Matthew Shepard's Murder Remembered 25 Years Later With a Renewed Call to Fight Anti-LGBTQ+ Hate

Twenty-five years ago this week, Americans — and possibly much of the world — began thinking about anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes to an extent they hadn’t before. On October 12, 1998, 21-year-old gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard died in a hospital in Fort Collins, Colo., of injuries he’d sustained six days earlier in Laramie, Wyo. He was savagely beaten by two men he met in a Laramie bar and left hanging on a fence on the city’s outskirts. Shepard quickly became the face of the victims of anti-LGBTQ+ crimes...