SPOKEN & WRITTEN WORD POETRY & LITERATURE

Home > SPOKEN & WRITTEN WORD > POETRY & LITERATURE > Judy Shepard

• Tweet
• Outlook
• ICAL
• PRINT
• Email
• Feedback

• RSS

• Official Website
• Add to My Favorites

Judy Shepard

Presented by Sam Weller's Zion Bookstore at City Library Auditorium

September 26, 2009

Add Review/Comment
Comment on Facebook

Most people know the horrific details of 21-year old college student Matthew Shepard's murder in Laramie, Wyoming ten years ago. Synonymous with gay rights, Matthew Shepard's tragic murder has forever changed the way people have viewed hate crimes in this country. Matthew's story has been immortalized in the play The Laramie Project, which is performed in hundreds of schools and theaters across the country a decade after its initial performance, and was made into a movie of the same name. Even now, over a decade later, the U.S. Senate is finally voting on the Matthew Shepard Act, a bill to expand federal hate-crimes laws to protect people attacked because of their sexual orientation or gender. But long before the terrible hate crime that took his life and made him a household name in the arena of gay rights, Matthew was simply Judy Shepard's son. In The Meaning of Matthew: My Son's Murder in Laramie, and a World Transformed Judy Shepard speaks for the first time in book form about her loss: sharing memories of Matthew, their life as a typical American family, and the pivotal event in a small college town that changed everything. Since her son's death, Judy Shepard has become the beloved face of gay rights in this country. But how Judy went from small town grieving mother to internationally celebrated gay rights activist is a long and varied story. In The Meaning of Matthew Judy confides with readers about how she handled the crippling loss of her child in the public eye and specifically of learning to distinguish between her son the person, and her son the symbol, why she became a gay rights activist, and the challenges and rewards of raising a gay child in America today.