The Houston Chronicle spoke with Judy Shepard as she appeared at Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts as part of the “Campaign to Erase Hate”.
Says Shepard: “I’m just somebody’s mom who got really angry at the system and felt I had the opportunity to make a change. In my own mind, speaking like I did today, that is my grief process. I get to keep Matthew with me. I’ve always been a person who believed things happen for a reason,” she said. “When I figure out what this reason is, I hope I’m open to it. And I hope that losing my son was part of it.”
She doesn’t plan on forgiving the two young men who put her on this path: “It’s not a part of my process. I don’t blame them 100 percent. I sort of blame society for creating the environment to make them think they could get away with it.”
Shepard also says her new life has changed many of her relationships with friends at home: “There are a lot of them who don’t know how to talk to me. They don’t know what to ask me. They don’t really know who I am anymore. They wonder how the Judy they knew could be doing what this Judy is doing.”
Rewards, if you can call them that, come in the form of a great need: “…from the reception she got at Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts last week, she’s also a surrogate mother of sorts to a generation of young gays. After her speech at HSPVA, attended by hundreds, many of those students line up backstage to meet her. Most throw their arms around her and tell her in a gush about coming out to their parents or describe their horror at homophobia. Several just want to tell her how much her work means to them. There’s a sense of urgency to share with her because she somehow will agree and, most of all, understand.”
‘A journey of personal change’ [houston chronicle]
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