That's Not a Scarecrow

By Howard Chua-Eoan

Matthew Shepard was not openly gay. He was just himself. If people asked and he felt comfortable in their presence, he'd say, "I'm gay." There was no flaunting it. After all, he was a freshman at the University of Wyoming in the Cowboy State, a campus where real men were supposed to love football and all-night parties. Shepard, barely 5-ft. 2-in. tall and on a good day 105 lbs., preferred political debate and languages (German and Arabic) to the stereotypical masculine pursuits of his father's alma mater. Shepard said his jaw was recently broken by a man in a Cody, Wyo., bar who decked him when he realized he was gay. There are no gay bars in Wyoming. The closest gay nightclubs to Shepard's college are a 1 1/2-hr. drive away and across the Colorado border. Still, Shepard was comfortable enough to join his school's gay organization, comfortable enough knowing that some people were aware of his sexual orientation and most suspected it. Perhaps, despite his quiet caution, he was too comfortable.

Last Tuesday night, at the Fireside Lounge, a campus watering hole where he was a favorite regular, Shepard, 21, was enough at ease to strike up a conversation with two tall, muscular men, Russell Henderson, 21, and Aaron McKinney, 22, both high school dropouts. In fact, Shepard was comfortable enough to get into a pickup truck with them at about midnight. According to the police in Laramie, Wyo., the pair had apparently led him to believe that they too were gay. But all pretense vanished as the journey got under way. Police say the three were barely a half-mile on Grand Avenue, Laramie's main street, when McKinney abruptly pulled over and, apparently taking turns with Henderson, began pounding Shepard on the head with a .357 Magnum revolver. The pair then drove about a mile east of town and, on Snowy Mountain View Road, they dragged Shepard out of the car. "They tied him to a post," says police commander Dave O'Malley, and as he begged for his life, they "beat him and beat him." Perhaps as an afterthought, police say, the pair took Shepard's wallet and his shoes. The back of his head bashed to the brain stem, his face cut, his limbs scorched with burn marks, Shepard hung spread-eagled on a rough-hewn deer fence through a night of near freezing temperatures, unconscious and losing more and more blood. On the evening of the next day, 18 hours after he was abandoned, two bicyclists saw him. At first, they thought they were looking at a scarecrow. On seeing his nephew's near lifeless body hooked up to a respirator, Robert Eaton told a reporter, "It's like something you might see in war."

The comparison was apt. The brutal assault came at a time when the U.S. is buzzing with a dissonant debate over sexual orientation. It is a controversy fueled by reports of increased violence against homosexuals and a new campaign by religious conservatives touting the power of faith to overcome what they proclaim to be a sinful sensuality. The Wyoming attack occurred days shy of National Coming Out Day, which was heralded not only by gay organizations but also by the Center for Reclaiming America as it launched a new series of TV ads avowing that conversion to Christianity can reverse even the most sordid of homosexual life-styles. In one ad, the mother of a now nonpracticing homosexual declares, "Just because you love your children, it doesn't mean you approve of everything they do. Sometimes they make bad choices."

After the attack on Shepard, gay activists decried Reclaiming America's campaign as, in the words of Jennifer Einhorn of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, "a license to hate." They point not only to the proliferation of print ads deploring the gay life-style but also to a disturbing rise in bashings in safe gay havens, including Greenwich Village in New York City and Halsted Street in Chicago. The Family Research Council, which partly funds Reclaiming America, condemned the assault but said gay activists were exploiting it to promote their agenda. It stressed that the ads' message was "not about hate" but "about hope" and that "every crime is a hate crime."

Wyoming had been the site of many archconservative victories. The legislature three times crushed bills to outlaw discrimination against gays and lesbians. That stance may become problematic. Did the lack of legal restraint foster the assault? It certainly prevents Henderson and McKinney from being charged with a hate crime, though two women arrested as accomplices say the men made antigay remarks following the episode.

Henderson and McKinney sat stone-faced as they were arraigned on charges of attempted first-degree murder: alleged villains in the war against gays, cast out of anonymity and clothed in inflammatory orange.

The victim too has been transformed. "He was never imposing," says Shepard's friend Walt Boulden, describing "the most gentle soul I've ever met. He would smile at everyone." Boulden adds, "One-night stands, that wasn't Matt. Sex wasn't his primary interest." He wanted to find love. But as he lay near death, Matthew Shepard, through no choice of his own, had found martyrdom.

--Reported by Richard Woodbury/Denver and Maureen Harrington/Laramie

With reporting by Richard Woodbury/Denver and Maureen Harrington/Laramie