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That brash spirit is most evident today at the University of Wyoming, in Laramie, where Shepard was enrolled. Few students remember him personally. Optimism, not residual fear, prevails in the busy campus gay group, Spectrum. Abra Soule, 20, has been out as a bisexual since high school in Rock Springs, Wyo. After another girl outed her, Soule, then just 15, didn't try to hide. "And that actually helped... I just stated it and said, 'Yeah, this is who I am.'" She was never threatened. In fact, there was something of a school-wide shrug: many kids told her she was only trying to get attention in the wake of the Shepard murder, which had just occurred. And now, she says, "I actually get a lot more flak about being a feminist on campus than being bisexual."
Shepard would have loved the sense of change in the air. "Matt used to say to me, 'Why can't I find anything happy about gay people?'" says Judy Shepard. Happiness may still be a distant goal for all Wyoming gays, but five years after Shepard was murdered, you can feel the ground moving under your feet. Says de Vries: "In a place where we never talked about it, we talked about it after Matt died. And thankfully, we're still talking."