Most Americans remember Matthew Shepard.
As in “Oh, no. Wasn’t he that poor kid who was killed by homophobes out west somewhere? He was in a bar or something? Didn’t they grab him and put him on a fence, leave him for dead?”
Yes, that’s the one. A seventeen-year-old kid who was murdered horribly . And he was indeed a homosexual. In the interim between 1998 and now, Matthew Shepard’s horrific death has morphed into a very special narrative about the dangers of being a young homosexual man at the mercy of H8. What is H8? It’s what homophobes do to homosexuals.
Here’s the foundation bearing his name. You can find the gauzy details of his life captured there in loving detail. T.h.e. N.a.r.r.a.t.i.v.e., sub specie aeternitatis:
The life and death of Matthew Shepard changed the way we talk about, and deal with, hate in America. Since his death, Matt’s legacy has challenged and inspired millions of individuals to erase hate in all its forms. Although Matt’s life was short, his story continues to have a great impact on young and old alike. His legacy lives on in thousands of people who actively fight to replace hate with understanding, compassion, and acceptance.
But guess what? Another ‘icon’ bites the dust, because the real story of Matthew Shepard is far more complicated than the received hagiography. It usually is. And there are usually iconoclasts waiting with their hammers. But this one is going to smash a lot of people for whom the codified version gives their lives meaning – his family for one, and those who made money trafficking in his image for another.
Not everything is a lie.
To begin with, that fellow serving life for Matthew’s murder is indeed his stone killer and deserves to be where he is. But that boy we’ve come to think of as Saint Matthew had some mighty big clay feet.
Matthew Shepard was the winsome young homosexual in Laramie, Wyoming who in October 1998 was tortured, killed, and left hanging grotesquely from a fence. He was discovered almost a day later and later died in the hospital from his horrific wounds.
Gruesome and true. Partial truths. The received wisdom all these years is that an innocent young man was at a bar in Laramie and two evil strangers offered him a ride home. Only he never made it home. Instead he was left battered and broken, barefoot and spread out on a fence like some re-enactment of The Crucifixion, western-style. Later, his personal belongings would be found in the truck of the two men.
As Austin Ruse — the aptly named Breitbart writer — tells the story, these two attempted to use a defense I’ve never heard of: they were true-blue heterosexual good ol’ boys and when he came on to them, they panicked, just like we know heterosexual men always do. This is called “the gay panic defense”.
Mr. Ruse says:
Almost immediately Shepard became a secular saint, and his killing became a kind of gay Passion Play where he suffered and died for the cause of homosexuality against the growing homophobia and hatred of gay America.
Indeed, a Mathew Shepard industry grew rapidly with plays and foundations along with state and even national hate crimes legislation named for him. Rock stars wrote songs about him, including Elton John and Melissa Etheridge. Lady Gaga performed John Lennon’s “Imagine” and changed the lyrics to include Shepard.
Never miss a chance to cash in on someone else’s pain, eh? The soppy sentimentality of these folks looks even more grotesque as the truth comes out:
Mr. Ruse again:
Thanks to a new book by an award winning gay journalist we now know that much of this narrative turns out to be false, little more than gay hagiography.
And Dymphna asks, “why do we need to know the author of the book is gay? Is it not sufficient that he is “an award-winning-journalist”?
As gay journalist Aaron Hicklin [oops, another double-credential here with this second gay journalist – D], writing in The Advocate asks “… how does it color our understanding of such a crime if the perpetrator and victim not only knew each other but also had sex together, bought drugs from one another, and partied together?”
And Dymphna asks, “why do we need to know Mr. Hicklin’s sexual orientation. Oh… right, The Advocate is a gay magazine. Of course. And so why does he bandy about the world “color” here? That’s a b-u-o word: “black-use-only”. But perhaps Mr. Hicklin is black. In which case, he can talk about our understanding being any color he wants. Black privilege and all that.
But let’s look at Mr. Hicklin’s question using race-neutral terms: how does it affect our understanding of such a crime if the perpetrator and victim not only knew each other but also had sex together, bought drugs from one another, and partied together?
Since the Baron has let our subscription to The Advocate lapse, let me offer my own opinion: it matters crucially. The fact that Saint Matthew Shepard was a meth head and was at the moment of his captivity keeping a large batch of the stuff from someone he must have known was on a long binge of the stuff? The best one can say is that he was probably strung out himself and showed all the judgment of a meth head.
And how about his ‘friends’ at the time? They knew his drug habits.
Well maybe the answers are all in the book.
The author interviewed over a hundred people for this story, which really ought to have been titled “The New Book of Matt”. Whatev. It will be released in a week or so but you can pre-order at Amazon
Mr. Ruse says:
As to be expected, Matthew Shepard Inc. is rallying to denounce the new narrative that his homosexuality had little or nothing to do with his murder…[…]
Sadly, his sexual orientation wasn’t central to his death at all. Being a meth-head who refused to share with his lover was what got him killed.
Of course his family will denounce “the new narrative”. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Mr. Ruse, couldn’t you at least have been less po-mo here? Why not just call it “the Truth”. New narrative, my foot!
The dead teenager’s kith and kin have expended their lives burnishing Saint Matthew’s halo. Now some investigative journalist wants to foreclose on the very meaning they created to sustain themselves beyond his death.
The truth may make you free, but at first it can make you unutterably miserable for a very long time.
The story at Breitbart now has well over three thousand comments. Whether they are any more enlightening to this truth is your call. Our commenters are definitely a cut above the ordinary so it will be far more interesting to see what you have to say.
I think the fact that this book was written by a gay journalist is important. It’s called, policing your own community. If people who reported on this book left this information out, it would be like not mentioning the religion of a terrorist. In both cases, there might be an agenda. When people ask, why do we need to know his orientation, religion, race, etc., I want to ask, why don’t you think I should know this.
I wanted to know why there had to be two: the writer AND the reviewer. It’s an overload of p.c.
And having been mau-maued by the gay community of late…it’s simply tiresome. So is the black grievance industry tiresome. And the slutwalk folks…and the marching Muslims, etc, ad nauseam.
Whole lot of bullying going on.
The author of The Advocate piece writes, “There are valuable reasons for telling certain stories in a certain way at pivotal times, but that doesn’t mean we have to hold on to them once they’ve outlived their usefulness.”
Fascinating. It clearly matters very much that the writer is gay. That the reviewer would be gay is only to be expected of The Advocate, and I suppose we could say the same of the writer if we accept that the published review isn’t an attempted blacklisting. But the above quote tells us something about the motive for finally admitting what those skeptical of the Matthew Shepherd story have long known, that it had nothing to do with homophobia and everything to do with illicit drugs.
This book is not intended to challenge the gay narrative so much as to advance an important nuance. Yes, it admits that gays have lied in the past, but implies that those lies were told under the social duress of a society which was refusing to acknowledge the moral superiority of homosexuality. By openly admitting that they lied now that the advantage they sought from a lie is secured, gays can prove that they are morally superior to everyone else, just as they prove their superior sexual morality by openly admitting to homosexuality.
This apparently perverse view of the virtue of honesty may be more prevalent among homosexuals because they typically have lived a double life for some period of time before “coming out of the closet”. It is not, however, in any way unique to homosexuals. It is almost the sine qua non of modern leftist politics to demonstrate “courage and honesty” by admitting to past misdeeds, and rapidly coming to characterize all politics. The reasons for this culture of public confession of private sins are several. Cults use such tactics to ensure a psychological submission of the individual to the group, a dependence on the cult for “forgiveness”. The constant narrative of exposed sins in everyone that is examined is a useful propaganda tool for dismissing the idea that it is possible to resist temptations. The promise of being “accepted for oneself” despite giving into temptations is seductive as the shame of yielding to them, there is no enticement in being promised acceptance of behavior that is not fundamentally shameful.
This is a declaration of victory in the Cultural war, or at least a call to declare victory and negotiate the terms of enemy surrender. It is tragicomic only because global civilization is on the brink of absolutely dissolving, along with every “gain” supposedly made by those seeking to make sin publicly acceptable. The degree to which the advocacy of moral degeneration has contributed to the coming fall adds an element of bathos to this hubristic assumption that morality has been finally defeated. Homosexuality is a late comer to the game, and mainly served as a handicap to the advance of more generally tempting sins; perjury, legalized theft, convenient murder, adultery and fornication, sanctioned covetousness, denial of God’s authority. I supposed a few more items could be listed, but my point is that homosexuality is not just late to the party, it is only arriving at all because the party is about to be over.
Homosexual advocacy accomplished nothing except to serve as a gauge of how much progress had already been made by the real front in destruction of the essential values of personal accountability on which civilization necessarily depends for continued survival. Like a popinjay standing atop an undermined dike to claim conquest based on the efforts of those who did the dirty work.
Well and eloquently put!
It likely may not matter that the journalist is gay, because the irrationality of the LGBT supersubculture will swallow him up and spit him out as a traitor, perhaps a “self-hating gay” or find out he’s a “Lincoln Log” conservative, etc.
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I don’t think you’ve ever heard of “Bar Noar slaughter” in Tel Aviv in 2009. In Israel it was THE GAY HATRED crime. Well, exactly like this one. One evening the masked gunman entered the center for gay teens (youth bar – bar noar) and emptied his gun into the room. 2 of the teens were ruthlessly killed. Immediately all the media and LGBT community turned the poor victims into the “icons” who “fell as a result of a hate campaign by the far right and religious orthodox”. Expecially Eli Ishai’s name was dragged through the dirt with almost direct accusations. Everyone “respectable and enlightened” hurried up to mount even more blame on the “intolerable Israeli Jewish society” – starting from dear Mr.Shimon Peres of course.
Guess what? About 3 months ago the evidence came up and the murder was finally solved – though not because of the police efforts but because one of the involved in murder simply decided to speak up for his personal reasons.
As it appears, mr. Shaul Ganon, the “youth center manager”, the main LGBT activist “forced” himself upon a young teenager who was visiting a center as he was in doubt about his own sexual identity. The under-age-of -consent boy felt humiliated and told his cousen with the criminal background. They took another criminal relative into the scheme and decided to murder the bar-owner. Yet the plan went awry when the guy for some reason wasn’t at the bar that evening. So the relative decided to empty his gun anyway into the innocent teens. Horrible without a doubt.
Mr. Shaul, who didn’t tell the police from the beginning about his relationships with the “bar visitors”, to avoid the – 1. trial for sex with under age teen and 2. misinforming the police – hurried to make a deal of protection with the police in exchange for his cooperation in the trial of those criminals and despicable murderes.
Not a whisper of saying sorry to all the jewish religious society!!! Instead they’ve practically hushed from the public the end of the proceedings and continue to claim it still was a hate crime as the shooter killed the poor teens as” a revenge for their sexual orientation”. Huh?!
I have no doubt that our “enlightened” court will agree with this version.
Oh, by the way immediately another hip of similar acuusations about “the forced sex” from the “former gay bar visitors” came upon mr. Ganon. But I’m sure they’ll be generously paid off and /or hushed up into the oblivion from the “hate-driven” public.
LSM (lamestream media) will spin yarns about ‘martyr’ Matthew and ‘evil homophobes’ till the cows come home, but whisper nary a word about Robert Sanchez, the gay train engineer who was so busy texting a teenage boy that he blew through a red light, crashing his passenger train head-on into a freight in California, Sept 12, 2008, killing 25 people.
If it had been a Christian texting a potential convert, there would have been hundreds of derogatory articles about it, hour-long exposes on alphabet networks, maybe a play or two and a Hollywood movie.
And yes, we’ve all heard of Matthew Shepard, but Jesse Dirkhising has been forgotten. He was the unfortunate 13-year-old who was raped, tortured and murdered by two homosexual fiends in Prairie Grove, Arkansas, Sept. 26, 1999. No hand-wringing, no candlelight vigils and marches, no national news coverage, no presidential proclamations for Jesse -he was just a white male, 13-year-old boy, not a member of a politically-protected class.
Jesse was murdered by homosexuals, and now it turns out, so was Matthew. Research, which is rarely if ever mentioned in the LSM, has shown a long list of medical and psychological pathologies associated with GLB(gay, lesbian, bisexual)ism, including AIDS and many other STDs, cancers (notably anal and throat), increased alcoholism, suicide, illegal drug use, depression, and verbal/physical domestic abuse. It looks like the Bible was right; sodomy is an abomination. And it looks like the Left is wrong again, just as they are about Islam.
Nice piece Dymphna.
I think the modern master of using the Narrative in this fashion has to be Yasser Arafat. I certainly hope his misbegotten soul is suffering wherever he is now, but credit where credit is due – he created a ‘nationality’ that didn’t exist out of pure scratch, convinced an American president (Clinton) to be his main advocate after he tortured to death two American diplomats in the Sudan and murdered a number of other Americans, gleefully stole millions in aid money and even convinced the Israeli Left(with Clinton’s help) to rescue him from obscurity in Tunis and give him and his PLO thugs control over their own little reichlet as a base.
As for Shepard…well, let’s face it, most Leftist icons are pure BS when you do even a small amount of digging. Their entire worldview is built on lies. Remember Che? People still wear tee shirts with that murderer’s face on them.
Or to quote Arafat, “I’ve killed for my cause. Don’t you think I would lie for it?”
“Research, which is rarely if ever mentioned in the LSM, has shown a long list of medical and psychological pathologies associated with GLB(gay, lesbian, bisexual)ism, including AIDS and many other STDs, cancers (notably anal and throat), increased alcoholism, suicide, illegal drug use, depression, and verbal/physical domestic abuse. It looks like the Bible was right; sodomy is an abomination. And it looks like the Left is wrong again, just as they are about Islam.”
1. Only an idiot would think the media had ignored the connection between AIDS and anal sex. It seems your god approves of lesbians, since they don’t get AIDS from sex. However, your god does not appear to approve of African kids who do get AIDS, but not from anal sex.
2. It seems you are unaware of the connection between ovarian cancer and heterosexual sex.
3. It seems you are unaware that most injecting drug users are heterosexual. They’d have to be, as the number of homosexuals even in liberal western societies is no more than 1% of the population.
Whatever religion you think you are, it’s clear you are a not a christian.
The media didn’t ignore the connection between HIV transmission rates and anal sex, they actively suppressed it. The role of non-monogamous sex (including rampant rape and sex-slavery) in spreading HIV infection through large segments of the African population is noted, but this was often conflated with total transmission statistics to make it appear that ordinary heterosexual contact was similarly risky to anal sex. Christianity is well-known to have less stringent attitudes towards female homosexual conduct, some biblical interpretations even suggest that it is permitted as long as both woman are married to the same man (or sincerely intend to both marry the same man). This is obviously a minority view, even among those who regard polygamous relationships as valid, but the greater tolerance (and even validation) accorded expression of physical affection among females compared to males is overwhelmingly part of Christian culture and tradition.
Women who have carried a pregnancy to term have a lower risk of ovarian cancer than women who have not. The risk goes down with each full-term pregnancy. Breastfeeding may lower the risk even further.
Although the Bible is silent on the subject of intravenous drug use, modern interpolations categorize it as a sin between drunkeness and body-modification, though both of these are generally regarded as less theological than cultural infractions. At the same time, it is worth noting that homosexuals are highly overrepresented among intravenous drug users. It is also true that medical studies have demonstrated that most people claiming HIV due to shared needles were definitely lying about having avoided anal sex.
Christianity, considered as a religion rather than as a claim of Christlike moral perfection, is hardly incompatible with the odd personal failing. The point of any religion is to get closer to God, it presumes at the outset that some separation exists to be overcome. However, when it comes to factual rather than counter factual assertions, being a disciple of Christ would always demand an attempt at honesty rather than deception.
Maybe you’re right about me being an “idiot”, but I only try to be ‘a fool in Christ’, like the apostles.
Sorry to have to break it to you Joe, but despite your apparent fondest wishes, God is not ‘politically correct’. For example, He does not “approve of lesbians” (see Romans 1:26).
I’ll grant you, I’m not a politically-correct Christian who follows a ‘social gospel’-type of post-modern ‘Christianity’. But I believe that God, not you, still does the judging as to whom is saved (thanks anyway for your concern).
God bless.
The same was done for Rachel Corrie; the actual facts surrounding her death were completely rewritten, she too was raised to sainthood, and a play was written about her life.
This same exact pattern appears, yet again, in a lesser-known incident. The Earth First! protester, David Chain, who was killed in a logging accident. The facts surrounding his death were completely rewritten, and he too was raised to sainthood.
Years ago, I had a email exchange with the blogger Dr. Sanity about this pattern of behavior. A pattern, which seems so common among the more fringe elements of the various protest groups. It turns out that this need for certain individuals, to first create and then fully believe their own false narrative, is a hallmark of narcissistic personality disorder.
Sainthood itself is a sort of fiction.
Most of the saints however, were killed for saying: divorce is wrong, rich priests consume the houses of the widows, treat the unfortunate well, just not lest ye be judged. The gay press simply saw the rhetorical tricks of the hagiographers of the saints and thought “we can justify our [redacted: bovine manure] with the same technique” missing the point of the content of the saint’s life.
Just like the Nazis did with Horst Wessel. Create a legend, fly a flag, have everybody gather round and march …
The revelation that another story so central to Leftist interpretations of our cultural history turns out to be a lie doesn’t surprise me. You can find so many examples of it how individuals who did not deserve canonization received it not because of who they were, or because of what the facts actually were about them, but because they served a broader agenda purpose for a certain dishonorable class of society.
Let’s take another example that has nothing to do with the gay issue. The beatification of Muhammad Ali (Cassius Clay) by sports historians. How often is Ali held up as an example of a “transcendent” figure in sports whose long-term stature is placed beyond his talents in the ring as a boxer? This was why Ali was given that exalted position of lighting the torch at the 96 Olympics and why he keeps getting rated in positions of greatest figures in all of sports.
The reason for this has to do with the fact that by validating Ali in this realm that goes way beyond fairly elevating his skills as an athlete, the left-leaning sportswriters want to cement an image of Ali a courageous voice of dissent in the sainted world of 1960s radical anti-Vietnam protest, a “victim” of the evil white establishment. In so doing, these writers then validate their own left-wing beliefs on the 60s and don’t have to deal with the inconvenient truths of how dishonorable that entire movement was. So as a result, Ali’s role as a mouthpiece for a hate organization, the Nation Of Islam, run by a man who was a traitor to the US in World War II, and an organization that ran down the Dream Martin Luther King spoke of from the Lincoln Memorial, is so often whitewashed. Not to mention how Ali, the supposedly principled Muslim standing up against fighting, hardly lived the life of a model Muslim with his adulterous flings during his marriages in this era. The one area where they have been forced to make some concession is Ali’s shabby and disgusting treatment of Joe Frazier, but even there they are so often unwilling to link that conduct of Ali’s to the *ideology* he was part of in his broader persona established by being part of 1960s protest. They might acknowledge where Ali could be a boor, but they won’t ever let themselves say he was a fool to embrace a repulsive ideology that turned him from all-American Cassius Clay into Black Muslim Muhammad Ali, because that would force them to tear down some of their own cherished beliefs that they hold dear and for which Leftists never want to have to say they’re sorry for.
“And Dymphna asks, “why do we need to know the author of the book is gay? Is it not sufficient that he is “an award-winning-journalist”?”
He’s not only gay, he’s a gay black Hispanic Muslim transgender lesbian developmentally differently abled journalist…
We had the opportunity of filling out a personnel form at work a while back and a couple of us became one-legged Romanian lesbians – FIREPROOF!
Watch it there. You are now on the list for your prosthesis replacement and when the “health advisor” makes a home visit to see how you are adjusting…woe betide you, because s/he will have that replacement in hand and the forms to fill out.
Possible scenario: Health advisor cuts off your leg – the leg matching the prosthesis – and advises you to get on with it. Then, since you’re Romanian, s/he will fill out the application for your placement in one of those “apartments” the Dutch are constructing for Romas and other troublemakers.
Since it is well-known that your kind doesn’t work, s/he will have you replaced at your job, probably with one of his/her relatives.
Yep, those prosthesis helpers are definitely armed. Soon all govt workers will be, due to widespread sullen resentment.