Beth Loffreda, Selections from Losing Matt Shepard: Life and Politics in the Aftermath of Anti-Gay Murder

Questions for Making Connections Within the Reading:

1. As Beth Loffreda works to unpack the significance of Matt Shepard's murder, she finds herself confronting a wide array of prejudices, not only about gays, but about Wyoming, the West and Native Americans. Create a chart that details all of the prejudices that Loffreda uncovers. What are the relationships between these prejudices? Does Loffreda have any prejudices or is her view unbiased?

2. In detailing the responses to Shepard's murder, Loffreda refers to many different individuals by name. Who are the most important people in the story that Loffreda has to tell? Which responses had more weight at the time of the murder? Which responses have the most weight with Loffreda? With you?

3. How is this selection from Losing Matt Shepard organized? Is it a series of observations or an argument? Does it build to a point? Does it have a structure? How does the structure that Loffreda has chosen influence what she has to say?

Questions for Writing

1. One of Loffreda's arguments in Losing Matt Shepard is that Matt Shepard, the individual, got lost in the media frenzy that followed his murder: part of the shock of Shepard's death, Loffreda reports, was "to watch rumor become myth, to see the story stitched out of repetition rather than investigation." If the media got Shepard's murder wrong, what are we to make of how and why they got it wrong? What would it take to provide "better coverage" of such tragedies? Are the print and visual media capable of providing nuanced understandings of unfolding events?

2. In describing how her colleagues at the University of Wyoming responded to Shepard's death, Loffreda records her own frustration at hearing teachers speak of their own "uselessness" and "irrelevance" in the face of such a tragedy. Such remarks struck Loffreda as "an appalling luxury, an indulgence in a kind of intellectual self-pity at a moment when the basic skills of education--critical thinking, articulation, self-reflection--could be so concretely valuable. I wondered about that, and I wondered too when we'd stop talking about how we felt and begin talking about what to do." What is it that teachers can or should do at such times? What role should secular institutions play in trying to shape the way their students see and understand the world?

Questions for Making Connections Between Readings

1. This selection from Losing Matt Shepard closes with Loffreda's discussion of what she terms "the limits of identification." In a sense, Susan Faludi's "The Naked Citadel" could also be described as a piece centrally concerned with "the limits of identification." What are these limits? How are they discovered? Can they be changed?

2. In exploring the responses to Matt Shepard's murder, has Loffreda gained access to what James C. Scott terms "the hidden transcript," or is homophobia and its violent consequences better considered part of the nation's "public transcript"?

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