentage and religion as second.

We could leave Mathew at this point as his death was a catalyst for change, but there is  more.

In the aftermath of Matt’s death, Judy and Dennis Shepard started the Matthew Shepard Foundation to honor his life and aspirations. Because of the tragedy endured by the Shepards, the beginning principle of the Foundation was to teach parents with children who may be questioning their sexuality to love and accept them for who they are, and to not throw them away.

The Laramie Project, Moisés Kaufman's internationally successful play, began one month after a horrific crime occurred in the city of Laramie, Wyoming. Members of Kaufman's theatrical group, Tectonic Theater Project, volunteered to travel with their director from New York City to the wide-open ranges of the West in order to gather in-person interviews from Laramie's populace. The idea was to capture the emotions, reflections, and reactions of the people who were most closely related to the crime—a brutal beating and subsequent death of a young college student. Was this a hate crime? Or was it a random, senseless assault and robbery?

No matter which, Kaufman's objective was to learn through the town folks' raw responses how the issues of homosexuality, religion, class, economics, education, and non-traditional lifestyles were reflected through this crime. How did this crime define the culture, not just of this Western town, but of the entire United States?

The play is based on over 400 interviews with about 100 Laramie residents, as well as journal entries from the members of Tectonic Theater Project and Kaufman, as they reflect on their own reactions to the crime and to the interviews they carried out. It is structured as if it were a documentary as it attempts to re-enact the events that occurred on that fateful night.

The play opened at the Denver Theater Center in March 2000 and two months later moved to Union Square Theater in New York, where it ran for five months. Later, HBO, working with the Sundance Theater Lab, turned the play into a film, which Kaufman also directed. It was presented as the opening-night film at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, with Robert Redford, the founder of Sundance, making a special appearance to introduce the movie. For his work, Kaufman received two Emmy Award nominations for director and writer of the film.

The play was also acted out in many drama classes in many educational institutions across North America, at least, the ones who were allowed to do so. It was not uncommon for administrators to shut down rehearsals and productions up to and including the opening night when the theatres were filled and waiting for the show to go in.

This powerful, raw play was the target of middle American religious groups, educators and people in general. Despite all of the efforts of so many groups to shut down the Laramie Project, the project and Mathew Shepard continue to educate us and cause us to question ourselves, what would we have done?