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To be sure, gay life here can be lonesome. Wyoming is thought to be the only state without a gay bar. While traveling here, I met a blond, lanky 22-year-old hair stylist whose mother had thrown him out for being gay. I met a man whose boyfriend committed suicide in despair, and I met a lesbian couple who have lived in the same Casper home for 21 years and yet have never spoken openly with the neighbors about their love for each other. Instead, they let people think they are just roommates. Wyoming has constructed an entire culture around the fraught military concept known as "Don't ask, don't tell." Nearly every Wyomingite I met used that phrase, or a version of it, with respect to homosexuality. "People have an open mind but a closed mouth here," says Alan Simpson, former G.O.P. Senator from Wyoming and honorary chairman of the R.U.C. So what happens when gays start opening their mouths?
THE CODY REPUBLICANS
Charles Francis didn't grow up in Cody, but he knew the town from childhood summers at the nearby ranch of oil tycoon H.L. Hunt, a longtime family friend. He remembered Cody's "big-sky libertarian feeling" and theatrically Western spirit (the town was named for showman Buffalo Bill; wannabe gunslingers still walk around in period dress to impress the tourists). In 2001, Francis, who had become a Washington p.r. man for DCI Group, a corporate lobbying firm, wanted to start an organization that would institutionalize the ties between well-connected gay Republicans like himself and the straight party leadership. It would be a "grass-tops" group that would complement a grass-roots organization called the Log Cabin Republicans.
He had an auspicious place to start: the top. The Francises and the Bushes are Texas families connected by the deep bonds of power and wealth. L.B.J. biographer Robert Caro has called Francis' granduncle Charles I. Francis a "heroic figure in the Texas oil industry." The younger Charles first met George W. Bush some 15 years ago on a bass-fishing trip in Athens, Texas, where both families had getaways. Francis' brother James was Bush's campaign chairman in the 1994 gubernatorial race. Four years later, Charles came out to Bush in a letter. "The day he gets it, he calls, and he says, 'Course I knew you were gay, but I wasn't sure how to bring it up,'" recalls Francis, 52. "'And I want you to know we are better friends than ever, even though there's going to be stuff we disagree on.'"
Francis had seen AIDS devastate gay Washington in the '80s, and he had watched as closeted Reagan officials said nothing to the President. "Then 20 years later, my family friend is running for President," says Francis. "And I thought, I'll be damned if he is President and there's this weird, awful silence again." He organized a group of gay Republicans to meet Bush in Austin, Texas, during the campaign--a group that became the seed for the R.U.C.