Wyoming has some real primitives living there. I say this as somebody who grew up in Colorado and who had many friends from Wyoming. They told me some pretty savage war stories, and this fits right in, unfortunately.
This tee shirt sold out in a bar in Cheyenne.
This is not unusual. Two of my best friends were from Wyoming, one from Wheatland, one from Buffalo. The one from Wheatland was a straight guy, but he was intellectual and slight of build. He became a science fiction writer. He told me how some of his compatriots growing up tackled him and threatened to castrate him. He posed a threat to them on some level. He also told me later how some of the same fellows had grown up and gone to work in the local pig factory and they delighted tossing piglets around and dropping them and injuring them. Homo Neanderthalis comes to mind.
The man from Buffalo was gay. He impressed upon me how he had to keep that a dark, dirty secret or risk getting seriously injured, possibly killed. It would also have brought disgrace upon his family. When he died of AIDS in the 1980’s, the story back home was that he died of cancer.
Point being, I have seen this kind of activity in Wyoming first hand and it’s saddening.
Here’s what a local gay activist group posted on Facebook.
My two friends left Wyoming because they didn’t like the attitudes there. I met one in Colorado and the other in California. And I’m not condemning Wyoming. Merely saying that it’s a sparsely populated, deep red state and these are the attitudes you find in places like that.
The owner of the bar on Monday told The Cheyenne Post the tee shirts have “sold out.” He says he will not be reordering them, not because of massive outrage on social media, but because he is “in the bar business, not the apparel business.”
No statewide elected politician in Wyoming has commented. Governor Mark Gordon, U.S. Senators John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis, and U.S Rep. Liz Cheney, all Republicans, have said nothing on social media.
They can’t hide forever. One of them has to say something and it probably will be Cheney.
We sometimes forget that we still have a long way to go to achieve full LGBT rights, and particularly when it comes to trans rights.
The solution to the “Wyoming problem” would be for some Bezos-esque billionaire to move a hundred thousand jobs to the state and transfer those workers from blue urban communities…setting into motion an “Oregonification” of the state. But I don’t see that happening, Wyoming may just remain a state with no significant urban anchor to offset the rural conservatism.
Meh…we’ll take Georgia, North Carolina and Texas instead.
The big urban anchor for them is Denver. That’s Mecca to them. Liberal minded people like my friends just move away and that’s how this status quo remains in place.
In Texas, it’s Houston/Dallas/Austin/San Antonio.
Rory, unless the 100k workers were pretty much all LGBT+ and unless your Bezos-esque billionaire also brought in extra security, nothing is really going to change and the folks who are LGBT+ will probably STILL be in a great deal of danger. It’s bad up in MT but WY is much, much, worse. Brokeback Mountain could have been a documentary…a documentary about WY’s relationship with that community in the 21st century in fact that is how little things have changed. I have friends in the community and I steer them to OR, WA and Canada if they want to fly fish, ski, hike, camp. MT and WY are real sh*t-holes and highly dangerous for most people not white, x-tian extremist…and straight.
The fossil fuel industry has turned WY, MT, ND into complete and utter shit-holes. The people though, they were already there-can’t blame exxon for that one.