Serendipity

When I scheduled The Laramie Project for discussion earlier this month, I of course had the 20th anniversary of Matthew Shepard's murder in mind.  As it turns out, there is also a connection between that event and the book we'll be discussing at our Nov. 7 meeting, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self. Specifically, in Didier Erebon's Postscript to his Introduction, on p. 12, we find this:

At the moment that I am finishing this introduction, I read in the newspapers that a young gay man was murdered in a small town in Wyoming. He was tortured by his two attackers and left to die, tied to a barbed-wire fence. He was twenty-two. His name was Matthew Shepard. I know he is not the only gay man to have had such a tragic fate in the United States in the past few years, just as I know that numerous gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transsexuals are regularly and systematically victims of such violence. A report by Amnesty International recently provided a terrifying list—one that was, alas, far from complete.

But it is Matthew Shepard's photograph that I have in front of me today, along with the account of what he suffered. How can I not think of him as I prepare to publish this book? How can I not ask the reader to remember, in reading it, that there are more than just theoretical problems at stake?

How indeed?