UW professor speaks out about gay life in the Cowboy State

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

By Lucille Rice

In October 1998, a young man was found beaten beyond recognition, tortured and tied to a fence along a mountain bike trail outside of Laramie, Wyo. The man, Matthew Shepard, a student at the University of Wyoming, died of his injuries. His murder was condemned as a hate crime and Laramie, and Wyoming as a whole, was accused of being homophobic.

Beth Loffreda, an East Coast native, moved to Laramie to teach at the University of Wyoming just a few months before Matthew Shepard’s murder. As soon as news of the crime traveled East, she received pleas from family and friends back home to reconsider living in a town where such a horrific crime could take place. Loffreda wanted to defend Wyoming and to answers the questions her family, community members, and she herself were asking.

So she wrote a book about the aftermath of the crime and touched on subjects including media coverage, the community’s obligation to face the facts and the politics of discrimination. “Losing Matt Shepard: Life and Politics in the Aftermath of Anti-Gay Murder” was published  in 2000. To this day, it arouses a wide range of heartfelt reaction.

Jackson Hole PFLAG – Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays – brings Loffreda to town to speak at 7:30 p.m. on Friday in the Teton County Library Auditorium. She took the time to field some questions on Sunday from her home in Laramie.

Planet Jackson Hole: What led you to write “Losing Matt Shepard”?

Beth Loffreda: I had just moved to Wyoming the summer before Matthew was murdered, and I had been asked by students to be the faculty advisor for the [Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Association]. When [Matthew Shepard] was killed, I found myself closer to the middle of what was happening than I would have expected. I had recently moved here from the East Coast, and all my friends and family were calling asking, “What kind of an awful place did you move to?” They had questions like, “What is Wyoming life like?” and “What is gay life like out there?” I wanted to defend Wyoming and find out the answers to those questions. I wanted to try to make sense of what had happened and show people that [Laramie] was better than what they portrayed it as.

PJH: Was Laramie to blame?

BL: It is always hard to answer this kind of question. I think there are things about Laramie that made it possible for [Russell] Henderson and [Aaron] McKinney [Shepard’s convicted killers] to go the way they went. When I think of the two of them, they were guys who felt like they were looking at a dead-end kind of life. That has something to do with the kind of social and economic realities of Laramie.

They went to a high school that was phobic about talking about gay identity in any kind of positive way. One of the things that does feel different about Wyoming compared to other places I’ve lived is that people are much more comfortable about being quiet about difference here. Gay residents in Wyoming talk about how they need to keep their heads down. That is one of the real peculiarities of Wyoming and probably life in the rural Rocky Mountain West: There is diversity, but people don’t really want to look at it or hear it. 

PJH: What was the community’s response to your book?

BL: There were weeks and weeks after the book came out during which I received letters and visits to my house. The book or portions of it is taught in a number of classes, so I still hear a lot from students that are reading it. For me, the most gratifying thing was that gay and lesbian residents, or those that felt on the margin of Laramie, felt that the book caught something true about their experience.

I know that the [university] administration wasn’t thrilled I was writing it. They were understandably wishing there was less attention, but I can remember a couple uncomfortable conversations with the university president at the time.

PJH: You mention several times in your book that Matthew Shepard became, with the media’s overbearing sensationalism, a symbol or cause rather than a human being. Is that so bad if it helps create change for the better and prevent other hate crimes?

BL: It’s almost inevitable, and when you look at the kind of civil rights and social movements in America, martyrs are important, they are powerful rallying points. What Matt provided for many Americans was a way to identify with a gay kid in a way that many straight people hadn’t been able to before.

I think the thing that was worrisome to me and other people was the fact that Matt seemed so young that he didn’t appear to be a grown man or “really gay.” There was almost a kind of denial of what a full diversity of gay life could look like.

PJH: How has Laramie changed vis-à-vis the community’s acceptance of gays since your book was published in 2000?

BL: Social change is so hard to track. I learned that writing this book. There have been small changes that are positive. The cowboy bar downtown has hosted a few drag nights, and initially people thought, “Oh my god, we can’t do that,” and then everything’s OK. You still hear rivers of casual homophobia. I think it’s still such a work in progress for both [racial and sexual minorities]. Certainly on campus the rate of change for racial and sexual minorities has been slow. I feel like sometimes there could be more leadership.

PJH: What do you think of Wyoming’s current leadership on the issue of gay rights?

BL: I find it dismaying. It’s dismaying, their comfort with dehumanizing an entire group of people who they represent, and I feel like the ease with which so many of our leaders will deny basic human rights to people that we know is dismaying.

PJH: What of the many politicians’ referrals to the Bible that states homosexuality is a sin?

BL: One of the greatest innovations is the separation of church and state. I am firm believer in that religious beliefs have no place in the political realm. They are welcome to practice them in the privacy of their own lives. We are not a nation that bases fact on Biblical principles, but on Constitutional principles. That is not a premise that I think is acceptable for denying people public rights.

PJH: If the same exact crime happened today, what do you think would happen differently?

BL: It still seems absolutely possible that it could happen. I certainly wouldn’t say that life here has changed enough that we could imagine ourselves safe from that kind of crime. And that’s not to say that because this is a terrible place but it is imperfect as every place is.

Courtesy Photo
Beth Lafredda

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