Mr. Kaufman does not hide his feelings easily. After an interview this weekend with Laramie’s mayor, Klaus Hanson, Mr. Kaufman shook with anger that Mr. Hanson was not doing anything to commemorate the anniversary. (“Now that you have touched upon it,” the mayor said, “I will need to rethink it.”) Mr. Kaufman’s expressed dismay that there is no hate-crimes law in Wyoming, as he thinks there should be. He and others also said that some in Laramie were no longer speaking of Mr. Shepard’s death as a hate crime but rather as a drug-fueled robbery gone wrong.

“A lot of people in the community went through a sense of grief, in a very poignant, heartfelt, painful way, and I think eventually the pain became so great that they don’t want to think about it or hear about it,” Rebecca Hilliker, a professor of theater at the University of Wyoming here, told Mr. Kaufman over the weekend. “After I got over the emotional trauma, the nightmares, I myself had to say, ‘O.K., step back, think about this  what you can and can’t do  and stop placing the burden of changing the state on yourself.’ ”

Mr. Kaufman conceded, “People get exhausted.”

“You get exhausted,” Ms. Hilliker nodded, sitting by windows in her home on a breathtaking open plain. “And then you can’t plan anymore how to fix things.”

Laramie has changed in some ways. The city council passed a bias crimes ordinance that tracks such crimes, though it does not include penalties for them. There is an AIDS Walk now. Several residents say they came out publicly as gay, in their churches or on campus, in part to honor Mr. Shepard’s memory. The university hosts a four-day Shepard Symposium for Social Justice each spring, and there is talk of creating a degree minor in gay and lesbian studies.

And yet, to the bewilderment of some people here, there is no memorial to Mr. Shepard in Laramie. The log fence has been torn down where he lay dying for 18 hours on Oct. 7, 1998. There is no marker. Wild grass blows in the wind.

The Fireside bar  where Mr. Shepard was lured away by Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, who are serving life terms for murder  is also gone, sold and renamed years ago. Without the Fireside, there is no longer a bar in town where gays, jocks, foreign students and cowboys mix together.

“I put it up for sale two weeks later  it was a ghost town,” said Matt Mickelson, the former owner of the Fireside, told Andy Paris, a member of the Tectonic company.