Accessory to Murder: Our Culture’s Complicity in the Death of Ryan Skipper

This feature-length documentary explores the institutionalized homophobia surrounding the life and murder of a Central Florida man, Ryan Skipper. In March 2007, Ryan Skipper of Polk County, Florida was targeted and brutally murdered because he was gay. Ryan’s violent death, at age 25, was the final act in the life of a man who endured years of harassment and assaults simply because he was gay in a rural community. Ryan was also victimized in death by a county sheriff who stereotypically and wrongly declared that Ryan was responsible for his own murder by cruising for sex and being involved in illegal activities with his own killers. Ryan was further victimized in death by a media that blindly accepted the sheriff’s homophobic assertions as fact, instead of uncovering the truth and exposing a heinous anti-gay hate crime – a crime that our anti-gay culture was complicit in perpetrating. Ryan Skipper was murdered, maligned and ultimately ignored simply because he was gay.