The Importance Of Grieving Our Queer Dead
On October 26, 2018 Matthew Shepard was laid to rest in the Washington National Cathedral. I was fortunate enough to attend this ceremony with some friends. We were able to find seating in the north transept which allowed us to be remarkably close to the pulpit where the first openly gay Episcopal bishop, Gene Robinson, helped preside over the ceremony. What we did not know, however, was that we were also seated by the entrance to the crypt where Matthew would be interred.
The ceremony was beautiful. I was crying before it even started. I’m normally pretty hesitant to sing in public but everyone there gave their voices to the hymns and other songs of remembrance. There was joy and sadness and release.
At the end of the ceremony the family recessed down the main aisle and then looped back down the side of the church, marching past where me and my friends were seated on their way to a private ceremony in the crypt. We had no idea this would happen. Judy Shepard, Matthew’s mother and a fierce advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, walked past us holding her sons ashes in her arms. By that point I thought I was all cried out but I was wrong.
Later that day I wrote a post for Facebook explaining what Matthew Shepard means to me as a gay man who was just starting to realize he was different when the murder became national news. I would like to share those thoughts with you here.
I was in middle school when Matthew Shepard was killed. I didn't fully realize I was gay just yet, but I knew I was different from other boys. Different in the same way my uncle was different - although it would be years before someone finally used the word "gay" to describe my uncle around me. As Matthew's story came out I realized that he, too, was like my uncle. Which meant he was like me, and I was like him. We were all gay.
My first exposure to that word as something I might be, as far as I can recall, was a hate crime. I came into a tepid realization of myself through a national narrative of how dangerous and scary it would be if I actually was gay. And from the other side I heard how I might be a pervert, an abomination, someTHING worthy of torture and death and damnation.
I think this is what made me afraid to accept being gay for a long time. Maybe not consciously, but I can't deny that my exposure to a way of thinking about who I might be was so wrapped up in how that could get me killed, and how so many people thought that would be justified.
I never would have thought then that 20 years later I would be proud to be gay. That coming out would be one of the most liberating experiences I would embark upon. That I would be sitting, as a married gay man, in the National Cathedral surrounded by a community in renewed mourning as Matthew Shepard was finally given a physical place to rest.
It seems so incongruous in this current era, under this administration that actively seeks to erase my community, that builds power off of stoking hate and violence, that the remains of a young gay man from Wyoming who's death did so much to highlight our humanity and inherent worth should be laid to rest in so prominent a fashion in the nation's capital. But I believe this is a testament to the enduring legacy of Matthew, and our community - we are resilient, we are here, we are worthy, and we are loved.
