Word: shepards
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Hoffman will portray his first romantic lead in David Mamet's State and Main, opposite Rebecca Pidgeon, but he scoffs at the notion of Hollywood stardom. He will, he says, continue living in New York City, doing theater (he'll make his Broadway debut in a revival of Sam Shepard's True West in February) and worrying about his love life. "I date," he says. "But it's a nightmare. You're traveling all the time. I gotta figure it out, because I want to get married and have kids someday." Listening, Amy? There's still time to give this...
SENTENCED. AARON MCKINNEY, 22, high school dropout; to two consecutive life sentences without parole; for the 1998 murder, kidnapping and robbery of gay college student Matthew Shepard; in Laramie, Wyo. Matthew's parents--who interceded as the jury began to deliberate--spared him the death penalty in exchange for his promise never to appeal...
...panel also addressed a question on the problem of enforcing the civil rights of illegal immigrants and the "gay panic" defense used in the Matthew Shepard murder trial, in which a gay college student was killed for his sexual orientation...
...Essentially, Shepard was lynched - taken from a bar, beaten and left to die because he was the vilified "other," whom society has often cast as an acceptable target of abuse; Dirkhising was just "another" to a pair of deviants. And while child abuse is unfortunately no big news, lynching still is. Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson were not satisfying some animalistic sexual impulse, they were bullies who gratuitously killed someone out of hate for being different than they were. It wasn't about them, it was about Matthew Shepard. Because they dramatically reflected some of society's darkest influences...
...reason the Dirkhising story received so little play is because it offered no lessons. Shepard's murder touches on a host of complex and timely issues: intolerance, society's attitudes toward gays and the pressure to conform, the use of violence as a means of confronting one's demons. Jesse Dirkhising's death gives us nothing except the depravity of two sick men. There is no lesson here, no moral of tolerance, no hope to be gleaned in the punishment of the perpetrators. To be somehow equated with these monsters would be a bitter legacy indeed for Matthew Shepard...