(Image courtesy of Wyoming Equality)
***This story contains an image of gun violence that may be triggering for some***
The Casper-Tribune newspaper and Wyoming Equality reported July 12 that a bar in the Wyoming capital city of Cheyenne was selling T-shirts that depict a caricature of a bearded motorcycle rider pointing a revolver at the viewer. “In Wyoming we have a cure for AIDS,” it reads. “We shoot fuck’n faggots.”
According to the Tribune, Sara Burlingame, the executive director of Wyoming Equality, approached the bar’s owner requesting he cease sales of the T-shirt but he refused.
On the group’s Facebook page Burlingame wrote:
“We are sad to say that we failed to convince a local bar to pull these shirts from circulation. We hoped that they would choose to stop selling them when they realized the harm it did to the LGBTQ community and those living with AIDS.
“We are not sharing the name of the business because we do not want them to gain notoriety/ sell more shirts off the pain of our community. It is a sad day. Wyoming Equality understands that…this sucks. And we’d all rather spend our summer getting ready for Rendezvous, spending time with family and friends and recuperating from a hard year.
“But let’s do what we do best and pull together. If you have the capacity we are asking folks to promote this message:+ please don’t share the name of the establishment- you’ll only drive business to them+ please don’t protest the business (see above).”
The state’s Republican Governor Mark Gordon released a statement condemning the unnamed bar.
“It’s incredibly disheartening to learn that any business would offer a product for sale with a message like this. This hurtful rhetoric is not reflective of our state’s values, and does nothing but promote hate and division,” Gordon said.
The editor and publisher of a local Cheyenne newspaper, The Cheyenne Post in a July 12 article identified the bar as the the Eagle’s Nest bar in Cheyenne. Bar owner Ray Bereziuk told the paper that his bar has stopped selling the shirts. He said that he is “in the bar business, not the apparel business,” and that he would not be reordering the shirts.
The discovery that a Cheyenne bar was selling a violent, homophobic T-shirt drew a strong rebuke Monday from community and state leaders. https://t.co/CzROWYoMvQ
— Casper Star-Tribune (@CSTribune) July 13, 2021
