MATTHEW SHEPARD: THE LIE CONTINUES

Takimag ^ | 10/13/18

[Altura Ct.]

In 2009, Barack Obama honored dead gay man Matthew Shepard by putting his name on some silly-ass federal hate crimes act.

Now Shepard’s gay corpse will join other luminaries as Woodrow Wilson and Helen Keller by being interred at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC.

Ever since Shepard’s 1998 murder in Laramie, WY, his legacy has become sanctified to a nigh untouchable level. We are led to believe that two homophobic Wyoming rednecks met Shepard at a bar, then lured him to the outskirts of town, where they cracked his skull by pistol-whipping him and then tied him to a fence and set him on fire. We are also led to believe—in fact, we are forbidden from believing anything else, lest we be called naughty names—that the sole reason these rednecks bashed this angelic little 5’2” gay man was because he was gay, and all Wyoming rednecks are secretly gay, which is why they take out their self-loathing by bashing in gay men’s skulls with pistols.

Alas, just as with MLK and Nelson Mandela, any time someone is depicted as saintly, you can breathe easy knowing it’s a steamin’ crock o’ shit.

ABC News will tell you that Matthew was “no different than any other young man that age.”

That’s assuming that most young men that age were HIV-positive meth dealers. That’s also assuming that Shepard and his killers met that night and that they weren’t all meth dealers and that Shepard wasn’t already involved sexually with at least one of them.

“The view was that homophobic rednecks walked into a bar and saw an obviously gay man with money and targeted him and beat him to death for that reason,” says Stephen Jimenez, author of The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths about the Murder of Matthew Shepard. “But that isn’t what happened. [Killer] Aaron McKinney and Matthew had a friendship. They’d been involved sexually, they bought and sold drugs from each other. That complicates the original story of two strangers walking into a bar and targeting Matthew—someone they did not know—because he was gay.”

Jimenez, who is himself as unabashedly gay as a sprig of mistletoe on a red-velvet winter’s vest, spent thirteen years researching the case and says he originally arrived in Laramie convinced that it was a homophobic hate crime. But after interviewing 100 individuals close to the case, he suggests that the murder may have instead been the result of McKinney’s five-day meth binge and an intent to rob Shepard of a $10K meth shipment that was coming into Laramie.

Jimeneze quotes a Laramie police officer with the incredibly macho name of Flint Waters:

I believe to this day that McKinney and Henderson were trying to find Matthew’s house so they could steal his drugs. It was fairly well known in the Laramie community that McKinney wouldn’t be one that was striking out of a sense of homophobia. Some of the officers I worked with had caught him in a sexual act with another man, so it didn’t fit – none of that made any sense.

He also quotes investigator Ben Fritzen:

Shepard’s sexual preference … certainly wasn’t the motive in the homicide. What it came down to really is drugs and money.

Even the story that Shepard was tied to a fence as if he were crucified is a lie, despite the fact that nearly every major media outlet who reported on his upcoming interment at the National Cathedral repeated it unquestioningly. According to the lead detective on the case, Shepard was found sitting on the ground with his hands tied behind his back.

As much as it pains us to say it, the gay community really needs better hate-crime victims. It’s not that we want anything bad to happen, but from a public-relations standpoint, it would certainly help their image, and we all know how image-conscious those rump-wranglers can be

[pbear8]

Washington National Cathedral is Episcopal.

[itsahoot]

The Soviets were good ad changing history too.

The past is never certain.