![]() 'My feeling is,' says Durzy, 'that if told he would become a gay icon he would laugh. What he did is both inconceivable and great.' And that's lucky for all of us, and unlucky for people who are biased against us. 'It's ironic that in death he is being celebrated for something he did not think was worth politicising. 'He didn't politicise his sexuality at all,' said Bingham's friend and roommate Per Casey. I think he knew himself that was not anyone's idea of a typical gay man'. He described him as someone 'who knew how to use his size and would get into situations without thinking about it - which used to amuse us and scare us. Talking to The Observer last week, Bingham's friend Hani Durzy remembered how he had once fought off a mugger with a gun. I simply can't say to myself any more that gays have no place in the military.' Well, as we found out last week, Mark Bingham could cut it. He has become perhaps the first openly gay, great American patriotic idol, and certainly an emblematic figure in the gay community.Ī posting on the website run by Andrew Sullivan, gay former editor of the New Republic magazine, reads: 'The media portrayal of gays (lots of it by gays themselves) is as effeminate, etc, as well as my personal experience with gays my age, most of whom seemed little interested in military service or aggressive pursuits in general. He was a sportsman with, says former employer Holland Cartney, 'a very sensitive, creative side'. He was known and loved on the San Francisco scene, a public relations executive, a graduate of Berkeley. Bingham intrigues because he does not fit the image of the all-American hero quite as neatly as Todd Beamer, a family man from rural New Jersey with a Lord's Prayer bookmark in the Tom Clancy novel he had onboard.īingham was gay. Mark Bingham was last to board the plane, having arrived late and nearly missed the flight. In a nation hungry for heroes Todd Beamer stands out as America's martyr - but there were other figures who played less well known but more crucial parts in the passengers' rebellion aboard Flight 93. The recent release of tapes from the cockpit voice recorder indicates just how close they came to doing so. And in the hopeless claustrophobia of a tubular steel trap 30,000 feet up, they tried to defy death.īy the time Beamer dialled GTE, his aircraft had been re-routed by the terrorists towards Washington, and perhaps on course for the White House, or the Capitol.īeamer and other passengers decided to take on the hijackers and wrest control of the plane. For as Flight 93 was gnarled off course, he and other passengers learnt through an extraordinary series of calls they made to relatives and partners that their plane was one of a quartet turned into terrorist guided missiles. He and Jefferson talked for 13 minutes, during which they recited together the Lord's Prayer and Psalm 23 - 'Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for Thou art with me Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.'īeamer had ideas about that valley, and how many dead it should claim. “He was calm through the entire conversation,” said Jefferson, “and I tried to stay just as calm with him.” Todd told Jefferson about the hijacking he asked her to tell his wife he loved her and their family they prayed the Lord’s Prayer together.Beamer, who didn't want to worry his pregnant wife, had called GTC, the company that provides the telephone service on United Airlines flights. Todd, trying to call his wife Lisa on one of the plane’s phones, was routed to customer service, and he spoke with GTE supervisor Lisa Jefferson. Passengers and flight attendants huddling in the rear of the plane used in-flight phones to contact their loved ones and officials on the ground. The pilots of Flight 93 were informed of the crash and the two that followed only moments before four hijackers on their flight took over the cockpit and cabin. He would take the early flight from Newark to San Francisco, attend his meeting, and fly back that night.īut Todd Beamer ’87 never made it back to his wife, Lisa, their two young sons, David and Drew, and their unborn child.ĭelayed more than 40 minutes on the runway, Flight 93 took off only four minutes before an American Airlines Boeing 767 crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center (WTC).
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