Media Watch

Friday, October 31, 2008

By Ben Cannon

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-Wyoming has come a long way in its attitudes towards homosexuality over the last decade. When much of the national media observed the 10th anniversary of the brutal slaying of Matthew Shepard on Oct. 12, the Open Spaces series on Wyoming Public Radio pieced together the life and death of Sheppard through interviews with friends, family and law enforcement who investigated his murder. (The rumor that he was victim to a drug deal, which still lingers in some circles, is baseless, investigators said.)

Since the tragedy, which became a national symbol of hate crime against gays, Wyoming has improved it general climate of tolerance, observers said.
Last week the online Casper Star Tribune ran an L.A. Times piece on reclusive Saratoga resident Annie Proulx (“Writer no longer home on the range”), who gained notoriety when her short story “Brokeback Mountain” was made into the 2005 film.
In an interview, the 73-year old author, who lives in a large modern home on a sprawling plot of open space, said she had grown weary of the local attitudes of rural Wyoming and wanted to spend time away. Some of the residents of Saratoga who were interviewed welcomed her to leave.

Proulx even indicated she sometimes wished she never had written the story.
“Yeah,” one reader commented online, “she should have never written that book.”
Others, though, heaped messages of thanks and praise on the author.
When the Sublette County Library screened the film in Pinedale, some objected, though library director Daphne Platts said more than 50 people turned out – a significant attendance for the relatively rural county. PJH


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