Wyoming bar accused of selling violent anti-LGBT+ t-shirts

The bar owner said he would not reorder the shirts, but said it was not because of the outcry

A shirt sold in a bar in Wyoming that depicts a man with a revolver and a line of text celebrating the shooting of LGBT+ people (Wyoming Equality Facebook Post)

A Wyoming bar has come under scrutiny for selling shirts that celebrate and appear to encourage the shooting of LGBT+ people.

One of the shirts depicts a biker-looking individual pointing a revolver toward the viewer along with the line "In Wyoming we have a cure for AIDS. We shoot f*** in' f******."

The shirts were featured in a post by Wyoming Equality, a group supporting LGBT+ rights. The group said it had attempted to get the bar to pull the shirts, but was unable to convince them to stop selling them.

"We are sad to say that we failed to convince a local bar to pull these shirts from circulation," the group said in a Facebook post.

"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," the organisation said, "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."

Sara Burlingame, the executive director of the organisation, spoke with The Casper Star-Tribune, telling a reporter that she contacted the bar asking that they stop selling the shirt, but the bar owner refused.

The report stated that someone "who answered the phone at the Cheyenne bar refused to put the Star-Tribune in contact with the manager or the owner when contacted for comment."

Apparently the shirts proved popular in the deeply conservative state, as the bar owner told The Cheyenne Post that the shirts have "sold out”.

The infamous torture and killing of Matthew Shepard, a gay man, occurred in Wyoming. Mr Shepard was beaten, tied to a barbed wire fence, and left for dead in the cold in 1998. He died six days after he was found and hospitalised.

While Congress eventually passed hate crime legislation in 2009 named for Mr Shephard, Wyoming has not passed any anti-hate legislation.

Mr Shepard's mother told the Star-Tribune that the state has had 22 years to pass hate crime legislation, but has failed to do so.

"It is time for Wyoming to face reality and recognise that we are losing our youth, our economic potential and our soul. The time to take a stand is now, not after another family loses their child," she said.

The bar owner said he did not plan on reordering the shirts, but said was not bending to social media pressure. He claimed his reasoning for not reordering the shirts was because he is "in the bar business, not the apparel business”.

Thus far, no state elected officials in Wyoming have denounced the shirts.