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. Beamer, who didn't want to worry his pregnant wife, had called GTC, the company that provides the telephone service on United Airlines flights.
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