Word: sheparded
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...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...
...closet but kept its door ajar. He was living in the same house as his partner, Jason Marsden, 31, and he gave that address as his campaign headquarters. Marsden, executive director of a conservation group, came out in a Casper Star-Tribune op-ed shortly after the Shepard murder, so everyone knew he was gay. "Honestly, if anyone thought about it, they could figure it out," says Padgett. "The newspaper never asked, never did a story. In fact, in all my campaigning, door to door, talking to people, no one asked me, not once...
...sure that some of his colleagues and most of his constituents don't know he's gay. When he, Marsden and I first met, they asked me not to reveal Padgett's name in this article. Marsden kept a butcher knife next to his bed in the days after Shepard was killed, and he didn't want to live in fear again. "I don't know if the doors and windows and locks are strong enough for us to want to expose ourselves again," Marsden said...
...Padgett spent a mostly sleepless night reconsidering his decision. He knew that Judy Shepard, Matt's mother, went around the country saying nothing will change until "everybody comes out and stays out," as she puts it. And here he was, someone who had known her son--and had seen her tears--and he was hiding. "Let's do it," he told me, adding later, "Now that we've had five years to grieve, it's time to make some positive changes." What about the butcher knife? "I felt silly about that anyway, even at the time," says Marsden. Nonetheless...
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...