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Matthew Shepard book creates uproar

Laramie sheriff calls writer’s claims about 1998 murder ‘conspiracy theory BS’

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Matthew Shepard, The Book of Matt, gay news, Washington Blade
Matthew Shepard, The Book of Matt, gay news, Washington Blade

A new book claims Matthew Shepard sold crystal meth and worked as an escort. His family said it won’t respond to ‘conspiracy theories.’

A newly published book that claims gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard had a sexual relationship with his killer and his 1998 murder wasn’t a hate crime has triggered expressions of outrage by LGBT activists and fueled efforts by anti-gay groups to downplay the need for hate crimes laws.

“The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths About the Murder of Matthew Shepard,” written by gay journalist Stephen Jimenez and officially released on Tuesday, comes on the eve of the 15th anniversary of Shepard’s murder in Laramie, Wyo.

It also comes at a time when the “Laramie Project,” the internationally acclaimed play about the Shepard murder and its portrayal of the slaying as a hate crime, is about to open at the Ford’s Theater in Washington with a newly produced epilogue.

In addition, a documentary film called “Matt Shepard is a Friend of Mine,” directed by a filmmaker who was one of Shepard’s high school friends, is scheduled to premiere at the Washington National Cathedral on Oct. 4.

With the play and film exploring the Shepard murder as a hate crime that adversely impacted an entire community beyond the scope of an individual victim, the startling assertions made in Jimenez’s book have prompted at least one prominent gay commentator to reassess longstanding assumptions about the Shepard case.

“Events are more complicated than most politicians and activists want them to be,” said gay conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan. “No one should be afraid of the truth.”

Among the book’s claims is that Shepard, 21, knew and socialized with Aaron McKinney, also 21, one of two men convicted of his murder, at least a year before the crime. According to Jimenez’s stated findings in the book, Shepard and McKinney each used and sold crystal meth, both had been involved with an escort service in Denver and Laramie that arranged for them to have sex for money with men, they were seen at the same parties in Laramie, and the two occasionally had sex with each other.

Jimenez told the Blade he devoted more than 13 years of research and investigative reporting in preparation for his book, interviewing more than 100 people on the record, including a dozen people he identifies as friends of Shepard and more than a dozen friends of McKinney.

But some of the national LGBT advocacy groups have joined the Matthew Shepard Foundation, which was created by Shepard’s parents to combat anti-LGBT violence, in challenging the accuracy of the book and the credibility of its sources.

“Attempts now to rewrite the story of this hate crime appear to be based on untrustworthy sources, factual errors, rumors and innuendo rather than the actual evidence gathered by law enforcement and presented in a court of law,” a statement released by the Shepard Foundation says.

“We do not respond to innuendo, rumor or conspiracy theories,” the statement says. “Instead we remain committed to honoring Matthew’s memory, and refuse to be intimidated by those who seek to tarnish it.”

Albany County, Wyo., Sheriff David O’Malley, who served as Laramie police commander at the time of the murder, told the Blade on Tuesday that he believes the book “is full of lies” and described it as “conspiracy theory BS.”

Jimenez said he and others working with him have thoroughly and meticulously scrutinized and vetted the findings of his investigation, which he says included a careful reading of virtually all of the police and court records related to the case that initially had been sealed by a judge.

Laramie officials have said the records became available to the public in late 1999 shortly after the conclusion of the trial of McKinney, who was convicted of bludgeoning Shepard to death by repeatedly striking him in the head with the barrel of a .357 Magnum pistol while Shepard was tied to a fence at an isolated prairie just outside of town.

Co-defendant Russell Henderson confessed to having tied Shepard to the fence while accompanying McKinney on what he said began as a plan by McKinney to lure Shepard from a Laramie bar to rob him. Unlike McKinney, Henderson pleaded guilty to a murder charge rather than face a trial. Both men were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

“I think the discovery of who Matthew Shepard was as a person and the complexity of who he was as a human being is really important,” Jimenez told the Blade.

“And so my reason for writing the book is to really say let’s understand what was really going on here,” he said. “If we’re serious about dealing with hate and violence in the culture, let’s understand what really happened here. What are the forces that came into play that created this grotesquely violent murder?”

Added Jimenez: “And certainly as I know now, the official story that these were two strangers that walked into a bar and targeted Matthew because he looked well-dressed and looked like he had money and appeared to be gay or that Matthew came on to them in the bar or that they lured him out of the bar because he was gay – those are simply not true.”

Jimenez was referring to the findings in the official police report that was based in part on a confession by McKinney to police at the time of his arrest three days after the murder. In his confession, McKinney said he and Henderson planned to rob Shepard, not to kill him. He said he lost control of his emotions and actions after Shepard allegedly groped him in the pickup truck that Henderson was driving after Shepard accepted McKinney’s invitation to drive him home from the Fireside bar on the night of Oct. 6, 1998.

McKinney’s lawyers, who attempted to invoke the so-called “gay panic” defense at McKinney’s trial, told the jury in his November 1999 closing argument that McKinney’s judgment was clouded that night by his consumption of alcohol and his use of and addiction to crystal meth amphetamine.

“Aaron McKinney is not a cold-blooded killer,” defense attorney Dion Custis said. “What happened is he hit him too many times” after the crystal meth consumption and Shepard’s alleged groping caused him to fly into an “uncontrollable rage.”

LGBT advocacy groups, noting that perpetrators of anti-gay hate crimes often use the gay panic defense as an alibi, said at the time that McKinney’s use of the gay panic defense confirmed their belief that McKinney’s motive was anti-gay hatred.

O’Malley said the police investigation found that McKinney had not been using crystal meth for several days and that investigators concluded that the murder “had nothing to do with drugs.” He said that the incident started as a robbery but investigators believe the brutality of the beating, in which McKinney crushed Shepard’s skull, involved a form of “overkill” that indicated the true motive was anti-gay animus.

Jimenez argues in his book that McKinney was suffering from the effects of his crystal meth use at the time of the attack but that some of his animus toward Shepard was based on alleged conflicts over a drug deal at a time when the two were working for rival drug suppliers. He bases this theory on information from both named and anonymous sources.

“It boggles the mind that this book flies in the face of all of the evidence related to the drug use,” said Cathy Renna, a former official with Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), who attended the McKinney trial.

“Aaron McKinney has changed his story so many times it’s not even worth trying to keep count,” said Renna in referring to subsequent statements that McKinney has made to reporters in interviews from jail.

“But the one thing that Aaron McKinney has been clear about and has remained consistent to is that he didn’t know Matt beforehand.”

Renna and others questioning the reliability of Jimenez’s sources have cited a memo that ABC News correspondent Elizabeth Vargas mistakenly left at O’Malley’s residence in 2004, when she interviewed O’Malley, as confirmation that Jimenez reached his conclusions about the Shepard case before he began research for a controversial report on the ABC program 20/20. The memo, according to critics who have seen it, outlined the view the Shepard murder was not a hate crime along with some of the other revelations recounted in the Jimenez book.

Jimenez, however, told the Blade that the criticism is unfounded because his memo was based on more than two years of research that he already had conducted on the case long before he became involved in the 20/20 project.

He also disputes claims by critics that the 20/20 broadcast on the Shepard case in 2004 was based on unreliable sources.

“When I did the ABC News story every single note, every single interview transcript, everything we did was vetted by the top vice presidents and lawyers at ABC,” Jimenez said.

Concerning his book, Jimenez notes that the lead prosecutor in the Shepard murder case, Cal Rerucha, has stated on the record in his book that he agrees that the preponderance of evidence shows that drugs rather than anti-gay hate was the motive behind the murder of Matthew Shepard.

Regardless of whether the claims in Jimenez’s book are correct or not, some LGBT activists question the purpose of such a book, which they note has already been cited by right-wing anti-gay organizations to question the validity of hate crime legislation.

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U.S. Supreme Court

Supreme Court declines to hear case over drag show at Texas university

Students argue First Amendment protects performance

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The U.S. Supreme Court justices on June 30, 2022. ((Photo by Fred Schilling of the U.S. Supreme Court)

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday declined to hear a First Amendment case over a public university president’s refusal to allow an LGBTQ student group to host a drag show on campus.

The group’s application was denied without the justices providing their reasoning or issuing dissenting opinions, as is custom for such requests for emergency review.

When plaintiffs sought to organize the drag performance to raise money for suicide prevention in March 2023, West Texas A&M University President Walter Wendler cancelled the event, citing the Bible and other religious texts.

The students sued, arguing the move constituted prior restraint and viewpoint-based discrimination, in violation of the First Amendment. Wendler had called drag shows “derisive, divisive and demoralizing misogyny,” adding that “a harmless drag show” was “not possible.”

The notoriously conservative Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who former President Donald Trump appointed to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, ruled against the plaintiffs in September, writing that “it is not clearly established that all drag shows are inherently expressive.”

Kacsmaryk further argued that the High Court’s precedent-setting opinions protecting stage performances and establishing that “speech may not be banned on the ground that it expresses ideas that offend” was inconsistent with constitutional interpretation based on “text, history and tradition.”

Plaintiffs appealed to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which is by far the most conservative of the nation’s 12 appellate circuit courts. They sought emergency review by the Supreme Court because the 5th Circuit refused to fast-track their case, so arguments were scheduled to begin after the date of their drag show.

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Federal Government

EXCLUSIVE: USAID LGBTQ coordinator visits Uganda

Jay Gilliam met with activists, community members from Feb. 19-27

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U.S. Agency for International Development Senior LGBTQI+ Coordinator Jay Gilliam (Photo courtesy of USAID)

U.S. Agency for International Development Senior LGBTQI+ Coordinator Jay Gilliam last month traveled to Uganda.

Gilliam was in the country from Feb. 19-27. He visited Kampala, the Ugandan capital, and the nearby city of Jinja.

Gilliam met with LGBTQ activists who discussed the impact of the Anti-Homosexuality Act, a law with a death penalty provision for “aggravated homosexuality” that President Yoweri Museveni signed last May. Gilliam also sat down with USAID staffers.

Gilliam on Wednesday during an exclusive interview with the Washington Blade did not identify the specific activists and organizations with whom he met “out of protection.” 

“I really wanted to meet with community members and understand the impacts on them,” he said.

Consensual same-sex sexual relations in Uganda were already criminalized before Museveni signed the Anti-Homosexuality Act. Gilliam told the Blade he spoke with a person who said authorities arrested them at a community meeting for mental health and psychosocial support “under false pretenses of engaging in same-sex relations and caught in a video that purportedly showed him.” 

The person, according to Gilliam, said authorities outed them and drove them around the town in which they were arrested in order to humiliate them. Gilliam told the Blade that prisoners and guards beat them, subjected them to so-called anal exams and denied them access to antiretroviral drugs.

“They were told that you are not even a human being. From here on you are no longer living, just dead,” recalled Gilliam.

“I just can’t imagine how difficult it is for someone to be able to live through something like that and being released and having ongoing needs for personal security, having to be relocated and getting support for that and lots of other personal issues and trauma,” added Gilliam.

Gilliam said activists shared stories of landlords and hotel owners evicting LGBTQ people and advocacy groups from their properties. Gilliam told the Blade they “purport that they don’t want to run afoul of” the Anti-Homosexuality Act.

“These evictions really exacerbate the needs from the community in terms of relocation and temporary shelter and just the trauma of being kicked out of your home, being kicked out of your village and having to find a place to stay at a moment’s notice, knowing that you’re also trying to escape harm and harassment from neighbors and community members,” he said.

Gilliam also noted the Anti-Homosexuality Act has impacted community members in different ways.

Reported cases of violence and eviction, for example, are higher among gay men and transgender women. Gilliam noted lesbian, bisexual and queer women and trans men face intimate partner violence, are forced into marriages, endure corrective rape and lose custody of their children when they are outed. He said these community members are also unable to inherit land, cannot control their own finances and face employment discrimination because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.  

US sanctioned Ugandan officials over Anti-Homosexuality Act

The U.S imposed visa restrictions on Ugandan officials shortly after Museveni signed the law. The World Bank Group later announced the suspension of new loans to Uganda.

The Biden-Harris administration last October issued a business advisory that said the Anti-Homosexuality Act “further increases restrictions on human rights, to include restrictions on freedoms of expression and peaceful assembly and exacerbates issues regarding the respect for leases and employment contracts.” The White House has also removed Uganda from a program that allows sub-Saharan African countries to trade duty-free with the U.S. and has issued a business advisory for the country over the Anti-Homosexuality Act. 

Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Dec. 4, 2023, announced sanctions against current and former Ugandan officials who committed human rights abuses against LGBTQ people and other groups. Media reports this week indicate the U.S. denied MP Sarah Achieng Opendi a visa that would have allowed her to travel to New York in order to attend the annual U.N. Commission on the Status of Women.

Museveni, for his part, has criticized the U.S. and other Western countries’ response to the Anti-Homosexuality Act. 

Gilliam noted authorities have arrested and charged Ugandans under the law. 

Two men on motorcycles on Jan. 3 stabbed Steven Kabuye, co-executive director of Coloured Voice Truth to LGBTQ Uganda, outside his home while he was going to work. The incident took place months after Museveni attended Uganda’s National Prayer Breakfast at which U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) spoke and defended the Anti-Homosexuality Act.

The State Department condemned the attack that Kabuye blamed on politicians and religious leaders who are stoking anti-LGBTQ sentiments in Uganda. Gilliam did not meet with Ugandan government officials while he was in the country.

“We in the U.S. government have already made it clear our stance with government officials on how we feel about the AHA, as well as broader human rights concerns in country,” said Gilliam. “That’s been communicated from the very highest levels.”

The Uganda’s Constitutional Court last Dec. 18 heard arguments in a lawsuit that challenges the Anti-Homosexuality Act. It is unclear when a ruling in the case will take place, but Gilliam said LGBTQ Ugandans with whom he met described the law “as just one moment.” 

“Obviously there is lots of work that has been done, that continues to be done to respond to this moment,” he told the Blade. “They know that there’s going to be a lot of work that needs to continue to really address a lot of the root causes and to really back humanity to the community.” 

Gilliam further noted it will “take some years to recover from the damage of 2023 and the AHA (Anti-Homosexuality Act) there.” He added activists are “already laying down the groundwork for what that work looks like” in terms of finding MPs, religious leaders, human rights activists and family members who may become allies.

“Those types of allyships are going to be key to building back the community and to continue the resiliency of the movement,” said Gilliam.

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Texas

Pornhub blocks Texas accessing site over age verification law

Court battle forced statute to take effect

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Washingtonporn Blade graphic

Aylo (formerly MindGeek) the largest global adult online entertainment conglomerate, owned by Canadian private equity firm Ethical Capital Partners, has restricted access to its platforms including its flagship Pornhub in Texas after a court battle forces the state’s age verification law to take effect.

Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton had appealed a U.S. District Court decision that enjoined him from enforcing House Bill 1181. Paxton and others argued that purveyors of obscene materials online needed to institute reasonable age-verification measures to safeguard children from pornography. 

A week ago the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals partially vacated the original injunction, ruling that the age verification requirements are constitutional. 

“Applying rational-basis review, the age-verification requirement is rationally related to the government’s legitimate interest in preventing minors’ access to pornography,” the three judge panel of the 5th Circuit explained. “Therefore, the age-verification requirement does not violate the First Amendment.”

While the court vacated the injunction against the age-verification requirement of the statute, it upheld the lower court’s injunction against a separate section of the law that would require pornography websites to display a health warning on their landing page and all advertisements. 

Texas users are greeted with this notice.

The Houston Chronicle reported people who go to the site are now greeted with a long message from the company railing against the legal change as “ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous.” The company calls for age verification by the makers of devices that let people on the internet, instead of individual websites.

Age verification legislation was enacted in several states in 2023 in addition to Texas, including North Carolina, Montana, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Utah and Virginia.

The new laws require users to provide digital confirmation via a certified approved third party vendor like London-based digital identity company Yoti. The other possibility would be a state approved digital ID such as the California DMV’s Wallet app, which contains a mobile driver’s license.

Users accessing Pornhub from within Louisiana are presented with a different webpage that directs them to verify their age with the state’s digital ID system, known as LA Wallet. The law passed in 2022 subjects adult websites to damage lawsuits and state civil penalties as high as $5,000 a day if they fail to verify that users are at least 18 years old by requiring the use of digitized, state-issued driver’s licenses or other methods.

The Associated Press reported this past October that an adult entertainment group’s lawsuit against a Louisiana law requiring sexually explicit websites to verify the ages of their viewers was dismissed by U.S. District Judge Susie Morgan in New Orleans.

Texas users are greeted with this notice.

Potential or existing Pornhub users in North Carolina and Montana are directed to a video that features adult film star Cherie DeVille, who recites a message also written under the video.

“As you may know, your elected officials in your state are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website. While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most effective solution for protecting our users and in fact, will put children and your privacy at risk.”

“Mandating age verification without proper enforcement gives platforms the opportunity to choose whether or not to comply,” the statement continues. “As we’ve seen in other states, this just drives traffic to sites with far fewer safety measures in place.”

“Until a real solution is offered, we have made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in [the aforementioned locales]” the message ends with.

The company previously blocked Utah on May 7, 2023. CNN reported at the time:

Affected users are shown a message expressing opposition to Senate Bill 287, the Utah law signed by Gov. Spencer Cox in March that creates liability for porn sites that make their content available to people below the age of 18.

“As you may know, your elected officials in Utah are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website,” the message said. “While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most effective solution for protecting our users, and in fact, will put children and your privacy at risk.”

Courthouse News reported that after Virginia’s bill was passed in June, state Sen. L. Louise Lucas, a Democrat, criticized the state for not creating a system for age verification, and instead leaving it up to websites to manage the process, citing security risks.  

“We passed a bill during this session to protect children from online porn. However the executive branch had an obligation to create a system for age verification,” Lucas said on X, formerly Twitter. “We will continue our work to keep pornography out of the hands of minors … but we will also work to ensure that this Governor’s error does not put the privacy of Virginians at further risk.”

Beyond the U.S. in the European Union, Pornhub and two more of the world’s biggest porn websites face new requirements in the European Union that include verifying the ages of users, under the EU’s Digital Services Act.

According to a December 20 report from the Associated Press, Pornhub, XVideos and Stripchat have now been classed as “very large online platforms” subject to more stringent controls under the Digital Services Act because they each have 45 million average monthly users, according to the European Commission, the EU’s executive branch.

They are the first porn sites to be targeted by the sweeping Digital Services Act, which imposes tough obligations to keep users safe from illegal content and dodgy products, the Associated Press reported last month.

In addition to the adult entertainment websites, any violations are punishable by fines of up to 6% of global revenue or even a ban on operating in the EU. Some 19 online platforms and search engines have already been identified for stricter scrutiny under the DSA, including TikTok, Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, Google and more.

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