When Matthew Shepard was martyred in 1998 in a lonely field in Laramie, Wyo., his death gave anti-gay hate crimes a human face and put the nation on notice that "the war is far from over," says Episcopal priest Malcolm Boyd, an outspoken gay and civil rights activist.
"He humanized the cause of gays ... he made a sacrifice that was totally unjust," said Boyd, poet-in-residence in the Diocese of Los Angeles. "Unfortunately, without the blood of martyrs, maybe there wouldn’t be many changes."
Shepard, 21, a University of Wyoming student, was tied to a split-rail fence, beaten, pistol-whipped and left for dead in near freezing temperatures by two men he met in a campus bar. A cyclist who found him 18 hours later at first mistook Shepard for a scarecrow. He died five days afterward without regaining consciousness.
His death rallied the gay community nationally and inspired the rural community of Lander, about 220 miles southeast of Laramie. Located in Fremont County, it borders the Wind River Reservation, where about 36,000 Shoshone and Arapaho live, including Two-Spirit people, a Native American designation for gays.
"When people said, ‘We’re not like that here,’ I replied: ‘If we’re not like that here, let’s prove it,’" said Debra East, director of the Wind River Country Initiative for Youth, an alliance of LGBT and non-LGBT people created in 2000 by United Gays of Wyoming. Prior to that, there was little cross-cultural interaction, barely "a glimmer of understanding of how all those forms of oppression had hurt all of us together and some of us most profoundly," East said.
Later that year, through its coalition-building efforts, the agency helped rally the community against Church of the Creator, a white supremacist organization that moved its headquarters to Lander.
"Together, people are standing up to them," said East. "They are also struggling with the next question – if ‘we’re not that kind of people,’ then what kind of people are we?"
The Initiative offers tools "to figure out how to interrupt those daily times when people say things that are oppressive or hurtful or unaware, to be respectful of all people and yet to allow for change in a positive way. We all know how to be adversarial – the question is, how do we actively engage in building relationships that don’t add another stone to the wall that we’ve taken centuries to build?"
East is headed to Laramie, where she and colleagues Blaire Wetchie and Yolanda Hvizdak will present a workshop at the Shepard Symposium on Social Justice, an annual event sponsored by the Shepard family. "By being present, three gay people who are Shoshone, Arapaho and white, we are showing shared leadership and teamwork. We’re trying to break down old constructs by modeling working together."
They also teach prejudice reduction and empowerment skills – ways to listen and inquire by "building on where we’re similar, where we’re different, how to tell our own stories, express our outrage at particular events, how our lives are affected by sexism, homophobia, classism, racism.
"Ironically, people perceive gay liberation, cross-cultural work as somewhat marginal, when it’s central," says East. But she hopes to reach 10 percent of the population within five years, adding, "If we can do the work well here, it will shift thinking outside of our area. Hopefully, it will grow."
– Pat McCaughan