All eyes were watching.

Matthew Shepard's murder changed the way the press covers gays. Will the change last?

Cynthia Bowers remembers the instant the first wire-service report about the Matthew Shepard gay bashing came across her desk. The CBS News correspondent read with horror that the University of Wyoming student had been abducted, beaten, lashed to a deer fence, tortured, and left for dead in the frigid night.

"I was just flabbergasted by the murder scenario," says Bowers, who made two trips from the network's Dallas bureau to Laramie, a quiet college town of about 27,000 in southeast Wyoming where Shepard, 21, had been a political science major. "I just couldn't believe that he had been hung up like a scarecrow. One of the suspects had told his girlfriend what he had done, and still no one did anything to help [the victim]. It seemed to symbolize in graphic terms the treatment of homosexuals in this country."

Bowers was not the only journalist to feel the impact of the crime. For a week after Shepard's unconscious body was discovered by a bicyclist October 7, dozens of reporters descended on Laramie, unleashing an unprecedented flood of press coverage notable as much for its quality as its quantity. From the Laramie Daily Boomerang to the ABC TV newsmagazine 20/20, Shepard's slaying as well as the ensuing candlelight vigils and the debate over hate-crimes legislation dominated headlines for more than a week, pushing President Clinton's sex scandal off the front pages.

Perhaps no previous case of antigay violence has so galvanized public sympathy for the plight of gay men and lesbians in America. In the long, sad history of antigay violence, few cases had received as much attention. Only three have come close--the assassination of Harvey Milk in 1978; the killing of gay sailor Allen Schindler, who was beaten beyond recognition, in 1992; and the murder of Scott Amedure, a guest on the Jenny Jones talk show who was gunned down by another guest in March 1995, three days after they had taped the show.

The Shepard coverage "was certainly greater than the vast majority of bias-related murders," says Edward Alwood, author of Straight News: Gays, Lesbians, and the News Media. "Almost overnight the public was made painfully aware that being gay in this country is a dangerous thing and that some people hate gay people enough to actually target them for violent attacks." Moreover, by linking Shepard's murder to that of James Byrd, a black man dragged to death behind a car in a bias incident in Texas last June, the press implied, for perhaps the first time, that gays are no different from other minorities targeted for hate crimes.

Indeed, the reporting departed markedly from last year's sensationalistic coverage of alleged murderer Andrew Cunanan, who was regularly described in such terms as "homicidal homosexual" and "bloodthirsty gay serial killer."

Media watchers say an unlikely confluence of events contributed to the press's taking this act of antigay violence seriously. Shepard's battered, unconscious body was discovered the day before the Center for Reclaiming America, a coalition of religious-right groups, unveiled a second round of advertising, a series of 60-second television spots similar to print ads that ran nationally in newspapers earlier this summer, touting "ex-gay" ministries. The incident also occurred less than a week before National Coming Out Day on October 11 and the launch of the annual Gay Awareness Week at the University of Wyoming, where Shepard was something of a gay activist.

"The media couldn't avoid the connection" between the ads and the killing, says Cathy Renna, director of community relations and Washington, D.C., media resource center manager for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, a media watch-dog group. "The gay community has now reached a critical mass where it has the resources and the visibility to command attention when it is under attack. Maybe the years of education are finally paying off." Newspapers in Philadelphia, Denver, and Logan, Utah, went so far as to revisit past gay bashings that took place in their regions, including one murder dating back to the 1960s.

In previous cases reporters often focused on the fact that victims had been picked up in gay bars or cruising areas. In Shepard's case the suspects allegedly singled him out at the Fireside Lounge, a campus watering hole frequented by gays and straights alike, allowing reporters to paint him as a veritable gay saint. The October 19 edition of Time magazine, for instance, explicitly linked the "archconservative" advertising campaign to the attack and then concluded: "He wanted to find love. But as he lay near death, Matthew Shepard, through no choice of his own, had found martyrdom." Time built on its coverage the following week with a cover package titled THE WAR OVER GAYS.

Jim Osborn, president of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered Alliance at the University of Wyoming, says Shepard's personality was bound to elicit such descriptions. "You couldn't even make up a more sympathetic victim," says Osborn, who was a friend of Shepard. "Matthew was a beloved kid who could have been anyone's gay son. He was slight of build, which made you want to protect him, and he always had a smile on his face." Adds Alwood: "It was obvious from the beginning that Matthew could not have hurt a flea."

The coverage would not have been possible without years of work by anti-violence advocates, says Bill Dobbs, a New York City gay activist. "Even though earlier cases around the country may not have received much attention, they served to gradually raise the consciousness of editors and reporters," he says. "They now understand the concept of gay bashing much better than in the past, when it was often blamed on the victim or seen as an isolated event."

For Dianne Hardy-Garcia, the story of the slaying of Matthew Shepard was eerily familiar. Hardy-Garcia, executive director of the Lesbian/Gay Rights Lobby of Texas, has watched with fury and helplessness as at least 28 gay men in Texas have been killed since 1988, often by equally sadistic means. After a barrage of national coverage that peaked in 1995, the media all but stopped reporting on the murders. Hardy-Garcia has pleaded to little avail with journalists to cover the September 25 acquittal of Charles Edward Lowery, who claimed that he killed Pablo Zuniga, a deaf-mute gay man, in self-defense when Zuniga supposedly made a pass at him and verbally threatened him with robbery. But Zuniga can't have done that, says his brother, Manuel: "He could not speak. Lowery has gotten away with murder."

"I don't want to sound cynical, but around here the murder of a gay man is not news," Hardy-Garcia says wearily. "These cases have been overlooked by prosecutors, police, and the media for the last ten years. The deaths have become so common, the press has basically stopped reporting on them. Without good coverage, it's very hard to generate the kind of public outrage necessary to do something." If the outpouring of media sympathy for Matthew Shepard is any indication, however, perhaps good coverage, at least in the future, won't be as hard to find.