Has Anything Changed?

These two stances, denial and self-reflection, have divided the town. "This is where I choose to live," insists Jonas Slonaker, a gay man who chose to come out after Shepard's murder, "and this is a state that always votes Republican and is pretty conservative. So there'll be a lot of resistance [to change]. It might be a situation where those rights will come from a federal level down before it comes to the state level."

But nationally, the situation regarding gay rights legislation mirrors Wyoming's. In 2007, the Matthew Shepard Act passed in both the House and the Senate but the legislation never made it out of Congress—because of a Bush veto threat and the bill's attachment to a defense authorization measure.

Still, shifts are occurring: Wyoming's Governor Dave Freudenthal, says, "If you really believe in that Western 'live and let live' [philosophy] then you wouldn't have homophobic violence. So there's a contradiction. We tolerate an awful lot of violence in this state and we have to look at that." In 2005, the neighboring town of Casper elected a gay man as mayor and professor Connolly is running for a State House seat in the coming election. In addition, the faculty at the university continues to fight for same-sex partner benefits.

Measuring change is not an exact science: the markers can be elusive or blurry, yet no less meaningful. Peacock says, "I think it does a great disservice to the power of the story around Matthew's death to measure it by whether there's been definitive or quantifiable change like a law passed. We know that there has been so much qualitative and transformational change. So I think it does a real disservice to the story to measure it that way. I just think that's too thin of a measure."

© 2008