Six Dads of LGBTQ Kids — Including Matthew Shepard's Father — Bond and Cry in New Doc (Exclusive)

There’s nothing quite like the bond of fatherhood in the great outdoors to tie the lives of six disparate dads together.

As the men stand along a restless river on an early Oklahoma morning in May 2022, it’s clear at first glance that they’re quietly enjoying nature on a fishing trip. With the mist still hanging in the air, the dads carefully tie their own lures before casting them out into the water. 

Some are fishing for the first time, and others, like Dennis Shepard, have been doing it for for decades. The last time Shepard went fishing was in Wyoming's Bighorn Mountains with his son, Matthew Shepard, in 1998.

“It just brought back memories of fishing with my grandparents, with my folks, with the boys, teaching them how to fish,” the father of two sons fondly recalls to PEOPLE. 

Yet, just a few months after that trip to Bighorn Mountains, his sense of peace would be shattered when Matthew, a 21-year-old college student, was brutally slain in an anti-gay hate crime — one that reverberated around the world and paved the way for sweeping hate-crime legislation. 

Viewers ofThe Dads, the documentary short now streaming on Netflix, will quickly realize that for the six dads, the weekend fishing trip in Oklahoma, actually “wasn’t about fishing at all.”

It becomes more apparent when the men — Stephen Chukumba, Frank Gonzales, Jose Trujillo, Peter Betz, Wayne Maines and Shepard — gather afterward around a dining table. Over a shared breakfast of waffles, they begin to reveal the love, hopes and fears they have for their children.

As different as they are from one another (racially diverse, they come from various parts of the country, and most of them had never even met before the weekend trip), they all are connected by a common thread: the unconditional love they have for their transgender and gay children. 

As documented in the 10-minute short from director Luchina Fisher and executive producer Dwyane Wade, the trip offered a rare opportunity for the dads to be at their most truthful and vulnerable in a space full of understanding. 

While temporarily shielded from a world where the civil rights of their children are being challenged, they not only shared their experiences as fathers of LGBTQ children, but also questioned what “fatherhood” and “manhood” really mean. 

The roots of the trip were sown back in 2020, when Shepard and Maines, both of whom “have a love of the outdoors,” talked about going on a fishing trip. When Fisher overheard the “outdoorsmen” discuss their plans at the Human Rights Campaign’s LGBTQ Youth Summit, a lightbulb immediately went off. 

“I was so struck by this juxtaposition of these two worlds, and I thought, ‘Wow, that’s interesting.'” Fisher says. “I was like, ‘Well guys, I’d love to go on that trip with you and bring some cameras.’” 

There’s a reason why, unlike other traditional documentaries, this short is only 10 minutes long and isn't more complex than needed. 

“I wanted it to be an interior experience when you hear them talking about their own journeys and then to be this fly on the wall when you see them at the table,” Fisher continues. “I love when things are simple, but really much deeper than they appear on the surface.” 

The latter was indeed true for Chukumba, a widower with four children, including his trans son Hobbes. As a Black man, he sums up the impact that being in a room with White men and Hispanic men from all parts of the country had on him: “Remarkable.” 

“Literally, we could not have been more different,” Chukumba says. “And still, we spoke the same language. We had the same hearts. We saw life through many of the same lenses and experientially, we were in a place that we understood to be critical for ourselves and our children and our families."

By bonding with the other dads, Chukumba learned that he couldn’t move forward in his journey alone. Up until that point, he’d been “grappling” as a single father for years ever since his wife, Chanel, died in 2016. 

Without a sense of community in the “hostile” outside world, he came to terms with just how much of an “illusion” the concept of a melting pot is in the United States.

“When you put some butter on a pan and it melts, it infuses that flavor, it infuses into the food that you put in that same pan,” Chukumba says. “Oftentimes, you don’t really see that happening. You see loggerheads, you see people at odds with one another. The beauty of this film is that this is the representation of a melting pot in its truest sense.” 

Finding that sense of community began to sew up the hole of “isolation” in which he’d been living. Chukumba also envisioned how the bonding could serve as a “model” for the rest of the country in separating the “foolishness” from “what’s important.” 

“We can see clearly that what binds us together is greater than that which separates us, and that’s what we cleave to,” he says. “That’s what we left that weekend with, was the fact that we have so much in common. If we hold onto that, we are stronger than separated.” 

One aspect of that common thread was how their trans children caused them to reflect on their own upbringing and the relationships around them. 

As a first-generation Nigerian born in the United States, Chukumba said he already had to wrestle with the dichotomy of both cultural identities. Unlike his family, who immigrated to the States, his entire understanding of the world had been contextualized from growing up in the U.S. 

“If you ask a Nigerian person about my trans son, they’re going to tell you that I’m living like an American,” Chukumba says. “I had to unlearn what the colonial masters taught us about who we were. I also had to help my people unlearn.” 

“I didn't have a positive reception from my mother at first,” he added of telling his relatives about Hobbes. “She has since come along. I didn't have a positive reception from my brother at first. He has not yet come along. I still have family members who I will never share my child's identity with because they will not understand.” 

He’s learned to “meet people where they are.” When not everyone has that “expansiveness of thought to understand and appreciate” gender-diverse youth, he says it’s better to focus on the people that he’s able to reach and bring along. 

Unlearning personal biases and forgiving oneself for past mistakes have also been entire journeys for Shepard and former basketball player Wade. 

Rather than dwelling on the past, Shepard says moving forward is “something you have to do.” Immediately after his son died, he worked with his wife, Judy, to start the Matthew Shepard Foundation on Dec. 1, 1998 to not only honor his life, but also advocate for the LGBTQ community.