Shepard's killing caused outrage across the country, in large part because McKinney and Henderson, whose guilty plea in April led to two life sentences, quickly defended their brutality by saying Shepard was beaten because he made sexual overtures toward them. Impromptu memorials to Shepard sprang up in gay neighborhoods in Chicago, New York and San Francisco. Human-rights activists quickly portrayed Shepard as a martyr, and Laramie as a place where gay bashing was the inevitable product of America's mythologizing of the cowboy, who, seated on a bucking horse, is the state's emblem. Laramie, a town of 24,000 if you count the 10,000 university students, with its coffee shops, vegetarian restaurants, outdoor-gear emporiums, and cowboy saloons, is a place where it is as likely you will see Birkenstock sandals as cowboy boots. What happened is not what this town is like.
People talk about the 'cowboy mentality' here.
But those guys were about as far from cowboys as you can get. Laramie has a palpable sense of isolation, of being a town adrift in a landscape that defines it and, at times, overwhelms it. When that happens, people in Laramie are left to their own devices. In the big mirror behind the Buckhorn Bar is a hole the size of a quarter, the result 20 years ago of a bartender's spurned boyfriend firing his rifle from across the street and through the front window. Fake cobwebs, Halloween decorations, stream out of the hole this time of year.