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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Judy Shepard talks about her struggles to accept her son Matthew's homosexuality, his brutal murder and the unwanted celebrity she decided to use on behalf of gay rights.
Oct 15, 1999 | Judy Shepard tried to resist the unwanted celebrity her son Matthew's brutal murder thrust upon her last October. But after months of quiet grieving, she researched gay rights activist groups, and approached four targeted groups in May.
"I think maybe I could do something to help you," she recalls saying. "I have a voice now -- people seem to want to hear what I have to say."
And indeed they do. This unlikely housewife from Wyoming has grabbed the media spotlight, with a raft of projects timed to coincide with the anniversary of her son's killing, and the capital murder trial of his accused killer, Aaron McKinney, here in Laramie. Shepard has just completed a speaking tour, she headlined the premiere of the documentary "Journey to a Hate Free Millennium," and she also taped three public service announcements produced by the Human Rights Campaign and the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN).
The GLSEN spot began heavy rotation on MTV last week, reaching 30 to 45 million youth, according to the network. Judy Shepard is spliced between shots of students shouting "homo," "faggot" and "queer," and Matthew's picture followed by the words "murdered / because he was gay / end / hate." In the spot she appears timid, emotional and vulnerable, exactly as she comes off in person: "The next time you use words like these, think about what they really mean."
Shepard sat down with Salon News this week to discuss her struggles to accept her son's sexuality, her conflicted feelings about his status as gay-bashing poster boy, and the impact his death has made on progress toward gay acceptance. As an activist, her objectives seem primarily cultural rather than political -- she talks about equal treatment rather than equal rights, for instance. And though she's appealed to Congress to pass hate crimes legislation, most of her efforts have been channeled into humanizing gays and changing cultural attitudes, primarily among kids.
"I think education is where we have to start," she said. "Kids go to school to learn how to behave in society. There's a way you behave at home, and then there's a way you behave with everybody else. And if we don't start doing that in the schools soon, it's harder to do as an adult.
"GLSEN is a wonderful way to do it," Shepard continued, "because not only do they incorporate the problems that gay children face, but the problems that all children face in being talked about in school."
GLSEN reports its membership as 30 to 35 percent straight, the remainder gay. The group has conducted teacher trainings in several thousand schools over the past five years, but Shepard's death has dramatically improved access. "Five years ago it was incredibly difficult to get into the schools," GLSEN spokesman Jim Anderson said. "Now, schools are calling us."
"I think what it's done is make the teachers and administrators more aware of the problem," Shepard said. "But it's a slow process. School boards are notoriously conservative and set in their ways, and don't want to do anything, especially open the door to the least bit of controversy."
A handful of large states have begun to make schools take violence against gays seriously. Two weeks ago, Gov. Gray Davis signed the California Student Safety and Violence Prevention Act, making California the fourth state to extend protections based on sexual orientation to students in its public schools.
Another entry point has been students themselves, who have organized gay-straight alliance groups in nearly 500 schools. That number has nearly doubled in the past year, Anderson said, with organizers repeatedly citing Shepard's murder as the galvanizing event. "I think because he was young, and his murderers were young, people made a connection," Anderson said.
Late last month, GLSEN released its first "school climate" survey, conducted among 496 gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students across 32 states. Ninety-one percent reported hearing words like "faggot," "dyke," or "queer" regularly at school, 69 percent experienced direct verbal harassment and 24 percent suffered physical harassment. Far more troubling was that more than a third heard those remarks from faculty or staff, and that their peers were actually more likely than faculty or staff to intervene.
"I sort of get the feeling that teachers and administrators feel that they grew up with that teasing in school, and they made it through -- they treat it almost as a rite of passage," Shepard says. "We survived it, you can survive it. This is how you grow." She shakes her head incredulously: "Oh, ignorant people! Kids have scars -- from being teased because they had big ears. What kind of scars do they have from being teased because they're black, or gay?"
