This cover story was prompted by the grisly 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student in Wyoming, and the political firestorm it sparked on Capitol Hill. “What people mean when they say Matthew Shepard’s murder was a lynching is that he was killed to make a point,” TIME wrote. “Maybe his most important political act was his life. He was gay, and for a while he lived that way.”
TIME Covers the Gay Rights Movement
Over the last five decades, these six cover stories chronicled both the milestones and the setbacks for homosexual men and women.
“The War Over Gays”
Oct. 26, 1998