Jason Marsden remembered as respected reporter, Wyoming pioneer of gay rights

It was just after Matthew Shepard was assaulted and tortured in an anti-gay hate crime, then left to die tied to a buckrail fence near Laramie. As a stunned community prepared to remember him at an October 1998 service, editors at the statewide flagship newspaper Casper Star-Tribune gathered to deliberate.

Reporter Jason Marsden, who wrote news stories focused on environmental issues, wanted to pen an opinion column. On his news beats, Marsden had cemented his reputation as a trusted reporter, even as he tackled taboo subjects like legacy pollution from the state’s bedrock oil and gas industry.

Marsden didn’t earn his credibility by telling half a story, showing bias or inserting opinion in news reports. So his request to opine triggered an editorial conclave.

Marsden met Shepard at a party where the college student berated the reporter’s newspaper for not covering Afghanistan’s then obscure Taliban as they abused women. Shepard, a slight, gay University of Wyoming student who had attended high school in Switzerland, was wise to civil rights and international affairs.

“He decided he needed to step out and declare his sexuality publicly. He didn’t agonize over it.”

Dan Neal

Shepard’s murder at 21 spurred Marsden to write anew. Assistant managing editor Dan Neal raised the issue of a reporter writing an opinion piece.

“You probably know Jason is gay,” Neal told the editor. “He feels it is important to come out.”

Marsden wanted to tell the world what Shepard’s murder meant to those who lived in the shadows.

“He decided he needed to step out and declare his sexuality publicly,” Neal said in an interview. “He didn’t agonize over it.”

Marsden declared “here I am, too,” Neal said. “The courage was really eye-opening to me.”

Sold out

Marsden, 52, died of natural causes at his Salida, Colorado, home last month after notable careers in journalism, conservation, civil rights and political activism. His op-ed piece about Shepard’s murder, published Oct. 17, 1998, was a high-profile mark along that productive road.

Stephen Busemeyer, another former Star-Tribune editor, recalled how Marsden in 1998 nurtured his column in a garden of love, not on an anvil of hate. As Marsden prepared his column and the state prepared for Shepard’s memorial, a fax arrived in the newsroom from the Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church. It outlined Westboro’s plans for an anti-gay demonstration at the service.

“Jason gets hold of it,” Busemeyer said of the fax, “holds it in his hand, shaking it.” Despite all the ugliness in the Westboro message, Marsden wouldn’t stoop.

“We must love these people,” he said.

“That’s who Jason Marsden was,” Busemeyer said, “fiercely emotional, intellectual, utterly unafraid.”

Marsden titled his piece “Hatred Will Always Target Light.” “The column ended up on my desk,” editor David Hipschman said.

The piece was about Shepard’s intellectual presence outweighing his slight build, about his spirit and tenacity and about attempts by him and those like him to find a place in “this troubled world.”

“[W]e’re members of the loose-knit community of gay people striving to make our way in this sometimes hostile place called Wyoming,” Marsden wrote. In all, there were only 682 words, but they ended up circling the globe.

“I thought it would be dishonest in some way if I did not disclose that I was gay myself,” Marsden told Colorado journalist and podcaster Adam Williams last spring.

Powerful as the column was, Hipschman wouldn’t leave Marsden standing alone. The editor wrote an accompanying piece calling for support.

He laid out the two columns side by side with a graphic cut-on-dotted-line border. Hipschman urged residents to tape the page to their storefronts and windows. He printed an overrun, then experienced something he had never seen.

“The paper sold out.”

American poetry

Marsden’s route to Salida, a small town in the 70-mile-long Arkansas River valley surrounded by four mountain ranges, the state’s tallest 14ers and wilderness areas, had taken him around the world.

He grew up first on a farm in southern Minnesota, he told podcaster Williams, where he was exposed to the outdoors and nature itself. His father died when he was 8, he said on the “We are Chaffee” podcast, and his mother moved the family to Sheridan to begin a new life in a new environment — the city.

Marsden, whose family had a history of labor-movement politics in Minnesota, excelled in high school. “President of the debate team, state champion, national qualifier several times over, class president, blah, blah, blah … all the academics,” he told Williams. With $65 from his job at Arby’s, he applied for early admission to an elite Ivy.

He had never been to Boston, he told Williams, “but I was aware that Harvard was regarded as a quality institution.” As his intellect germinated, Marsden latched on to that most practical arena of studies: post-WWII American poetry.

Toward what end? “It taught me a great deal about trying to figure out what people are really saying,” he told Williams.

Upon graduation in 1994, Marsden returned to Wyoming to work on Democratic campaigns. When Gov. Mike Sullivan lost his race for the U.S. Senate to Craig Thomas, Marsden became an $8.98-an-hour Christmastime UPS elf.

He had other ambitions. Anne MacKinnon, the Star-Tribune editor at the time, remembers Marsden’s resume. Attached was a “wonderful essay … which was basically about advertising and what it tries to do to people,” she said. MacKinnon took lessons from the essay as she was raising her 2-year-old son.

Marsden moved through the newsroom beats, landing on the environmental desk before the paper sent him to Washington, D.C. to cover the Wyoming delegation. He was there on 9/11.

On that date, the world’s front pages suddenly focused on the once-obscure Taliban that Shepard, now dead for three years, had sniffed out long before.

“The person who was paying the most attention to it, as far as I know, was a little gay boy from Casper, Wyoming,” Marsden said in the Williams podcast.

Wyoming’s lost chance

Soon after 9/11, Marsden left Washington D.C. for Wyoming and the fledgling nonprofit Wyoming Conservation Voters. He was proud of getting the Legislature and Gov. Dave Freudenthal to create the Wyoming Wildlife and Natural Resource Trust.

In 2008, Matthew Shepard’s mother Judy was looking for a leader for the foundation that would remember her son and advocate for others like him. Marsden emerged as an obvious choice.

“It was hard to find people who would talk about Matt and had the same kind of experience,” she said in a telephone interview. “People wanted to be seen and heard. He was instrumental in that regard.”

Marsden began a global odyssey — Mexico, Peru, Norway — to talk to those still hiding. “What we did [was] to give them some confidence to be accepted,” Judy Shepard said.

“He was among the best and brightest we could find.”

Rone Tempest

The international program, supported by the State Department, ended abruptly when Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 and cut LGBTQ+ programs.

Despite the foundation’s accomplishments — President Joe Biden in 2024 awarded Judy Shepard the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her advocacy — not everybody has become accepting of gay people and their rights.

When Congress passed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act in 2009, Wyoming resisted. In key votes, Wyoming’s delegation of U.S. Rep. Cynthia Lummis and U.S. Sens. Mike Enzi and John Barrasso opposed the measure.

“I was born and raised here,” Judy Shepard said of Wyoming. “It was a balanced state,” but recently “it’s just gone over the cliff.”

The Shepards would not bury their son in Wyoming, fearing desecration of any gravesite. A bench at the University of Wyoming is the only memorial in the state, she said.

Matthew Shepard was interred in 2018 in the columbarium of St. Joseph’s Chapel beneath the Washington National Cathedral alongside Helen Keller and others. Rev. Gene Robinson grew emotional as he spoke that day as Marsden listened in the congregation.

“Gently rest in this place,” Robinson said, “you are safe now. Matthew, welcome home.”

Judy Shepard said her native state let her down. “Wyoming had the opportunity to set the path,” she said. “But they turned around and ran.”

Olympic torch

After leaving the Shepard foundation, Marsden turned back to his passion for conservation and the outdoors, hiring on in 2023 to lead the Greater Arkansas River Nature Association in Salida. He was back outdoors building beaver dam analogs, hiking in the hills and keeping the environment healthy.

“Preserving wild spaces for future generations was something that he relished,” Marsden’s husband Guy Padgett, a WyoFile employee, said. “He wanted to run the best damn little conservation agency that he possibly could. And he was on his way to doing that.”

Along the route from newspaperman to conservationist to civil rights advocate and conservationist again, Marsden was among the journalists who met at Cheyenne’s Plains Hotel in 2008 to organize a new form of journalism. Traditional outlets had been laying off journalists “for the entirety of my life,” he said in the Williams podcast.

Rone Tempest, one of WyoFile’s founders, recalls the cadre of Wyoming journalists who gathered for lunch to discuss their project. It would be called WyoFile.

“The first step was how to produce copy,” Tempest said.

One idea was to collect the best writers to pen regular columns. Marsden pitched in.

“He was among the best and brightest we could find,” Tempest said.  “He put more time into it than other people. You could say he was one of the founders — pioneers.”

Throughout his work, Marsden’s brain corralled an untold number of facts which burst forth in games of trivia. He took his talents to television, qualifying in 2019 for Jeopardy!

“It was nerve-wracking,” Padgett said of watching the show’s taping from the audience. “They definitely had rules; ‘Do not try to make eye contact with your contestant.’”

Marsden stumbled on the Scottish caber and the Pacific Crest Trail, which he called the Pacific coast trail. Then he got on a roll. “It was one of the most spectacular comebacks,” Padgett said.

In Final Jeopardy, Jason bet the farm. Fellow competitor Laurel Lathrop, a graduate student from Tallahassee, Florida, did the math and bet enough to beat him on the final clue, even if both got the response correct.

Jeopardy host Alex Trebek read the clue. “To complete one of its regular trips, in 1948 it took a boat across the English Channel; in 1952 it took a plane en route to Finland.”

The clock ticked. Merv Griffin’s composition “Think” jingled in the background. Marsden answered correctly – What is the Olympic torch?

So did Lathrop, who outearned Marsden $32,801 to $30,401.

Something emerged from the broadcast that wasn’t frivolous, however.

During introductions, Marsden told how Matthew Shepard was a friend and how his murder led Marsden to become director of the Matthew Shepard Foundation.

For one moment, perhaps the most popular person on television spoke in non-trivial terms.

“In this day and age,” Trebek said, “we need more people like you.”

Services for Jason Marsden will be held at 1 p.m., Saturday, March 15, at Salida United Methodist Church. A celebration of life will follow at the Salida Steam Plant, a community events center.