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In the News


Counting Our Losses
By Ann Rostow


Based on percentages alone, hundreds of gay men and lesbians lost their lives last week, along with Americans of every category, and citizens of dozens of other nations. As the gay and lesbian press struggles to make sense of these events, reporters and publishers are feeling the tension between the mandate of the gay press - to cover the GLBT community - and the sense that neither sexual orientation, nor any other human feature, divides the nation at this time. Yet, that tension is resolved by the realization that if we don't cover the "gay angle," perhaps no one will. Nor does the "gay angle" set our community apart from the rest of America. Indeed, it submerges us.

The heroes and heroines of Sept. 11 will never be counted, and many of their stories will never be told. Surely the names of every firefighter and every police officer will be etched somewhere in stone, but who knows how many invisible acts of courage took place that day? How many people comforted their colleagues as the fires approached? How many people died trying to save others? When we do put names and faces on a few individuals, we do so with the realization that they represent the common bravery of the hour. And when we single out gay heroes in particular, we do so with the realization that every community has its heroes. We were all in this together, but the several gay men who died so visibly, symbolize for our community our role in our country's common sacrifice.

On the afternoon of the attack, one of the first men eulogized by the media was the Reverend Mychal Judge, a 68-year-old Franciscan friar who served as the chaplain for the New York City fire department. Summoned from his home on West 31st after the first plane hit One World Trade Center, Father Mike joined the firefighters at the base of the twin towers, which still stood. In a horrifying final act of duty, Mychal Judge knelt by a dying fireman who had been hit by the body of someone who jumped from one of the towers. He gave the man last rites, and died moments later as parts of the building rained down on the early rescuers. Grieving firefighters carried his body from the area and brought him first to a nearby church. Later, they carried his body through the torn streets of New York to the 31st Street stone friary he had lived in for the last 15 years.

On that Tuesday afternoon, the smiling face of Mychal Judge appeared on CNN along with the City's Fire Chief and other top ranking personnel who had rushed to the scene of terror before the buildings had collapsed. Firemen with tears in their eyes told reporters how much he had meant to them, how often he had helped them, how he had never missed a major fire. There was no reason, at that early stage of coverage, to mention that he was openly gay, and no one did.

But he was. Updating his online dispatches throughout the day, gay reporter Rex Wockner immediately listed Judge as "among the other openly gay people known dead." How did he know that? "I asked people who knew him," he told us. Later, Wockner received calls from other editors asking for evidence that Judge was gay. "How many gay activists and gay leaders and straight colleagues does one need to be out to, before one can be considered openly gay?" Wockner asked. "Or does one have to come out on the cover of The Advocate?" Indeed, Judge was a longtime member of the Catholic lesbian and gay group, Dignity, which sent its "particular condolences" to Judge's friends and family on its New York web site. Speaking to Wockner on the afternoon of the attack, gay journalist Andy Humm called Judge "a decent, wonderful human being," who abhorred discrimination from within and outside the Catholic Church, and who often joined protests for gay and AIDS causes. As far as I know, his sexual orientation was not reported anywhere in the mainstream press.

Another story making the rounds on the cable news networks that afternoon was the mystery surrounding the crash of United Airlines Flight 93 near Pittsburgh. Jeremy Glick, Thomas Burnett and Mark Bingham all called their families from the doomed plane. Burnett's wife and Bingham's aunt told reporters they had no doubt their men had attacked the hijackers and possibly saved the lives of people in an unknown target on the ground. Burnett told his wife that he and a couple of the other men on the plane were going to take action. The L.A. Times reported that Glick made four calls to his wife, telling her in the final call: "We're going to rush the hijackers." According to Glick's wife, there were sounds of a struggle in the background.

The online gay community learned quickly that Bingham, the 31-year-old owner of the Bingham Group, a public relations firm with offices in New York and San Francisco, was an openly gay man. An avid rugby player, the 6'5" athlete had run with the bulls at Pamplona and had fought off street muggers who attacked him a few years ago. Speaking at an informal memorial on Sept. 16, Bingham's friend Todd Sarner connected the dots:

"Many of you have heard the story of how a couple of guys, one of them with a gun, attacked Mark and his friends Mike and Paul," Sarner told the gathering. "Mark jumped in front of his friends to protect them, knocked the gun out of the attacker's hand, and proceeded to beat the crap out of them until they ran away.

"Does anybody here doubt what happened on that airplane?"

Although there's no confirmation one way or another, the gay community has embraced Bingham as a symbol of courage. On Sept. 17, thousands of San Franciscans remembered their lost friends and family at a ceremony in the Civic Auditorium, where Senator Barbara Boxer presented an American flag to Bingham's partner, Paul Holm. "I will miss Mark each day of the rest of my life," Holm had said a few days earlier. "He was one of the finest men to come before us. I hate what has happened, but I believe it was God's will and Mark's destiny to go out this way, as the hero he was to those who knew him and the hero he is now to the whole world."

In a thoughtful piece syndicated by writer Michael Alvear, Alvear asks why America's mainstream newspapers have yet to highlight the sexual orientation of some of these men, who one wouldn't call gay activists, but who were certainly openly gay. David Charlebois, the 39-year-old co-pilot of American Airlines flight 77, lost his life to a hijacker, or perhaps was killed when his plane slammed into the Pentagon. He was a member of the National Gay Pilots Association. He marched on Washington last year. He signed up his partner of 14 years for American Airlines' domestic partner benefits, yet as Alvear notes, the Associated Press report of his funeral, attended by a thousand people, never mentioned this central aspect of his life.

As for Ronald Gamboa, Dan Brandhorst and their adopted son David, most of the national news media did indeed report that these victims of the first plane to hit the World Trade Center, were a gay family, as was so obvious. But not everyone. According to the Kentucky GLBT paper, The Letter, the Louisville Courier-Journal inexplicably ignored the men's relationship and referred to Gamboa as "single." Whether or not this happened in other local newspapers around the country is anyone's guess.

In an unprecedented moment of national solidarity, Alvear writes, "a profound respect and admiration is emerging between America's incongruous groups. A respect that begins with an explicit recognition of our differences. That's why it's so important for the media to acknowledge the gay men and women who are among the dead and missing, among the victims and heroes, among the loved and lost. How can gay men and women be part of this emerging inter-group respect if the media constantly ignores us?"

In all probability, the mainstream press is not "ignoring" the sexual orientation of men like Judge and Bingham, but acting out of a misguided sense that sexual orientation is a "private matter" that would be somehow inappropriate to "expose" in a tragic context. Well, it's not a private matter to most, and it wasn't to these men, and Alvear is right to calculate the cost of the 1980s mentality that assumes gay people are in the closet unless they've issued a press release to the contrary.

In San Francisco, the Sept. 18 Chronicle recounts the fate of a gay man, who shockingly died after escaping from the Trade Center area. Jack Keohane located his partner of 17 years and the two men stood transfixed as they watched the collapse of the towers from what they thought was a safe distance. Keohane, 41, was talking to his mother in Petaluma on his cell phone when he was killed by falling debris. His partner was unhurt. "He just had a passion with news and politics and human rights," his mother said. "He shouldn't have died."

We expect such coverage in San Francisco. We should expect it everywhere. There is a Jack Keohane in every city.



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