To Be Young And Gay In Wyoming

By Steve Lopez/Laramie

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.

"When I left Cheyenne for Laramie," Korhonen remembers, "my father said, 'I know you're very proud of who you are, but please, please watch yourself because there are people who will want to destroy you simply because of who you are.' I gave him a big hug and said, 'I know.' And then the first thing I saw when I got to Laramie was a bumper sticker that said HATRED IS A FAMILY VIRTUE."

That was in August. In September his roommate, head of the gay-activities club on campus, was attacked. And then on Oct. 7 the roommate, Jim Osborne, called with the news about Matt Shepard. Osborne had not yet come out to his entire family, but that was taken care of as he eulogized his friend Matt on national television.

"I hate to say it, but it affirmed my worst possible nightmares of what was possible. I just never felt comfortable here," says Korhonen, who had never met Shepard. "When I walked out of the apartment to my car, it was, 'Oh, my God.' This could have happened to any one of us. It could have been me. It was the most terrifying moment. You know this is real; you go out into the dark; and it's everything adding up."

He loves Wyoming, as Shepard did, as Osborne does, because it's beautiful and it's home. But when the semester's done in December, Korhonen will be gone. He's moving to Denver, where it's easier to be gay.

Travis Brin, a 24-year-old welder, remembers being at parties with Aaron McKinney, who was like a lot of people who talk a lot. He had nothing to say.

"A total redneck," says Brin. "He'd say crazy, stupid stuff about black people and gay people... One time he said we ought to get all these people with AIDS, stick them in an airplane and blow it up. But if you got up in his face, he'd back down, because he was a punk, like any other young punk you see on the street."

Police say it was McKinney, 22, and his quiet-man pal Russell Henderson, 21, both high school dropouts, who met Shepard in Laramie's Fireside Lounge. "After Mr. Shepard confided he was gay, the subjects deceived Mr. Shepard into leaving with them in their vehicle," reads the Albany County court filing of first-degree murder, kidnapping and aggravated robbery charges against McKinney and Henderson.

In addition to being an unspeakably gruesome crime, it was a profoundly dumb one. After allegedly leaving Shepard hanging on the fence on that rocky ridge just outside of town, McKinney and Henderson drew attention to themselves by getting into a fight with two other men. It was then, police say, that they found a bloody .357 Magnum in the pickup truck, and Shepard's wallet in McKinney's house. McKinney, by the way, was awaiting sentencing for burglarizing a Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Laramie, along with the rest of the nation, found itself wondering what dark hole this kind of ugliness bubbles up out of. But some of that mystery was cleared up when McKinney's father Bill opened his mouth. The media, he said in an interview with the Denver Post, "blew it totally out of proportion because it involved a homosexual."

McKinney's girlfriend, Kristen LeAnn Price, did no one but prosecutors any favors when she said Shepard had pushed himself on McKinney in the bar, and it embarrassed him in front of his friends. Price and Henderson's girlfriend, Chastity Vera Pasley, were charged with being accessories for offering alibis for their boyfriends and disposing of Shepard's bloody clothes.

Those who squirm over Shepard's life-style might have felt more righteous last week when it was reported that he'd made a pass at a bartender in Cody last summer, got punched in the face and falsely reported to police that he'd been raped. (No charges were filed.) If only a punch in the face were the stiffest penalty for making a pass.

There's a touch of homophobia in the Wyoming legislature, state representative Mike Massie of Laramie tells you. It's a religious thing, he says. God has apparently channeled his thoughts on gays through a few good ole boys in Cheyenne.

Four times this decade, Massie has co-sponsored antibias bills; four times they've died. There's no problem with enhanced penalties for crimes against race, religion or ethnicity, he's been told, but if he doesn't drop sexual orientation from the list, there's not a chance in hell. Other opponents argue against special legislation for any group or contend that existing laws are sufficient.

"I am so angry over the fact that it never passed," Massie says, because now the nation can wonder whether, "gee, maybe Wyoming tolerates this kind of thing."

And that, for all the legalistic hand wringing, is the most compelling reason for such a bill. The symbolism. Politics is at least half symbolism anyway.

"You know the quote: The only prerequisite for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing," said Graham Baxendale, an Englishman who came to America in August to study, of all things, hate groups. He teaches a University of Wyoming class on "the implications and ramifications of hate crimes." "Unfortunately," he said at a teach-in last week, "my job just got easier." There's no telling how long it will last, Baxendale says, but there is a dialogue in Laramie where there wasn't one before, and it has spread through Wyoming and beyond.

Shepard's body was taken home last week to Casper, where he once played Little League and acted in local theater and was always the littlest kid. Annie Spitzer, a Shepard family friend known as Sister Annie at a Pentecostal ministry, remembers a trip downtown with Matt when he was in elementary school. "He saw a flag at half-staff, and he asked me, 'What's wrong with that flag? Why isn't it all the way up?'" And she told him, "Oh, that means that someone very important has died." As she explained mourning, Matt hugged her legs.

Snow fell Friday at Shepard's funeral in Casper, where the flags flew at half-staff and hate groups demonstrated not far from St. Mark's Episcopal Church. Winter, beautiful and wicked, is coming to Wyoming.

--With reporting by Maureen Harrington/Casper and Richard Woodbury/Denver

With reporting by Maureen Harrington/Casper and Richard Woodbury/Denver