Very Much at Home:
A Gay Mayor in
Wyoming
By KIRK JOHNSON,
NYTimes on the Web, December 16, 2005
CASPER, Wyo., Dec. 15 - Guy
Padgett, the openly gay mayor here in Wyoming's second-largest city, had a tough
time getting to his table for dinner at a restaurant the other night,
interrupted and detained every few feet by a friend, a constituent or some other
well-wisher who wanted to shake his hand.
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Carmel Zucker for The New York Times
"Brokeback
Mountain," about gay cowboys in Wyoming, has not yet made it to
Casper. |
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Carmel Zucker for The New York Times
Mayor Guy
Padgett says little will change when it does. |
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Though neither he nor many other
people here have seen it yet, Mr. Padgett says he feels pretty sure that "Brokeback
Mountain," the new movie about gay cowboys in Wyoming, will not change those old
rhythms of glad-handing very much. People here, he thinks, have gotten
past seeing him as gay; to most of them he is now just Guy.
"I like to say that Casper, and Wyoming in general, are places willing to judge
you on your accomplishments and contributions rather than any aspect of your
character, and I have found that to be true," he said.
Mr. Padgett's career -- he is also the executive director of the Wyoming
Symphony Orchestra, and at 27 the city's youngest mayor ever -- puts to rest, he
and other prominent people here say, the idea that rugged Western individualism
and homophobia are synonymous. Alan K. Simpson, a Republican who served 18
years in the United States Senate and still creates a wide political wake in the
state, has been among his most vocal supporters.
"Guy came out, and he's the mayor," Mr. Simpson said in a telephone interview.
"This is about awareness and tolerance, not stereotypes."
Casper, with a population of 51,000 and a rough-edged downtown that serves as an
urban center for much of the booming oil, gas and coal industry of eastern
Wyoming, is probably nobody's idea of a gay-culture magnet. There is not a
single gay bar, and not much evidence that gay investors and homeowners are
boosting local fortunes as they are in some other cities.
Nor, people who track Wyoming politics say, is Casper the most liberal place in
the state. That distinction belongs to Jackson, with its Hollywood-in-the-Tetons
culture, followed by Laramie, home of the University of Wyoming. Casper's
economy and population, those experts say, still hark back to Wyoming's tougher
roots of ranching and mining that long predate the finer points of tourism or
higher education.
And it should be noted as well that Casper chooses its mayors by vote of the
nine-member nonpartisan City Council. His homosexuality already known, Mr.
Padgett was chosen unanimously -- but by proxy of the voters through their
council members, not by the voters themselves.
Even so, that Casper appears to have largely accepted, if not embraced, a gay
man as its civic spokesman is considered by many people here to be a very
profound thing, even a very Wyoming thing. Movies come and go. Here,
real life happened.
There have been changes, Mr. Padgett says, including his own election, that are
linked in one way or another to the death of Matthew Shepard, a gay student at
the University of Wyoming whose killing, in 1998 at the hands of two men he had
met in a bar, shocked the nation.
Mr. Padgett met Mr. Shepard in junior high school and came out about his own
sexual orientation in a magazine interview five years after the murder.
Mr. Padgett's partner, Jason Marsden, who was a reporter for The Casper
Star-Tribune at the time of the killing, came out in an op-ed column even as his
paper was covering the crime.
Mr. Shepard is buried here. And Casper, many say, has probably carried the
discussion of what the crime meant, and what it revealed, further than just
about any other place.
"People did a lot of soul-searching," Mr. Padgett said.
Some think the city arrived in the wrong place from that soul search.
Murray Watson, a 64-year-old rancher who lives 30 miles away and was in town on
Thursday to shop, said Mr. Padgett's election was a dark day for Casper.
"I wouldn't live in this town because of it," Mr. Watson said.
As for the movie, he wants it to be the biggest flop ever. "I hope it
breaks the movie company," he said.
Other people said the film's gay-cowboy theme would be a bigger deal outside
Wyoming than in places like Casper, because the outside world, they say, has
locked in stereotypes about the state that the movie can play with and shatter.
Here, they say, many people will yawn, or chuckle.
Mr. Padgett, whose single term expires next month, said that he did not think
there would be any backlash against gay men in Casper as a result of "Brokeback
Mountain," when it eventually does play in theaters here, but that there
probably would not be any positive change, either.
"I suspect people will probably just see it as a movie," he said.
What will also not change, he said, is Wyoming culture, in which a pronounced
libertarian streak -- I'll mind my business, you mind yours -- can sometimes be
hard to read. If people are less likely to judge, Mr. Padgett said, that
can sometimes just mean they are turning away.
"It's live and let live," he said. "Sometimes that equates to acceptance,
and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes live and let live just means
distance."
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