The Book of Matt: Matthew Shepard was not the victim of a hate crime

C-Fam reports that there is now confirmation of what many of us had heard or suspected. Matthew Shepard knew his killers, they were all into dealing and doing drugs (meth) and his murder had nothing to do with his homosexual orientation.

All along there were naysayers to the Shepard narrative. Social critic Camille Paglia wrote in Salon that Shepard had a taste for what is called “rough trade” and that he could have died from that. Detectives at the time suggested that he death was more than likely tied to drugs rather than his homosexuality. An ABC 20/20 segment several years later explored that possibility.

However, a new book out by award winning gay journalist Steven Jiminez goes much further than previous critics of the Shepard narrative. Jiminez went to Laramie many years ago to conduct interviews for a movie script about the life and death of Shepard. Almost immediately he began to hear stories about Shepard that had never been reported and that flatly contradict the notion that he was killed because he was gay.

In The Book of Matt reveals what townsfolk knew all along, that Shepard was very involved in the Laramie drug scene, may have been an occasional drug dealer himself, and even more importantly, he knew his killers. More than that, he and his killers had sex together.

One of the conceits of the dominant narrative was that Shepard did not know his killers, that his killers walked into the Fireside bar that night at 11:45 and somehow got a total stranger, Shepard, to leave with them 15 minutes later. According to the Jiminez book, Shepard knew his killers well. The book speculates that Shepard was killed because he had a new stash of methamphetamine and the killers wanted it. The book also reports that his main killer, Aaron McKinney, was on a five-day meth binge, a state given to maniacal violence.

The new book has been reported in the gay press and also in the conservative press but does not seem to have broken into the mainstream, not yet anyway. Things may change when the book is finally released on October 1. But the question remains, will this new story change in any way the dominant story that has aided the gay movement so well? If Matthew Shepard was killed strictly because of drugs by his sometime gay sex partner, what will that do to his martyr status in the gay community and in the larger world including at the United Nations?

Kudos to the author of this book, Stephen Jimenez, a man who is gay but who is nonetheless committed to the truth of this case. Here's some more info from the Amazon page for the Book of Matt:

Stephen Jimenez’s The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths About the Murder of Matthew Shepard is a compelling story of a journalist’s determination to ascertain why Matthew Shepard -- a gay University of Wyoming student -- was viciously killed in 1998. The story that had been told in the media, and to some extent in the courtroom, was that Shepard had made a pass at two strangers in a bar, who became outraged, took Shepard to a remote spot, bashed his head in, and left him affixed to a fence, to die. It was the anti-gay hate crime of the century, and while the rationale for including anti-gay attacks under hate crime law was clearly established long before the Shepard murder, his case became a symbol and rallying point for such legislation.

Jimenez, however, uncovered another story, one that was to some extent unappreciated at the time of the crime, but was also intentionally hidden for a variety of motivations. Among those motivations were fear, courtroom strategy, and the desire of media, activists, and others to believe the powerful story of a gay man being brutally killed for no other reason than he made an unwelcome pass at a man he happened to meet in a bar.

Shepard and his killer, Aaron McKinney, were not strangers after all. In fact Aaron McKinney was a bisexual, who had had sex with Shepard. And both were dealers of methamphetamine.

Jimenez makes a strong case that the unappreciated lesson of the Shepard murder is one about the dangers of methamphetamine. This book is a well-constructed narrative of a 13-year investigative quest by a talented author whose passion for uncovering the true story rings clear. Highly recommended.

Yes, hopefully this will get people talking about the strong connection between gay culture and the use of drugs, especially meth. But don't hold your breath for the voices in the mainstream media to spill anything other than the standard line that once gays stop being bullied they'll quit using drugs. Well, at least now there is a story of gays killing each other over drugs. This book will be hard to ignore; at least it will showcase how many lies the gay mafia is willing to tell.