Matt Shepard, a gay student at the University of Wyoming, was murdered by thugs on a dirt road in October 1998, and his death focused national attention on hate crimes. Just a few months before the killing, Beth Loffreda moved to Laramie, where she became an English professor and adviser to the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Association at the university. Shepard’s death, and the state’s complicated reaction to it, inspired Loffreda to attempt to discern and explain Laramie’s deep, contradictory impulses. The result was the engaging book “Losing Matt Shepard: Life and Politics in the Aftermath of Anti-Gay Murder” (Columbia University Press, $22.95). On a trip to Chicago, Loffreda reflected on the book with literary editor Elizabeth Taylor:
Q. As a new professor at the University of Wyoming, how did you get involved with this story?
A. I had arrived in Laramie in June, started teaching in September, and Matt was killed in October. I had become the faculty adviser to the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Association just a few weeks before he died. The students had just suspected that I’m supportive and asked me to be their adviser.
A friend at Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., asked me to give a talk to their lesbian/gay student group because those students were really absorbed in what had happened.
It ended up that over 200 people came. And they were asking me questions that I realized I didn’t have good answers for–about what gay life is like in Wyoming, what the class politics of Wyoming are.
I came home and started digging around. And it just coincided with a kind of growing frustration on my part personally with the limits of academic writing.
Q. How did you, as a literary critic, decide to take on a subject that might be dismissed as journalistic, rather than scholarly?
A. I felt like I was already moving away from the narrowly conceived work that my Ph.D. had demanded. So I saw this as an opportunity to really take a risk as a writer and write for an audience bigger than three. You know, can I write a book that people might come across in a book store and just pick up and get absorbed in? And it seemed to me that we were all standing around in Laramie complaining how bad the media coverage was. And after a while it was like, you know, get off your butt!
Q. The book seemed to be more about the town of Laramie than about Matt Shepard.
A. I didn’t want to write [his] life story. In part, it was because his privacy was already being invaded pretty profoundly, in the media but more in the trials and in the court proceedings. But I was interested in how people who were strangers to Matt when he was alive nevertheless were profoundly transformed–in very different ways–by his loss, by his death.
That became a way of telling the story of the town: both what the town was like before he died and then how the town–really messily and unevenly–reacted to what happened to him.
Q. Explain your strategy in trying to figure that out.
A. I guess what I tried to do in the book was keep changing direction–changing to a new voice or . . . a new angle on Laramie, or on Wyoming itself. I wanted kind of a collection of images of Laramie, but not necessarily that it was all going to build to some single conclusion.
Every time I would talk to somebody new, I’d get pulled off into a different way of thinking about things. So in some ways, I tried to recreate that in the book.
Q. You refer to many characters by their first names. How did that choice evolve?
A. Well, some people only wanted to go by their first names, especially some gay residents who didn’t want to fully identify themselves. But then yet, I wanted that kind of intimacy.
Q. In all the coverage of your book, you are described the same way: “Beth Loffreda, the straight faculty adviser to the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Association.” Why was your sexual preference important to know?
A. I thought it was important at the beginning of the book to say that I’m straight because I think it’s important to make my position clear. But it didn’t seem all that significant to me. I have to admit that I’ve been sort of surprised that [everyone] keeps saying that.
Q. It seems that people who like the book want to give it a certain credibility, and they feel the gay or transgendered person wouldn’t get it right.
A. Maybe. Maybe they would be seen as too personally involved? I was an insider to the story because I was working with the group of which Matt was a member, but I was also an outsider in the sense that I wasn’t gay, so I didn’t have that kind of deep connection to what had happened to him.
Q. Did any books serve as models in the kind of narrative non-fiction you wanted to write?
A. Well, I thought about Joan Didion–not because I thought I could ever write as well as she can.
It always seemed to me that she had a real moral clarity in her writing without being knowing in the way that bothers me. I think she’s one of these non-fiction writers who can let description do a lot of work for her, just by setting scenes. I wanted to be Didion without the migraines.
Q. Talk a little about the sort of double-consciousness and schizophrenia in Laramie.
A. One of the images in the book is that the county courthouse became a kind of green room. It became this antechamber to minor celebrity. You would see national activists, national journalists talking to one another there on the courthouse lawn about Laramie and about what had happened in Laramie, and spinning Laramie.
You saw this spectral Laramie being created there in the middle of the real Laramie. And that spectral Laramie, or that twin, felt utterly detached from what daily life was like in the town. And there was so little interaction between the national activists and local activists, between national media and the everyday residents of Laramie. It was an experience of double-consciousness. You would watch yourself on TV.
Q. I was interested in the American Indian who said that if this happened to him nobody would have noticed.
A. Yeah, Jay. He’s a gay Native American student from a reservation in the center of the state. Well, he lived there until he was about 9 and then moved to Laramie. That was his sense and that was the sense of a lot of the minority residents of the town.
But . . . I would talk to white residents of Laramie, and I’d ask them, “Are there racial tensions here?” And they’d say, “No. No. No. It’s just a great place to raise your kids. It’s really laid back.” And in many ways that’s true. But then you talk to Mexican-American residents, or black residents, or Native American residents, and they’d say, “This is not an easy town to be visibly different in.”
Q. What has been the reaction to your book? What is it like to live in Laramie now?
A. So far, so good. It’s generally been positive. It’s kind of weird. I mean, it’s Laramie, so people who I’ve never met before read the book and come knock on my door to see if they can come and talk to me about it.
Q. Is there a sense of people having lived there for a long time, or is there a sense of pioneering newness to it?
A. Laramie is a little different from the rest of the state because it’s a college town, so you have this constant flow in and out. I think in Wyoming you feel your temporariness more than in other parts of the country because it hasn’t been built over. There are actually vast distances between towns, where you see nothing.
People love to talk about how many generations of their family have lived in Wyoming, so there’s a real desire to sort of demonstrate your hearty longevity. But at the same time, for example, many students at the university are getting their education in order to get out. It’s an issue that people talk about in the state: We educate our students, and then we lose them. There’s a constant drain of young people out of Wyoming.
So in a way there’s almost that sense of the potential ghosting of the entire state. I don’t think that’s necessarily going to happen, but you get that feeling.
Q. How did working on the book change you?
A. Well, it changed me forever as a writer. It’s hard to imagine going back to [the language] of academic scholarship.
And it changed me, too, because I never thought of myself as much of an activist. I never thought of myself as very good at working in groups, doing the slow, kind of slogging work of going to city council meetings or pressuring university administrations for tiny things. But as I was writing the book it forced me to do those things more than I had in the past because it seemed there was something illegitimate or hypocritical about simply writing about it.
And, I’m not saying I’m celebrating myself as this great activist presence in Laramie. I wouldn’t say that for a moment. It just sharpened my sense of what one’s responsibility is in the aftermath of something like this.
