The Community United Against Violence, a counseling organization based in San Francisco, estimates that 7 to 9 percent of gay men and lesbians are subjected to some form of violence each year because of their sexual orientation. Most of those incidents don't inspire public declarations of outrage from the White House or prime-time news coverage.
The brutal slaying of Matthew Shepard, however -- the 22-year-old University of Wyoming student who was pistol-whipped and lashed to a fence by two men last week, and who died of massive brain injuries early Monday -- gripped the national imagination, both online and in broadcast media.
Anchorman Tom Brokaw says it was the "particularly horrendous ... outrageous character" of the killing that led the NBC Nightly News to air a 2-minute-and-22-second segment on it on Friday night -- a lengthy report in the soundbite-driven landscape of TV news. Brokaw called the circumstances of Shepard's death "very comparable to the situation in Texas" last June, when a black man, James Byrd Jr., was murdered by being dragged behind a truck.
While broadcast news brought the Shepard killing to the forefront of national attention, the Net provided a conduit of information that boosted the outpouring of concern for Shepard, and the rage against his attackers.
After receiving dozens of inquiries by phone about Shepard's condition when the first reports went out over the wires on Friday, the Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado reconfigured the news page on its Web site as a source for updates on Shepard, and referred both the media and the public to the site.
From an average of 100 hits a day, the site was suddenly swamped with thousands, including requests that the hospital establish an email address for get-well wishes and messages to the Shepard family. Over 2000 mails flooded into the address in the 24 hours after it was published on the site Saturday night.
The University of Wyoming used its own Web site to correct the mistaken information -- first reported in the Denver Post and picked up on the wires -- that the two primary suspects in the case were University of Wyoming students. Only the suspects' girlfriends, who are being charged as accessories after the fact for helping to dispose of bloody clothing after the murder, were enrolled at the school.
The school's student newspaper, the Branding Iron, mobilized student response to the attack by publishing statements on its Web site from the university president and a representative of the UW Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Association. The site also tracked the media frenzy that descended on the small campus in Laramie, Wyoming, including a piquant observation from Associated Press photographer Ed Andrieski that "it seems slow in the news world ... and people want other things in their newspaper beside Clinton."
The Net also played a role in organizing the gay response to the attack.
Friday morning, an item titled "Vicious Attack in Wyoming" moved on Rex Wockner's mailing list, an overview of press coverage of gay issues that is mailed out to over 600 recipients -- many of whom are activists and journalists -- and copied to tens of thousands more. Influential gay writer and AIDS activist Larry Kramer subscribes to Wockner's list, and was horrified by the report of the young man beaten and discovered by two mountain bikers who (the item read) "at first thought [Shepard] was a scarecrow because of the way he was positioned on the fence."
Friday afternoon, Kramer called Tom Brokaw's office at NBC to call the anchorman's attention to the disturbing dispatch. The Shepard story had been slated for broadcast since that morning, says Nightly News executive producer David Doss, but Brokaw's assistant pulled the Shepard story up from wire service reports and printed it out for Brokaw following Kramer's call. Kramer also phoned ABC news anchorman Peter Jennings' office.
Kramer calls Wockner's list "the most important communication device the gay population has to draw on."
On Sunday afternoon, Internet political strategist John Aravosis launched a Web site designed to be a central resource for information on Shepard and on hate-crime legislation.
Aravosis compared the email messages sent to Shepard's family to the "flowers that piled up at Kensington Palace" after Princess Diana's death, but urged those moved by the death of the boyish, outspoken political-science major to use the Net to organize support for the Hate Crimes Prevention Act now under consideration in Congress.
In light of the attack on Shepard -- and the statement from one of the suspect's fathers that the murder was motivated by "embarrassment" over a pass made by the victim -- "It's time to put our email where our mouths are," Aravosis says.
