Funny. Smart. Sincere. Irritable. Gay. Cute. Humble. These are just some of the adjectives used by Matthew Shepard to describe himself in an ongoing series of journal entries that he mostly kept a secret from his friends, his family, everyone. Shepard was a young gay man from Laramie, Wyoming whose brutal murder sent ripples of grief and stringent awareness from the middle of the country all the way to the coasts. I suspect Shepard kept this diary (where all entries begin with “I am…”) to allow himself some sense of belonging in a world that so often denied him that basic human right. The new documentary “Matt Shepard Was A Friend Of Mine” —directed by Shepard’s childhood friend Michele Josue, who conducts some shattering interviews with Shepard’s schoolmates, family friends and his understandably devastated parents— sheds some light not just on the heinous details of the crime that ultimately left Shepard in a coma for days before his death, but also on the person he was before that...
