20 years ago, In October, 1998, in the middle of the prairie outside Laramie, Wyoming, Matthew Shepard, a 21 year old student at the University of Wyoming, was tied to a fence post, tortured, pistol whipped about the head, robbed, and left to die alone.  His comatose body, face so disfigured the only flesh that could be seen was where tears flushed a path through the blood, was discovered eighteen hours later by a student bicyclist. He was taken to a nearby hospital, put on life support and died five days later. Parenthetically, it was not the first time he’d been beaten up; you see, the young man was gay.