Just like they deny the existence of the gay scene near the small town, the idea that their attitudes could have played any contributing role in fostering the circumstances that gave rise to Matthew's murder is inconceivable. The character of Laramie as a community is conveyed by the evocative language used by the characters. Their words simultaneously paint a collective physical and emotional picture of the landscape and reveal the attitudes of the individual speaker. The town of Laramie was almost two towns, a conventional Western ranching town filled with open spaces and conservative Western morality and faith on one hand, and on the other hand, a town that boasted a university with gay professors, gay students, and harbored the diversity that is characteristic of many college campuses all over the world.

In every college town to some extent there are town and gown tensions, as the culture of the students will be in conflict with some of the needs and desires of the year-round residents. But in Laramie this mix of personalities and tensions created a particularly potent concoction. Likewise, there is homophobia everywhere, but the willed collective silence of Laramie in regards to the subject of homosexuality, combined with the town's hatred of the wealthier and...

The disaffected, depressed residents who lived outside the college community were looking for something and someone to hate, and they found this in the persona of the openly gay Shepard.
And yes, gay bashing can occur anywhere. But the circumstances that spawned Matthew Shepard's fatal, final ride were particular to Laramie. Laramie was loaded with the dynamite of fundamentalism, economic depression, and people who felt a sense of alienation from the college community. The townspeople defined themselves by what they were 'not' -- not homosexual, not part of the college town, not linked to the secular life of the city and wider America. Matthew represented all of these things, and so he had to die. The town had tried to ignore homosexuality, and when it was not silent in their midst, it seemed to threaten their culture and way of life, simply by offering an alternative way of being in the world. To the uncertain residents of Laramie, the play suggests, there is no way to 'live and let live.' Simply to live and to love in a different way was interpreted as an act of perceived aggression, and deserved to be met with violence.