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A gay dad’s birthday letter to Matthew Shepard

A gay dad’s birthday letter to Matthew Shepard
Today Matthew Shepard, had he lived, would have been 39 years old.

Instead, he forever will be remembered as a gentle-looking, young 21-year old who was left for dead on a cold Wyoming plain, crucified for being gay.

I spoke recently to his friend Michele Jouse. Michele attended boarding school with Matthew when they were teens.

Now, years later, after almost two decades of rage and grief, she gathered her emotions and was able to make a documentary film, Matt Shepard is a Friend of Mine.

I interviewed her on my radio show, Out in Santa Cruz.

Many of us thought we knew Matthew. We didn’t. Not like those in his real life did.

Today, many people don’t know him at all.

As I talked about the interview to several straight people, the response was often, “Who is Matthew Shepard?”

I replied: “Matthew Shepard was the young man who was crucified at the hands of homophobia. He died so I didn’t have to.”

Here’s my letter to Matt. Happy birthday, young man, wherever you are.

Dear Matt,

It is your birthday today, yet I’m thinking of your death.

I will never forget how that atrocity became seared into my psyche, and onto the psyche of thousands.

For the vast majority of people who hadn’t ever given a single thought to LGBTQ rights, you represented the “kid next door.” Their neighbor. Their own child.

Your death rightly terrified them.

The hatred and continued persecution by Westboro Baptist Church further fed awareness as to the depths and horrors of homophobia.

We didn’t know the three-dimensional Matt, however.

At 21, you were already becoming an activist, and were filled with the desire to have a voice against prejudice.

You were already battling demons in this world, including HIV.

That demon had already gotten to you, long before that fateful night in Laramie.

When you were visiting Morocco with friends, on leave from boarding school, you ventured out of the closet you’d built and slipped into the night on your own, presumably to find the gay part of a strange town.

I understand that. When I was young, closeted, traveling with others, I did the same.

But stepping out didn’t bring you relief. Instead, you fell prey to a group of six thugs who lay in wait for a gentle gay boy to rape.

That’s what they did. Foreshadowing a worse event to come, they not only abused your body, they threw you into a darkness that only the vilest of homophobia can create.

It was a darkness that you worked to escape when you returned home to Wyoming; to the land of your innocence.

As you were finding your voice as an LGBTQ activist, homophobia found you again.

This time, it slaughtered you.

I’ve been told that the activist spirit we’ve witnessed in your mother Judy demonstrates that the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree.

The activist she became was the one you’d intended to be yourself.

As you lay clinging to life, your family was asked if they wanted to remove you from life support.

It was a choice they would never want to make.

A family friend came in to talk to you, and in his talk, he told you it was okay for you to let go of your life.

He told you that all you set out to do — namely, become a voice and a hero — had been achieved.

You lent fame to the issue and laid out homophobia in its stark bare evil for the world to see.

He told you that you’d be famous. That night, having heard him, your spirit departed, allowing the rest of your legacy to begin.

A child of December, strung up on a cross, left to die on a lonely plain, who certainly let out a final cry to God: “Why oh, why, hast thou forsaken me?”

It is all too reminiscent for me as a Christian. As the man who experienced it died as a lightning rod for our sins, you died as a lightning rod for the scourge of homophobia.

You inspired a change in consciousness in the public that allowed people to see the humanity of LGBTQ people — many for the first time.

You were the ripple that caused a wave — the equality that many of us hadn’t dreamed of witnessing in our lifetimes.

I stop and wonder what your life would be like now.

I think that you’d be a lot like me. You’d have love in your life, and potentially be a gay dad, with kids who adore you.

You’d have years of being yourself, and attracting people who loved you for it.

Your ability to live equally, free and safe, would have been on the back of a public awareness and a popularity that allowed for it.

It begs the question.

Could you have had the love of building your own family in equality if you yourself hadn’t died to become part of the movement that made it possible?

We’ll never know.

All I can tell you is that you gave me a gift I can never repay.

As I kiss my two boys goodnight and tuck them in, I reflect that it might not be, had you not made the sacrifice that you did.

So I kiss them and love them, and I think of you.

I think of the kisses of your mom and your dad that can never come again.

It’s a debt I can’t repay to you or to them, but one that I’m committed to paying forward.

My sons will know your name.

Those who know me will know what you represent.

Matt Shepard, you weren’t a personal friend of mine. I wouldn’t be so presumptuous to claim that in respect for those, like Michele Jouse, to whom you were that full three-dimensional person.

However, I’ll always wish that you had been.

And I’l always carry gratitude for you as though you were.

Your value will not be squandered and your ultimate sacrifice will not be in vain.

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