by Rex Wockner
[story filed Sept. 17, 2001]
Gay New York was in shock along with everyone else.
"I thought I was a goner," said Ralph
Buchalter, a
friend of this reporter who works
at the American
Stock Exchange. "I saw the second
plane hit. I was
late going to work. The towers are
two blocks from
where I work.
"When the first tower came down, this
noise started,
like a freight train, and people started
screaming,
then there was just like this cloud
of black. It was
like trying to outrun a train with
thousands of other
people. People were screaming and
fainting. The noise
was so deafening. There was nothing
I could do. It
didn't matter if I ran 15 more feet.
I stopped in the
doorway of an Indian fabric store.
"I thought I was fine when I woke up
today [Wednesday,
Sept. 12] and I went to breakfast
and I got a
newspaper, and when I saw the pictures
I almost
fainted and I had to leave the restaurant.
You think
you're fine for a while and then one
image comes into
your head, and I start crying. I'm
alive. I'm very
thankful. I feel very lucky. The psychological
thing
of handling the enormity of it is
the difficult
thing."
Terrorists crashed hijacked commercial
jetliners into
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
Sept. 11. Both
towers of the Trade Center collapsed,
as did one wall
of the Pentagon. A fourth hijacked
jetliner en route
to San Francisco crashed in rural
Pennsylvania. The
cumulative death tolls are expected
to exceed 5,000.
"[I] will never be OK again," veteran
New York City
gay journalist Andy Humm said the
day of the attacks.
"Sure to have lost friends. Monstrous.
Don't know what
to do. Don't know where to go. My
roommate, Jed,
witnessed it from his office across
the Hudson in
Jersey City. Called me to turn on
the TV. Saw the
second plane hit live on TV. Went
to an upper floor
here in London Terrace and saw the
buildings burning.
Went out for a few minutes. Came back
and they were
gone. Gone."
"My father and three brothers own and
run two coffee
shops down there; one is just up the
street from WTC,"
said gay journalist and author Michelangelo
Signorile.
"They got to the bomb shelter in their
respective
buildings just after the explosions
blew their windows
out and just before the Twin Towers
collapsed. One of
their shops was completely destroyed
in the 'tidal
wave' of debris from the collapse,
the other badly
damaged. Amazingly, we were able to
speak to them, on
and off, on the telephone throughout
the whole thing.
They were, as you can imagine, very
shaken up. They
were mostly OK physically, suffered
from smoke
inhalation. They made it to the Staten
Island Ferry on
foot, the only way off of Manhattan.
My brother
reports seeing 'terrible' things on
the streets in
terms of damage to people."
"Bicycled down near city hall," veteran
New York City
gay activist Bill Dobbs said Sept.
11. "Lots of face
masks, improvised and otherwise. Real
dust storm in
some spots. Little traffic except
emergency vehicles.
Dust/silt all over the streets there,
places several
inches deep. ... Mood is incredulous,
emotional but
calm. ... Trade Towers are a part
of my daily life,
seeing them and the Empire State Building
is
quintessence of Manhattan for me.
Now giant clouds of
gray black smoke obscure where they
would be. Can't
imagine what [it was] like when structures
collapsed."
"My boyfriend Gary was in his new office
just off Wall
Street ... when the first plane hit,"
said veteran ACT
UP/New York and AIDS-treatment activist
Peter Staley.
"He called me at 8:50, asking me if
anything was on
the news, since he had heard a boom,
and office paper
was blowing past his window. I watched
the second
plane hit live on CNN. Gary was able
to catch a
[number] 2/3 subway train home before
the buildings
collapsed."
"My business partner, Gayzette publisher
Frank
Williams, had just come up from the
subway two blocks
from the WTC, smelled smoke and headed
toward the
crowd gathered at the end of the block
when the first
building began to collapse," said
Carol Fezuk, editor
of the Rehoboth Beach [Delaware] Gayzette.
"He said
there was bedlam and chaos as people
ran over and atop
each other in an attempt to find shelter.
He crawled
over bodies and others grabbed him
to get ahead of the
cloud of dust and debris that enveloped
the streets of
the city. He's seems OK ... has some
chest pain and
congestion from the dust."
The Lambda Legal Defense and Education
Fund and the
American Foundation for AIDS Research
are located near
the lower Manhattan disaster area,
but no one from the
organizations was injured.
"Apart from choking our way through
clouds of dust and
soot, those of us at Lambda Legal
Defense made it out
fine and walked ourselves home," said
staff attorney
Jennifer Middleton. "We are in the
same building as
AmFAR, and though the building was
not in harm's way,
all of us inside exited to unbelievable
debris amid
throngs of evacuees making their way
north."
Playwright, author and ACT UP cofounder
Larry Kramer
woke up in his Greenwich Village apartment
shortly
after the attacks.
"The World Trade Center was a towering
smoke stack
billowing unbelievable amounts of
huge white clouds,"
Kramer said. "I turned on my TV set
and for the next
hour I rushed from the window to the
TV and back to
compare. The reality was almost too
much to bear
looking at. I lay down on my bed and
I started to feel
peculiar. I don't know how to describe
the feeling
exactly. I felt my life, and everyone's
life, and this
country, had lost control. God knows
I've been through
hell with my health this past couple
of years but this
was different. I guess if I had studied
Sartre he
would have told me it was existential.
My existence
was no longer my existence. I called
the few friends I
know who work in the World Trade Center
and discovered
they were all safe. Then, for whatever
reason, I
decided to try and go through my planned
day. My
dentist told me to come in (I want
to finish some
messy work before my new liver arrives)
... so I went
outside and tried to figure how to
get myself to
(first stop) 61st and Park."
Among the gay people known dead is
New York Fire
Department Catholic chaplain Rev.
Mychal Judge.
"He was a decent wonderful human being,"
said
journalist Humm. "When gays were kept
out of the St.
Patrick's Parade, he gave me an interview
on
the street telling me how terrible
it was for us to be
discriminated against and for the
church to be doing
it. I saw him at many demonstrations
for gay
and AIDS causes, showing up in his
Franciscan monk's
cassock. And he was equally beloved
by the Fire
Department, there at every major fire
tragedy in the
city lending moral support to firefighters."
San Francisco gay rugby player Mark
Bingham died in
the Pennsylvania crash. Bingham, 31,
had been planning
to field a team in next year's Gay
Games in Sydney.
A gay male couple from Los Angeles,
Ronald Gamboa and
Dan Brandhorst, and their 3-year-old
adopted son,
David, died on one of the planes that
slammed into the
World Trade Center, Kentucky's WAVE-TV
reported.
Gamboa's mother lives in Kentucky.
The co-pilot of American Airlines flight
77, which
crashed into the Pentagon, was openly
gay, the
Washington Blade reported. David Charlebois
lived in
Washington, D.C., and was a member
of the National Gay
Pilots Association.
David Angell, 54, of Pasadena, Calif.,
executive
producer of the NBC TV show Frasier,
died in one of
the plane crashes. Angell, who was
straight, was
involved in the gay protests against
Dr. Laura
Schlessinger and wrote the episode
of Cheers in which
Sam's old buddy comes out to him and
the gang fears
Cheers is going to become a gay bar.
In Washington, D.C., where the Pentagon
crash killed
an estimated 200 people, activist
John Aravosis said:
"Those of us in Washington ... are
under a state of
emergency and spent most of the morning
[Sept. 11]
looking out our windows expecting
11 reportedly errant
planes to take out the Congress, the
White House and
the Washington Monument. You can see
all from my
balcony.
"Literally every 10 minutes I was looking
out my
window, expecting the Capitol building
to go up in
flames," Aravosis said. "A friend
in a senator's
office got a call at 10 a.m. that
a jet was heading
right for the Congress, and they evacuated
the
building, fast. The only thing you
could hear outside
all day was sirens and F-16s flying
overhead
protecting the city's airspace, which
I suppose should
have been comforting, but it was more
creepy, in a
Beirut kind of way, than soothing."
"This morning, it is odd to see Humvees
and military
police on the street corners in Georgetown,"
D.C.
activist Joel Lawson said Sept. 12.
"Out my office
window, military and civilian police
constantly patrol
the Potomac River, paying particular
attention to the
security of structures along the water
here such as
the Kennedy Center and the massive
Key Bridge. ...
Living in Washington, D.C., for a
long time, what
haunts you most is the realization
that so many
security gaps have existed for so
long. Security will
finally change here. ... 'Business
as usual' is a
retired notion."