Who Counts as Family

Chapter 0

Before you enter

Twenty-five years ago this morning, 2,977 people were killed. This exhibit holds all of them. It then does something the official record never did, and names the lesbian, gay, and bisexual people among them, and the partners who were told they were not family.

Chapter I

Tuesday, September 11, 2001

Two thousand nine hundred seventy-seven

Before this exhibit turns to any one group of people, it holds the whole number, because every person inside it was somebody's.

They were divided across three places. In New York 2,753 people were killed. At the Pentagon 184 were killed, 125 of them inside the building. On United Flight 93, which came down in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, 40 were killed. The youngest person killed anywhere that day was Christine Lee Hanson, two and a half years old, of Groton, Massachusetts, who was on United Flight 175 with her parents Peter and Sue Kim Hanson.

Twenty-five years later the work of identification has not stopped. On August 24, 2026 the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner announced the 1,654th identification, an adult woman whose name was withheld at her family's request. It was the first identification made through forensic investigative genetic genealogy. Verified

The dying did not stop in 2001 either. The World Trade Center Health Program, run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had 145,275 people enrolled as of June 30, 2026, and 67.3 percent of them are certified for at least one 9/11-related health condition. Over the program's life it has certified 57,044 cancers. The New York City Fire Department has lost, by its own account, more than 400 members to World Trade Center illnesses, a number now larger than the 343 it lost on the day. Verified

Sources: 911memorial.org FAQ and institutional backgrounder; the City of New York Office of the Mayor and the Office of Chief Medical Examiner, August 2026; the CDC World Trade Center Health Program quarterly summary published August 1, 2026; FDNY releases of September 2025 and December 2025. The Health Program states plainly that it "does not track cause of death for deceased members," so we publish no figure for deaths from 9/11 illness, only the enrollment and certification counts it does publish.

Chapter II

Logan International Airport, 7:59 a.m.

Two planes left Boston

This is a South Coast museum, and the reason we hold this story is not sentiment. Half of the aircraft used that morning took off from our state.

Every time above is the 9/11 Commission's own, from Chapter 1 of its report. Verified

The Commission also recorded who was responsible for the screening those men walked through at Logan. The checkpoints for the American 11 gate "were operated by Globe Security under a contract with American Airlines." The single checkpoint for United 175 "was controlled by United Airlines, which had contracted with Huntleigh USA to perform the screening." Three of the Flight 11 hijackers were flagged in Boston by the airline screening system then in use. "None of the checkpoint supervisors recalled the hijackers or reported anything suspicious regarding their screening."

Massachusetts lost people in every part of the attack. The Massachusetts 9/11 Fund, which maintains the Commonwealth's list and reads it aloud each year on the State House steps, counts 219 people with connections to Massachusetts. Other figures circulate, 206 and 204 and 198, each counting something slightly different. We use 219 and we say whose number it is.

Today, on the twenty-fifth anniversary, that list was read at 8:30 in the morning on the State House steps, followed by a moment of silence at 8:46. At one o'clock a wreath was laid at the Garden of Remembrance in the Boston Public Garden. At eleven, Logan rededicated its own memorial, a glass cube on the airport grounds by Moskow Linn Architects called The Place of Remembrance, dedicated in 2008 and carrying the names of every passenger and crew member of the two flights that left from there. Verified

Read that list of relations again and notice the word companions, sitting between grandchildren and friends. The stone was dedicated in July 2004. Massachusetts had begun issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples that May, and for the three years before it, the surviving partners in this exhibit had been told by airlines, insurers, and state compensation boards that they were not family at all. We do not know who chose that word or why, and we have found no source that says. We only note that the Commonwealth's memorial stone made room for a category of survivor that the law had spent three years refusing to see. Intent behind the wording: unknown, and we do not guess

Sources: 9/11 Commission Report, Chapter 1 and its notes; Massachusetts 9/11 Fund; Massport's own page on the Logan memorial and Moskow Linn Architects; the Historical Marker Database transcription of the Public Garden inscription; Boston Globe, September 8 and 11, 2026. Flagged: the number of names carved on the Public Garden stone is given as 198 by one source and implied as 206 or 219 by others. We have not counted them on site and so we publish no figure for the stone itself.

Chapter III

The South Coast losses

Five people from our own towns were killed. Their names are on the memorial in New York, and each of them is confirmed here against the official list of those killed.

Dartmouth High School, class of 1994, where she played field hockey, softball, and basketball and served in student government. Columbia University, engineering, 1998. She was a technical sales consultant in risk-management software at Marsh and McLennan, on the 96th floor of the North Tower, and she had been in the job two months. She would have turned 25 the following day; her birthday was September 12. Her mother, Elizabeth Rego of Dartmouth, said this twenty years on: "Grief never ends, but it changes. It's a passage not a place to stay." The Leah E. Oliver Memorial Scholarship Fund sends Dartmouth High School students to college. Verified

Of Westport Point. Nineteen years with American Airlines, seventeen of them based in New York and two in Boston. She was working the first plane to leave Logan that morning. She left her husband John, her son Leland, and her daughter Blakeslee. Verified

Born and raised in Taunton. Monsignor James Coyle High School, class of 1964, with honors, then Northeastern in 1969 for a degree in electrical engineering. He was a Raytheon executive on his way to the company's West Coast facility. Every year since, the Peter A. Gay Memorial Scholarship sends a thousand dollars to a graduating senior from a Diocese of Fall River high school, Bishop Feehan, Bishop Stang, or St. John Paul II, who is going on to study engineering. A South Coast teenager is studying engineering this fall because of him. Verified Sources differ on whether his title was plant manager or vice president

Superior of the Holy Cross residence in North Dartmouth. A Navy veteran of the Second World War, ordained in 1955, a teacher of religion, and on that morning a man in transit to a new posting as a chaplain. Of his long ministry a colleague said, "if he erred, it was always on the side of compassion." A votive candle is lit for him every September 11 at St. Joseph's Center in Valatie, New York. We found no memorial to him on the South Coast. Corroborated

Attleboro High School 1994, Bryant College 1998, graduate work at Providence College. She administered retirement plans at Putnam Investments in Norwood. She was traveling with her boyfriend, Shawn Nassaney of Pawtucket. Her parents endowed a memorial scholarship for students of the Kennedy Donovan Center and have given out more than a dozen of them. Verified One outlet gives her age as 24 and her town as North Attleboro; the official list and the Boston Globe give 25 and Attleboro

The Commonwealth's official 9/11 memorial is on the South Coast. It stands at Battleship Cove in Fall River, three bronze plaques carrying the names of Massachusetts residents killed in the attacks, on ground broken September 11, 2004 under a bill approved by Acting Governor Jane Swift on July 5, 2002. This morning a Rite of Reflection was held there from 8:30, with honor guards, a twenty-one gun salute from the USS Massachusetts, and a dove release. Ceremonies were also held today in Dartmouth, Acushnet, Westport, Somerset, Taunton, Attleboro, and Fairhaven. Verified

Sources: the National September 11 Memorial official names list, which confirmed every name and panel above; Dartmouth Week, September 10, 2021; the Boston Globe's archived victim lists for Flights 11 and 175; the Diocese of Fall River FACE scholarship page; The Evangelist, April 6, 2018; Patch Attleboro, September 7, 2011; Voices Center for Resilience; WBSM, 2016 and 2018; battleshipcove.org; Fairhaven Neighborhood News, September 9, 2026.

Chapter IV

How many were LGBTQ+

Nobody knows. Nobody can know. And the reason nobody can know is the first thing this exhibit has to teach.

No government body has ever published a count of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people killed on September 11, because no authority that counted the dead ever recorded it.

We checked rather than assumed. The September 11th Victim Compensation Fund publishes a monthly statistical report. We pulled the edition covering claims through August 31, 2026 and searched its full text. It breaks its claims out by responder and survivor, by personal injury and death, by determination, by dollars awarded, by month of registration, by approval and denial, and by geography. The words sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, domestic partnership, and LGBT do not appear anywhere in it. Verified absence

The National September 11 Memorial and Museum publishes 2,983 names and the bronze panel each one sits on. It publishes no demographic data of any kind beyond names and panel locations. Verified absence

There is a reason the question was never asked, and it is not indifference. The Special Master of the compensation fund, Kenneth Feinberg, tied eligibility to state probate law, and in 2001 no state in the country recognized a same-sex relationship. Asked about same-sex partners, he said this:

So the counting was left to journalists. Between 2001 and 2026, twelve published lists named LGBTQ+ victims. Taken together they name 24 adults, plus the three-year-old son of a same-sex couple, plus one firefighter recorded only as "Eddie," the partner of an NYPD detective, whose surname no list carries.

Two of those lists tell you plainly what they are. Will Kohler wrote in 2014: "Unfortunately, there is no way to know the exact number of LGBT victims," and, of his own roster, "The above list of LGBT lives lost on 9/11 is by no means complete." Michael Strangeways wrote in 2018 that "there is a no way to know exactly how many gay and queer lives were taken that day, but we do know the names of many." Verified

And The Advocate's 2015 list, the one everyone quotes, ends with the sentence that should govern this whole chapter:

Look at how the known names were found, and the undercount becomes obvious. Almost every one surfaced because a surviving partner came forward, usually while fighting an airline, an insurer, or a state compensation board, and was willing to be named in public while doing it. That method finds the partnered and the out. It cannot find anyone who was single. It cannot find anyone who was closeted. It cannot find anyone whose family chose silence, and in 2001 a great many families did.

So the honest statement, and the one this museum will stand behind, is this. At least twenty-four LGBTQ+ people killed on September 11 have been publicly named. The real number is higher. It cannot now be established, and the reason it cannot is that the people doing the counting never thought to ask, and the people who could have answered had every reason not to volunteer.

Sources: September 11th Victim Compensation Fund monthly program statistics through August 31, 2026, read in full; 911memorial.org names pages; The Advocate, May 29, 2015 and September 11, 2018; the Washington Blade archive of its September 2006 roundup, and its 2011, 2021 and 2026 pieces; LGBTQ Nation and Bilerico, September 11, 2014 and 2019; Seattle Gay Scene, September 11, 2018; Gay Express, September 11, 2026; OUT FRONT, September 11, 2021; Trudy Ring writing on Karen Ocamb's Substack, September 10, 2026. Preservation note: back2stonewall.com, the root of the longest name list, now refuses all requests. The 2014 Bilerico republication is the surviving copy and this museum has recorded its address.

Chapter V · In memoriam

The ones we can name

Here they are: twenty-four adults named as lesbian, gay, or bisexual across the published record, and the three-year-old son of two of them. Select a name to read who they were, who they loved, and what happened to the person they left. Each card carries its own evidence, including where that evidence is thin.

• Father Mychal F. Judge68

  Franciscan friar and chaplain to the New York City Fire Department. Killed in the North Tower lobby when the South Tower fell. His was the first certified death of the day. He ran an AIDS ministry at St. Francis of Assisi when few Catholic priests would, and belonged to Dignity, the Catholic LGBTQ+ group. Inside the cover of his journal he had written: "Irish, Catholic, Democrat, priest, gay and more."

  Panel S-18. See Chapter VI. Sources: NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project; Michael Daly, The Book of Mychal; The Advocate, September 11, 2026.

• Mark Kendall Bingham31

  Public relations executive, rugby player, and one of the passengers who fought back aboard United Flight 93. Six foot four, a national champion at California, and a founding presence in the San Francisco Fog, one of the first gay rugby clubs. He called his mother from the plane. Partner Paul Holm.

  Panel S-67 and the Wall of Names at Shanksville. See Chapter VII.

• David M. Charlebois39

  First officer of American Airlines Flight 77. Born in Morocco, raised in Paris and Arlington, flying commercially since 1988. He lived near Dupont Circle in Washington with his partner Tom Hay, whom he met in 1988, and their border collie Chance. He was an early member of the National Gay Pilots Association and pressed quietly for gay employees' rights inside his airline. The association's David M. Charlebois Memorial Scholarship trains pilots in his name.

  Pentagon Memorial. Sources: pentagonmemorial.org; Washington Post, 2001; American Airlines newsroom, 2021; ngpa.org.

• ♥Ronald L. Gamboa33

  Managed a Gap store in Santa Monica. He was on United Flight 175 out of Boston with his partner Dan Brandhorst and their son David, coming home from a New England visit. Their son called him "daddy." They helped found the Pop Luck Club, one of the earliest support organizations for gay fathers.

  Panel S-4, beside his family. Sources: 911memorial.org family page and blog.

• ♥Daniel Raymond Brandhorst41

  An attorney and accountant with PricewaterhouseCoopers. Their son David was born one day after his birthday, with both fathers in the delivery room. David called him "papa." New York State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal remembered in 2023: "Daniel handed me the keys to my first apartment in NYC."

  Panel S-4. Sources give his age as 41 or 42, and his work as accountant, lawyer, or attorney

• ♥David Reed Gamboa Brandhorst3

  Three years old, welcomed into his family in 1998. The playground plaque at West Hollywood Park carries what he used to say: "five more minutes Daddy!" The three of them are inscribed together on the memorial in New York, at their family's request.

  Panel S-4. The Washington Blade's 2021 and 2026 pieces place this family on Flight 93. Nine other sources, including the Blade's own 2011 archive and the 9/11 Memorial, place them correctly on United 175.

• Carol Ann Flyzik40

  Of Plaistow, New Hampshire, flying out of Boston on American Flight 11 to demonstrate software for Meditech, the Massachusetts company she worked for. Partner of twelve to thirteen years to Nancy Walsh, and stepmother to Walsh's three children. When Walsh called the airline that morning she was refused information, because she was not family. A granite memorial carrying her name stands outside Plaistow Town Hall.

  Sources: Eagle-Tribune, September 12, 2001; Union Leader, 2011; GLAD case record. Some sources describe her as a registered nurse, others give only the Meditech role

• Graham Andrew Berkeley37

  Born in Nottinghamshire, living in Boston, a director at Compuware, and a violinist. He had just won permanent residency in June 2001 and was preparing to move to New York. He was on United Flight 175. His partner Tim Fristoe lived in Provincetown; they had met that summer over the Fourth of July. Fristoe said of his last call from the gate that it "was just one aspect of his intensely romantic personality." His parents: "We watched our child die. He was a brilliant boy, a brilliant man."

  Panel S-3. Sources: Boston Globe archived list; London Remembers; The Advocate, 2018.

• Jeffrey Dwayne Collman41

  A flight attendant on American Flight 11 out of Boston. He had volunteered to work the extra trip. His partner of eleven years, Keith Bradkowski, a registered nurse, spent the next two years fighting for recognition and then testified before the United States Senate about it. American Airlines paid its death benefit to Collman's parents. The airline later changed its domestic partner policy.

  Panel N-74. See Chapters VIII and IX. Sources: Bradkowski's Senate testimony, September 4, 2003; California Senate floor analysis of AB 2216.

• Sheila M. S. Hein51

  Born in Springfield, Massachusetts. A civilian employee of the United States Army, killed inside the Pentagon. She enlisted in the Navy out of high school and served ten years as a photographer, then earned her bachelor's degree in 1998 after twenty years of study in pieces. Partner of seventeen or eighteen years to Peggy Neff; they spent seven years renovating their house together. When rescue workers recovered her remains, she was wearing a gold band that Neff had given her.

  Panel S-75 and a bench at the Pentagon Memorial. She was inside the building. Several lists carelessly turn her into a passenger on Flight 77. She was not.

• Eugene Clark47

  Administrative assistant at Aon, on the 102nd floor of the South Tower. Roberta Flack had been his music teacher in Washington in the 1960s. His partner of thirteen years, Larry Courtney, said he observed the three D's: dance, drama and divas. He turned a ten-by-twenty-four foot concrete slab on a 42nd Street rooftop into a garden of hibiscus, geraniums, miniature cedars and hollyhocks, and their guests watched the ball drop from it every New Year's Eve. Courtney's daughter Heather marched in Washington in 1993 carrying a sign that read "I'm proud of my gay dad and my new step-queen."

  Panel S-56. Source: New York Times, Portraits of Grief, November 18, 2001. See Chapter X for Courtney's case.

• Wesley Mercer70

  Vice president of corporate security for Morgan Stanley, in the South Tower. One of eleven children. Twenty-five years in the Army, one tour in Korea and two in Vietnam, retiring as a Sergeant First Class. He wore a sports jacket to walk the dog. He owned neither sneakers nor jeans. On September 11 he went back up through Morgan Stanley's twenty-two floors with Rick Rescorla to make sure they were clear; the company had already steered some 3,700 employees out. His partner Bill Randolph, a church organist, on hearing he had gone back: "It put a hole in my stomach. But I knew that's what he would have done."

  Panel S-47. Buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Source: New York Times, Portraits of Grief, October 1, 2001. They had lived together in Harlem for twenty-six years.

• Patricia Ann McAneney50

  Insurance professional at Guy Carpenter on the 94th floor of the North Tower, and the fire marshal for her floor. The Times profile opened: "As a little girl, Patricia McAneney was rarely without her toy fireman's hat. She grew up honest and conscientious, embodying the firefighter ideal." Her partner of nearly twenty years, Margaret Cruz, said of that honesty: "If one of us committed a crime, Pat would be the last person we could go to because she would turn you in." Teased about it, she allowed that she might give Cruz a few hours' head start.

  Panel N-8. Source: New York Times, Portraits of Grief, December 2, 2001. What happened to Cruz afterward is in Chapter XI.

• Luke A. Dudek50

  Food and beverage controller at Windows on the World, on the 106th and 107th floors. He had a knack for numbers and a love of good wine; when his glass was empty he would tell the waiter "my tide is out." His real joy was Coqui Designs, the flower business he ran with his partner of twenty years, George A. Cuellar, who did the designing while Dudek kept the books and made weekend deliveries. "I called him the core of the apple," Cuellar said. After fifteen years of renting they had bought their own building that May and spent the summer renovating it. Dudek gave up a week of vacation to finish the work. September 11 was his first day back.

  Panel N-70. Source: New York Times, Portraits of Grief, October 13, 2001. All 73 Windows on the World staff present that morning were killed.

• Michael A. Lepore39

  A project analyst at Marsh and McLennan. He and his partner of eighteen years, David O'Leary, lived in a Yonkers house designed by Edgar Tafel, an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright, with windows opening onto a terraced garden, mission furniture, and three cocker spaniels. After September 11 his friends came and pruned the rosebushes and planted bulbs for the spring. O'Leary: "We used to say nothing bad could ever happen here. And it's still the most important thing. It's where I see most of Michael." His last perfect memory was a late August day with both families there and the garden in bloom: "Everything was so perfect in our lives. Just so perfect."

  Panel N-13. His published obituary names O'Leary directly as "devoted longtime partner," which makes this the most firmly documented relationship in the roster.

• John Richard Keohane41

  A lawyer for Zurich American Insurance at One Liberty Plaza, across from the towers. He got out safely, having helped a coworker with multiple sclerosis escape, and met his partner Michael Lyons three blocks away. Then he stopped to call his mother in California to tell her he was all right. She heard a noise, he said a third plane had hit a building, and the line went dead. He was killed in the street by falling debris as the second tower came down. A priest who found him minutes later wrote to the family. He and his mother vacationed together every year; her bags were packed to meet him in Florida that Saturday.

  Panel S-63. Several lists place him inside the South Tower. He was in the street, and had already escaped. What happened to Michael Lyons is in Chapter XI.

• Pamela J. Boyce43

  Assistant vice president of accounting at Carr Futures, 92nd floor, North Tower, and still taking classes while working full time. A competitive disco dancer. People sometimes mistook her directness for abrasiveness and she declined to change. To a friend grieving too long, she would say "Stop. It's not what they would want." Of herself she said: "I'm not afraid to die because I know where I am going is beautiful." One of her happiest days was coaching her sister through the birth of her niece; she was so anxious in the delivery room she had to find a mark on the baby's ear to be sure they had the right one.

  Panel N-58. Partner: Catherine Anello. Source: New York Times, Portraits of Grief. Sources give the length of their relationship as six and a half years or nearly thirteen. We print no number.

• Renee Barrett-Arjune41

  An accountant at Cantor Fitzgerald in the North Tower, of Irvington, New Jersey. She escaped the building and died of her burns on October 18, 2001, five weeks later. Partner Enez Cooper. She left a son, Eddie.

  Corroborated across the Advocate and Blade lineages

• Waleska Martinez37

  A supervisory computer specialist for the United States Census Bureau, aboard United Flight 93. Born in Puerto Rico, she graduated first in her class at the University of Puerto Rico in 1986, the first in her family to finish college, and taught computer science before moving to New York in 1987. Her regional director called her "a manager's dream." Off the clock she cooked rice and beans for crowds, danced at concerts until she dropped, played tennis and softball, and rooted for the Yankees.

  Wall of Names, Shanksville. Her inclusion rests on attribution, not on our own assertion. Voices Center for Resilience records that she was in a long-term partnership with Angela Lopez, and The Advocate names Lopez as her partner. The 2001 newspaper profile called Lopez her "roommate." The National Park Service biography mentions no partner at all. We name her because a reputable source does, and we show you the whole of that record rather than the convenient part of it.

• J. Joseph Ferguson39

  Of the National Geographic Society, aboard American Airlines Flight 77 when it struck the Pentagon. He was traveling on a Geographic education program.

  Named on six lists across two lineages. Corroborated Also appears as James Joe Ferguson.

• Catherine T. Smith44

  Of Marsh and McLennan in the North Tower. Partner of six years, Elba Cedeno.

  Sources place her on the 92nd floor or the 97th. Marsh occupied floors 93 to 100, which favors the 97th, but one source is internally inconsistent and we have not resolved it.

• William Anthony Karnes37

  Of Marsh and McLennan, North Tower. Partner John Winter.

  Named on three lists across two lineages The record we could reach holds little more than this, and we would rather show a short card than pad one.

• Philip Paul Ognibene39

  A bond trader at Keefe, Bruyette and Woods on the 89th floor of the South Tower. Known to friends as Roxy Eddie.

  Named on four lists One widely copied list misspells his firm as Keefe, Brunette and Woods.

• Seamus L. O'Neal

  Killed at the World Trade Center. Partner Tom Miller.

  Three lists, two lineages, and no age or workplace we could confirm. We name him because the record names him, and we mark the rest as missing rather than fill it in.

• Andrew LaCorte

  Killed in the North Tower when the first plane struck. Described as having no partner at the time, and as remembered and missed by many friends and family.

  He appears on ONE list only, and curiously not on the list that list credits as its source. We include him rather than erase him, and we mark him as unconfirmed. Verifying or correcting this entry is an open piece of work.

Chapter VI

North Tower lobby · about 9:59 a.m.

Victim 0001

The first death certified on September 11 belonged to a Franciscan friar who had spent the previous decade burying gay men that other priests would not bury.

Robert Emmett Judge was born in Brooklyn in May 1933, entered the Order of Friars Minor in 1954, and was ordained in 1961. From 1986 he lived in the friary on West 31st Street, in a room facing the street. From 1992 he was a chaplain to the New York City Fire Department, and the city's own record of him says he served in that role "until the very moment of his death."

He went to the North Tower with the firefighters. He was killed in the lobby by debris when the South Tower came down. An NYPD lieutenant gave him last rites. Five men carried his body out through the dust, two firefighters, a police lieutenant, an emergency worker, and a civilian from Goldman Sachs, and a Reuters photographer named Shannon Stapleton made the picture that became one of the most reproduced images of the day. Stapleton has said of it: "It's been called the modern-day Pieta."

The medical examiner marked his body DM0001-01. DM stands for Disaster Manhattan. He was the first certified casualty, and he is still called Victim 0001 in the Fire Department's own communications twenty-five years later. Verified

He told very few people while he was alive. The NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project puts it exactly: he "only told his close friends, friars he felt he could trust, and the fire commissioner that he was gay."

What he did instead of saying it was work. When the archdiocese barred a Manhattan parish from hosting the Mass of Dignity, the Catholic LGBTQ+ group, Judge invited the group to St. Francis of Assisi, which lay outside diocesan control. He answered a classified advertisement in OutWeek to join the parish AIDS ministry, and later ran it. He connected with St. Clare's Hospital, which had opened the city's first AIDS ward. He said funeral Masses for gay men who died of AIDS at a time when many priests would not, and he traveled to do it. One friend who knew him told NBC in 2021 that he would "get on an airplane and fly out to do a funeral in Ohio." Another, Brian Carroll, said simply: "Mike taught me how to come out as a young man."

He marched in the New York City Pride march in 1993, and in the first St. Pat's for All parade in Queens in 2000.

The documentation that he was gay does not rest on one claim. Michael Daly's 2008 biography The Book of Mychal drew on his diaries and reported both his sexuality and a long relationship with a nurse. Brendan Fay, who knew him and co-produced the 2006 documentary Saint of 9/11, has spoken about it for two decades: "He wasn't a flag-waver, but he definitely pushed boundaries." Francis DeBernardo published a biography in 2023. The Jesuit-affiliated outlet Outreach summarized the basis this year as "corroboration of many people to whom Judge had come out, his personal journals and his active participation in the gay community."

His funeral was on September 15, 2001, at St. Francis of Assisi. Roughly three thousand people came, including former President Bill Clinton. Cardinal Edward Egan presided. In December Mayor Giuliani signed the bill that made the block of West 31st Street where he had lived Father Mychal F. Judge Street.

He was also the reason a federal law changed, and that story is in Chapter X.

Twenty-five years on, there is still no formal cause for his canonization. A Rome-based priest, Luis Escalante, has been gathering testimony since roughly 2017, when Pope Francis created a pathway for those who offer their lives for others, and New Ways Ministry supplied about twenty-five names of people willing to testify. Neither the Franciscans nor the Archdiocese of New York has agreed to sponsor a cause. In 2021 the Franciscan provincial said: "We leave it to our brothers in the generations to come to inquire about sainthood." Verified as of September 11, 2026

What exists instead is a walk. On the Sunday before each anniversary, people retrace about three miles from St. Francis of Assisi down Seventh Avenue. It was started by an NYPD detective, Steven McDonald, and his wife Patti Ann, and is now carried on by their son Conor. It was held again four days ago.

Sources: City of New York, Office of the Mayor, press release 392-01, December 10, 2001; NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project; Slate, September 11, 2017; The Advocate, September 11, 2026; Outreach, September 10, 2026; NBC News, September 11, 2021; America Magazine, September 9, 2021; the Globe and Mail on the Stapleton photograph, September 1, 2011; FDNY release, August 27, 2026; friars.us; NY1, September 7, 2026. Corrected here: his fire helmet and coat are held by the New York City Fire Museum, not by the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, which holds his prayer bench.

Chapter VII

United Flight 93 · 9:44 a.m., the call

The man in seat 4D

Mark Bingham overslept, boarded last, and sat in first class next to Tom Burnett. Forty minutes later he called his mother to tell her the plane had been taken.

He was thirty-one. He ran a public relations firm. He had played rugby at the University of California, where he was a member of the 1991 national championship side, and he was one of the early players for the San Francisco Fog, a gay rugby club founded in 2000. He helped start the Gotham Knights in New York the following year. He was six foot four, or six foot five, depending on which account you read, and his teammates called him Bear Trap.

At 9:44 in the morning he reached his mother, Alice Hoagland, in California. The call lasted about three minutes before it cut off. He told her the plane had been hijacked by men who said they had a bomb, and he told her he loved her. She tried to call back and could not get through. She left two voicemails telling him to do everything he could to overpower them.

The 9/11 Commission established that the hijacking of Flight 93 began at 9:28, that at least ten passengers and two crew members made calls, that the passenger assault began at 9:57, and that the plane came down at 10:03:11 near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, about twenty minutes' flying time from Washington. The Commission concluded the target was "the Capitol or the White House."

Eleven days later, on September 22, 2001, about five hundred people gathered at Wheeler Hall on the Berkeley campus, fifteen to twenty of them his former teammates. Senator John McCain, whom Bingham had supported in 2000, gave the eulogy.

Bingham had written something himself that year, to the members of his new club, and it is the sentence this exhibit would keep if it could keep only one:

In 2002 his teammates founded a tournament in his name. What it became is in Chapter XV.

His mother spent the next nineteen years as an advocate, for aviation security, for LGBTQ+ inclusion in sport, and for the right of 9/11 families to sue Saudi Arabia. She had been a United flight attendant herself. In 2010, during the fight over Don't Ask, Don't Tell, she told Salon she meant to write to McCain, who by then opposed repeal, that "the gay men and women who are in our military deserve better." Alice Hoagland died on December 22, 2020, at seventy-one.

Sources: National Park Service biography of Mark Bingham; 9/11 Commission Report, Chapter 1 and note 80; San Francisco Chronicle, September 8, 2026; ABC News; CBS and the Associated Press, January 22, 2021; Salon, December 3, 2010; California Golden Bears athletics; fogrugby.com; Star Observer, January 22, 2021. Flagged: sources differ on his height and on whether he founded the Fog or joined shortly after its founding. We give both rather than pick.

Chapter VIII

The Boston flights

Four of the people on this exhibit's wall boarded at Logan, and a fifth worked the cabin. This is the part of the story that belongs to us.

American Airlines Flight 11, 7:59 a.m.

Carol Ann Flyzik, forty, of Plaistow, New Hampshire, was flying to Los Angeles to demonstrate software for Meditech, the Massachusetts health records company in Westwood. Her partner of twelve or thirteen years was Nancy Walsh. Flyzik was stepmother to Walsh's three children, and the Times profile of her was headed "A Patient Stepmother."

When Walsh telephoned American Airlines that morning, the airline would not speak to her. GLAD, the Boston legal organization that later took her case, recorded the reason without ornament: "the airline wouldn't talk to Nancy, saying they would only give information to family members." Verified

Jeffrey Dwayne Collman, forty-one, was a flight attendant on the same aircraft. He had volunteered to work the extra trip. His partner of eleven years, Keith Bradkowski, a registered nurse, received a call from the airline telling him his partner was gone, and then spent two years discovering what that call did and did not entitle him to.

Dianne Bullis Snyder, forty-two, of Westport Point on the South Coast, was also working that cabin. No source identifies her as LGBTQ+, and we do not suggest otherwise. She is in this exhibit because she was ours, and she is in this chapter because she and Collman were crew on the same plane.

United Airlines Flight 175, 8:14 a.m.

Graham Andrew Berkeley, thirty-seven, a Boston resident born in Nottinghamshire, a violinist, a director at Compuware, had won his permanent residency that June and was preparing to move to New York. His partner Tim Fristoe lived in Provincetown. They had met that summer over the Fourth of July. Fristoe later described Berkeley's last call from the gate as "just one aspect of his intensely romantic personality." Berkeley's parents said afterward: "We watched our child die. He was a brilliant boy, a brilliant man."

Also aboard, in row after row of ordinary travel, were Ronald Gamboa, thirty-three, Dan Brandhorst, forty-one, and their three-year-old son David, flying home to Los Angeles after a New England visit. The 9/11 Memorial's own account says they had been visiting family on Cape Cod. Another account by a family friend says Maine and Massachusetts. The Advocate says they were returning from an annual trip to Provincetown. All three versions put a gay family's summer vacation in New England at the start of that flight, and we cannot tell you which is right.

Two South Coast people were on that plane as well: Rev. Francis Grogan of North Dartmouth and Lynn Goodchild of Attleboro, traveling with her boyfriend Shawn Nassaney.

The memorial in New York does not arrange its names alphabetically. It arranges them by what it calls meaningful adjacencies: where people were, whom they worked beside, and whom their families asked that they be placed next to. More than twelve hundred such requests were made and honored.

Hold that beside the rest of this exhibit. In 2011, a memorial asked families a simple question, who belonged next to whom, and then carved the answer into bronze. In 2001, an airline asked a narrower question, who counts as family, and hung up the phone. The stone was more generous than the statute, and it was the families, not the lawyers, who were asked.

Sources: 9/11 Commission Report, Chapter 1; GLAD case record "In re Nancy Walsh"; Eagle-Tribune, September 12, 2001; the Boston Globe's archived flight manifests; The Advocate, 2015 and 2018; 911memorial.org family page, blog, and about-the-memorial pages. Flagged and unresolved: where the Gamboa Brandhorst family had been visiting, and whether Carol Flyzik was a nurse as well as a Meditech supervisor.

Chapter IX

We only speak to family

The discrimination did not begin with a benefits form. It began within the hour, on the telephone, while the towers were still standing.

Nancy Walsh called American Airlines to ask about Carol Flyzik and was told the airline would only give information to family members. That is the first thing that happened to a surviving same-sex partner on September 11, 2001, and it is documented by the legal organization that later represented her.

What followed had a pattern, and the pattern was not malice so much as machinery. Every system that moved money or information after the attacks ran on a definition of family, and in 2001 not one of those definitions included these couples. No state in the United States recognized a same-sex relationship. There was no marriage anywhere, no civil union outside Vermont, and the federal Defense of Marriage Act had been law for five years.

So the partners discovered the machinery one gate at a time.

A death certificate. Keith Bradkowski told the Senate: "With no marriage license to prove our relationship existed, even something as fundamental as obtaining his death certificate became a monumental task." Nancy Walsh needed a lawyer to get one.

The employer's death benefit. American Airlines paid its twenty-five thousand dollar September 11 compensation for Jeffrey Collman to his parents as legal next of kin, along with his final paychecks and his credit union balance. The California Senate's own analysis of the bill that followed put it plainly: "American Airlines refused to recognize the surviving domestic partner, Mr. Bradkowski, for purposes of employee death benefits provided to heirs." Verified, a state legislative document

The estate. Several of these men and women died without wills, which in 2001 meant everything passed to blood relatives. Bradkowski described "huge anxiety about maintaining the home we shared together." Nancy Walsh had no automatic right to administer Flyzik's estate or to go on living in their house. Both couples had done what the law allowed them to do, registering as domestic partners at work and naming each other as insurance and retirement beneficiaries. It was not enough, because none of it was a marriage license.

State crime victim compensation. Peggy Neff applied to Virginia's Criminal Injuries Compensation Fund after Sheila Hein was killed at the Pentagon. Virginia limited compensation to spouses, parents, grandparents, siblings and children. The letter she received said: "We regret to inform you that you are not eligible to file a claim for benefits under the Virginia Victims of Crime Act." Had Hein been killed a few hundred miles north, in New York, Neff would have qualified.

Workers' compensation. Larry Courtney filed with the New York State Workers' Compensation Board for the spousal death benefit owed after Eugene Clark was killed at work. Insurers contested it on the ground that a same-sex domestic partner is not a spouse. His hearing was April 23, 2002.

The federal fund. The September 11th Victim Compensation Fund deferred to state probate law on who could claim. Its Final Report says so directly: "Since few states recognize the claim of a fiancee or a domestic partner, a domestic partner or fiancee could ordinarily only receive an award from the Fund if he or she was provided for in the decedent's will, or was financially dependent upon the decedent." And in a footnote: "if the state wrongful death law did not recognize domestic partners or fiancees as distributees, the Fund could not mandate that a portion of the economic award be allocated to them." Verified, read from the Special Master's Final Report

Two years later, Keith Bradkowski sat before a subcommittee of the United States Senate Judiciary Committee at a hearing titled "What Is Needed to Defend the Bipartisan Defense of Marriage Act of 1996," and said this on the record:

Sources: GLAD case record "In re Nancy Walsh"; Keith Bradkowski's written testimony filed with the Senate Judiciary Committee and the hearing transcript, S. Hrg. 108-813, September 4, 2003; California Senate floor analysis of AB 2216, August 2002; Women's eNews, January 20, 2002; Final Report of the Special Master for the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, pages 5, 27, 34, 49, 59 and note 177; Lambda Legal case record for Larry Courtney; SFGate, April 21, 2002.

Chapter X

The ledger of repair

Between December 2001 and 2006, a set of institutions changed their rules one at a time. Not one of them changed because of a court order. They changed because grieving people made themselves public.

The Mychal Judge Act, read closely

The law named for the chaplain in Chapter VI is the one people mean when they say 9/11 produced the first federal benefit for same-sex couples. It is worth reading what it actually says, because the wording is the whole point.

The statute never uses the words same-sex. It never uses the words domestic partner. What it does is stop requiring that the survivor be a spouse or a child, and let a fallen officer's own written choice of beneficiary decide. A gay firefighter could not marry his partner in 2002, but he could name him on a form, and after June 24, 2002 that form counted.

The Washington Blade has called it the first time the federal government extended an equal benefit to same-sex couples. The historian Joanne Meyerowitz puts it the same way: "The act was the first time any federal benefit was offered to same-sex partners." No government source makes that claim, so we attribute it rather than assert it. Corroborated, and attributed

Sources: Public Law 107-196 as published by the Government Publishing Office; congress.gov records for S. 2431 and H.R. 3297; the White House statement of June 24, 2002; New York State Bar Association special committee report, 2004, pages 240 to 241, on Executive Order 113.30; New York Workers' Compensation Law section 4 as it reads today; the Final Report of the Special Master, page 49; CNN, August 21, 2002; the Washington Blade, September 8, 2011; the Advocate, January 24, 2003 and May 7, 2004; Cruz v. McAneney, 31 A.D.3d 54 (2d Dept. 2006).

Chapter XI

What was still refused

A ledger of repairs can read like a story that ends well. This chapter is here so that it does not.

The remedy had a date on it

Joe Lopes was a flight attendant. He held a master's degree in social work from Columbia and preferred flying. He was the partner of Bill Valentine for twenty-one years; they met in San Francisco in 1980 and their second date was a walk on the beach. He was killed on American Airlines Flight 587, which crashed in Belle Harbor, Queens, on November 12, 2001, sixty-two days after the attacks. He had asked for that day off and been refused.

Lambda Legal brought his case and Larry Courtney's together, and argued them as one thing: "Eugene Clark and Joe Lopes both died on the job. They paid the same taxes and insurance premiums as their co-workers, and it's only fair that their closest family members, their life partners, get support as spouses."

When New York amended its workers' compensation law in August 2002, the amendment applied, in the statute's own words, "only to cases in which the employee's death occurred as a result of the terrorist attacks that occurred on September eleven, two thousand one." Bill Valentine was left out on the face of the law. Joe Tarver of the Empire State Pride Agenda said at the time: "This is a great first step, but we need to go the next step. We shouldn't be separating some people out, saying you can receive and others can't." Verified, the statute reads this way today

Valentine said, years later: "I don't think an hour goes by when I'm not thinking of Joe in some way."

The award that never reached her

Patricia McAneney died intestate and had never formally registered a domestic partnership. Her brother filed the compensation claim as her personal representative. The fund first approved $278,087.42, calculated as though she were single. After Margaret Cruz, her partner of nearly twenty years, filed a statement of financial interest, the fund offered to raise the award by $253,454, to $531,541.42, on the condition that the brother agree in writing to pass the increase to Cruz.

He did not agree. He collected the full $531,541.42 and kept it. Cruz, who had received roughly eighty thousand dollars from state and charitable sources, sued, and in 2006 the Appellate Division held that her claims could proceed. Verified, reported decision

The Special Master's own report explains why the fund could not simply direct the money: it was bound to state law, and state law did not see her.

The one the law could not have fixed

Michael J. Lyons of Jersey City had multiple sclerosis and was not working. On September 11 he stood three blocks from One Liberty Plaza with his partner of seventeen years, John Keohane, who had just escaped the building and stopped to call his mother. Lyons watched him die when the second tower fell, and was separated from him in the dark.

The Human Rights Campaign and the Empire State Pride Agenda tried to help him apply for relief. He was slow to file and his money was running out. On March 1, 2002, his forty-first birthday, Michael Lyons took his own life. Advocates at the time identified it as the first known suicide of a gay partner of a September 11 victim.

Elizabeth Birch of the Human Rights Campaign said his "psyche was severely damaged because of the drama of seeing John die and being in the proximity of his death and being separated by him." Joe Tarver said Keohane had been "the rudder in his life." Corroborated

No executive order would have reached him. It is here because an exhibit that lists only the victories would be telling a story about laws, and this is a story about people.

The count that the fixes never produced

By the Human Rights Campaign's own estimate, about twenty-two surviving same-sex partners were known to the advocacy groups working on this. In 2011 the Blade reported that at least two of those roughly twenty-two received compensation from the federal fund. The Family Fund's total, spread across those it could find, came to nearly $17,315 each.

And on the twenty-fifth anniversary, with the compensation fund now authorized to take claims until October 1, 2090 and more than $18.5 billion awarded to more than 77,000 people, the Washington Blade reported that eligibility for same-sex partners remains, in its word, unclear. Verified, fund figures through August 31, 2026

Sources: NBC News on Flight 587; CNN, August 21, 2002; New York Workers' Compensation Law section 4; Lambda Legal case record; Cruz v. McAneney, 31 A.D.3d 54 (2d Dept. 2006); the Final Report of the Special Master; Fridae and the Washington Blade archive on Michael Lyons; LGBTQ Nation, September 11, 2011 and 2019; the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund monthly report through August 31, 2026; the Washington Blade, September 11, 2026.

Chapter XII

Thursday, September 13, 2001 · two days after

Blamed from a pulpit

While the fires were still burning, a televised preacher told a national audience that gay and lesbian people had helped make it happen.

We print what was said, in full and unedited. Softening it would be a kind of protection nobody involved asked for, and it would hide the fact that this was broadcast, in those words, while people were still being pulled out of the rubble.

The host's reply, on air, was: "Well, I totally concur, and the problem is we have adopted that agenda at the highest levels of our government." Falwell also said that God "continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve." Verified

The White House called the remarks inappropriate, and said the president did not share those views. We have not been able to establish which spokesperson said it, so we do not attach a name to it. Corroborated, speaker unidentified

Falwell apologized the next day, by telephone, to CNN: "I would never blame any human being except the terrorists, and if I left that impression with gays or lesbians or anyone else, I apologize." In the same period he described his statement as theological rather than legal. A written apology followed, reported on September 18: "In the midst of the shock and mourning of a dark week for America, I made a statement that I should not have made and which I sincerely regret." Verified

Robertson's network put out a statement calling Falwell's remarks "severe and harsh in tone and, frankly, not fully understood" by the host and his co-hosts. Verified

Years later Falwell described his own remarks inaccurately in a television interview, claiming he had also blamed "a sleeping church." The transcript shows he did not. Corroborated

Sources: Snopes fact-check and Wikiquote reproductions of the September 13, 2001 broadcast; Christianity Today's September 2001 weblog and its September 2026 retrospective; CNN, September 14, 2001; CBS News, September 18, 2001; LifeSiteNews, September 18, 2001; Democracy Now, September 27, 2001; Media Matters on the later misdescription. Flagged: the named White House spokesperson and the exact issuance date of the written apology could not be established.

Chapter XIII

Fired for the skill they needed

In the year after the attacks, the Army discharged nine linguists from its language school for being gay. At least six of them spoke Arabic.

The Defense Language Institute in Monterey trains the military's interpreters. Between October 2001 and September 2002, in the twelve months when the United States needed Arabic speakers more than it had in a generation, nine Army linguists were discharged from it under Don't Ask, Don't Tell. An Army spokesman confirmed the dates and declined to say more. Seven were discharged after telling superiors they were gay. Two were caught together after curfew. Verified

One of them, Alastair Gamble, was twenty-four. He later described what happened in a law journal:

What he said publicly at the time was not about himself.

What the government's own auditors found

In February 2005 the Government Accountability Office published the arithmetic. We use its exact wording, because almost every popular summary of this report gets the categories wrong.

The auditors also priced it. The ten years of discharges cost about $95 million in constant 2004 dollars in recruiting and training alone, and the Marine Corps could not produce an estimate at all. A follow-up report in 2011 found 3,664 more separations between 2004 and 2009, at about $193.3 million. Verified

Other figures circulate and they do not agree with each other. A 2003 report counted 37 Arabic translators discharged over two years. Records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and reported in January 2005 showed 20 Arabic and 6 Farsi linguists discharged between 1998 and 2004. A 2006 wire story about the Arabic linguist Bleu Copas said 55 were proficient in Arabic. We list them separately rather than merge them, because they count different things over different years and nobody has ever reconciled them. Corroborated, mutually inconsistent

Don't Ask, Don't Tell was not repealed until 2011, ten years after the attacks.

Sources: GAO-05-299, published February 23, 2005, read from the PDF, and GAO-11-170, January 20, 2011; CBS News, November 14, 2002; Los Angeles Times, reprinted in the Monterey County Weekly, November 21, 2002; Alastair Gamble, Hofstra Labor and Employment Law Journal, volume 21, 2004; Democracy Now, December 5, 2003; NBC News and Fox News, January 2005; NBC and the Associated Press, July 27, 2006.

Chapter XIV

Papers, bodies, suspicion

The security machinery built after September 11 asked everyone to prove who they were. For trans people that question had no easy answer, and the machine was not built to hear one.

The papers

The REAL ID Act of 2005 set federal standards for state driver's licenses. Its enforcement clause said a federal agency "may not accept, for any official purpose," a license from a state that did not comply, and it defined official purpose to include "boarding federally regulated commercial aircraft."

The law lists nine things a compliant card must carry. The third is four words long: "The person's gender."

It also required states to photograph every identity document an applicant presents, retain those images for at least ten years, and give every other state electronic access to the database. For most people that is a filing rule. For a trans person it means the paperwork of a transition, the court orders and the amended certificates, is scanned and held and shared.

The National Center for Transgender Equality and the Transgender Law Center said so together in 2005, in a joint document:

Their fear was not only exposure but retreat: that "the chilling effect of this legislation" would lead "some states that have had fairly liberal policies to tighten those policies significantly."

When the Department of Homeland Security published its final rule in January 2008, the whole of its engagement with the question was a single exchange. Two states asked how gender should be determined for trans applicants. The Department's answer was that it "will leave the determination of gender up to the States." Verified, read from the Federal Register

The scale of the mismatch is not small. In the 2015 United States Transgender Survey, of 27,715 respondents, only 11 percent said all of their identity documents carried the name and gender they use. More than two thirds said none of them did.

The body

In October 2008 the Transportation Security Administration published the Secure Flight rule, effective that December. It defines the passenger data an airline must submit as full name, date of birth, and gender, and it says an airline "may not submit" that data for anyone who does not provide all three. Asked by commenters to drop the gender field, the agency explained that "many names are gender neutral" and that gender "will reduce the number of false positive watch list matches." Verified

Body scanners began deploying in 2008 and expanded quickly after December 2009. How they worked in practice was reported by ProPublica in 2019:

If the officer chose the pink button and the machine found something in the groin area, it read a body part as a possible threat and raised an alarm. What followed the alarm was a search. ProPublica's review of civil rights complaints filed between January 2016 and April 2019 found that 5 percent of them, 298 complaints, concerned the screening of transgender people.

The United States Transgender Survey had already measured it. Of respondents who passed through airport security in the year before the 2015 survey, 43 percent had a problem related to being transgender. Twenty-nine percent were addressed with the wrong pronouns or title. Seventeen percent were patted down because of a binder or a prosthetic. Fourteen percent were patted down by an officer of the wrong gender. The rate was higher for Middle Eastern respondents, at 56 percent, and higher again for those whose documents did not match.

The agency changed the system on March 31, 2022, Transgender Day of Visibility, announcing gender-neutral screening technology funded with $18.6 million, a checkpoint procedure that no longer weighs gender when validating identification, and an X marker for PreCheck. Verified That announcement has since been removed from the agency's website. We read it from an archived capture.

The suspicion

The rule that created special registration for men from two dozen mostly Muslim countries was published on August 12, 2002. Its effective date, chosen by the government, was September 11, 2002, the first anniversary. Verified, read from the Federal Register

Commenters told the Department of Justice the rule "will further stigmatize innocent Arab and Muslim visitors who have committed no crimes and pose no danger to us." The Department replied that it "strongly disagrees with the premise of the comments that the rule is invidiously discriminatory." The same document acknowledged, in the government's own words, that "a number of Muslim Americans, and others wrongly believed to be Muslims, have been threatened or attacked."

The FBI counted those attacks.

People who were both queer and Muslim lived at the intersection of all of it. Al-Fatiha, the organization for LGBTQ+ Muslims, had been founded after a listserv grew into a retreat, and that first international retreat was held in Boston, in October 1998, with more than forty people from thirteen nationalities. Its founder, Faisal Alam, published an opinion piece four days after the attacks titled "A Time for Serious Understanding and Reflection in the United States," and on October 24, 2001 the organization issued a statement titled "LGBTQ Muslims Express Concern About Infringements on Civil Liberties."

Years later Alam described what the period had done to the conversation: "Islamophobia is seemingly a bigger issue than homophobia, and much more visible to people in regards to our skin color and our names. The sexuality becomes secondary to people." Verified

For binational couples the door simply stayed shut. A bill to let a citizen sponsor a same-sex partner had been introduced in February 2000 by Representative Jerrold Nadler, and it defined a permanent partner as someone committed, interdependent, and "unable to contract with that other individual a marriage cognizable under this Act." Eligibility was written around the impossibility of marriage. Senator Patrick Leahy carried the Senate version in 2003. Neither passed. Binational same-sex couples had no federal path until the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act on June 26, 2013. Verified

Sources: REAL ID Act, Division B of Public Law 109-13, read from the Government Publishing Office compilation; the REAL ID final rule at 73 FR 5272; the joint NCTE and Transgender Law Center document of 2005 and NCTE's analysis of March 13, 2008, both from Internet Archive captures of their own site; the 2015 United States Transgender Survey, chapters 6 and 16; the Secure Flight final rule at 73 FR 64018 and 49 CFR 1560; the Advanced Imaging Technology rulemaking at 78 FR 18287; ProPublica, August 26, 2019; the TSA release of March 31, 2022 from an archived capture; the NSEERS rule at 67 FR 52584 and its termination at 76 FR 23830; FBI Hate Crime Statistics for 2000 and 2001, Table 1 of each; Al-Fatiha's own pages by way of the Internet Archive; OutSmart Magazine, 2013; H.R. 3650 of the 106th Congress and S. 1510 of the 108th; United States v. Windsor, 570 U.S. 744.

Chapter XV

The living memorials

Some memorials are carved. These ones are played, walked, and awarded, and they are still happening this year.

Fifty teams in Brisbane

In 2002 Mark Bingham's teammates founded a tournament and named it for him. The Mark Kendall Bingham Memorial Tournament, the Bingham Cup, began that June in Golden Gate Park with eight teams. The San Francisco Fog won it.

It is now run by International Gay Rugby, which calls it "the largest amateur rugby union tournament in the world." It has been held in London, New York, Dublin, Minneapolis, Manchester, Sydney, Nashville, Amsterdam, Ottawa, and Rome. By Amsterdam in 2018 it drew 74 teams from 20 countries.

Three weeks ago, from August 20 to 23, 2026, the Bingham Cup was played in Brisbane. International Gay Rugby's own report of it opens: "Four days. Fifty teams. One hundred and thirty-four matches." Kings Cross Steelers beat Sydney Convicts twelve to five in the final. The second-tier trophy, the Hoagland Cup, named for Mark's mother, went to the Bristol Bisons after extra time. The next tournament goes to Leeds in 2028. Verified

Eight teams in a San Francisco park have become fifty teams on the other side of the world, twenty-four years later, still carrying his name. And every September 11 the San Francisco Fog gathers at the Pilsner Inn to raise a glass to him and to every member they have lost since.

Three miles down Seventh Avenue

The Father Mychal Judge Walk of Remembrance retraces his last route each year on the Sunday before the anniversary, from St. Francis of Assisi down Seventh Avenue. It was begun by an NYPD detective and his wife, and their son carries it on. It was walked four days ago, on September 7, 2026, with the Fire Commissioner among the walkers. The Franciscans also premiered a documentary about him this month, and the Fire Department released one of its own for the twenty-fifth anniversary, calling him by the name the medical examiner gave him.

The block of West 31st Street where he lived has been Father Mychal F. Judge Street since the bill was signed in December 2001. His archives, more than 850 photographs, letters, awards, and artifacts, are kept at the New York City Fire Museum. In County Leitrim, on land his father owned, a peace garden has stood since 2005, and this year's ceremony there replaced a tree that a storm had damaged.

The scholarships

The David M. Charlebois Memorial Scholarship is given by the National Gay Pilots Association, the organization the first officer of Flight 77 joined in its early years, to a recipient who is "an exemplary model of citizenship to the LGBTQ+ community, their local community, their nation, and their world." It trains pilots.

On the South Coast, the Peter A. Gay Memorial Scholarship sends a Diocese of Fall River graduate to study engineering every year, and the Leah E. Oliver Memorial Scholarship Fund sends Dartmouth High School students to college. Neither of those two was LGBTQ+ as far as any record shows. They are here because this exhibit belongs to a region as much as to a community, and because a scholarship is the most stubborn form a memorial takes: it insists on a future.

What the twenty-fifth anniversary looked like

This morning at the memorial in New York, families read the names, beginning with a moment of silence at 8:46. There were seven moments of silence in the ceremony. The seventh was for those who have died of 9/11-related illness and injury in the years since, which is the memorial's own acknowledgment that the list is not closed. Verified

In Shanksville the forty names were read and the Bells of Remembrance rung. At the Pentagon a wreath was laid, and the day before, ground was broken on a visitor education center. In Boston the 219 were read on the State House steps and a wreath was laid in the Public Garden at one o'clock. At Battleship Cove in Fall River, our own state memorial, there was a rite of reflection with a twenty-one gun salute and a dove release.

Sources: International Gay Rugby's results report from Brisbane, August 2026, and its Bingham Cup pages; fogrugby.com; NY1, September 7, 2026; friars.us, August 31, 2026; FDNY release, August 27, 2026; Irish Times, September 11, 2026; ngpa.org; the Diocese of Fall River FACE scholarship page; Dartmouth Week; 911memorial.org commemoration pages; National Park Service release, August 31, 2026; Massachusetts 9/11 Fund; Fairhaven Neighborhood News, September 9, 2026.

Chapter XVI

Did it change the argument

There is a story people tell in which September 11 helped win marriage equality. It is a tempting story. This chapter is about how much of it we can actually prove.

The timing invites the claim. Goodridge v. Department of Public Health was filed in Massachusetts in April 2001, five months before the attacks. It was decided in November 2003. Massachusetts began issuing licenses in May 2004. The three years in between are exactly the years when surviving same-sex partners were in the newspapers, in state legislatures, and once in front of a Senate subcommittee, explaining what it costs when the law does not know what to call you.

Here is what people who were there have actually said, each one attributed.

Sean Cahill of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, speaking while Goodridge was still pending, called the aftermath "hugely significant" and said it had produced "recognition that same-sex couples are family." The historian Joanne Meyerowitz, writing in 2023, argues that the campaigns for 9/11 partners "rehearsed the kinds of homonormative arguments on loving couples that eventually won recognition for same-sex marriage." That is her scholarly claim and we mark it as hers. Corroborated as attributed opinion

Nancy Walsh, when the federal fund finally compensated her in May 2004, put it in the first person: "I learned the extent of the discrimination our families face in times of crisis because of discriminatory marriage laws."

There is one more link that gets asserted constantly and that we could not source at all. It is often said that the LGBTQ+ community met the 9/11 benefit denials with a particular fury because it had lived through the AIDS years, when partners were kept out of hospital rooms, excluded from funerals, and left off benefit forms. It is an obvious parallel. We searched a dozen retrospectives, the contemporaneous coverage, and the scholarship for a named advocate or scholar making it, and we did not find one.

What we did find was this, from GMHC, about grief rather than about paperwork:

So we place the two facts beside each other and leave the line for you to draw. The community that was told in 2001 that a partner of eighteen years was not next of kin had spent the previous twenty years being told the same thing at hospital doors. We will not put that connection in a scholar's mouth until we find the scholar who said it.

Sources: Washington Blade, September 8, 2011; ABC7 San Francisco, September 11, 2021; Joanne Meyerowitz, "September 11th Revisited: The Troubled History of Victim Compensation," Modern American History, 2023; The Advocate, May 7, 2004 and September 9, 2011; the Congressional Record for July 13 and 14, 2004, checked directly; the Massachusetts 9/11 Fund; the Boston Globe's 2001 archive index. Named as unsourced: the AIDS-era-to-9/11 causal claim, and any Federal Marriage Amendment testimony by Neff or Randolph.

Chapter XVII

How we know, and what is missing

This exhibit was built in one day, on the twenty-fifth anniversary, from ten parallel research passes. Here is what that produced, what it could not reach, and what we corrected along the way.

Corrections we made to the published record

These are errors that appear in reputable outlets and are repeated widely. We checked each one against a primary source and we do not carry any of them.

Facts we did not resolve, and did not hide

• How many names are carved in the Boston Public Garden Unresolved

  One source says 198. Others imply 206 or 219. The Massachusetts 9/11 Fund's own page does not say. Someone should stand in front of the stone and count.

• Catherine Smith's floor, and Pamela Boyce's years with Catherine Anello Unresolved

  Sources conflict and we print no number rather than pick one.

• Where the Gamboa Brandhorst family had been visiting Unresolved

  Cape Cod, Maine and Massachusetts, or Provincetown, depending on the source. All three put them in New England.

• Whether Andrew LaCorte belongs on this wall Unconfirmed

  He appears on one list and not on the list it credits as its source. We include him and mark him, rather than drop a man for the convenience of a tidy roster.

• Eddie's surname Lost

  A New York firefighter, the partner of a police detective, killed that day. No published account carries his name.

• Whether Massachusetts did anything for surviving partners No record found

  New York's governor acted in October 2001. We found nothing comparable here, and we distinguish that from nothing having happened.

What the record does not hold at all

Where our own record is thin

Three archives we could not open would each improve this exhibit. Bay Windows and the Boston Phoenix for September and October 2001, which would tell us what Boston's own LGBTQ+ press said while it was happening. GLAD's own files, which are held at Yale and which scholarship indicates contain material on 9/11 partners. And Nancy Knauer's 2002 Temple Law Review article on surviving same-sex partners, the major scholarly treatment of the whole question, which sits behind two repositories that refused us.

We also have no photographs in this exhibit. That is deliberate rather than lazy. Almost every image from that day is copyrighted, and portraits of those who died belong to families we have not asked. We would rather show you a wall of names than an image we had no right to use.

Method: ten parallel research passes on September 11, 2026, each instructed to prefer primary sources, to quote verbatim, to tag every fact as verified, corroborated, or unverified, and never to state a figure it had not read on a page. Their full reports, with every source address, are held in this museum's research record as ten dossiers. Every correction listed above was made by reading the primary document rather than by preferring one outlet to another. Where two sources disagree and neither is primary, this exhibit shows both.