ABSTRACT
This essay explores the cultural legacy of Matthew Shepard from a local and partial perspective. Local, because Loffreda lived in Laramie for 19 years, until the summer of 2017. Partial, because Loffreda’s research is intentionally so, in two senses of the word: it is both an incomplete rendering and a fond one. Gathering up a set of interviews and written in literary-journalistic style, the essay intends to capture the ways cultural legacy and normativity feel in Laramie for some of its nonnormative residents: the felt textures and pressures of daily life, the presence of Matt (or not) in those sensations. Along the way the essay will, when prompted by the thoughts of the interview participants, return to and reconsider some arguments Loffreda made in her book, Losing Matt Shepard seventeen years ago. And lastly it is Loffreda’s farewell to Laramie, and in that, it is also a consideration of the workings of privilege inside of love: who gets to love Laramie and why.
