by MK ScottIt is hard to believe that October 12th will be the 20th anniversary of the death of Matthew Shepard. It all started on the night of October 6, 1998, when Matthew Shepard was lured to an open field and was tied up to a fence and tortured for days. Not since the days of the AIDS crisis, both the LGBTQ and straight community came together to help put hate crime legislation into law. Yes, Matthew was known as being the face of combating hate crimes.
I first met Judy Shepard in the fall of 2001 during her visit to Seattle to appear as a keynote speaker at the screening of a documentary called Journey to a Hate Free Millennium at the old Opera House. In 2009, I met up with Shepard again at a cocktail party in Portland; so when I had a chance to actually interview this amazing woman (and meeting her incredible husband) at the National Conference of LGBTQ Journalists on September 8th in Palm Springs, CA I seized the opportunity.
Earlier in the day, the Shepards spoke to a jam packed room of over 200 journalists and when it was all over the audience got up and gave them a standing ovation that lasted for over 10 minutes. This was an amazing opportunity to reflect on the past 20 years and we got to go into detail of what we discussed 17 years ago.
