Beth Loffreda, Selections from Losing Matt Shepard: Life and Politics in the Aftermath of Anti-Gay Murder

How do the media decide which stories to cover on any given day? And what gets left out when the stories chosen get transformed into a three-minute segment on the nightly news or a column of print in the daily paper? These are some of the issues that Beth Loffreda takes up in Losing Matt Shepard: Life and Politics in the Aftermath of Anti-Gay Murder, her book-length study of how the residents of Wyoming responded when Shepard, a young gay student at the university in Laramie, was brutally beaten and left to die by the side of the road in the fall of 1998. Both an ethnographic study and a cultural critique, Losing Matt Shepard explores and carefully details the limits of the media's representation of the complexities of life in Wyoming after Shepard's highly publicized murder. In his review of Losing Matt Shepard for the Lambda Book Report, Malcolm Farley wrote: "Anyone who cares about the gay experience in America-or about America in general-should read Loffreda's fiercely intelligent account of the causes and consequences of Matt Shepard's murder."  

Beth Loffreda is an associate professor of English and adjunct professor of Women's Studies at the University of Wyoming, where she also serves as an adviser to the university's Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered student group. Since the publication of Losing Matt Shepard, which was selected as a finalist for the American Library Association's Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Round Table Award in 2000, Loffreda has become a national spokesperson in discussions about hate crimes legislation and gay rights. She was also recognized as one of the University of Wyoming's top teachers in 1999. In the selection from Losing Matt Shepard included here, Loffreda shows just how varied the response to Shepard's murder was at the University of Wyoming, in the surrounding communities of Laramie, and across the nation. As she does so, she asks her readers to consider the following question: Why is it that, when there are so many murders every year, this one in particular captured the nation's attention?

Loffreda, Beth. Selections from Losing Matt Shepard. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. 1-31.
Biographical information drawn from Beth Loffreda, Losing Matt Shepard. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
Digital image drawn from the Wyoming Council for the Humanities.

Links to Explore:

The Wyoming State home page: the official site for Wyoming, with information about the economy, tourism, and a virtual tour of the state

Home page for the University of Wyoming's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transsexual Association: includes links to a site specifically devoted to remembering Matt Shepard and to a collection of news articles that concern his murder and its aftermath.

Hate Crimes Defined: from the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the Leadership Conference Education Fund, two advocacy groups concerned with extending and protecting human rights, this page offers a definition of "hate crimes" and provides additional resources regarding hate crimes.

Active Hate Groups: from the Southern Poverty Law Center's web site, a list of hate groups active in 2000 and links to additional sites that detail ongoing research into the lifeways of such groups, including a discussion of the growing role that cyber chat rooms play in sustaining these communities.

The Laramie Project Archives: contains links to seventeen New York Times articles about Matt Shepard's murder and its aftermath.

Questions for Learning:

• In Losing Matt Shepard, Loffreda describes the efforts that local residents made "to shape the media summary of Laramie." The Wyoming State home page provides another attempt to shape how the state is seen by outsiders. How is Wyoming represented on the state government's home page? Do the issues that most concern Loffreda make their way on to the site?

• The University of Wyoming's LGBTA serves as a meeting place for all who are concerned about the rights and experiences of those whose sexual orientation is lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transsexual. How does the LGBTA imagine the needs of these various communities? That is, what information does this organization provide and why does it do so? Are there any signs that an organization that caters to such a diverse group of peoples is confronting the "limits of identification" that Loffreda discusses at the end of the selection from Losing Matt Shepard?
  
  

• If it is the case, as it is stated on the web site maintained by Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the Leadership Conference Education Fund, that "legislation alone will not combat the bias and bigotry that leads to" the commission of hate crimes, what can be done to curtail such acts? Can a web site, like Hate Crimes Defined, bring about the changes that are necessary to reduce the number and the severity of such crimes? And if not--that is, if legislation and education cannot put an end to bias and bigotry--, then what other options are available to a civil society to protect the lives of all its citizens?
  
  
• The Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report on the role that the net plays in sustaining membership in hate groups concludes with the ominous observation that the "radical right is decentralizing . . . Organized groups are becoming less crucial to the movement, and the lone wolf model is coming forward." What is "the lone wolf" model? What can a free society do to combat this model? Would you say that the execution of Timothy McVeigh was a productive response to this model?

Questions for Connecting:

• This selection from Losing Matt Shepard closes with Loffreda's discussion of what she terms "the limits of identification." In a sense, Susan Faludi's "The Naked Citadel" could also be described as a piece centrally concerned with "the limits of identification." What are these limits? How are they discovered? Can they be changed?

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