Andrew Sullivan noted a few days ago, a letter Stephen Fry addressed to his 16-year-old self…
Oh, lord love you, Stephen. How I admire your arrogance and rage and misery. How pure and righteous they are and how passionately storm-drenched was your adolescence. How filled with true feeling, fury, despair, joy, anxiety, shame, pride and above all, supremely above all, how overpowered it was by love. My eyes fill with tears just to think of you. Of me. Tears splash on to my keyboard now. I am perhaps happier now than I have ever been and yet I cannot but recognize that I would trade all that I am to be you, the eternally unhappy, nervous, wild, wondering and despairing 16-year-old Stephen: angry, angst-ridden and awkward but alive. Because you know how to feel, and knowing how to feel is more important than how you feel. Deadness of soul is the only unpardonable crime, and if there is one thing happiness can do it is mask deadness of soul.
Sullivan adds his own reaction to the film, History Boys…
A line it from the lonely gay schoolboy was almost too much to hear: "I’m Jewish. I’m homosexual. And I’m in Sheffield … I’m fucked." Somewhere in my mind in those teenage years was a similar refrain: "I’m Catholic. I’m homosexual. And I’m in East Grinstead … I’m fucked."
But I wasn’t fucked, of course. And not-to-be-fucked, not to turn into the tragic homosexual figure, memorizing "Brief Encounter," constantly chasing unrequited love, seeking refuge in the great worlds of Hardy or Larkin or Auden as a substitute for life: that was my goal.
See…I didn’t make that my goal. I just assumed it wouldn’t happen to me, because I didn’t buy into all the crap I was told about homosexuality.
That was a mistake. It was nearly impossible to grow up in that world, and no absorb some of its contempt for gay people. And it did its work on me all the same I realize now. Which is what makes it a good idea for gay folk to write these sorts of things…these bear your soul to the world letters. It seems very self absorbed, but it isn’t necessarily. It can be useful, not just for making peace with your own past, but also as a kind of message in a bottle to other generations in other times.
Gay kids have very little to no blood connection to past generations. You kind-of pop up in your family as gay, and everyone else isn’t. Maybe if you’re lucky you have a kind gay older uncle or aunt who can tell you a thing or two about what it was like for them, how to protect yourself from the tribulations they faced, and work toward the better world for us all. But more likely if you do have older gay relatives they are terrified to be seen as being too interested in you, lest they be accused of pedophilia. So you find yourself disconnected from the past, other then as history. And that history is still mostly being taught to each new generation of gay kids, by heterosexuals. Some gay-friendly, some not. We need to tell each other our own stories, in our own words.
So a letter to your younger gay self can be useful, not just to you, but to others who need to know what it was like for those of us in the previous generation. So that, hopefully, no gay kid will have to grow up in a world ever again, where everywhere you turn, literally, someone is putting a knife into your heart…telling you that you are pathetic…ridiculous…grotesque…sick.
I’ve had a letter to my younger self percolating somewhere inside of me for quite a long time now, so it’s probably time to get it out of me. But I have a few other letters to post before I get around to The Kid I Was. I’m going to start, with a Letter To A Straight Friend. I have some others that need writing too. And then I’ll write to Bruce. There’s a lot I’d have liked to tell him.
So I get to work, and immediately after settling into my office, go wash my hands before I touch anything on my desk. I mean…since I’ve had to touch all the door knobs on the way to my desk. And as I’m washing, I’m thinking…
Remember Y2K? Remember how it turned out to be no big deal after all. That wasn’t because it wasn’t any big deal. It actually was. If nothing had been done, guarantee you nothing would have worked by the time the calendar rolled over to the year 2000. Actually, things would have begun to fail Much sooner, since all the programs that calculate things like morgages and car loans and credit card exparation dates would have begun to fail years ahead of Y2K. But never mind that. If nothing had been fixed, nothing would have worked. We computer professionals took the warnings seriously, and got to work, and Fixed The Problem. And when the magic night came along, it wasn’t much of a problem after all. Thanks to us. And what did we get for our trouble? A lot of grief about how we’d scared the whole damn world for nothing.
Now it’s Swine Flu. Excuse me…Industrial…Pig Farm…Flu. Everybody’s gotten the message. A Dangerous Flu Is Spreading… Take Precautions… Be Alert… Good Hygiene Is The Best Defense… Suppose it works. Suppose that enough people take the message about good hygiene seriously enough, and government health agencies take the threat seriously enough, that this flu does not spread so rapidly, and not so many people die of it. Will we all say afterward that the threat was overblown?
Michael Steele has an interesting message for moderates, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinelreports. During a news conference at the Wisconsin GOP convention on Friday, Steele said moderates are welcome to join the Republican Party — but not to change it.
"All you moderates out there, y’all come. I mean, that’s the message," Steele said. "The message of this party is this is a big table for everyone to have a seat. I have a place setting with your name on the front."
But, he added: "Understand that when you come into someone’s house, you’re not looking to change it. You come in because that’s the place you want to be."
Get it moderates? This is not Your house…it’s Our house…
Princess Ruruna, of the Kingdom of Kod, has a problem. Her parents, the King and Queen, have left to travel abroad. Ruruna has been left to manage the nations fruit business. Much is at stake, Kod is known as "The Country of Fruit." Ruruna is not happy though, as she is swamped by paperwork and information overload. A mysterious book, sent by her father, contains Tico the fairy. Tico, and the supernatural book are going to help Princess Ruruna solve her problems with the power of the database. This is the setting for all that takes place in The Manga Guide to Databases. If you are like me and learned things like normalization and set operations from a rather dry text book, you may be quite entertained by the contents of this book. If you would like to teach others about creating and using relational databases and you want it to be fun, this book may be exactly what you need.
Er… Right. It’s Monday morning…it’s gray and rainy and chilly just like it’s been now for days and days… I’m tired, I’m about to go nuts with all this damn rain all the damn time…and this pops up on my computer screen. A Manga. About a princess. In the Country of Fruit. Suffering from information overload. Swamped with database problems. Rescued in the nick of time by Tico The Fairy. I had to stare at this for a few seconds while my brain kept insisting that I was going to wake up any moment now and Monday would begin for real this time…
If this post is confusing you…don’t worry. There’s an in-joke staring me in the face that I just can’t even think about clarifying here.
Posted by CmdrTaco from the are-you-really-surprised dept.
David Gerard writes "Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 claims support for ODF 1.1. With hard work and careful thinking, they have successfully achieved technical compliance but zero interoperability! MSO 2007sp2 won’t read ODF 1.1 from any other existing application, and its ODF is only readable by the CleverAge plugin. The post goes into detail as to how it manages this so thoroughly."
ODF: The open standard file format that only Microsoft applications can use…
[Update…] In comments Jonathan Allen points out that ODF is the Oasis Group open document standard, not Microsoft’s, which is OpenXML. I was confusing the two, and the point of the Slashdot post. This isn’t about Microsoft’s own proprietary open standard. It’s about them applying their usual Embrace, Extend and Extinguish tactic on ODF. Here’s some of the Slashdot commentary…
If it achieves 100% technical compliance with the standard, but zero interoperability, this is certainly a problem with the standard itself.
And the problem in this case is the missing formula specification. It’s not in ODF 1.1, and ODF 1.2 is still a draft. While this is Microsoft and we all "know" that this was intentional, ODF is what should be fixed first. We were all bashing OOXML specifications, but ODF 1.1’s far from perfect, as we can see.
…
That is, curiously, not quite true. ODF 1.1 doesn’t fully specify formulas, but it does specify the general syntax that should be used for them, and Microsoft seems to have ignored this. (Also, in practice, the major spreadsheets are quite similar in terms of what expressions they accept in formulas. This makes it relatively simple to convert between MS Office formulas and OpenOffice.org ones, which are what most ODF-based apps use.)
…
The irony here is that the formula language used by OpenOffice (and by other vendors) is based on that used by Excel, which itself was not fully documented when OpenOffice implemented it. So an argument, by Microsoft, not to support that language because it is not documented is rather hypocritical. Excel supports 1-2-3 files and formulas and legacy Excel versions (back to Excel 4.0) neither of which have standardized formula languages. Why are these supported? Also, the fact that the Microsoft/CleverAge add-in correctly reads and writes the legacy ODF formula syntax shows not only that it can be done, but that Microsoft already has the code to do it. The inexplicably thing is why that code never made it into Excel 2007 SP2.
Just look at this. They’re in complete technical compliance, and yet if you read an ODF file format spreadsheet into Excel and then write it back out again it’s now locked utterly into MS Office’s specific implementation of ODF. You can no longer read it back into any other spreadsheet program that supports ODF, because it can’t read Microsoft’s ODF formula implementation.
They just never stop, do they? I started out as a Microsoft platforms developer. Now I work on software that runs on many different platforms and swear to God I will never again be a Microsoft only developer. I will not help them betray the promise of the personal computer. I will not help them put handcuffs on the whole goddamned world just because that’s their business model.
This may strike some of you, or most of you as odd…but most of my sexy guy sketches start with my seeing something aimed more at young heterosexual males…some pin-up photo of a sexy woman…and I’ll find myself thinking Hey…that’s a nice pose…but I’d rather see a guy in that photo…
The young pirate I did some months ago was actually one of those little pirate statuettes you find for sale at some seaside resorts…a sexy female pirate being served a jug of ale by a little monkey. I bought the statuette and when I got it home did several quick sketches, recasting her as a young man, and adding some background detail and giving him a slightly more direct and challenging look. I guess you could say I butched him up a tad…but only a tad. I was reaching for a sense where he’s beautiful and sexy but not in a passive way, such as I often see in most male heterosexual skin magazines. I’m trying to thread a middle ground between the hyper-masculine art I see in a lot of gay magazines and the hyper-feminine stuff I see in straight boy magazines.
It seems the gay sensual archetype here in the U.S. is the hunk. I’m really not into that. But I’m not really into uber twink either. There is very little I find myself responding to in any of the gay magazines or the online photo galleries. I’m not into porn. Porn is obvious. I want to be teased. I like the sensual and beautiful over graphic sexuality. And no…this isn’t just a middle aged guy loosing his interest. I’ve always been like this. In a world that must seem to the pulpit thumpers like it’s swimming in sex, there is very little in it I actually like. I don’t see that as my being particularly finicky. I’m an artist. I don’t like saying that about myself because it sounds so damn pretentious, but there it is. I spend a lot of time with my feelings…alone at my drafting table, or out and about with one of my cameras. I know perfectly well what turns me on and it’s not that I have a sexually narrow bandwidth, it’s that the culture I live in does not like to admit that men can be beautiful and sexy that particular way. Most of my skin magazines are Asian and that’s not because I have a thing necessarily for Asians, but because Asian cultures seem more willing to admit that males can be beautiful and sexy in a way that isn’t hunk.
There are males like that everywhere. But here in the U.S. they have to dress like slobs or butch up or they catch grief from other U.S. males. Once upon a time, back in the 70s and early 80s, sexy lean and beautiful guys could wear their jeans tight and low and their hair long and their cut-offs high and nobody gave it a second thought. That was a great time to be a young gay man I’m here to tell you. But then as the gay rights movement grew and became more vocal, heterosexual males experienced a kind of gay panic and then those gawd awful baggy pants and swimsuits began to appear and all the sexy beautiful males went into hiding, lest someone think they were gay. Meanwhile, gay males, after being told for generations that they were pathetic mincing swishy faggots, began to reclaim maleness for themselves. That’s a good thing, but alas it’s become too much of a good thing. At least for me.
So when I want to spend some sexy time at the drawing board, I find myself inspired more by straight boy pin-up girls then by anything I see in the gay press or online on the gay websites. It’s weird I guess, but except for the passivity I usually see in it, I find myself drawn more to that then to explicitly gay stuff. I just mentally switch the gender of the subject a lot. I find myself looking at something that is very nice, but would be greatly improved by adding a few ‘Y’ chromosomes. But not too many.
The sketch in the previous post started out as a photo of a gay guy in low riser jeans with thong straps rising up slightly in a very sexy way from the pant waist. I thought that was a good idea, but I didn’t like his pose and he was a tad too muscular for my taste. I like muscle…I like the hardness of the male body…but there are limits. Then I saw another photo of a woman in a very tiny bikini and a hat. She was looking at the camera in a pouty pin-up girl kind of way. I took her pose and the idea of the low risers and thong straps and tried to combine the two. I made the pose a tad more assertive and changed the facial expression from pouty pin-up girl to more introspective and sensual male.
I do most of my pencil work these days on layout paper because it’s easier to erase and re-draw and I am a hunt and peck kind of draftsman, not a professional by any means. I am completely self taught and it probably shows. When it’s sexy time at the drafting table my goal is making myself all hot and bothered. It isn’t like I have anyone in my life to do that to me. So I do it to myself. I find that it’s often the simplest strokes of the pencil that can have the most dramatic results. The concentration level is intense…almost trance like…while I’m working with the pencil. That logical analytical side of my brain is working on the mechanics of drawing, and at the same time it is dispassionately watching the libido. I draw to make my libido go…Damn! Goddamn!
Beats sitting alone in a bar pondering the fact that Facebook is feeding me ads for Mature Gay Dating now. I would love to find a nice, good looking, good-hearted gay guy about my own age to date. As long as he wasn’t mature.
It rained practically the entire weekend here in Baltimore, and I was able to get very little yard work done. It’s just been rain rain rain rain rain here. Especially today. Just steady gray sky rain all friggin day long. Foo.
So what’s a single, lonely gay guy to do on a rainy day? A few indoor repairs I suppose. Some chores. Call my ex-boyfriend and mope around the house afterward… Do some filing I’d put off…
Oh…I know…I know…! I can draw some pencil sketches of guys who wear hats…
Point Taken…But You Still Aren’t Paying Attention…
Andrew Sullivan updates his post on Virginia Foxx and Matthew Shepard…
I should be clear: I do not for a minute believe that the bigotry behind the Matthew Shepard murder was a hoax. I think it was murkier and more complicated – i.e. more human – than some want it to be. Of course, if you believe that his murderers deserved the maximum sentence because they brutally murdered someone, and not because they were meth-fueled bigots, it doesn’t matter. I want the same laws against the same acts enforced equally on everyone. If police don’t enforce the law equally, get on their case. But leave the laws alone.
Okay…point taken and granted. He’s not saying hate had nothing to do with the murder, which is Exactly what the kook pews are saying. As to his horribly misinformed attitude about anti-lynching laws hate crime laws, I’ll leave that argument for another time. But this business that the murder of Matthew Shepard was "murkier and more complicated" then it at first appeared is a load of horseshit.
In his confession to DeBree, McKinney had denied using meth the day of the murder, and while McKinney had been arrested too late for the police to confirm this through blood testing, DeBree felt certain that McKinney had for once told the truth. Obviously it’s unsurprising that the lead investigator would disagree with the defense, but DeBree had some compelling reasons on his side. "There’s no way" it was a meth crime, DeBree argued, still passionate about the issue when I met him nearly six months after the trial had ended. No evidence of recent drug use was "found in a search of their residences. There was no evidence in the truck. From everything we were able to investigate, the last time they would have done meth would have been two to three weeks previous to that night. What the defense attempted to do was a bluff." Meth crimes do have hallmarks. One, "Overkill," certainly seems to describe what happened to Matt, but no others so seamlessly fit that night: "A meth crime is going to be a quick attack," DeBree pointed out. "It’s going to be a manic attack… No. This was a sustained event. And somebody that’s high on meth is not going to be targeting and zeroing in on a head, and deliver the blows that they did in the way that they did," with such precision. "Consistently it was targeted, and even if you’re drunk, you’re going to have a tough time trying to keep your target. No. There’s absolutely no involvement with drugs."
Beth Loffreda, Loosing Matt Shepard. pg 133 – 134
A week after we met in his office, Rob [DeBree] took me to the crime scene. As we drove out to the fence in a Sheriff’s Office SUV, he stopped in mid-sentence by the Wal-Mart" "Here’s where it began," he told me and gestured in imitation of McKinney striking Matt. We restart the conversation, but he’s made his point: the drive to the fence seems unimaginably long. It’s not far – no more then a mile or two – but the rutted dirt road they turned on to makes for extremely slow driving. When I say something to Rob about how long it takes, he agrees. "They were coming here to finish him." On that dirt track, it is hard to believe the defense attorney’s claims that the two killers had been drunk or high on drugs or crazed by homosexual panic. It just takes too long to get to the fence…
Beth Loffreda, Loosing Matt Shepard. pg 155 – 156
"I have never worked a homicide with this much evidence," Rob says, all these months later a bit of wonder still bleeding into his voice. "It was like a case of God giving it to us. I’m not kidding. The whole way it broke down from the beginning to the end – it was like, here it is, boys: work it. It’s almost like it pissed off God, and he says, oh well, come here, let me walk you over here, walk you over there, pick up all this, pick up all that. It was just a gift.
Beth Loffreda, Loosing Matt Shepard. pg 157
There is more. Much, much more. But that last paragraph I quoted pretty much sums it up. There is absolutely nothing murky or mysterious about the death of Matthew Shepard. It is one of the most crystal clear examples of purely venomous anti-gay murder in the record. They spent time torturing that kid. That is not hyperbole, it is the one overwhelming fact at the heart of what happened. That, and that they made an effort to take him where they did. Whatever their intent when they walked into that bar that night, when they walk out of it with that kid, they were about torturing and killing a homosexual.
The only confusion regarding this case, is what has been deliberately and maliciously injected into the national conversation about it by the religious right. And to understand why they’ve been so vehement about denying that anti-gay hate was the root of it, you have to consider not only the political context of their opposition to hate crime laws, but the context in which Shepard’s death came to light.
What happened was that Shepard’s death brought to a grinding halt, their brand new nationwide 600,000 dollar anti-gay ad campaign. That summer, starting with a full page ad in the New York Times that proclaimed "I’m Living Proof That The Truth Can Set You Free", a group called "Truth In Love" sponsored by fifteen arch right anti-gay groups began a national campaign to roll back the gains gay activists had won, using ex-gay therapy as their ruse, not to talk about curing homosexuality, but to demonize homosexual people. Wayne Besen in his book, Anything But Straight, documents the brutality of that campaign. Behind the smiling faces of people who were now free, free at last from the loathsome taint of homosexuality, the campaign was peppered with lies about gay recruitment in schools, child molestation, the spread of AIDS, and how homosexuality leads to drugs, disease, and death and many biblical condemnations of homosexuality. Don Wildmon, whose group was one of the sponsors, was busy telling people that…
Since homosexuals cannot reproduce, the only way for them to "breed" is to RECRUIT!"
In the midst of this propaganda onslaught, comes the news that a gay college student was practically crucified on a deer fence in Wyoming…that the kid who found his dying body thought a first that it was a scarecrow. And then a couple days later, news that Fort Collins Colorado fraternity revelers during their homecoming parade, entered a float that bore a scarecrow with a sign that read "I’m gay" And disgust swept across the nation. The ad campaign now seemed less an outreach to homosexuals in the public mind, and more like what it really was, an attack on their lives.
Almost Immediately the religious right set about blaming Shepard for his own death. It’s not hard to understand why. They deliberately created the climate of hate toward gay people that made that both kid’s death and the mockery of it in Fort Collins not merely inevitable, but intentional. Desired. The homosexual monster must be feared. The homosexual monster must be eliminated from our midst. The very last thing they wanted was that the climate of hate would be held to account…that terrorizing homosexuals would be considered criminal.
For generations the act of beating, and even murdering, homosexuals was considered less a crime and more a distasteful consequence of homosexuality in society. Randy Shilts related how a young gay man who was raped sought medical help, telling a doctor what happened, only to have the doctor look at him and say "Well you’re a homosexual aren’t you?" Matthew Shepard put a human face on all that…the face of anyone’s kid…and suddenly it seemed as if for once beating and killing a homosexual wouldn’t just be swept under the rug as par for the course…no more then what you got, and probably deserved if you were a homosexual. Instead, the nation was appalled at what happened to that kid.
And that made the religious right livid.
They began Immediately to smear and slime that poor kid’s memory. What ABC News and 20/20 did by taking that smear campaign and elevating it to the level of "respectable journalism" is unforgivable. ABC News ground another cigarette into a dead gay kid’s body so they could get some ratings. At least the hatred of Fred Phelps is genuine.
There is nothing murky about what happened to Matthew Shepard. Nothing. The evidence leaves absolutely no doubt that a 112 pound gay college student was tortured and murdered by two thugs because they thought homosexuals were human garbage and their contempt for them justified anything they did to that kid that night. They had Fun. They enjoyed themselves. Anyone who cites that 20/20 hit piece is in about the same category as William Bennett, citing Paul Cameron on the shortened lifespan of homosexuals. You are dispensing bullshit that even Baghdad Bob would laugh at.
"I have never worked a homicide with this much evidence," Rob says, all these months later a bit of wonder still bleeding into his voice. "It was like a case of God giving it to us. I’m not kidding. The whole way it broke down from the beginning to the end – it was like, here it is, boys: work it. It’s almost like it pissed off God, and he says, oh well, come here, let me walk you over here, walk you over there, pick up all this, pick up all that. It was just a gift.
Take a wee stroll around that lonely prairie grass field of evidence sometime. It’ll rip your comfortable 20/20 myths…and then your heart…to crying pieces.
The footprints and the tire tracks were perfectly etched; Matt’s watch, his student ID, and a quarter were laid out by the fence like props. All that told DeBree a pretty clear story about what had happened there, including something I’d never heard in all the reporting of the crime – that Matt had made a run for it that night. First, he had desperately "tried to stay in the truck," Rob believes. Once out, he tried to escape. "Henderson had made a statement to Chasity Pasley that she told us about, that Matt was able to break free and tried to run. And according to what we were able to see at the crime scene, we could pretty well put that together. His wristwatch was located twenty-three feet or so from where he was tied up, and I think that’s essentially what he was trying to do, was just to run. He was tackled down; then he was drug over to the fence and tied by Henderson."
Actually Mr. Sullivan, The Facts Are Staring You In The Face.
I see Andrew Sullivan is still trying to make that 20/20 hit piece on Matthew Shepard into something it isn’t…namely journalism…
I don’t doubt that homophobia fueled the disgusting murder. But I am unconvinced it was the sole motive. ABC’s 20/20 report brought some serious facts to the table – most specifically the crystal meth binge that the killers had been on, and the original motive being possibly robbery of someone McKinney knew casually
No…No…and, No…
To: Andrew Sullivan
From: Bruce Garrett
Subject: What Facts?
You’re still trying to make that 20/20 episode into something it isn’t…a serious exploration of the circumstances of Matthew Shepard’s death. There is nothing confusing or mysterious about what happened that night. It is in fact, one of the best documented cases of a gay bashing/murder, with that classic aspect of overkill that such murders almost always have. Yeah…they robbed him. But had be been heterosexual, a robbery would have been all that it was.
The facts are there, staring you in the face…you’re just not paying attention to them. Question: if McKinney and Shepard knew each other, then why did he ask Shepard if he could read his license plates?
Both sides agreed that McKinney committed the murder, with Custis actually using that legal term in his closing argument. The points of contention boiled down to whether the act was premeditated or the result of extreme intoxication.
Prosecutor Cal Rerucha alluded to testimony that McKinney was actually sober at the time of the killing, and focused on his final request for Shepard to read McKinney’s license plate as the most damning proof of premeditation — allegedly proving that McKinney intentionally killed Shepard to make sure he could never be a witness in a case against him.
If they knew each other, even casually, then this is pointless. Shepard already can identify him. But there it is.
If you have any doubts about what was going on that night, I suggest you do what I did. Go to Laramie, and drive the route Shepard’s killers took from the bar they picked him up at, to the fence where they beat him to the edge of death. I have family in California and I regularly drive out to visit them because I love seeing America from the road. One year I detoured to Laramie and just to see for myself.
Well you can’t get to the fence now from the road: there are signs warning you that it’s a private driveway now. But you can take the drive from where the bar was to close enough to where the fence is and I am here to tell you that you won’t get halfway there before it becomes sickeningly clear that it may have started out as a robbery in the bar, but by the time the two of them got that 112 pound kid in the truck and started heading out of town it wasn’t that anymore. They could have robbed him anywhere along that route pushed him out of the truck and gotten safely away. Hell, they could have put a bullet in his head and dumped his body out in various spots along that route where nobody would likely have seen anything. Drive the route late at night. I did it one July, but doing it around the time of year of the killing would be even better, because the route would be even darker, the air much colder, the driver even less likely to see other people out there. It is very clarifying.
You go out of the downtown section…you drive for blocks…past the university…past the outlying convenience stores…a few fast food joints…some liquor stores…out to the edge of town and beyond. Into the rolling sage. Into the darkness. I know why they turned off onto Pilot Peak Road now. Pilot Peak was their last turn off before the Interstate. They had to make that left, or they would have been on the Interstate and from there it was either drive west and back toward town or drive east for miles and miles to Happy Jack Road. So they took the left onto Pilot Peak Road and drove back into that sub division as far as they could. Into the darkness. Where no one would see. Where their handiwork wouldn’t be discovered for a long time. They made an effort to take him where they did, and that only makes sense if they planned to beat the living daylights out of that poor kid, simply for being a homosexual, because he disgusted them. Perhaps…perhaps…because they disgusted themselves, and now they had a queer they could take it out on.
I repeat: if McKinney and Shepard knew each other, then why did he ask Shepard if he could read his license plates? Oh…and Doc O’Connor says they were never together in his limo. And the detectives found no evidence of any kind of drug connection to the crime. But who are you going to believe…the detectives or the killer’s friends? All 20/20 did was take the drug saturated gossip of the friends of Shepard’s killers and elevate that to "serious questions" about the killing. Their testimony is contradicted in so many ways by both the evidence and the testimony of the detectives that it’s impossible to see what 20/20 did as anything other then a hit piece.
But if you have doubts, like I said, go there and drive that route for yourself. Do it around the same time of night as Shepard’s killers kidnapped him. Try to keep a picture in your mind of those two thugs with a 112 pound kid in their truck, driving that route, and all they have in mind is robbing him. Trust me, it won’t last long.
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