Copied directly from MSN News in case you missed it on the PFLAG Blog.

Following her son's beating death 15 years ago, Judy Shepard has become a forceful voice for gay rights and a sort of mother figure for gay teens turned away by their own families.

NEW YORK — The mother who championed gay rights after her son was tied to a fence and beaten to death couldn't bear to sit through the play that has helped keep his memory alive for the nearly 15 years since his murder.
But this weekend, at the opening of a double-billing of Moises Kaufman's "The Laramie Project" and "The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later" at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Judy Shepard — seated in an aisle seat to allow for an easy escape — soldiered through the entire five-hour production, which recalls the story of Matthew Shepard's death in 1998.
"I just really didn't feel I needed to watch it because I lived it. And so many of the scenes bring back such horrific memories. I've never felt comfortable crying in public," Shepard said just before the Saturday performance. "It's been 15 years. I should be able to do this now."
Shepard made it through with the help of hugs from well-wishers at the intermissions.
Kaufman, a playwright and director who leads the Tectonic Theater Project, recalled the Shepard murder as a watershed moment that helped create a generation of activists and energize "straight allies" to the cause of gay rights.
"All of a sudden we had an image, we had an event, that operated as a catalyst," said Kaufman, a Venezuelan native who lives in New York.
The original play was born from the question of why Shepard's murder resonated more than other hate crimes, Kaufman said. The play has been staged more than 1,000 times.
Ten years after Shepard's death, Kaufman and Tectonic returned to Laramie, Wyo., to produce an epilogue and to interview Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney, who are serving life sentences for the murder.
Nine U.S. states have legalized same-sex marriage, and in March the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a challenge to the U.S. Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage under federal law as being between a man and a woman, and whether Proposition 8, a California ballot initiative that outlawed same-sex marriage, should be struck down.
ANATOMY OF A MURDER
Henderson and McKinney confessed to meeting the 21-year-old at a Laramie bar on the night of Oct. 6-7, pretending to be gay and offering him a ride home, with the intent to rob him. They grew enraged after Shepard made a sexual advance, they said, and took him to a desolate area in the outskirts of town, tied him to a fence and repeatedly struck him in the head with a handgun.
Shepard was close to death when he was discovered 18 hours later and he died in a Colorado hospital on Oct. 12. In her 2010 book, "The Meaning of Matthew," Judy Shepard wrote that while she was at her son's side, she was barely aware of the rallies by thousands of well-wishers in cities across the country.
Judy Shepard, who is soft-spoken and shy despite her years in the limelight, says she is a reluctant advocate. But she has become a forceful voice for gay rights and a sort of mother figure for gay teens turned away by their own families.
"Many of us feel that Judy is the mother we never had. But it goes way beyond that," Kaufman said. "It's a story of a person who was put in an untenable situation and got the skills to triumph in that situation."
Shepard, who still lives in Wyoming, heads the Matthew Shepard Foundation and has fought for gay rights in her home state and for a federal hate crimes bill, which President Barack Obama signed into law in 2009 with Shepard at his side.
"I did what people didn't expect me to do, which was not go away," she said. "As a straight person, I have a gravitas that someone in the gay community saying the things that I say would not have."
She said she has been frustrated that change in Wyoming, also the setting of the 2005 film "Brokeback Mountain," has come slowly. The state has no hate crimes law and this year the legislature rejected a gay marriage bill and a domestic partnership bill for same-sex couples.
Before the performance, a man who said he was about the same age as Matthew Shepard would be now tearfully thanked Shepard for her advocacy and said gay people "could not have had a better angel and a better mother."
Shepard's eyes also filled with tears, but she quickly regained her composure, saying: "This is what happens when you piss off somebody's mom."
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World AIDS Day and the bliss of ignorance in youth.

Today being December 1 is of course, World AIDS Day.  I went to the Library at 10 this morning and hung my Memorial Quilt display with the help of John Mark, Linda, Julie and another lady who I forget her name.  Then I went to lunch, Bought goose food, stopped and visited my banker lady, came home, fell asleep in the chair and woke up to a whole new world.
The grand daughter came after school so she could go to the Observance this evening with me.  I forgot the cookies.  I forgot the camera. I forgot my water.  So I was pretty sure I was on a losing streak.  The program was fairly simple and went well.  Linda was the emcee. Joanne Grove presented the statistics which amazed me even now.  I must verify them before I report them, just cause that is what I do. Eddie Three Eagles told how AIDS affects the Native Americans.  And he remembered me from last year. I presented my two new panels and then they were blessed by Rev. Lamb. John Mark then gave his story putting a face on AIDS.  He has been positive for 27 years; over half of his life.  Then we all gave names to people who have passed and wrote their names on a red ribbon and hung them on the tree.  the ice cream cake donated by Dairy Queen was by that time starting to melt.  They should have opened a window and it would have frozen right back up.
The plan was to then go down to the first floor foyer and pick up a candle and have it lit and proceed outside.  Deven and I were inside and I was in no hurry to go out in the 1 degree weather.  Two young teenagers came in past the candle lighters and stopped near us.  The following conversation ensued.
Girl: I wonder why they are lighting those candles.
Me: It is in observance of World AIDS Day.
Girl: What is AIDS Day?
Boy:  That is that disease you hear about.  AIDS!
Girl: Oh, wow!  They are celebrating STD's?
Boy:  No, I don't think so.  I think they are not happy about it.
Me:  We do it in rememberance of all the people who have died.  But listen, we were up on the fourth floor and there is a lot of literature about it up there.  Also an ice cream cake that needs eaten.
Boy:  Gee, thanks. 
And they got in the elevator for the fourth floor. Deven and I looked at each other in amazement.  She is 14 and very wise for her years.  I was amazed that the two on their way up knew what STD's were.  I never figured that out until I was 40 years old.
But World AIDS Day is over for another year and my camera is hanging on the newel behind me where I hung it this morning so I would not forget it.  My quilts will be hanging on the fourth floor for a week and then I will go pick them up.  Guess they are on loan to the Library.  I am rather happy that they will be there so people can see and wonder what they are for.  So I put up a short paper on what they were and why they were there.
Now I am tired.  And it is very cold.  So I am going to nuke my rice bag and my corn bag and call it a night.  And I am going to throw another blanket on the bed.  I love to crawl in a cold bed and pull the covers way up, but I have the hot thing down there on my feet and off to sleep I go.  Life is good.