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I wrote this in October, 2008, for the online “Obit Magazine,” which called itself ” ‘The New Yorker’ of Death.” It’s been two decades since his murder.<\/em><\/p>\n None of us can control<\/strong> how we\u2019re remembered, though we may try to live in ways that minimize the dancing on our graves. Yet a special place should be made for those who are memorialized not for how they lived, but how they died. Those singular victims of war, accident, or crime may become famous, even important. But their daily voices, their quirks and smiles, their plain ambitions and ordinary loves risk being overwhelmed by the drama of their end. Celebrated so publicly, the private person we also mean to mourn might disappear.<\/p>\n On Oct. 6, 1998, college student Matthew Shepard (who preferred to be called Matt) was taken by two young men from a bar. He was driven to a windswept plain, pistol-whipped and robbed, tied tightly to a wooden fence, tortured, and left under the stars to die \u2013 which he did on Oct. 12, five days after his bloody, insensate body was gathered up and brought to a hospital. The bicyclist who found Shepard in the morning thought the sagging form was a scarecrow.<\/p>\n Many readers will know exactly where this happened: in Laramie, Wyoming, population 26,000. I visited friends there decades ago and was surprised at how small it was. When the University of Wyoming football team had a home game, the whole town emptied into the stadium, its streets deserted.<\/p>\n It may seem odd, but this awful story still has currency, and for one reason. Matt Shepard was out. He wore black patent-leather shoes where cowboy boots were de rigueur. He was a diminutive, polite, sometimes brash gay man who was viciously murdered at age 21, not by \u201coutsiders,\u201d as shocked townspeople said in a way that implied some local absence of cruelty, but by two regular guys almost everyone knew.<\/p>\n Ten years ago, someone\u2019s death made major news because that someone was gay.<\/p>\n Until then, the occasional murder of men and women because they were \u201cthat way\u201d went mostly unnoticed, so few could have predicted the immediate response of almost universal revulsion to Shepard\u2019s beating. Comedian Ellen DeGeneres, whose coming out the year before had placed her face on magazine covers everywhere, said in an agitated interview that \u201cI can\u2019t stop crying, this is what I was trying to stop.\u201d President Bill Clinton, clearly moved, urged the passage of a hate-crimes bill that would include the likes of Matt.<\/p>\n That bill, now awkwardly called the Matthew Shepard National Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act, is stalled because George W. Bush vowed to veto it. Barack Obama supports the legislation; John McCain previously voted against it. Wyoming is one of just five states that have no law pertinent to any category of hate.<\/p>\n Two years after the rapid trials and life-sentence convictions of Russell Arthur Henderson and Aaron James McKinney, a well-regarded play called The Laramie Project<\/i> by Mois\u00e9s Kaufman told the story of Shepard\u2019s death through interviews with 200 of those involved. Laramie Project<\/i> has been performed in thousands of community theaters and schools \u2013 and sometimes challenged by those who disdain a portrayal of gay anything, even a murder.<\/p>\n The play and trial records indicate that neither the jury nor most anyone else believed the defendants\u2019 \u201cgay panic defense\u201d \u2013 that Shepard came on to them sexually and caused them to lose control \u2013 or their subsequent claim that this was merely a robbery that went wrong. Defense attorneys had long considered the gay-panic justification a slam-dunk; something was changing.<\/p>\n