The bar sold out of the shirts. The bar’s owner, Ray Bereziuk, told The Cheyenne Post that he won’t reorder more because he’s “in the bar business, not the apparel business.”

“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,” Wyoming Equality, the state’s LGBTQ organization, said in a public Facebook post published last Saturday.

The organization said it was working with the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the nation’s largest LGBTQ organization to contact the bar’s alcohol distributors and “see if they are ok with working with an establishment selling these types of items,” the group said in a Facebook comment on its post.

However, it’s unclear how either organization might pressure distributors since the state controls the distribution of alcohol to vendors, according to the National Alcohol Beverage Control Association.

Newsweek contacted Wyoming Equality and Bereziuk for comment.

Wyoming ranks amongst the U.S. states with the fewest legal protections for LGBTQ individuals, according to the Movement Acceptance Project. The state gained infamy in October 1998 when 21-year-old Matthew Shepard was beaten to death for being gay. The state still lacks hate crime laws for violence against LGBTQ people, LGBTQ Nation reported.

Granted, this isn’t the first time a bar’s t-shirts have caused public outrage.

In June 2020, the Parallel Wine & Whiskey Bar in Virginia received blowback for selling a $25 t-shirt that said “Drunk Wives Matter.” Critics said the shirt made light of Black Lives Matter, a worldwide racial justice movement that also focuses on police brutality. The bar stopped selling the shirts, The Washington Post reported.

In December 2017, Casper’s Place, a now-defunct Irish bar in Mayfair, Pennsylvania was criticized for shirts that declared, “Casper’s, a friendly place to drink.”

The shirt featured a drawing of the cartoon character Casper the Friendly Ghost saying, “No spooks allowed!” Spook is an anti-Black slur. The bar disavowed the shirts and said they had been created by non-employees without the bar’s permission, City and State Pennsylvania reported.

In May 2016, the South Carolina biker bar Suck Bang Blow offended customers and employees alike by selling a shirt featuring Buckwheat, a Black character from the Lil’ Rascals film series. Some considered the shirts racist.

The bar said the shirts had been created by the bar’s previous owners and had been accidentally displayed for sale by unknowledgeable employees. The bar’s new owners removed the remaining shirts from sale and destroyed them, according to WCBD.