Box Turtle Bulletin

The Daily Agenda for Sunday, September 11

TODAY’S AGENDA:

Pride Celebration Today: Peoria, IL.

AIDS Walk Today: Bathurst/Chaleur, NB.

Also Today: Austin Gay and Lesbian International Film Festival, Austin, TX.

Fr. Judge in the WTC lobby, moments before he died

TODAY IN HISTORY:
Most people instinctively flee danger. It’s a natural result of the instinct for self-preservation. But when American Airlines Flight 11, carrying 92 passengers and crew, struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center between the 93rd and 99th floors at 8:46 a.m., Father Mychal Judge ran directly into the crippled building alongside the firemen he served as department chaplain.

The Franciscan friar’s priory was located just across the street from the firehouse on West 31st st., and the firemen there knew him as a “man’s man,” able to swing an axe and bust through doors with the best of them. But when he was in chaplain mode with his simple brown Franciscan robe, he had a very different countenance.  “He could go into the firehouse, have a cup of coffee, have a meal, listen to all the talk, watch the ballgame, hear your problems, talk about anything you want,” Boyle says. “But when he said Mass in the firehouse, I always felt when he got to the Eucharist, he just transformed himself. He became like Christ. He was just so pious.”

A French film crew happened to be in the burning North Tower and caught Fr. Judge on film in what would be some of his final moments of life. His friend, Fr. Michael Duffy, remarked about one scene where the Friar is standing by the lobby’s plate glass windows watching bodies fall onto the pavement from the building’s upper floors. “And if you look closely at that film, you’ll see his lips moving,” Duffy says. “Now, for those of us who know him, he wasn’t one that talked to himself. He was praying. And absolving people as they fell to their death.” When the South Tower collapsed, the force of the implosion shattered the windows and threw Fr. Judge across the lobby. He died from those injuries. He was designated as “victim 001,” the honorary first official victim of the September 11 attacks; his body was the first to be brought to the coroner.

The photo of Fr. Judge's body being carried out of the North Tower became an early iconic image of 9/11.

After his death, it was revealed that Fr. Judge was a gay man who was, as all priests are supposed to be, adherent to his vows of chastity. Fire commissioner Thomas Von Essen said, “I actually knew about his homosexuality when I was in the Uniformed Firefighters Association. I kept the secret, but then he told me when I became commissioner five years ago. He and I often laughed about it, because we knew how difficult it would have been for the other firemen to accept it as easily as I had. I just thought he was a phenomenal, warm, sincere man, and the fact that he was gay just had nothing to do with anything.” Judge was a longtime member of Dignity, a Catholic LGBT organization that advocates for change in the Catholic Church’s teachings on homosexuality. Judge reportedly often asked, “Is there so much love in the world that we can afford to discriminate against any kind of love?” His life was a testament to that kind of love that knew no bounds.

—–

Ron Gamboa, Dan Brandhorst and their 3-year old son David.

The South Tower’s collapse came about after United Airlines Flight 175 slammed into its southern facade at 9:03. a.m. On board that flight were Ronald Gamboa and Daniel Brandhorst, with their three-year-old son David. They were returning home to Los Angeles after a family trip to Boston. As newly adopted parents in 1998, the two dads had formed the Pop Luck Club, an L.A. support group for gay fathers, prospective fathers, and their children. Said Ken Yood, the group’s president in 2001, “Dan and Ron were gay dads when there were very few of us out there.  We saw a need for a resource for other prospective dads… and the Pop Luck Club was born!”

Ron and Dan were remembered as doting fathers. “I am so proud of the father he became,” said Dan’s sister, Dawn. “Nothing was more important than his family… and Ron was the best brother-in-law anyone could hope for. Sweet, precious, David learned love and compassion from his Poppa and Daddy.”

—–

David Charlebois, doing what he loved

David Charlebois had been born in 1962 in  Morocco during one of his father’s overseas assignments as a U.S. diplomat. His grandfather had been an auto mechanic who taught pioneer aviator Amelia Earhart auto mechanics a year before her attempted around-the-world flight. David graduated from Embry-Riddle aeronautical University in 1984 with a degree in aeronautical sciences, and joined American Airlines in 1991. Friends and family say that he loved flying more than anything else. He was an active member of the National Gay Pilots Association, and worked to change American Airline’s policies to include domestic partner benefits, and to change the company’s culture to one that was more inclusive and respectful.

David and his partner of fourteen years, Tom Hay, were well known in their Dupont Circle neighborhood. They lived the kind of charmed life that many people might envy, except David’s confident and centered manner rarely provoked such negative feelings. The couple had bought a large row hose and transformed it into one of the better houses on the block. When he wasn’t flying, David could be seen landscaping or walking their border collie, Chance.

As a pilot for AA, he flew mostly transcontinental flights out of Washington, D.C.’s Dulles International Airport. The morning of September 11 probably started out very little differently from any other morning. David was first officer for Flight 77, which was one of his standard routes. But thirty-five minutes into this flight, hijackers stormed to cockpit and herded the passengers to the rear of the Boeing 757. The hijackers then turned off the plane’s transponder and made a u-turn near the Ohio/Kentucky/West Virginia border and began heading back to Washington. Limited FAA radar coverage in that area however made tracking the plane difficult until it re-appeared on Dulles’s radar. By then it was making a bee-line for the Pentagon where it crashed into the western side of the Pentagon at 530 miles per hour at 9:38 a.m. All 53 passengers, and six crew members were killed, along with the five hijackers. The crash and fireball penetrated three outer rings of the Pentagon’s western side, and killed 125 people on the ground.

—–

Mark Bingham with this mother

Mark Bingham managed to call his mother, Alice Hoagland, at 9:37, sometime after his plane, United Airlines Flight 93 bound for San Francisco, had been hijacked. He told her that three men who claimed to have a bomb had commandeered the plane.  Hoagland, who had been a flight attendant with United, called back late and left a voice mail message on Bingham’s cell phone telling him about the World Trade Center attacks and urging him to reclaim the aircraft. We don’t know whether he received her message or not, but his seatmate, Tom Burnett, learned from a phone call to his wife that two airliners had crashed into the twin towers. There is substantial that Bingham was among a handful of passengers who stormed the cockpit and brought the aircraft down into a reclaimed coal strip mine outside of Shakesville, Pennsylvania at 10:03 a.m. According to reconstructions from the flight recorder and cell phone calls, the passenger rebellion began in Bingham’s section of the plane.

That Bingham was involved with bringing the plane down surprised no one. One former employer remarked that Bingham was a man of actions but few words. “If I know Mark, he would not have said anything about what he intended to do. I remember him coming to work one day with a huge black eye. I asked what had happened, and he said two guys had jumped him and he had fought them off. I said that was dangerous – better to give them the money – but he would have none of it. That would have been him on the plane. He was not someone afraid to act.” A burly 6 feet 4 inches and 225 pounds, the amateur rugby player was in good company with other passengers on the plane: a former college quarterback, a weightlifter and a former paratrooper. Bingham and the other members of Flight 93 changed the history of hijacking forever.

In 2000, Bingham had been an early supporter of Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) primary race against George W. Bush for the GOP nomination. Two weeks after the September 11 attacks, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) flew from Washington, D.C. to San Fransisco to deliver the eulogy for Bingham’s memorial service. “I never knew Mark Bingham. But I wish I had. I know he was a good son and friend, a good rugby player, a good American, and an extraordinary human being. He supported me, and his support now ranks among the greatest honors of my life. I wish I had known before September 11 just how great an honor his trust in me was. I wish I could have thanked him for it more profusely than time and circumstances allowed. But I know it now. And I thank him with the only means I possess, by being as good an American as he was.”

There is a more complete list of LGBT victims of the September 11 attacks here.

If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. PLEASE, don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).