"Matthew, the model gay"

I have some further thoughts on the 20/20 Matthew Shepard program.

1. It's a program whose language and assumptions reflect the continuing media assault on GLBT people in the wake of the November 2 election. The religious right wants this assault to continue, and so does the current administration. We could face an assault on the inclusion of sexual orientation in hate-crimes laws.

2. The program is an outrage. The executive director of NGLTF even wrote, "Direct action would also be an entirely appropriate response." ABC News, in the middle of sweeps month, wants ratings (and surely got them). In essence a battle to win over the Fox News segment, ABC's strategy represents, as my dad put it, a "race to the bottom" in network news reporting.

3. This story hits us where we're strongest. Americans support protections against violence, and the Matthew Shepard story was the major force that galvanized a perhaps rather sizable minority of Americans to come to recognize the reality of antigay violence. I wrote about it in my college newspaper at the time [unfortunately, the web archiving back then did not properly preserve formatting and punctuation of articles]. As my friend Moon said frequently in the period when gay marriage was suddenly hitting the national radar early this year, hate-crimes laws (as flawed as they may be) are a fight that we could win in 2004, if we were able to devote our resources to fighting it instead of trying pitifully to stop even one of the state marriage amendments.

4. The program's major claim is that the murderers were high on crystal meth and the victim was a frequent user of it. These facts somehow diminish the murderer's culpability and confer it on the victim (as when women are blamed for "asking" to be raped). But the shift in the viewer's perception that the program is most likely to create is that concerning Shepard himself. As Michael Bronski put it in this week's Boston Phoenix,

Let’s face it: the general population is going to have less sympathy for a wealthy, HIV-positive, meth-snorting college kid who had lived abroad for much of his life than it does for the angelic, fragile icon of Matthew Shepard that has been presented to us over the past six years.

Bronski hits the nail on the head here. This story isn't even really about the killers - it's about the fact that Matthew Shepard was an HIV-positive meth user. This was reported in a Harper's cover story in 1999, as Judy Shepard mentions in her press release today.

5. As much as I hate to say it (and I do), the gay community is partially responsible for the conditions that made this symbolic attack possible - that is, for making Matthew Shepard into the one and only symbol of antigay violence. In addition, there's some truth to a claim that a friend of mine made way back in October, 1998, in the next issue of my college newspaper following my own article's appearance. At the time, I was pretty pissed off by this passage of Corey's article:

Of course - and this is the part nobody wants to think too much about - Matthew is not just any ordinary queer. He is in fact the model American, Aryan, ideal - Matthew was white, middle class, Christian, well mannered, (heretofore white, etc) and yeah he happened to be gay. One newspaper article described him as someone who you would feel comfortable taking care of your grandmother - whoa, theres a lot of political and social history tied up in that statement, hunh? The fact is that we were all duked by the media into feeling remorse for their prototype.

The question is, what does this say about the motivations for our current acute awareness of gay rights issues? Tim *** last week wrote, in part, that one of the lessons of Matthew is that we arent as safe here as we think we are. After all - and forgive me Tim for a slight manipulation of your words, but the point must be made - he was a white college student like many of us (did any body notice the racial makeup of the Matthew Shepard vigil? - it wasnt all white, but it was close), and look what happened. Are we really all so dense as to need to be reminded that people are killed for their sexual practices and their gender bents by being hit over the head with the story of Matthew, the model gay? The answer, apparently, is yes.

At the time, this pissed me off, for at least three reasons. Reason #1: I knew Corey was partly right, even though I thought using the Shepard case to appeal to middle America could be a good "strategy." Reason #2: I felt the personal criticism here added insult to the injury of Corey's not wanting to date me several months previously. Was I right or was I right? Reason #3: It made me feel petty for even thinking about Reason #2 ("forgive me Tim...but the point must be made"). Reason #4: It seemed even more obnoxious given that I in fact organized "the" Matthew Shepard vigil that he was calling "close" to all-white, together with my best friend Talia, who incidentally was and is not white; over 100 people had come, according to the campus paper; and Talia called it "the most intense public mourning experience that [she] ever had." But in very important senses, Corey was right about the potential problems with the significance that Matthew Shepard was coming to take on. And I've forgiven him for the other things. Really.

The Matthew Shepard drama, and my friends' collective response to it at Swarthmore, represented a pretty key episode in my gay identity development, I think. The vigil was followed several months later by a vandalism incident at the Intercultural Center, which led to a huge rally on the campus's main lawn at which my boyfriend Ben was the major speaker. (Ben was later quoted sarcastically and disparagingly in US News and World Report , in one of those boilerplate stories about the excesses of multiculturalism on campus, for having said in that speech that he was "overcome by tears and mucus" when he first heard about the incident.) And then, the following summer, Talia and I stopped in Laramie - even spent the night at her family friend's house there - less than one year after the murder.

To a certain extent, we're stuck with the Shepard case. Its role is not going to disappear, and ABC News needs to be called out. But should we seek above all else to preserve its crucial status in the development of gay politics in the last ten years? Or would we be better served, as Tavia suggested in his reply to my post last night, by trying to paint a richer picture of the diversity and complexity of queer people and what we suffer.

The more I think about it, the 20/20 program is a trap that we simply can't get out of by continuing to rehash the Shepard case. Because, as brutal as it was and as crucial as it was in changing Americans' minds about gay-bashing, there is simply no reason why the larger question of antigay violence or hate-crimes laws should rise or fall on this case. The FBI has even just published data showing a sharp increase in hate crimes involving sexual orientation in 2003 (though I don't see why this might not be partly or, less likely, fully due to an increase in reporting). There are so very, very many other stories to be told.