50 STATES > Wyoming

The experience of walking through these landscapes armed with the knowledge that 170 years ago it was the stomping grounds of liberated and powerful gay men was an absolute paradigm shift for the two of us; an overturning of the narrative of the West as pioneered by exclusively heterosexual men that we'd grown up believing.

We felt like we belonged in Wyoming, a state that we had associated primarily with the murder of Matthew Shepard and conservative politics. We finished our journey to Fremont née Stewart Lake knowing for the first time that we had a claim to the history of these most spectacular mountains; that our queer forebearers had played an integral role in the founding of the region's mythologies.