Wyoming.

The news is filled with stories of gay marriage gaining across America and the world. But it none of that really matters unless you understand what this progress means in individual lives.

To that end, I highly recommend this beautifully written account of two men who have been together for many years, quietly and discretely in the town of Casper, before becoming the poster couple for gay marriage in Wyoming.

Tissues recommended. I cried reading this, their story is so very sweet.

Wyoming was the state of Matthew Shepard, a young gay man brutally killed and left to die hanging from a barbed wire fence on a lonely Wyoming road. While controversy may always remain about what happened that night, the extraordinary publicity around Matthew’s murder made anti-gay hate crimes visible to average Americans for the first time, another important step in shifting mainstream perceptions of gay people.

And just as Matthew’s story was so sad and hard to grasp, this simple story of Carl Oleson and Rob Johnston illustrates what is happy, lovely, and worth celebrating in the progress of gay rights.

Wyoming is a lonely and beautiful place, from the Tetons that easily stand as the most stunning mountains in America, to the vast high prairie and its surreal “big sky” that gives the land its name. People there are rugged, and there are 50% more people in the 7 x 7 miles of San Francisco than there are in the entire state of Wyoming, and they have over 97,000 square miles. But out of those people rose these two gay men, who bravely stepped out of their quiet lives and into history.