A little before 9 a.m. on a cool, gray day in Washington, a long line of people stretches outside the doors of the National Cathedral. They are waiting for a public memorial service for Matthew Shepard to begin. Twenty years after he died, he will finally be buried here, alongside some of America’s most notable figures.
A few elaborately dressed members of the D.C. chapter of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, which describes itself as a “leading-edge order of Queer nuns” (motto: “Go forth and sin some more!”) are among the attendees. “We came out today to be a visual reminder to our community that, yes, something horrible happened, but look at all the good that can come of it,” one “sister” says. “It’s a momentous occasion.”
Inside, the mood is more subdued, although one woman wanders through the crowd asking random people, “May I give you a hug?” The voices of the 2,000 or so attendees never rise above a respectful murmur as they find their seats. After a carillon prelude, the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington performs arrangements of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” U2’s “MLK,” and a song from Godspell. After greetings from the Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, and the Right Rev. V. Gene Robinson, who the Cathedral notes in its description of the event is “the first openly gay man elected a bishop in The Episcopal Church,” the service follows a traditional path, with a call to worship, hymns, prayers, readings, and a homily delivered by Robinson.
Matthew Shepard was a 21-year-old college student when he was severely beaten and left to die by two men in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998. Almost immediately the murder became international news, with claims the killing was a vicious hate crime because Shepard was gay. His killers eventually received two consecutive life sentences each. Shepard became a symbol of victimhood, a martyr to Americans’ supposed rampant homophobia. Although the Shepard family held a funeral for him after his death, they never buried Shepard’s cremated remains. As they relayed in several interviews with the media recently, including the Washington Post, they feared that if they chose a final resting place in Wyoming, his grave might be desecrated by anti-gay vandals.
“The family initially approached Washington National Cathedral expressing their interest in Matthew’s remains being interred at the Cathedral. We were honored and humbled by this request,” the Very Rev. Randolph Marshall Hollerith, dean of Washington National Cathedral, says via email when I ask about the decision to make the cathedral Shepard’s final resting place. The cathedral recognizes “the national significance that his passing has had in reminding us all of our Baptismal Covenant to ‘respect the dignity of every human being,’ ” he says, “and to push back against anti-LGBT bigotry and violence,” although he also acknowledges, “My starting point was to think as a pastor who saw a family that was grieving the loss of their son.”
Interment at National Cathedral is an honor only a handful of Americans have ever been granted (or, in the early days of the cathedral, when cash was scarce, purchased); among those interred there are Helen Keller, Admiral George Dewey, and Cordell Hull, all people who devoted their lives to public service. When I ask the dean why Shepard, who had not left a similar legacy of civic or military service at the time of his death, was given this honor, he points to the death itself and the meaning that has been attributed to it: “Matthew’s life was far too short, but his legacy is one that helped inspire our nation to start confronting its treatment of the LGBT community. His death shocked the nation and touched the lives of many in profound ways.”
Which is precisely the point. Shepard’s prominent resting place at the cathedral is the result of the fact that his death is understood to have come at the hands of bigots. And not just that, but bigots formed by the larger society in which they moved and acted. In the intervening years, a great deal of artistic and charitable energy has been expended in his name to fight such bigotry. The memorial service featured several performances by Conspirare, a vocal group founded by Craig Hella Johnson, whose major work is Considering Matthew Shepard, a composition that intermingles the “soulful texts” of poets such as Hildegard of Bingen and Rumi with snippets of Shepard’s journal entries. Shepard’s mother Judy wrote a book about her son, and she and her husband started the Matthew Shepard Foundation, which supports and advocates for LGBTQ youth. The foundation also supports performances of The Laramie Project, originally created by the Tectonic Theater Project in New York and today, according to the foundation, “one of the most frequently performed plays in America.” Shepard was the subject, too, of a 2002 made-for-television movie, The Matthew Shepard Story, starring Sam Waterston and Stockard Channing, who won an Emmy for her portrayal of Judy Shepard. And the Shepard family recently donated some of Matthew’s belongings to the Smithsonian, where they will be “preserved for future generations.”
But there is a competing narrative about Shepard’s life, one grounded in facts rather than perceptions and symbolism, and one the LGBTQ community has, for the most part, refused to acknowledge. In 2004, ABC News aired a lengthy report reassessing the claim that Shepard’s murder was a hate crime. Reporters interviewed Shepard’s killers as well as many of the investigators and witnesses in Laramie. “Matthew Shepard’s sexual preference or sexual orientation certainly wasn’t the motive in the homicide,” former Laramie police detective Ben Fritzen (one of the lead investigators on the case) told ABC. “What it came down to really is drugs and money and two punks that were out looking for it.”
Likewise, journalist Stephen Jimenez. He went to Laramie intending to write a screenplay based on Shepard’s life. He came away 13 years later with a very different story to tell from the one that had dominated the media narrative. Using recently unsealed court records and interviews with locals, Jimenez detailed Shepard’s drug problems and examined many leads that had not been pursued by law enforcement during the pursuit of the murderers. People who knew Shepard spoke frankly to Jimenez about the likelihood that Shepard knew one of his assailants; many also said that it was impossible to separate the drug culture in which Shepard was enmeshed from the homophobia of his assailants as a definitive cause for the murder. The real history of Shepard, Jimenez argued in The Book of Matt (2013), is that he was using drugs, including crystal meth, and he was a well-known denizen of the Laramie party scene, which was rife with criminal activity. “Have we got Matthew Shepard all wrong?” asked a writer for the Advocate after reviewing Jimenez’s book.
Not surprisingly, many LGBTQ activists denounced the book, as did the Matthew Shepard Foundation, which called it “innuendo.” “Jimenez has taken away their angel,” JoAnne Wypijewski, who reported on the Shepard murder for the Nation, told the Guardian “The people shaping the news require a very simple story—they have to be angels and villains.”
“He was not perfect,” says Hollerith, the dean of the cathedral, “nor is anyone interred at the Cathedral—but his interment here can and should serve as a reminder of the work we still need to do to live up to treating our fellow human beings with the dignity, respect, and compassion that Scripture calls on us to show everyone, regardless of who they are and who they love.”
Yet this standard puts progressives like Hollerith in an odd position, in which myth-building and myth-busting proceed along parallel tracks. Today the progressive left is eager to tear down monuments to men of the past who don’t conform to today’s progressive values. Consider Woodrow Wilson, who is also interred at Washington National Cathedral. His legacy—particularly at Princeton, the university he transformed before leading the nation as president—is being aggressively reassessed. In 2015, the Black Justice League at Princeton staged a student sit-in to protest Wilson’s racist views and demanded that the school remove his name and image from the campus—erase him from view, in other words. The New York Times endorsed the students’ effort in an editorial. Elsewhere, progressives eagerly argue for expunging from the record the names of colonialists like Cecil Rhodes (although they’d like to keep his scholarship money flowing). Bryn Mawr College is scrubbing the name of one of its founders, suffragette M. Carey Thomas, from buildings on campus after her inconvenient views on race were discovered.
In their eagerness to elevate progressive heroes, however, a concerning number of activists are happy to whitewash the unflattering details of their icons’ pasts—and denounce anyone who doesn’t toe the line. LGBTQ activists brook no dissent about Shepard. Writing about the interment of his ashes at the cathedral, the Washington Post reported, “gay equality activists say [he] can be a prominent symbol and even a pilgrimage destination for the movement.” Bishop Gene Robinson, who presided over the interment ceremony, was blunter, telling the Post, “movements need symbols. [The gay equality movement has] the triangle, that reminds of what was used to brand us during the Holocaust; the rainbow flag; and we’ve got Matt Shepard, who became a symbol of how we are targets of violence.” He added, “This could be a wonderful place for Matt’s ashes to rest, and where people could go and make a kind of pilgrimage.”
Orwell famously wrote, “Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.” But identity politics has rendered it impossible for a large swath of people on the left to reckon honestly with the facts of someone’s life if that person is designated a progressive hero or victim. As Wypijewski noted in the Nation about Shepard, “The murder was so vicious, the aftermath so sensational, that the story first told to explain it became gospel before anyone could measure it against reality.” Yet Shepard’s unimpeachable status as a symbol perversely robs him of the humanity his supporters claim to want to protect. Complicated lives have a lot to teach us. Think of Bayard Rustin, a crucial figure in the civil rights era who spent most of his adult life in the closet; later, when he came out about his sexuality, he became an advocate for equal rights for gay people.
Shepard’s other legacy also offers a more complicated story than is often told. According to the Advocate, Barack Obama credited Judy Shepard “for making him ‘passionate’ about LGBT equality,” which led to passage of the 2009 Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Named after Shepard and James Byrd Jr., an African-American man who was killed by two white men, the federal law expanded the definition of hate crimes to include those motivated by gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation. It also gave the federal government far greater power to prosecute hate crimes in state and local jurisdictions, usurping local authority in the process.
But as many critics have correctly noted, hate crime laws can have the unintended consequence of exacerbating differences rather than alleviating them. Selecting certain groups for special protections based solely on categories such as race, religion, or sexual orientation might give legislators a pleasing sense of moral superiority, but it does little to deter attacks. James B. Jacobs, a professor at NYU School of Law and author of Hate Crime: Criminal Law and Identity Politics, argued in Time in 2016, “The hate crime law movement re-criminalizes conduct that is already criminal. In effect, it creates a hierarchy of victims—one based upon the group identities of perpetrators and victims, as long as prosecutors can prove a bias motive. Thus, from the beginning, hate crime laws have simply given us something else to argue about: whose victimization should be punished more severely. They further politicize a law-enforcement and criminal-justice process that does best when it is perceived as being apolitical and even-handed—not a tool of identity politics.”
Matthew Shepard was robbed of the chance to live a full life as the result of a brutal crime. His parents should be commended for their decades-long efforts to create something positive after his murder. But sympathy for the Shepards and for their son shouldn’t blind us to the ways in which his life is being used to further others’ ambitions. It’s not a coincidence that one of the most notable responses from the audience during Shepard’s interment ceremony came when Gene Robinson used his homily to criticize the current administration and urge attendees, “Go vote!”
“Matt was blind, just like this beautiful house of worship,” Dennis Shepard said during his tribute to his son at the service. “He did not see skin color. He did not see religion. He did not see sexual orientation. All he saw was a chance to have another friend.”
Unfortunately, the logic of identity politics, whether it is embedded in hate crimes legislation or promulgated from the pulpit, compels the opposite: an approach to the world that views everything through precisely those markers of difference that advocates of tolerance claim to want to eliminate. What they’ve eliminated instead are the complicated realities of the lives of their own secular saints.
Additional reporting provided by Sophia Buono.
