Word: matt
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...could be killed in Wyoming for being gay, I would have said no. We are a state that respects individuality, and we are immune from that kind of violence, intolerance. Wyoming always felt like a very safe place to me. My family had never locked our doors... But after Matt was killed, I was scared for my personal safety and for my career opportunities in Wyoming...
...Padgett spent a mostly sleepless night reconsidering his decision. He knew that Judy Shepard, Matt's mother, went around the country saying nothing will change until "everybody comes out and stays out," as she puts it. And here he was, someone who had known her son--and had seen her tears--and he was hiding. "Let's do it," he told me, adding later, "Now that we've had five years to grieve, it's time to make some positive changes." What about the butcher knife? "I felt silly about that anyway, even at the time," says Marsden. Nonetheless...
...their home, though they never found proof. Such fears can loom large here because gays have no places to gather and buck one another up. "It's hard for gay people to even meet gay people in the state of Wyoming," says de Vries. "The thing that happened when Matt was murdered was that for the first time, I think, the state as a whole was forced to realize that there were gay people living here... Among gay people, the reactions were so far apart: some people dove back into the closet under the laundry. Other people said, 'Screw...
Shepard would have loved the sense of change in the air. "Matt used to say to me, 'Why can't I find anything happy about gay people?'" says Judy Shepard. Happiness may still be a distant goal for all Wyoming gays, but five years after Shepard was murdered, you can feel the ground moving under your feet. Says de Vries: "In a place where we never talked about it, we talked about it after Matt died. And thankfully, we're still talking...
...expel Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat from the West Bank. Arafat, for his part, condemned the suicide bombing. But Israel's impatience with the continued violence has left Arafat's fate, along with that of peace talks, hanging by an ever more precarious thread. --By Daren Fonda. Reported by Matt Rees/Jerusalem