A year or two later, 13-year-old Jesse Dirkhising was killed by two gay men during a brutal and bizarre sexual escapade. Jesse's murder didn't receive any attention in the national press until a few correspondents started asking "Why not?", and, even then, it barely made a ripple.

This discrepancy in coverage became a cause celebre among a cadre of conservative journalists. Some resented the Matthew Shepard coverage, and others resented the fact that the killers, who were gay, weren't pilloried like Matthew Shepard's murderers. And many wanted to condemn not just the murder, but also the sexual acts that preceded it.

First, the Complaint
The key complaint was that the "liberal press" and gay rights organizations had exploited the Matthew Shepard murder for political purposes, and were now burying the Jesse Dirkhising story.

One reason that Jesse Dirkhising's story touched a nerve is that a lot of people are still resentful over some of the overstatements that followed Matthew Shepard's murder. Matthew's murder ignited an outcry that surprised everyone. It's hard to say exactly how and why Matthew's murder resonated so strongly with so many people. There were several factors:

• the sheer brutality of the murder,
• the way Matthew languished in the hospital before dying (the initial vigils were for his recovery, not in response to his death)
• the collective fear that many gay people and their friends have over violent gay-bashing,
• a collective sense that anti-gay sentiments being expressed by conservative religious groups serve to encourage the violent gay-bashers,
• a sense that local and federal hate-crime legislation could have been a deterrent to such murders, and
• the fact that Matthew's parents became proponents of hate-crime legislation.

  Those factors don't explain fully why the press got so involved, however. Additional factors affecting the press coverage included

  • Timing - the absence of competing stories
  • Controversy - the conflict between religious conservatives and gay-rights supporters
  • Competition and Sensationalism - once it got started, it spiraled out of control

    I happen to believe that most the collective grief and other reactive sentiment expressed in response to Matthew Shepard's murder was legitimate and reasonable - including the suggestion that anti-gay statements made by conservative Christian spokespeople encourage anti-gay violence, even when those spokespeople explicitly disavow violence and harassment. But there's also no question that many reactive statements were excessive - even irresponsible. As a result, many conservative spokespeople and their supporters legitimately felt maligned - especially those who attempted to express their own sympathy, and to disavow violence.

    So when some of the people who still felt that they, or their religious leaders, were unfairly maligned started hearing about Jesse Dirkishing, some of that resentment was expressed as accusations against gay-support or gay-rights groups.

    To illustrate the controversy, I'll cite two pieces published by conservative writers, and two responses from the gay-rights community:

    1. Andrew Sullivan and Elizabeth Birth in The New Republic Magazine
       • Andrew Sullivan, a gay man and a senior editor at The New Republic wrote an article published in The New Republic on April 4, 2001 called "Us and Them", in which he decried the silence of the Human Rights Campaign in response to Jesse Dirkhising's murder.
       • Elizabeth Birch, the Executive Director of the Human Rights Campaign, replied in a letter-to-the-editor. I couldn't find her letter online, so I've transcribed it here.
    2. Dana Kelly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
       • Dana Kelly wrote a strongly worded editorial column titled "A Murder Ignored: The Sound of Silence", published on March 23, 2001. The column is available in the archives of the Democrat-Gazette (where you have to register and pay $3.00 for each article you read). Because it's available in that archive, I haven't reproduced it here, but I did include excerpts from it in the response I wrote.
       • As part of a private correspondence, I wrote a response to Kelly's article.