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Francis and Simpson mostly wish the marriage question hadn't come up yet. "Too fast, too soon," says Francis. Simpson is more revealing: "To be talking all day long about gay marriage is a tragedy. We have made so much advancement in this party, in this state, in this country, and they bring up the one issue that's contentious. I say, 'Jesus Christ, aren't you satisfied with progress? With acceptance? Beats hell out of me why you want to drag that dead cat around' ... Because see what happens? My whole party is now trying to do a constitutional amendment. My God! I can't believe it. I thought all you right-wing cuckoo pals of mine were all about states' rights."
Which pretty much sums up what the Cody Republicans believe: the party should stow the anti-gay rhetoric, but gays should shut up too. (The Cody Statement says, paradoxically, that the group--a classic issue organization--exists to make sexual orientation "a non-issue.") Even Francis occasionally finds his role as a Cody Republican uncomfortable. He brought his boyfriend, New York publishing executive Stephen Bottum, to a black-tie fund raiser for the Buffalo Bill Historical Center. But they didn't dance. "Charles wants to, but he thinks it would scandalize Cody," said Bottum, a Democrat, with a very patient smile.
THE CASPER POLITICIAN
Guy Padgett knows what being out in Wyoming can mean. He went to school with Matthew Shepard--their little smiling faces are just pages apart in the ninth-grade yearbook--and when Padgett moved back to Casper from Yale University, Shepard was part of his circle. "We weren't that close," says Padgett, 26. "But it felt very personal when he died. It hit me very hard. If you had asked me two weeks before if someone could be killed in Wyoming for being gay, I would have said no. We are a state that respects individuality, and we are immune from that kind of violence, intolerance. Wyoming always felt like a very safe place to me. My family had never locked our doors... But after Matt was killed, I was scared for my personal safety and for my career opportunities in Wyoming."
That Padgett made it to the city council is a measure of the state's devotion to the "Don't ask, don't tell" orthodoxy. After he started seeing men in Wyoming, Padgett discovered what many other lesbians and gays here already knew: if you stay out of roughneck bars like the Fireside (where Shepard met his killers), and if you avoid propositioning heterosexuals, you'll be fine, because straight Wyomingites will keep their end of the bargain--they won't ask. "Wyoming is a state of fences," says Bob Hooker, 43, a Wyoming AIDS activist who was born and raised in Laramie. "It has this whole attitude that goes back to ranching days: You don't worry about what's going on in my ranch, and I won't tell that you're beating your wife at yours."