Word: shepards
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...this oversimplified polarity, Wyoming sits in the heart of that first gay America. The two straight men who most famously pretended to be gay in this state were Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney, who--five years ago this week--got Matthew Shepard into a truck, tied him to a fence outside Laramie, beat him into an unrecognizable shell and left him to die. Though robbery and drugs may have been other factors, Henderson and McKinney were also teaching Shepard a lesson about what happens when you bring a little bit of Queer America to the other...
...five years later, that other America--the quiet gay frontier of Wyoming and other places where cowboy boots and work shoes far outnumber Prada slides--is becoming less frightened. In part because Shepard was attacked here, and in part because of its live-and-let-live ideal, Wyoming has even become something of a national laboratory in which gays and straights are learning--ever haltingly, now a step forward, now a lurch back--to live together...
...group to have a non-Washington feel, and he wanted a prominent straight Republican as chairman. Cody's Alan Simpson was an obvious choice. Simpson, who turned 72 a month ago and who left the U.S. Senate in 1997 after an 18-year career, had been shocked by the Shepard murder. One of his cousins--"sweetest guy on earth," he says--had come out decades earlier, and Simpson and his wife Ann had socialized in Washington with gay people for years, even though Simpson, a Judiciary Committee bulldog, fought for some of the most conservative court nominees in the country...
Simpson describes the Laramie attack as a "crucifixion," and he spoke at a vigil at the U.S. Capitol not long after Shepard died. Barney Frank, the openly gay Massachusetts Congressman and a friend, warned Simpson that because he was a Republican, he would be booed at the vigil. He was, but lesbians and gays from around his state also introduced themselves to him that day. "I said to myself, 'This is fascinating; these people are from all over,'" Simpson recalls, with self-conscious bemusement. When Francis approached him to join the R.U.C., he readily agreed. The group signed its credo...
...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...