Winter is coming fast to Wyoming, and it will be as it always is--beautiful and wicked. You could feel it in the air last week as ships of clouds sailed the blue sky above Laramie, snow-capped mountains rose in the distance, and a small herd of deer roamed the rocky ridge where Matthew Shepard, a gay student who loved Wyoming, was lynched.
They hold vigils and teach-ins in Laramie, a town searching its soul, but some people climb the hill as if there is something to confront up there. They go to where a small basket of dry flowers hangs from the fence where Shepard, 21, was tied with rope, pistol-whipped and left in the cold. The visitors arrive in silence and leave in prayer, and the vigils go on--in Laramie, in Denver, in San Francisco, in Washington.
With his beating Oct. 7 and death Oct. 12, one day after National Coming Out Day, Shepard has ignited a national town meeting on the enduring hatred that shames this country, a hatred so intense that even death didn't save him from it. While he lay dying at a hospital in nearby Colorado and thousands wired their support, college students there mocked Shepard with a scarecrow atop a parade float. While his family prepared for his burial and spoke of Shepard's gentleness and tolerant ways, a Kansas minister with a website called godhatesfags.com made plans to do a grave dance at the funeral.
With Laramie at the eye of the storm, there is something to tell about Wyoming. The cowboy state has its rednecks and yahoos, for sure, but there are no more bigots per capita in Wyoming than in New York, Florida or California. The difference is that in Wyoming there are fewer places to blend in if you're anything other than prairie stock. It is tough business--as Matt Shepard knew, and as his friends all know--to be gay in cowboy country.
He had spent a few years in a bit of a fog, living abroad with his parents (his father now works in Saudi Arabia), attending a boarding school in Switzerland. Somehow, he chose to return to where he grew up, to enroll in his father's alma mater, the University of Wyoming, thinking of becoming a diplomat. Short and slight, he knew he fit a gay stereotype. And while open, he was cautious. But just days before he died, he told a friend that he finally felt safe.
Jeff Korhonen, 27, can explain the situation as well as anyone else. He was raised in Cheyenne, his father a career military man, his mother a Mormon, his grandfather a First Assembly of God minister, and there was no dinner conversation long enough for Korhonen to slip in the news that he was a different kind of cowboy. Not until his early 20s, as an exchange student in Florida, did he come out, and there is something to be learned about diversity in Wyoming when you hear Korhonen say, "Orlando was like a gay Mecca to me."
The program done in Orlando, he went back home and began his coming out. He moved to Denver for a while, which for him was heaven on earth, but he wanted to finish college, and the only way he could afford it was to go to Laramie. His family by then had dealt with who he was and accepted him.