Yeah. I can say with absolute certainty that gay men could have done with an increased fear of crystal meth rather than fear of straight men. It’s a massive epidemic (meth use among gay men) that no one wants to talk about.
The only reason I know about it is that I used to watch "Intervention" all the time, and one of the interventionists, Ken, is a gay man who used to be addicted to meth and he talked about it. Television is very educational.
Those shows inevitably descend into carnival freak shows. It's too bad because the early seasons can be interesting and engaging. See also: My 600 Pound Life.
Watched that too. It all feels so exploitative now. Also, too few success stories for all three of those programs. And, for Intervention, that counselor who would say "these people love ya like crazy" every single damn time, drove me crazy. He was just phoning it in.
As a person who is very anti-obesity, I love "My 600 Pound Life." Aren't you always amazed how these 600 pound people always have girlfriends or boyfriends?
Hey did you see that Intervention episode where they did a "where are they now?" and the girl had become a trans man in a relationship with another woman? I have to say, she was quite convincing. This was many years ago and I wonder how she's doing now.
I haven't seen that. I drifted away from that show several years ago. In general trans men are more convincing than trans women. I could show you a picture of a trans man I went to school with, and between the bald head, the pot belly, and the beard, you'd never ever guess that he was named Margaret in junior high and high school.
Yup, the meth epidemic exists largely in two communities, working class (usually whites) in “flyover country” and the gay community.
The Corporate Press and Coastal Elites despise “flyover country” and therefore typically ignore the meth issues there and they won’t touch any negative aspects in the gay community without risking pissing off the activists.
But it's so much more fun to have marches against hate than to set up an educational program about drug abuse. Why do something practical when you could be making a statement about how long you've been crying for?
I've often been told that the best evidence for the divinity and resurrection of Jesus is that the disciples were men of consequence who spent the rest of their lives proclaiming its truth, even dying for it.
This argument used to convince me.
However, having lived through events like the deaths of George Floyd and Matthew Shepard, I've seen otherwise reasonable people sincerely believe complete fictions about these men because the movement was too important for them not to believe.
The architecture of religions becomes clearer when you witness someone become venerated in real time.
That and The whole “give it a rest. Sure it’s not true but the untruth is important to people” really get to me. Is it really better for people to believe that they’re in much greater danger than they actually are? Or that their neighbors hate them will assault them given the chance? I don’t think so and I don’t think it’s good for society
To be fair, the 90’s were another era and being assaulted was a regular occurrence for me in highschool. For something like that to happen today is would be fucked up but in 1998 it was a reasonable conclusion to jump to
Yeah, it was a way worse time to be gay. The religious right was always saying horrible things and pushing terrible legislation against gay rights. I was in high school in the '90's too. One of my best friends was an out lesbian and several other girls threatened to beat her up if she looked them in the wrong way. And this was in the northeast, which was more liberal than most of the US. It was not a good time to be gay; it was better than the '80's but that's a pretty low bar.
I never wanted to think something like "The truth is most important to me" because it felt like such a cunty, condescending thing to believe, surely the truth is important to everyone, we just interpret it differently. I believed this through college, way past when I should know better, because to think otherwise would just be self-important.
I no longer think that anymore. Truth is, to an utterly demoralizing degree, just not that important to some people
In the evolutionary ancestral environment, in-group cohesion was a matter of life and death, whereas having true beliefs about events that weren't in your immediate sphere of experience was basically irrelevant. Caring about truth over fitting in is pretty unnatural, and might just indicate that we have defective social skills (something I've been hearing since kindergarten).
I wouldn’t go too deep into this type of thinking.
Getting along with the group was important to survival, obviously, but so was innovation. For that to work reality-based thinking is required. Both conformity and non-conformity exist in humans as adaptive strategies which explains why both still exist today in each of us to greater or lesser extents
I agree. What you’re saying is, those who don’t value objectivity and reason and truth are further down on the evolutionary scale. And I agree with you.
Oh I'm well aware at this point how defective I am. I knew for a long time I was different but I didn't want to think that's the reason I care about truth so much.
I think it is a reason why I get along with people here. Even when we disagree passionately, I get the sense that most people are legitimately trying to get closer to the truth rather than scoring points for their "team". Whether that's good or bad in a general sense depends on who you ask, I guess.
This is a good point, although I'm not aware of any of the people from The Laramie Project getting crucified upside down for their beliefs so the incentive structure might be a little different.
I recently learned that the Kitty Genovese story, which was well before my time, turns out to have been really inaccurate. People did try to intervene and I think the caught the guy who did it with help from people in the neighborhood. This makes me wonder how many of these stories that galvanized people are at least significantly inaccurate
Good point. That one was just plain insane. And almost all of the coverage about the lawsuit was in the “yeah the bakery was right but it’s really unseemly for them to defend themselves and then sue the college.” Which makes no sense
I sort of hate to lump Kitty Genovese (which wasn't before my time) in with these other cases because she was truly an innocent victim who was brutally attacked by a stranger. (What isn't true is that nobody called the police or tried to intervene.)
Yeah she was totally innocent. I was thinking about the Matthew Shepherd case as one f those cases where the prevalent narrative is very wrong, though I don’t think people would get all that upset if you pointed out that the true Kitty Genovese story is very different from what people think happened. I am curious if the inaccurate narrative spread because people wanted to make a point and they just decided to exploit her story. Which was bad enough without the claim that people ignored her cries
I think there are some interesting parallels between the Michael Brown and Shepherd stories. Both are cases where young men did really stupid things and it ended badly. Young men do a lot of stupid stuff that gets them on the wrong side of law enforcement and other young men. There’s this tendency to paint young men in these situations as not having contributed to the situation which is counterproductive because if you want to stop stuff like that from happening you need to have an accurate understanding of what exactly is happening and why
This is apparently true of the infamous Stanford prison experiment. It seems like it's not as clear, but there's a fair amount of evidence that the researchers actually heavily encouraged the 'guards' to be abusive because that's what they wanted to experiment to show.
IIRC, the Kitty Genovese narrative all resulted from one story, really one headline, that focused not on the attack or her death, but on the idea that dozens of people watched it happen and didn’t intervene. That headline fed on existing concerns about urban life supposedly making people care less about others. When you take that element out, it’s a still-tragic but unfortunately all-too-mundane story that likely would never have caught any attention from the public.
Maybe that’s what made that version of her story so sticky, just like the Matthew Shepard case. It was something that seemed to confirm the public’s worst fears.
Well, Michael Brown committed a strong-arm robbery and then grabbed a policeman's gun. I'm not seeing a lot of similarities here either, other than a general instance of FAFO.
As it happens, Kitty was a lesbian, and her girlfriend at the time died just a few months ago. The NY Times obituary, which touches on their relationship, was beautiful.
"Read the room" is supposed to mean "don't be overtly sexual in a room full of church elders," not, "turn your brain off and support our political opinions"
I read "The Book of Matt" but I picked up something on listening to this podcast that I missed in the book. The defense wanted to use a "gay panic" defense--which is a strategy that has historically (at least in pre 1990s America) worked. I am not completely unsympathetic to Wyoming gay activists wanting to call attention to this case, in any way possible, to make sure the "gay panic" defense didn't work.
Of course, the prosecuter should have done an honest job job and outlined the entire drug ring and told the truth about Shepard's business relationship with those who murdered him.
For any serious journalist, not to mention the fact that the perpetrator was high on methamphetamines and attacked three other people that night is absolutely journalistic malpractice.
No argument there. The way the story was covered in the press was very irresponsible. And we've seen this over and over again, from Rittenhouse to Michael Brown to Trayvon Martin.
I had been living in Fort Collins (a couple of hours away) when this happened, so I followed the story carefully. I never saw any mention of meth.
I was listening to the "You're Wrong About" podcast during the pandemic, before I came upon BARPod, and it was the episode about this case that turned me off the podcast. Wait, what, the facts don't matter, Michael Hobbes??
Sometimes I feel like a manipulated puppet--being twitched here and there. Today I am totally at the mercy of Jesse and Katie--I hope they use their power wisely. ;-)
In The Book of Matt, Jimenez cover’s Shepard’s drug activity in Fort Collins. He’d hire Doc’s Limos to come to the Tornado Club, a gay club in the city. He also dropped off part of the drug deliveries in Fort Collins on his way back to Laramie from Denver.
I had the same reaction to the You're Wrong About episode and never listened to them again. Matthew's death galvanized the gay rights movement, and that's a good thing. But we don't have to retrospectively pretend that a fake story is true for that movement to have been justified. The movement and public change in perception about gays was a good outcome from a case that accidentally wasn't about what everyone thought it was.
ChatGPT —-Matthew Shepard was a 21-year-old gay college student at the University of Wyoming who was brutally attacked and murdered in October 1998. Shepard was lured from a bar by two men, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, who pretended to be gay to gain his trust. They drove him to a remote area, tied him to a fence, and severely beat him. Shepard was left tied to the fence in near-freezing temperatures for 18 hours before being discovered by a cyclist. He was in a coma and succumbed to his injuries six days later on October 12, 1998.
The attack was motivated by anti-gay hatred, and Shepard's murder brought national and international attention to hate crimes and violence against the LGBTQ+ community. The incident led to increased advocacy for hate crime legislation, culminating in the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2009. This law expanded the 1969 United States federal hate-crime law to include crimes motivated by a victim's actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.
In the years following Matthew Shepard's murder, there have been claims and theories suggesting alternative motives for the crime, including a botched drug deal. These theories have been explored in various media, notably in Stephen Jimenez's book "The Book of Matt," which argues that Shepard and his killers may have been involved in the methamphetamine trade and that the murder was not primarily motivated by anti-gay hatred.
However, these claims have been widely disputed and criticized by many, including those who were directly involved in the case, such as law enforcement officers and prosecutors. They maintain that the evidence clearly supports the conclusion that Shepard was targeted because of his sexual orientation. Additionally, Shepard's murderers, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, both made statements during their trials indicating that their actions were motivated by anti-gay sentiments.
While the exact details and motivations may never be fully known, the prevailing and legally recognized understanding of the case remains that Matthew Shepard's murder was a hate crime driven by homophobia. The impact of his death on the LGBTQ+ community and the subsequent legislative changes emphasize the broader societal recognition of the crime as one rooted in anti-gay violence.
When I talked to Jesse, the topic of whether or not to trust the press came up. I expressed skepticism of the New York Times coverage, and Jesse said it covered youth gender medicine fairly well. This story is why I am skeptical of mainstream media period, New York Times included. I was not surprised by the "news" of gay men and crystal meth. Anyone who has run with that crowd knows about it.
I’m not convinced by this. I’m not denying that there was a drug/robbery component, I just don’t think that overrides the hate crime angle. The (paraphrased) question, “If Aaron McKinney was closeted, doesn’t that play into the idea of a hate crime?” was so glossed over. Do all closeted men, especially those in active addiction, act with grace and reason when faced with the threat of being outed? This robbery was brutal, why was it so much more brutal than the other attacks McKinney allegedly committed that night? And if we’re supposed to view all of this with doubt because everyone involved was fucked out of their minds on meth, why am I supposed to believe any of the salacious stories coming from the salacious people who claim to have seen Matt and Aaron have sex? I don’t have a stake in this being a hate crime or not, but this wasn’t a revelation. Feels like Laramie Babylon. Interesting stories, some maybe truer than others.
Similarly, I’m assuming this is the same Mike Jones from Ted Haggard’s meth and sex scandal. I’ve met the guy and he’s nice enough, but again… this is someone who at least has been messy, addicted, and not always a reliable source.
Also completely undiscussed was the significance of McKinney having a girlfriend who was possibly involved in coming up with the "gay panic" story. I can't imagine that she was aware her partner was having meth-fueled group sex with other men and was totally cool with it.
And yeah, I thought it was an oversight for TFP to not at least do a full disclosure acknowledging that they're aware of Mike Jones's reputation. And if they *weren't* aware, well, that calls things into question too.
In his Flashman books, George MacDonald Fraser referred to "the guardsman's defense" as a way of defending yourself against a murder charge: you were outraged when a homosexual made a pass at you, in other words. I've never seen the phrase used anywhere else. But it looks like one of the defendants tried the guardsman's defense.
I stayed at an airbnb years ago and the old man left a grumpy old man comment on my account. He has since changed his profile pic to the swastika and changed his listing description that makes Kanye’s defcon tweets look sane.
You see that every time on my airbnb profile. I’ve reported it but it’s still live.
Fascinating - especially the reactions of the true believers towards the end, which anyone who has tried to discuss the truth of the Bible with evangelical Christians will recognise. Matthew Shepherd, martyr, joins Marsha P. Johnson, holy warrior, in the calendar of LGBTQ+ saints.
Yeah. I can say with absolute certainty that gay men could have done with an increased fear of crystal meth rather than fear of straight men. It’s a massive epidemic (meth use among gay men) that no one wants to talk about.
That’s methed up.
I did not know this!
Sometimes on apps you'll find someone saying that they like to "parTy". T = Tina = crysTal meth. Or they may just make a reference to the name Tina.
The only reason I know about it is that I used to watch "Intervention" all the time, and one of the interventionists, Ken, is a gay man who used to be addicted to meth and he talked about it. Television is very educational.
I used to watch a lot of Intervention at one time until I couldn't anymore. Same with Hoarders. It was just too depressing.
Those shows inevitably descend into carnival freak shows. It's too bad because the early seasons can be interesting and engaging. See also: My 600 Pound Life.
Watched that too. It all feels so exploitative now. Also, too few success stories for all three of those programs. And, for Intervention, that counselor who would say "these people love ya like crazy" every single damn time, drove me crazy. He was just phoning it in.
As a person who is very anti-obesity, I love "My 600 Pound Life." Aren't you always amazed how these 600 pound people always have girlfriends or boyfriends?
Hey did you see that Intervention episode where they did a "where are they now?" and the girl had become a trans man in a relationship with another woman? I have to say, she was quite convincing. This was many years ago and I wonder how she's doing now.
I haven't seen that. I drifted away from that show several years ago. In general trans men are more convincing than trans women. I could show you a picture of a trans man I went to school with, and between the bald head, the pot belly, and the beard, you'd never ever guess that he was named Margaret in junior high and high school.
Yup, the meth epidemic exists largely in two communities, working class (usually whites) in “flyover country” and the gay community.
The Corporate Press and Coastal Elites despise “flyover country” and therefore typically ignore the meth issues there and they won’t touch any negative aspects in the gay community without risking pissing off the activists.
But it's so much more fun to have marches against hate than to set up an educational program about drug abuse. Why do something practical when you could be making a statement about how long you've been crying for?
We could have marches against drug abuse but I think a march demanding better, less destructive party drugs (LETS GO SCIENCE) is more likely
I've often been told that the best evidence for the divinity and resurrection of Jesus is that the disciples were men of consequence who spent the rest of their lives proclaiming its truth, even dying for it.
This argument used to convince me.
However, having lived through events like the deaths of George Floyd and Matthew Shepard, I've seen otherwise reasonable people sincerely believe complete fictions about these men because the movement was too important for them not to believe.
The architecture of religions becomes clearer when you witness someone become venerated in real time.
The “Read the room” guy pissed me off. He was saying that they like the fiction and anyone trying to tell the truth needs to shut up.
That and The whole “give it a rest. Sure it’s not true but the untruth is important to people” really get to me. Is it really better for people to believe that they’re in much greater danger than they actually are? Or that their neighbors hate them will assault them given the chance? I don’t think so and I don’t think it’s good for society
Yeah this is what gets me. It is not better to live in some world you think is some dangerous bigoted hellscape. Especially when it isn't.
To be fair, the 90’s were another era and being assaulted was a regular occurrence for me in highschool. For something like that to happen today is would be fucked up but in 1998 it was a reasonable conclusion to jump to
Yeah, it was a way worse time to be gay. The religious right was always saying horrible things and pushing terrible legislation against gay rights. I was in high school in the '90's too. One of my best friends was an out lesbian and several other girls threatened to beat her up if she looked them in the wrong way. And this was in the northeast, which was more liberal than most of the US. It was not a good time to be gay; it was better than the '80's but that's a pretty low bar.
Oh yeah I knew Meghan
I think most people operate this way, whether they admit it or not. Those of us who value truth over fitting in are an odd and lonely bunch.
I never wanted to think something like "The truth is most important to me" because it felt like such a cunty, condescending thing to believe, surely the truth is important to everyone, we just interpret it differently. I believed this through college, way past when I should know better, because to think otherwise would just be self-important.
I no longer think that anymore. Truth is, to an utterly demoralizing degree, just not that important to some people
In the evolutionary ancestral environment, in-group cohesion was a matter of life and death, whereas having true beliefs about events that weren't in your immediate sphere of experience was basically irrelevant. Caring about truth over fitting in is pretty unnatural, and might just indicate that we have defective social skills (something I've been hearing since kindergarten).
I wouldn’t go too deep into this type of thinking.
Getting along with the group was important to survival, obviously, but so was innovation. For that to work reality-based thinking is required. Both conformity and non-conformity exist in humans as adaptive strategies which explains why both still exist today in each of us to greater or lesser extents
I agree. What you’re saying is, those who don’t value objectivity and reason and truth are further down on the evolutionary scale. And I agree with you.
Oh I'm well aware at this point how defective I am. I knew for a long time I was different but I didn't want to think that's the reason I care about truth so much.
Do you think that’s why we’re a good gang here? Because we generally care more about truth than tribalism? Or is that too self regarding?
I think it is a reason why I get along with people here. Even when we disagree passionately, I get the sense that most people are legitimately trying to get closer to the truth rather than scoring points for their "team". Whether that's good or bad in a general sense depends on who you ask, I guess.
From the movie The Man who Shot Liberty Valance-“ When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."
I feel like it’s an argument that works when you tell your young cops that the dog has gone to a farm upstate. But in this way?
Last time I told my young cops that, I got three tickets. I don't even think that's legal.
Damn Substack app for not letting me correct myself and damn you twice for being quick and clever!
Isn't it annoying when you catch your mistake before someone else but they get the comment out first? Sorry about that! It was too tempting.
As I posted down thread, that's a naked expression of group psychology over truth. It's coercive, a type of bullying and it's gross.
This is a good point, although I'm not aware of any of the people from The Laramie Project getting crucified upside down for their beliefs so the incentive structure might be a little different.
Well done.
Nobody's crucifying anymore! Sad.
But people do still kill themselves and others over falsehoods.
I recently learned that the Kitty Genovese story, which was well before my time, turns out to have been really inaccurate. People did try to intervene and I think the caught the guy who did it with help from people in the neighborhood. This makes me wonder how many of these stories that galvanized people are at least significantly inaccurate
A lot. Just think of the Oberlin bd Gibson Bakery reporting.
Good point. That one was just plain insane. And almost all of the coverage about the lawsuit was in the “yeah the bakery was right but it’s really unseemly for them to defend themselves and then sue the college.” Which makes no sense
The dean responsible for the huge settlement is employed as a student dean at Oglethorpe college. No consequences, more of the same behavior
I sort of hate to lump Kitty Genovese (which wasn't before my time) in with these other cases because she was truly an innocent victim who was brutally attacked by a stranger. (What isn't true is that nobody called the police or tried to intervene.)
Yeah she was totally innocent. I was thinking about the Matthew Shepherd case as one f those cases where the prevalent narrative is very wrong, though I don’t think people would get all that upset if you pointed out that the true Kitty Genovese story is very different from what people think happened. I am curious if the inaccurate narrative spread because people wanted to make a point and they just decided to exploit her story. Which was bad enough without the claim that people ignored her cries
I think there are some interesting parallels between the Michael Brown and Shepherd stories. Both are cases where young men did really stupid things and it ended badly. Young men do a lot of stupid stuff that gets them on the wrong side of law enforcement and other young men. There’s this tendency to paint young men in these situations as not having contributed to the situation which is counterproductive because if you want to stop stuff like that from happening you need to have an accurate understanding of what exactly is happening and why
This is apparently true of the infamous Stanford prison experiment. It seems like it's not as clear, but there's a fair amount of evidence that the researchers actually heavily encouraged the 'guards' to be abusive because that's what they wanted to experiment to show.
IIRC, the Kitty Genovese narrative all resulted from one story, really one headline, that focused not on the attack or her death, but on the idea that dozens of people watched it happen and didn’t intervene. That headline fed on existing concerns about urban life supposedly making people care less about others. When you take that element out, it’s a still-tragic but unfortunately all-too-mundane story that likely would never have caught any attention from the public.
Maybe that’s what made that version of her story so sticky, just like the Matthew Shepard case. It was something that seemed to confirm the public’s worst fears.
Well, Michael Brown committed a strong-arm robbery and then grabbed a policeman's gun. I'm not seeing a lot of similarities here either, other than a general instance of FAFO.
As it happens, Kitty was a lesbian, and her girlfriend at the time died just a few months ago. The NY Times obituary, which touches on their relationship, was beautiful.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/06/nyregion/mary-ann-zielonko-dead.html
The “read the room” comment just killed me.
I found it so confusing. “Read the room - we’re all liars here and we’re happy staying that way”? What else could he mean?
“Read the room, the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, don’t try to show me evidence it wasn’t”
Just Transparent tribalism
Yeah that shit just drives me crazy.
It's a naked appeal to let group psychology overrule truth and reason. Overt social bullying, in other words. Grotesque.
"Read the room" is supposed to mean "don't be overtly sexual in a room full of church elders," not, "turn your brain off and support our political opinions"
I read "The Book of Matt" but I picked up something on listening to this podcast that I missed in the book. The defense wanted to use a "gay panic" defense--which is a strategy that has historically (at least in pre 1990s America) worked. I am not completely unsympathetic to Wyoming gay activists wanting to call attention to this case, in any way possible, to make sure the "gay panic" defense didn't work.
Of course, the prosecuter should have done an honest job job and outlined the entire drug ring and told the truth about Shepard's business relationship with those who murdered him.
For any serious journalist, not to mention the fact that the perpetrator was high on methamphetamines and attacked three other people that night is absolutely journalistic malpractice.
No argument there. The way the story was covered in the press was very irresponsible. And we've seen this over and over again, from Rittenhouse to Michael Brown to Trayvon Martin.
It wasn’t just Wyoming gay activists who brought his killing to attention, it was Rocky Mountain and national activists.
It was also President Clinton looking to score political points and distract the American population from the Lewinsky Scandal.
I had been living in Fort Collins (a couple of hours away) when this happened, so I followed the story carefully. I never saw any mention of meth.
I was listening to the "You're Wrong About" podcast during the pandemic, before I came upon BARPod, and it was the episode about this case that turned me off the podcast. Wait, what, the facts don't matter, Michael Hobbes??
Sometimes I feel like a manipulated puppet--being twitched here and there. Today I am totally at the mercy of Jesse and Katie--I hope they use their power wisely. ;-)
In The Book of Matt, Jimenez cover’s Shepard’s drug activity in Fort Collins. He’d hire Doc’s Limos to come to the Tornado Club, a gay club in the city. He also dropped off part of the drug deliveries in Fort Collins on his way back to Laramie from Denver.
I had the same reaction to the You're Wrong About episode and never listened to them again. Matthew's death galvanized the gay rights movement, and that's a good thing. But we don't have to retrospectively pretend that a fake story is true for that movement to have been justified. The movement and public change in perception about gays was a good outcome from a case that accidentally wasn't about what everyone thought it was.
My friend group got so, so angry at me when I brought this up. Thanks! 😂
We'll know the truth when Coleman Hughes comments on this which promps Radley Balko to write a 30,000 response. Until then...
ChatGPT —-Matthew Shepard was a 21-year-old gay college student at the University of Wyoming who was brutally attacked and murdered in October 1998. Shepard was lured from a bar by two men, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, who pretended to be gay to gain his trust. They drove him to a remote area, tied him to a fence, and severely beat him. Shepard was left tied to the fence in near-freezing temperatures for 18 hours before being discovered by a cyclist. He was in a coma and succumbed to his injuries six days later on October 12, 1998.
The attack was motivated by anti-gay hatred, and Shepard's murder brought national and international attention to hate crimes and violence against the LGBTQ+ community. The incident led to increased advocacy for hate crime legislation, culminating in the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2009. This law expanded the 1969 United States federal hate-crime law to include crimes motivated by a victim's actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.
In the years following Matthew Shepard's murder, there have been claims and theories suggesting alternative motives for the crime, including a botched drug deal. These theories have been explored in various media, notably in Stephen Jimenez's book "The Book of Matt," which argues that Shepard and his killers may have been involved in the methamphetamine trade and that the murder was not primarily motivated by anti-gay hatred.
However, these claims have been widely disputed and criticized by many, including those who were directly involved in the case, such as law enforcement officers and prosecutors. They maintain that the evidence clearly supports the conclusion that Shepard was targeted because of his sexual orientation. Additionally, Shepard's murderers, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, both made statements during their trials indicating that their actions were motivated by anti-gay sentiments.
While the exact details and motivations may never be fully known, the prevailing and legally recognized understanding of the case remains that Matthew Shepard's murder was a hate crime driven by homophobia. The impact of his death on the LGBTQ+ community and the subsequent legislative changes emphasize the broader societal recognition of the crime as one rooted in anti-gay violence.
I fear for future generations who may get much of their education this way.
Wow! Not surprising for ChatGPT though.
Fascinating. The whole time I couldn’t stop thinking about how the narrative and backdrop reminded me of Twin Peaks lol
When I talked to Jesse, the topic of whether or not to trust the press came up. I expressed skepticism of the New York Times coverage, and Jesse said it covered youth gender medicine fairly well. This story is why I am skeptical of mainstream media period, New York Times included. I was not surprised by the "news" of gay men and crystal meth. Anyone who has run with that crowd knows about it.
Good pick for the extracurricular programming. Well done by Ben and TFP.
I’m not convinced by this. I’m not denying that there was a drug/robbery component, I just don’t think that overrides the hate crime angle. The (paraphrased) question, “If Aaron McKinney was closeted, doesn’t that play into the idea of a hate crime?” was so glossed over. Do all closeted men, especially those in active addiction, act with grace and reason when faced with the threat of being outed? This robbery was brutal, why was it so much more brutal than the other attacks McKinney allegedly committed that night? And if we’re supposed to view all of this with doubt because everyone involved was fucked out of their minds on meth, why am I supposed to believe any of the salacious stories coming from the salacious people who claim to have seen Matt and Aaron have sex? I don’t have a stake in this being a hate crime or not, but this wasn’t a revelation. Feels like Laramie Babylon. Interesting stories, some maybe truer than others.
Similarly, I’m assuming this is the same Mike Jones from Ted Haggard’s meth and sex scandal. I’ve met the guy and he’s nice enough, but again… this is someone who at least has been messy, addicted, and not always a reliable source.
Also completely undiscussed was the significance of McKinney having a girlfriend who was possibly involved in coming up with the "gay panic" story. I can't imagine that she was aware her partner was having meth-fueled group sex with other men and was totally cool with it.
And yeah, I thought it was an oversight for TFP to not at least do a full disclosure acknowledging that they're aware of Mike Jones's reputation. And if they *weren't* aware, well, that calls things into question too.
Pick up The Book of Matt!
In his Flashman books, George MacDonald Fraser referred to "the guardsman's defense" as a way of defending yourself against a murder charge: you were outraged when a homosexual made a pass at you, in other words. I've never seen the phrase used anywhere else. But it looks like one of the defendants tried the guardsman's defense.
I empathize with Jesse on banning the nazi.
I stayed at an airbnb years ago and the old man left a grumpy old man comment on my account. He has since changed his profile pic to the swastika and changed his listing description that makes Kanye’s defcon tweets look sane.
You see that every time on my airbnb profile. I’ve reported it but it’s still live.
Fascinating - especially the reactions of the true believers towards the end, which anyone who has tried to discuss the truth of the Bible with evangelical Christians will recognise. Matthew Shepherd, martyr, joins Marsha P. Johnson, holy warrior, in the calendar of LGBTQ+ saints.