Meet the new generation of LGBTQ activists

Matthew Shepard would’ve fit in with the millennials.

At least that’s what Jason Marsden believes. He would know — he was friends with Shepard and is the longtime director of the Denverbased foundation named after him. Marsden means it in a positive way.

Shepard was political and opinionated. He loved to debate and was impatient for progress, said Marsden, executive director of the Matthew Shepard Foundation. He was pushy.

Matthew Shepard, in fact, was much like many of the members of a new generation of activists who are working for LGBTQ equality and rights in his name, Marsden said.

Some were just coming to terms with their own sexuality when Shepard’s murder focused the world’s attention on the oppression, violence and inequality the gay community faced. Others weren’t even old enough at the time to read a newspaper.

Shepard, 21, died Oct. 12, 1998, in a Fort Collins hospital. Six days earlier, two men had beaten him unconscious and left him tied to a fence outside Laramie. The attackers told police they targeted Shepard because he was gay. Millions around the world followed news coverage of the attack, Shepard’s death and the trials of his murderers.

Joe Foster was 15 years old the day Shepard died. Foster knew he was gay but hadn’t told anyone. He was terrified.

Sara Grossman was 13 years old that day. She hadn’t come out either — she was just learning about her sexuality.

Jess Fahlsing was 2, and, of course, has no memory of the event.

All three grew up in the shadow of Shepard’s death. Now, 20 years later, all three are activists working in his name. They’re his living legacy.

“There’s a kind of beauty to the fact that they’re so much like he was,” said Marsden, 46.

A growing legacy

Jess Fahlsing’s life this past month has been hectic, as the 22yearold helped plan dozens of events at the University of Wyoming, where Shepard attended school. As cochair of the Matthew Shepard Memorial Group at the university, Fahlsing was in charge of a slate of events commemorating the 20th anniversary of Shepard’s death.

But Fahlsing, who identifies as queer and uses genderneutral pronouns, didn’t even know Shepard’s name until their senior year in high school in Rock Springs, Wyo. — about three hours west of Laramie on Interstate 80.

Fahlsing wasn’t sure about their own identity then. There was no visible queer community in Rock Springs, a town of about 23,000. There were no role models for Fahlsing there.

But once they moved to Laramie to attend the University of Wyoming, Fahlsing started to question their identity. Gradually, they began to live publicly as a queer person. But they remained fairly private, shying away from public activism.

Then, in April 2017, U.S. Sen. Mike Enzi, RWyo., told a group of high school students that a man who wears a tutu to a bar shouldn’t be surprised he gets into fights because the man in the tutu “asks for it.” About the same time, Fahlsing read “The Laramie Project,” a play about Shepard’s life and death, for a class. The combination of the two events propelled Fahlsing into activism.

It’s hard for Fahlsing to pin down exactly what Matthew’s legacy means in their life. They try to emulate Shepard and his family in small moments, by responding to hate and homophobia with love.

“It’s something that’s going to evolve over the course of my life,” Fahlsing said. “Matt’s legacy isn’t stagnant. It grows with people.”

A new era

Grossman and Foster work for the Matthew Shepard Foundation in Denver and represent a younger generation that will continue the work started by Shepard’s parents.

The Shepards are in their 60s now and reaching retirement age. Positions at the foundation they created are slowly being filled by people who were children or teens when Matthew died.

As a gay closeted teen, Foster was nervous about the killing. He didn’t want to meet the same end. He tried to keep family and friends at arm’s length, in case they might find out he was gay.

But his mom did the opposite. She started driving him to school every day. She became more affectionate toward him.

Years later, after he had come out, she told Foster she had known he was gay for years before he told her just after he graduated from high school. She said Shepard’s death made her fear for his safety. She saw the Shepard family’s grief and didn’t want it to become her own.

“She knew she couldn’t protect me from people who might want to hurt me,” Foster said. “But she did know that if something did happen, I knew I was cared for and loved.”

Foster, 35, now works as the development director for the Matthew Shepard Foundation. The Shepards’ example, and that of other LGBTQ activists, taught him to never stay silent in the face of injustice, he said.

“It was a natural fit for me,” he said. “(The Shepards) have been my heroes.”

“It was serendipity”

Grossman, communications manager for the Matthew Shepard Foundation, remembers the days after Shepard’s death. She remembers attending an assembly at her Florida middle school during which the headmaster discussed the murder. She remembers the school leaders forbidding the use of the word “gay” as a negative descriptor.

As an adult, Grossman worked for advocacy and political groups in Denver and elsewhere in Colorado before pivoting to focus more on startup businesses. Until June 12, 2016.

Grossman’s best friend, Drew Leinonen, died that day after a gunman opened fire in an Orlando, Fla., gay bar, killing 49. She was haunted by his death — the two had often partied at the Pulse Nightclub. After his funeral, she canceled all of her work contracts. She obsessed over the shooting. She reread Leinonen’s online journals from years ago.

After about a month, she decided she wanted to go back to work in LGBTQ advocacy and went online to a nonprofit job board.

The first listing was for a communications position at the Matthew Shepard Foundation. Drew was similar to Matt in many ways, Grossman said. They were both blunt, straightforward people. They didn’t shy from conflict.

“It was serendipity, it was kismet, it was all of those things,” she said.

There has been progress for the LGBTQ community over the last 20 years. But there’s still work to do, Grossman said.

Five states — including Shepard’s native Wyoming — don’t have any laws specific to hate crimes. Data on crimes or incidents where the victim was targeted because of their sexuality or gender identity remains incomplete.

But Fahlsing, Foster, Grossman and their peers in the new generation of activists are exactly the right people to handle the challenges, said Marsden, the foundation’s director. They will demand change. They will empower individual people to stand up for themselves, to set a high standard for how a person should be treated.

“Washington’s not going to save us, Wall Street’s not going to save us, Hollywood’s not going to save us,” he said. “It’s us. It’s them.”