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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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