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 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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