Download or read book The Book of Matt written by Stephen Jimenez and published by Steerforth. This book was released on 2013-09-24 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Methamphetamine was a huge part of this case . . . It was a horrible murder driven by drugs.” — Prosecutor Cal Rerucha, who convicted Matthew Shepard's killers On the night of October 6, 1998, twenty-one-year-old Matthew Shepard left a bar with two alleged “strangers,” Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson. Eighteen hours later, Matthew was found tied to a log fence on the outskirts of town, unconscious and barely alive. Overnight, a politically expedient myth took the place of important facts. By the time Matthew died a few days later, his name was synonymous with anti-gay hate. The Book of Matt, first published in 2013, demonstrated that the truth was in fact far more complicated – and daunting. Stephen Jimenez’s account revealed primary documents that had been under seal, and gave voice to many with firsthand knowledge of the case who had not been heard from, including members of law enforcement. In his Introduction to this updated edition, journalist Andrew Sullivan writes: “No one wanted Steve Jimenez to report this story, let alone go back and back to Laramie, Wyoming, asking awkward questions, puzzling over strange discrepancies, re-interviewing sources, seeking a deeper, more complex truth about the ghastly killing than America, it turned out, was prepared to hear. It was worse than that, actually. Not only did no one want to hear more about it, but many were incensed that the case was being re-examined at all.” As a gay man Jimenez felt an added moral imperative to tell the story of Matthew’s murder honestly, and his reporting has been thoroughly corroborated. “I urge you to read [The Book of Matt] carefully and skeptically,” Sullivan writes, “and to see better how life rarely fits into the neat boxes we want it to inhabit. That Matthew Shepard was a meth dealer and meth user says nothing that bad about him, and in no way mitigates the hideous brutality of the crime that killed him; instead it shows how vulnerable so many are to the drug’s escapist lure and its astonishing capacity to heighten sexual pleasure so that it’s the only thing you want to live for. Shepard was a victim twice over: of meth and of a fellow meth user.”
Download or read book October Mourning written by Leslea Newman and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A masterful poetic exploration of the impact of Matthew Shepard’s murder on the world. On the night of October 6, 1998, a gay twenty-one-year-old college student named Matthew Shepard was kidnapped from a Wyoming bar by two young men, savagely beaten, tied to a remote fence, and left to die. Gay Awareness Week was beginning at the University of Wyoming, and the keynote speaker was Lesléa Newman, discussing her book Heather Has Two Mommies. Shaken, the author addressed the large audience that gathered, but she remained haunted by Matthew’s murder. October Mourning, a novel in verse, is her deeply felt response to the events of that tragic day. Using her poetic imagination, the author creates fictitious monologues from various points of view, including the fence Matthew was tied to, the stars that watched over him, the deer that kept him company, and Matthew himself. More than a decade later, this stunning cycle of sixty-eight poems serves as an illumination for readers too young to remember, and as a powerful, enduring tribute to Matthew Shepard’s life. Back matter includes an epilogue, an afterword, explanations of poetic forms, and resources.
Download or read book Murder the Media and the Politics of Public Feelings written by Jennifer Petersen and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-12 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1998, the horrific murders of Matthew Shepard -- a gay man living in Laramie, Wyoming -- and James Byrd Jr. -- an African American man dragged to his death in Jasper, Texas -- provoked a passionate public outrage. The intense media coverage of the murders made moments of violence based in racism and homophobia highly visible and which eventually led to the passage of The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act in 2009. The role the media played in cultivating, shaping, and directing the collective emotional response toward these crimes is the subject of this gripping new book by Jennifer Petersen. Tracing the emotional exchange from news stories to the creation of law, Petersen calls for an approach to media and democratic politics that takes into account the role of affect in the political and legal life of the nation.
Download or read book Losing Matt Shepard written by Beth Loffreda and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2001-11-05 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores why the 1998 murder of gay student Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming, set off a media frenzy and continues to haunt the nation, and examines how the politics of sexuality unfolded in the small town.
Download or read book From Hate Crimes to Human Rights written by Mary E Swigonski and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-05-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fight for the human rights of LGBT individuals with strategies from this powerful book! From the intimate horror of domestic violence to the institutionalized heterosexism of marriage laws, this volume takes an unsparing look at the interconnections of prejudice and hate crimes in the lives of LGBT individuals. Bringing together original research and solidly grounded theory, From Hate Crimes to Human Rights: A Tribute to Matthew Shepard also offers fresh strategies so you can work effectively for social change. This moving, thoughtful volume begins with a friend's memoir of the murdered Matthew Shepard; this intimate glimpse is powerful testimony that hate crimes affect individuals, not just symbolic martyrs. From Hate Crimes to Human Rights drags hidden homophobia from the closet and examines it with clean, incisive intelligence. It tackles taboo topics, including: what the Bible really says about homosexuality how minority cultures sometimes foster hatred against the LGBT individuals in their midst why child welfare services don't protect LGBT youth from peer violence how internalized LGBT self-hatred can be expressed as domestic violence Hate crimes do not occur in a cultural vacuum. From Hate Crimes to Human Rights searches out the roots of hatred and suggests ways to eradicate them, drawing on economics, theology, and linguistics as well as sociology, history, and political science. Specific suggestions include: how to use language as a social and cultural change strategy what individuals and universities can do to promote human rights how to make use of the intersection of difference and tolerance to prevent hate crimes why equal treatment for LGBT individuals is a human rights issue, not a special-interest advantage From Hate Crimes to Human Rights provides powerful explanations of the ways hatred generates hate crimes and proposes positive action you can take to validate human rights. A Statement from the Authors One of the premises of this book is that if we want to progress from hate crimes to human rights, we must learn to respect, honor, and celebrate diversity. The chapter authors exemplify a rainbow of ethnicities, sexual orientations, and gender identities. Each of us is committed to advocate for human rights and to work to end hate crime. Toward those ends, the royalties from the sale of this book will go directly to a memorial fund that has been established at Monmouth University in Matthew Shepard's honor. The proceeds from that fund will be used to support students in their preparation for human rights advocacy.
Download or read book The Legacies of Matthew Shepard written by Helis Sikk and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection explores the deeper contexts and consequences surrounding the murder of Matthew Shepard. This young gay man was brutally beaten and left tied to a fence on a chill Wyoming night in October 1998. Found the next morning by two cyclists, he was transported to a hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado where he died five days later. His murder was one of the most publicized and for some, most vividly remembered, instances of hate crime related violence based on sexual orientation. Twenty years after his death, Matthew Shepard’s story is at a critical turning point: memories of his murder and its meanings can either fade into the past or be reinvigorated to make up part of more meaningful investigations into LGBTQ and modern U.S. history. The multidisciplinary contributors to this book blend personal narrative with more conventional academic approaches to offer a 20-year retrospective that re-examines the subject of Shepard’s murder, whilst also bringing to light questions of historical memory, rurality, race, and public policy. Each of the disciplines and genres included contributes unique understandings of the murder and responses to it that cannot be articulated solely through traditional academic writing. This collection then not only tells the story of Matthew Shepard in the context of 2018, but also provides a compelling view of how and through which means American culture communicates painful histories of violence, bias, and death.
Download or read book Blood Tears written by Scott Gibson and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of commemorative poems written by seventy-five poets, in memory of Matthew Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student who was murdered in 1998.
Download or read book God Hates Fags written by Michael Cobb and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, the author maintains that religious discourses have curiously figured as some of the most potent and pervasive forms of queer expression and activism throughout the twentieth century. He focuses on how queers have assumed religious rhetoric strategically to respond to the violence done against them.
Download or read book Dying to Be Normal written by Brett Krutzsch and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On October 14, 1998, five thousand people gathered on the steps of the U.S. Capitol to mourn the death of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student who had been murdered in Wyoming eight days earlier. Politicians and celebrities addressed the crowd and the televised national audience to share their grief with the country. Never before had a gay citizen's murder elicited such widespread outrage or concern from straight Americans. In Dying to Be Normal, Brett Krutzsch argues that gay activists memorialized people like Shepard as part of a political strategy to present gays as similar to the country's dominant class of white, straight Christians. Through an examination of publicly mourned gay deaths, Krutzsch counters the common perception that LGBT politics and religion have been oppositional and reveals how gay activists used religion to bolster the argument that gays are essentially the same as straights, and therefore deserving of equal rights. Krutzsch's analysis turns to the memorialization of Shepard, Harvey Milk, Tyler Clementi, Brandon Teena, and F. C. Martinez, to campaigns like the It Gets Better Project, and national tragedies like the Pulse nightclub shooting to illustrate how activists used prominent deaths to win acceptance, influence political debates over LGBT rights, and encourage assimilation. Throughout, Krutzsch shows how, in the fight for greater social inclusion, activists relied on Christian values and rhetoric to portray gays as upstanding Americans. As Krutzsch demonstrates, gay activists regularly reinforced a white Protestant vision of acceptable American citizenship that often excluded people of color, gender-variant individuals, non-Christians, and those who did not adhere to Protestant Christianity's sexual standards. The first book to detail how martyrdom has influenced national debates over LGBT rights, Dying to Be Normal establishes how religion has shaped gay assimilation in the United States and the mainstreaming of particular gays as "normal" Americans.
Download or read book The Whole World was Watching written by Romaine Patterson and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the evening of Thursday, October 8, 1998, 20-year-old Romaine Patterson received a phone call that her best friend, Matthew Shepard, had been beaten and left hanging on a split-rail fence outside Laramie, Wyoming. Romaine was then thrust to the center of the worldwide media frenzy that descended on Laramie, and she came face-to-face with twisted homophobia when Baptist minister Fred Phelps and his followers picketed Matthew’s funeral with signs reading, “Matt burns in hell.” Upon learning of Phelps’ plan to bring his ministry of hate to support Matt’s killers at their trial, Romaine went into action. Who can forget the image of Romaine and her friends donning seven-foot angel wings so they could encircle Phelps and his gang, leaving the picketers silent and invisible? From that moment forward, Romaine has become a spokesperson for tolerance, acceptance, and nonviolence around the globe, whether as a founder of Angel Action, as a consultant forThe Laramie Project(the award-winning play that has been produced hundreds of times and became an acclaimed HBO film starring Christina Ricci as Romaine). In one of their last conversations, Matt told Romaine that he wanted to spend his life helping people realize that they as individuals could make a difference in the world. This is Romaine Patterson’s journey to realizing the truth of that statement. Wyoming nativeRomaine Pattersongot started in activism when her close friend Matthew Shepard was killed. In April of 1999, she founded Angel Action, an organization for peaceful demonstration. Angel Action is now used all over the world as a means of combating hate. She has also served as a regional media manager for the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). She continues her work educating youth about hate crimes and has lectured at the University of Wyoming, Georgetown University, Penn State, and others. She currently lives in Brooklyn.
Download or read book Unfinished Lives written by Stephen V. Sprinkle and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2011-01-20 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over 13,000 Americans have been murdered in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries because of their sexual orientation and gender presentation. In Unfinished Lives: Reviving the Memory of LGBTQ Hate Crimes Victims, Stephen Sprinkle puts a human face on the outrage and loss suffered when people die from anti-gay hatred. Beginning with new developments in the story of Matthew Shepard's murder in Laramie, Wyoming, Sprinkle tells the stories of fourteen representative LGBTQ victims whose lives were savagely cut short due to homophobia and transphobia. These are stories about people who could be your neighbor, classmate, co-worker, or friend-real, everyday people whose love was foreclosed, relationships brutally terminated, and future contributions stolen from us by outrageous, irrational hatred. Told lovingly yet unflinchingly, Unfinished Lives lifts the stories of these LGBTQ victims from undeserved obscurity, allowing their memory to live again. Relying on personal interviews and visits to the locations where these people lived, loved, and died, Sprinkle records the raw emotions, powerful movements for social change, and unexpectedly hopeful communities that arise from the ruins of those people whose only "offense" was to live as they were born to be. Part portraiture, part crime narrative, and part ethnography, Unfinished Lives is poised to change the conversation on hate crimes in the United States.
Download or read book Tough on Hate written by Clara S. Lewis and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-13 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do we know every gory crime scene detail about such victims as Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. and yet almost nothing about the vast majority of other hate crime victims? Now that federal anti-hate-crimes laws have been passed, why has the number of these crimes not declined significantly? To answer such questions, Clara S. Lewis challenges us to reconsider our understanding of hate crimes. In doing so, she raises startling issues about the trajectory of civil and minority rights. Tough on Hate is the first book to examine the cultural politics of hate crimes both within and beyond the law. Drawing on a wide range of sources—including personal interviews, unarchived documents, television news broadcasts, legislative debates, and presidential speeches—the book calls attention to a disturbing irony: the sympathetic attention paid to certain shocking hate crime murders further legitimizes an already pervasive unwillingness to act on the urgent civil rights issues of our time. Worse still, it reveals the widespread acceptance of ideas about difference, tolerance, and crime that work against future progress on behalf of historically marginalized communities.
Download or read book Holy Bible NIV written by Various Authors, and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 2008-09-02 with total page 6637 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The NIV is the world's best-selling modern translation, with over 150 million copies in print since its first full publication in 1978. This highly accurate and smooth-reading version of the Bible in modern English has the largest library of printed and electronic support material of any modern translation.
Download or read book Unfollow written by Megan Phelps-Roper and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The activist and TED speaker Megan Phelps-Roper reveals her life growing up in the most hated family in America At the age of five, Megan Phelps-Roper began protesting homosexuality and other alleged vices alongside fellow members of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas. Founded by her grandfather and consisting almost entirely of her extended family, the tiny group would gain worldwide notoriety for its pickets at military funerals and celebrations of death and tragedy. As Phelps-Roper grew up, she saw that church members were close companions and accomplished debaters, applying the logic of predestination and the language of the King James Bible to everyday life with aplomb—which, as the church’s Twitter spokeswoman, she learned to do with great skill. Soon, however, dialogue on Twitter caused her to begin doubting the church’s leaders and message: If humans were sinful and fallible, how could the church itself be so confident about its beliefs? As she digitally jousted with critics, she started to wonder if sometimes they had a point—and then she began exchanging messages with a man who would help change her life. A gripping memoir of escaping extremism and falling in love, Unfollow relates Phelps-Roper’s moral awakening, her departure from the church, and how she exchanged the absolutes she grew up with for new forms of warmth and community. Rich with suspense and thoughtful reflection, Phelps-Roper’s life story exposes the dangers of black-and-white thinking and the need for true humility in a time of angry polarization.
Download or read book The Laramie Project written by and published by Dramatists Play Service Inc. This book was released on 2012 with total page 63 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE STORY: On November 6, 1998, gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard left the Fireside Bar with Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson. The following day he was discovered on a prairie at the edge of town, tied to a fence, brutally beaten, and close to death. Six days later Matthew Shepard died at Poudre Valley Hospital in Ft. Collins, Colorado. On November 14th, 1998, ten members of Tectonic Theatre Project traveled to Laramie, Wyoming and conducted interviews with the people of the town. Over the next year, the company returned to Laramie six times and conducted over 200 interviews. These texts became the basis for the play The Laramie Project. Ten years later on September 12th, 2008, five members of Tectonic returned to Laramie to try to understand the long-term effect of the murder. They found a town wrestling with its legacy and its place in history. In addition to revisiting the folks whose words riveted us in the original play, this time around, the company also spoke with the two murderers, McKinney and Henderson, as well as Matthew's mother, Judy Shepard. THE LARAMIE PROJECT: TEN YEARS LATER is a bold new work, which asks the question, "How does society write its own history?"
Download or read book The Family Book written by Todd Parr and published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2009-11-16 with total page 59 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Represents a variety of families, some big and some small, some with only one parent and some with two moms or dads, some quiet and some noisy, but all alike in some ways and special no matter what.
Download or read book Hellhound On His Trail written by Hampton Sides and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2010-04-27 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • On April 4, 1968, James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel. The nation was shocked, enraged, and saddened. As chaos erupted across the country and mourners gathered at King's funeral, investigators launched a sixty-five day search for King’s assassin that would lead them across two continents—from the author of Blood and Thunder and Ghost Soldiers. With a blistering, cross-cutting narrative that draws on a wealth of dramatic unpublished documents, Hampton Sides, bestselling author of Ghost Soldiers, delivers a non-fiction thriller in the tradition of William Manchester's The Death of a President and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. With Hellhound On His Trail, Sides shines a light on the largest manhunt in American history and brings it to life for all to see. With a New Afterword
