Martyrs often die twice. First when the body is killed and a second time when their memory is venerated -- or denigrated -- beyond any connection to real life.

Such was the case with Matthew Shepard, the young gay man who was beaten to a pulp and left to die, tied to a fence on a Wyoming prairie 11 years ago this month. Matthew Shepard immediately become an icon, figuratively and literally. Reports of how he was hoisted on a fence, crucified like Jesus, flashed around the world and still persist, even though it didn't quite happen that way. No matter, gay rights activists saw in Matthew a saint and a rallying cry.

Gay rights opponents, meanwhile, persistently tried to undermine the story -- confirmed in the trials that convicted Shepard's two killers -- that he was targeted because he was gay, and that his death had more to do with drugs and alcohol, or because Shepard provoked his attackers by putting moves on them.

Now Shepard's mother, Judy, is back in the spotlight with a new book about her son that tries to set the record straight, while at the same time pushing the country to embrace gays rights.

The time certainly seems right. A hate crimes bill named after Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, the black man dragged to his death behind a pickup truck by a gang of white men in Texas a few months before Shepard's 1998 killing, passed the House on Thursday (over many Republican objections). Passage is expected in the Senate next week, perhaps by the 11th anniversary of Shepard's death on Monday.

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The bill would expand a 1969 federal hate-crime law to cover crimes motivated by a victim's sexual orientation or gender identity. Versions of the law have been introduced since 2001, each time progressing a bit further through Congress, but eventually faltering before reaching the floor for a vote.

Now the movement has a Democratic Congress that is supportive of the measure and above all a president who has promised to sign it, though Judy Shepard has experienced too many disappointments to start celebrating just yet.

"We've been here before," she told me. "This is exactly where we were in 2007...We're a little more positive. But you know, quite honestly, you just never know."

She is encouraged, though, and like other activists notes that Barack Obama has pledged to take further steps, such as repealing the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, and he is on record as opposing the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act that defines marriage as a legal union exclusively between one man and one woman. Obama has appointed many openly gay officials; on Wednesday he said he planned to name an openly gay lawyer as the ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa.

That move came ahead of Obama's appearance Thursday night at the annual black-tie gala for the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the premier gay rights lobby. It marks just the second time a president will have attended the event. (Bill Clinton was the first.) Moreover, on Sunday, tens of thousands of marchers are expected to turn out on the Mall for the National Equality March for gay rights -- not that such grandiose venues are Judy Shepard's strong suit.

But with so much at stake, and with concern and criticism growing within the gay community over Obama's perceived slowness in acting on his pledges to support equality for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) Americans, Judy Shepard is not about to let up.

"Just because time has passed and laws have been passed, it's not over," Shepard told a group of high-school students in New York City earlier this week. "Ignorance is our enemy." A federal hate crimes law that includes the LGBT community is critical because a hate crime, as she explained, "is meant to terrorize a community, not solely to victimize an individual."

A Wyoming native who remains grounded in the Western culture of small towns and long drives, Judy Shepard is in many respects an American Everymom: she confesses to being "a very private, shy person," and she clearly does not like the spotlight. "For me to speak out, in crowds -- I just have to think he [Matthew] is up there helping me to do this," she says.

And she is good at it, as she showed in her talk to students at the Calhoun School in Manhattan.

"Matt is no longer with us because they learned -- they learned -- that it was okay to hate," she said, referring to the two young men, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, who in October 1998 offered Matthew Shepard a late-night ride home from a bar in Laramie, where Matthew, who was 21, had returned to attend the university.

Matthew Shepard had already endured many trials by then. He was always small and was often targeted for abuse, and he suffered from terrible bouts of depression. The Shepards had moved to Saudi Arabia when Matt was in his teens because his father, Dennis, could find work there in the gas industry. Matt and his younger brother, Logan, had to attend boarding schools in Europe, which was a painful separation that turned tragic when Matt was raped by unknown assailants while on a class trip to Morocco.

After moving around to various cities back in the U.S., Shepard and his worried parents hoped he'd make a fresh start when he enrolled that fall of 1998 at the University of Wyoming.

But it was not to be. After driving off with Matthew sitting between them in the cab of their pickup, McKinney and Henderson robbed, beat, and pistol-whipped Shepard and tied him to a fence in a field, leaving him to die. He was discovered 18 hours later, comatose. Judy and Dennis Shepard were still living in Saudi Arabia and her recounting of the 48 hours of air travel, layovers, and no sleep -- and no updates about their son -- that it took them to get home is as harrowing as the rest of the tragic story.

Six days after the attack, on Oct. 12, 1998, Matthew Shepard died. He never regained consciousness. McKinney and Henderson were charged with murder and during their trials it was confirmed that they had targeted Matthew Shepard because he was gay. (At one point they put forward a "gay panic" defense, contending Matthew had hit on them, which sparked their rage.) Both men were sentenced to consecutive life terms; Henderson had agreed to a plea but McKinney avoided the death penalty when the Shepards agreed at the sentencing phase that he receive the same sentence.

"It was not so much an altruistic decision as the fact that we wanted him out of our lives," Shepard told me this week, displaying the same candor in conversation that she does in her talks and in her book, "The Meaning of Matthew: My Son's Murder in Laramie, and a World Transformed."

The book marks the first time she has told the story in full, and it is a deeply moving, often gripping account of Matt's life, his death, and the afterlife of Judy Shepard's new calling as a gay rights activist and head of The Matthew Shepard Foundation.

It is a role she fulfills with humility and passion, and by challenging all sides in the debate. Her principal goal, of course, is to see gay rights measures -- from hate crimes coverage to marriage equality to job protection -- enacted across the country. As she points out, there are still 30 states where teachers can be fired if they are found to be homosexual, and in Wyoming the laws protecting wildlife are tougher than those protecting gays and lesbians.

But she also speaks frankly to the gay community and their supporters. At her talk on Manhattan's Upper West Side, she repeatedly pointed out that her gay-friendly audience needed to realize that New York City is the exception, not the rule, in the U.S.

In rural areas and elsewhere young homosexuals like her son find few safe havens or welcoming crowds or families, much less legal protections. She even tweaked the sacred cow of the city's annual Gay Pride parade, noting that the focus on the more outrageous gay caricatures can obscure the larger picture that the rest of the country needs to focus on.

"Don't get me wrong, I'm not disrespecting the Village People," she said, referring to the popular and campy ''70s gay disco act. "But they don't represent the community as a whole." It's the parents with strollers and the insurance salesmen and others at the back of the parade who are often left out of the picture.

Shepard is uncompromising in refusing to accept the status quo and holding politicians accountable. But she is just as tough on the movement's activists and sympathizers. They can't just go around carping about Obama's lack of action, for example.

"I'm not about to stomp my feet and whine because it not all happening within a year. That's disingenuous," she says without apology. "Things will get done," she says. "I think things are happening behind the scenes," referring to the administration and Congress.

Not only are many activists critical of Obama, but some are also disillusioned with the Human Rights Campaign, especially in the wake of the stunning passage of California's Proposition 8 initiative that defined marriage as between a man and a woman.

Judy Shepard is having none of it. "Anyone who says the HRC has failed us in their lobbying efforts has never done lobbying. It's the most frustrating thing on earth," she says -- a lot of walking and talking and negotiation and compromise. "I hate it. But it's our system. And you have to be part of the system even if you hate it. That's the way things get changed."

Her realism, her heartland pragmatism, is also evident, and more intimate, as she talks about Matthew.

For more than a decade Shepard has had to deal with the fact that her eldest son became -- even as he lay in a coma -- an international celebrity and an icon (literally, as in this work of art ) of the gay rights struggle. Matthew Shepard was no longer her son, but was instead a Christ-like figure, crucified on a fence on a remote hill.

That image persisted even in the HBO film "The Laramie Project," the widely-presented play about Shepard's murder that was based on hundreds of interviews conducted with residents of Laramie. (A follow-up, "The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later," has just been produced.)

Some activists have questioned the "Deification of Matthew Shepard," as Gabriel Arana titled a provocative essay in The American Prospect last month. In her piece, Arana critiques the LGBT community for this apotheosis (the kind of bickering that exasperates Shepard) and even singles out Judy Shepard for not sufficiently debunking the analogy.

But that's not fair. Judy Shepard and her husband lost not only their son to two killers but also the memory of him to a larger cause. One of Shepard's goals in writing "The Meaning of Matthew" was to recover the real Matthew Shepard: the flawed, loveable, maddening, passionate, rebellious son who was turned into a martyr for a cause even before his parents arrived at his hospital bed.

"The comparisons they were making [about Matt] were very inappropriate and very uncomfortable," Judy Shepard told me. "The fact is that the public, and the media, just don't want to let go of that. Matt was not tied to that fence in a crucifixion pose." [He was tied at the base of the post, lying on the ground, and within a quarter mile of a housing development.] "They just seem to want to hold on to it. Maybe it makes it more visually impactful or dramatic. It was important for me to get the truth out there, and you can believe it or not. I wanted people to know Matt as a real human being as he was. I thought it was a disservice to Matt and his community to portray him as something other than as he was."

Some of the most arresting passages of Judy Shepard's book are about the hype that engulfed her son and her family before she knew it.

She recalls seeing newspaper headlines in an airport about the attack and not realizing they were talking about Matt. She and her husband and her surviving son were in a cocoon of sorts, almost unaware of the grass roots following springing up in the wake of the attack. Shepard writes of leaving the hospital one day before Matt died and joining a candlelight vigil for her son -- no one recognized her because her picture hadn't been publicized yet -- and suddenly realizing what was happening, and that she was in some way an outsider to the very movement that her son had inspired.

Not anymore. Judy Shepard is working harder than ever, a low-key presence in a high-profile movement. She mainly talks to college students and young people, because she believes education is as critical as any legislation. (She is also possessed of a dry wit, about herself -- the fan she carries is because "I am a woman of a certain age and I have my own personal summers"-- and about her son: "My first indication [that Matthew was gay] was that Dolly Parton was his favorite Halloween character for three years in a row."

Where others are critical she will quickly highlight the advancements the gay rights movement has made, as well as the work to be done. "There's all this dialogue, and it's just wonderful. People are talking about it now whereas 15 or 20 years ago you just didn't find that in a positive way...The possibilities are endless." She agrees that with all the other pressing issues Obama and Congress have to face "the timing is just cruddy -- I could use another word -- but it's bad, it's just bad. But it'll happen. It's just a matter of time."

She is realistic and hopeful, and offers no magic bullets to those who long for an easy way out. It's about teaching by example, and Judy Shepard is practicing what she preaches.


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