When Matthew Shepard was 19 years old, he called his mother Judy on the phone and confessed to her that he was gay. Judy’s response was: “What has taken you so long to tell me?”

She told her son she had probably known about his sexuality longer than he had. Matthew then asked, “Well, why didn’t you tell me?”

Judy replied, “That’s not my job.”

That anecdote was one of the few humorous moments in Judy Shepard’s presentation in the Sun Room of the Memorial Union Thursday evening. Matthew Shepard, a student at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, Wyo., was killed in October 1998 by Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney. The two men posed as gay and lured Shepard into a truck, savagely beat him and left him for dead.

Judy Shepard, speaking before a Committee on Lectures-estimated count of 800 people, brought her message as both a mother and committed activist against hate crimes to Iowa State — her ninth campus stop.

Despite her multiple standing ovations, Shepard admitted she isn’t entirely comfortable with being in the public eye yet.

“I’m not a public speaker by education, not by choice really; I’d much rather be home baking cookies, because then I’d have both my sons,” she said.

A petite woman with a quiet voice, Shepard spoke honestly about her son’s brutal murder to a somber crowd. Quoting from a statement she read in court, she described her oldest son as a “loving, vibrant, kind, young man,” who was taken away from her and their family too soon. As Judy Shepard said, Matthew’s death “has left a hole in my existence.”

Shepard became an activist after her son’s murder because, in her words, “I was trying to make something positive out of something so horrific.”

Judy Shepard was a continent away when Matthew was attacked because her husband Dennis was working for a company in Saudi Arabia. They traveled back to the United States, making a 25-hour journey filled with nightmarish lay-overs.

“It seemed like an eternity, an eternity of not knowing whether Matt was still alive,” she said.

When the Shepard family arrived in the Colorado hospital where Matthew was taken after the attack, he was “a motionless, unaware young man,” she said, with his head covered in bandages. Judy Shepard said that although it was hard to believe the figure in the hospital was Matthew, he still had his braces and the bump on his ears — she knew it was her son.

As Matthew lay in the bed, Shepard said she asked herself, “How could anyone feel so threatened by this tiny, sweet individual that they could do this? … It’s incomprehensible.”

Matthew Shepard died at 12:53 a.m., Monday, Oct. 12, 1998. “We joined hands, wept, prayed over him and for ourselves,” Judy Shepard said, saying that only then did the Shepard family realize “our suffering was really just beginning.”

As part of a plea agreement, Henderson and McKinney are each serving two consecutive life sentences. Because of the agreement, they will never get the chance to appeal.

When asked by an audience member, Shepard said she has chosen not to live with hate for her son’s killers.

“Those men just don’t exist to us. … I prefer to live a positive life,” she said.

Shepard said the answer to fighting bigotry and intolerance is to never give up, to speak out against hate-rhetoric and to teach children about loving everyone.

“Everyone is equal in God’s eyes. That’s what I was taught. That’s what Matt was taught,” she said.

Shepard noted that her native Wyoming is “still a scary place” in terms of intolerance for people of different colors and sexual orientations. “Diversity is very hard to teach in isolation,” she said.

Shepard’s speech was the keynote event for Awareness Days 2000, a weeklong celebration of the ISU and Ames lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. Her presentation brought the largest attendance for an event sponsored by the ISU LGBTAA.

Sarah Schweitzer, former president of LGBTAA, introduced Shepard, calling her a “hero.” Afterwards, she said Shepard’s speech did a lot to raise awareness of Iowa State’s LGBT community.

“This was about hate crimes. This was about Matthew,” said Schweitzer, sophomore in women’s studies and history.

Jeremy Hayes, information director for LGBTAA and sophomore in management information systems, said Shepard is the perfect person to bring this message to Iowa State.

“To have a mom — it gives a different perspective,” Hayes said, noting that audience members were probably more receptive to Shepard because she seems more “universal.”