Gay pilot remembered, Pentagon crash claims life of first officer from D.C.; rugby player may have helped stop hijackers in Pa.

An openly gay pilot who held the position of first officer on board American Airlines Flight 77 was among the crew and passengers who lost their lives Tuesday when terrorists hijacked the Boeing 757 jetliner and crashed it into the Pentagon.

Among the terrorists' victims this week was gay public relations executive and rugby enthusiast Mark Bingham of San Francisco, who contacted his mother by cell phone minutes before the United Airlines jet he was taking from Newark, N.J., to San Francisco crashed in the countryside

The deaths of Bingham and American Airlines co-pilot David Charlebois, a resident of Washington, D.C.'s popular gay Dupont Circle neighborhood and a member of the National Gay Pilots Association, were two of many instances in which gays shared, firsthand, the nation's horror and grief following the terrorist attack on Sept. 11, that led to the destruction of New York City's World Trade Center and extensive damage to the Pentagon.

The story of Bingham's possible heroics became the subject of national television and newspaper reports this week when his mother, Alice Hoglan, a United Airlines flight attendant, told of how Bingham called her on his cell phone to say his plane had been hijacked.

Hoglan said her son's reputation for fighting for civic justice, along with a past episode where he fought off muggers, leads her to believe that he took steps on the United flight to prevent the terrorists from taking the hijacked plane to its intended target.

U.S. government officials have speculated that the terrorists planned to crash the plane into the presidential retreat in Camp David, Md., or possibly into the U.S. Capitol Building.

"The fact that he was so close to the action, it is likely that he was able to get at these guys," she told the Associated Press. "It gives me a great deal of comfort to know my son may have been able to avert the killing of many, many innocent people."

Another passenger on the flight, Thomas Burnett, of San Ramon, Calif., called his wife and said that he and two other passengers had decided to try and wrest control of the plane from the terrorists, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

"I know we're all going to die there's three of us who are going to do something about it," Burnett told his wife, according to the paper.

Bingham was sitting at the rear of the first class cabin, but it was unclear where Burnett was sitting and whether Bingham was one of the other two men mentioned in his brief call. Hoglan said she believed the call from her son came 10-15 minutes before the plane crashed near Pittsburgh.

The San Francisco gay sports organization Outsports reports on its Web site that Bingham, 31, was a member of a local gay rugby team and planned to organize a rugby team for next year's Gay Games in Sydney, Australia. Outsports called Bingham "a warm, friendly, smart, handsome man who welcomed people into his life. He was a member of our community."

Meanwhile, American Airlines flight attendant Robert Todd, who is gay, said he was shocked on Tuesday when he learned that Flight 77 was the jet that the terrorist hijackers had plunged into the side of the Pentagon. Todd said he worked on that flight numerous times while Charlebois served in the cockpit as first officer.

Todd said he also worked frequently on that flight with pilot Charles Burlingame and each of the four flight attendants who perished on Tuesday. Flight 77 originates at Washington's Dulles International Airport and travels on weekdays to Los Angeles.

"I lost a whole crew of my co-workers and friends," Todd told the Washington Blade, struggling to contain his emotions. He said he is grappling with the loss, in part, by volunteering to work with American Airlines' Care Team, a group of counselors, grief experts and trained volunteers that assists relatives of passengers who are lost in airline crashes. Todd said the team also offers its services to employees faced with the loss of co-workers and friends.

American Airlines officials said late Wednesday that they were not ready to release official company biographies on the flight crews lost in the crash of Flight 77, at the site of the Pentagon, and of Flight 11, the first of two jets to slam into one of the two World Trade Center towers in New York.

Todd said Charlebois, 39, had been flying for American Airlines for about 10 years. According to Todd, Charlebois was trained and certified to serve as first officer, or co-pilot, on U.S. domestic flights for Boeing 757s, which carry about 178 passengers, and Boeing 767s, which carry about 207 passengers.

Among the victims: Father Mychal Judge, the gay chaplain of the New York Fire Department, is presumed killed by falling debris from the World Trade Center collapse; and Mark Bingham was on United Airlines Flight 93 and with an athletic background that includes a national rugby championship, may have helped wrestle control of that flight from the terrorists.

He said first officers typically serve as second-in-command and usually fly the planes to which they are assigned on the return trip during "two-leg" flights to various cities.

"He was one of the most liked pilots I know," said Todd, who noted that American Airlines officials and virtually all flight crews and pilots who worked with Charlebois knew he was gay.

"While the entire country has been deeply affected by today's events, it is our sad duty to report that this tragedy has struck [the National Gay Pilots Association] directly," the NGPA's board of directors said in a statement to its members released Sept. 11. "NGPA member David Charlebois, based in Washington, D.C., was the first officer on one of the American Airlines 767 [jets] lost in today's attack.

"His smile brightened a number of NGPA events and the news of his loss carries with it a great grief for all of those who knew him, both on the ground and in the air," the NGPA statement said.

Eric Little, owner of the Washington gay bar JR.'s, called Charlebois "a wonderful friend and neighbor." Little said Charlebois was a frequent patron at JR.'s and appeared to be well-liked by everyone who knew him.

Among the other openly gay people known dead as a result of the terrorist attack is Rev. Mychal Judge, the New York Fire Department's Catholic chaplain, according to New York gay journalist and commentator Andy Humm.

"He was a decent, wonderful human being," said 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."

As the Blade went to press yesterday, the names of at least three more gay people killed in the terrorist driven plane crashes surfaced.

J. Joe Ferguson, director of the National Geographic Society's geography education outreach program, was yet another gay man onboard American Airlines Flight 77, according to his friend Harrv Lester. An article on the National Geographic Society's Web page says Ferguson and another Society official, Ann Judge, were accompanying a group of teachers and sixth-grade students from D.C. public schools on an educational trip to the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary, which is located off the coast of California.

"The D.C. school district has lost six extraordinary people, and we at the Society have lost two treasured colleagues," the Web site article says.

Lester said Ferguson, a native of Durant, Miss., has lived in D.C. on Capitol Hill for more than 10 years.

D.C. businessperson Andrew Isen said Los Angeles gay residents Daniel Bradhorst and Ronald Gamboa, who were couple and close friends of Isen's, were onboard United Airlines Flight 175 when it crashed into the World Trade Center. Three-year-old David Bradhorst, the couple's adopted son, was with them when the plane went down shortly after terrorists hijacked following its departure from Boston. It was headed for Los Angeles.

Isen said Brandhourst and Gamboa had been together 10 years and adopted their child at the time of his birth.

"The child knew his parents as 'Daddy' and 'Poppy,'" Isen said. "He was the loving focus of their lives." Isen, who said he meet Brandhorst and Gamboa nine years ago during a Colorado ski trip, said he is devastated over the tragic events that ended their lives.

David Angell, 54, of Pasadena, Calif., executive producer of the NBC-TV show Frasier, was aboard American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center.

Angell, who was heterosexual, joined in the protests against "Dr. Laura" Schlessinger and wrote the episode of Cheers in which Sam's old friend comes out to him and the gang fears Cheers is going to become a gay bar.

Also killed in the plane crash at the Pentagon was Berry Berenson, an acclaimed fashion photographer and actor, and the former wife of actor Anthony Perkins (of Psycho fame). Berenson was known for her advocacy work in support of gay civil rights and AIDS-related causes. After their divorce, Perkins publicly acknowledged he was gay and died later from AIDS-related complications.

Like their straight counterparts, gay Americans huddled by their televisions, struggled to reach loved ones through overloaded telephone lines, and pondered the meaning and the magnitude of the stunning developments.

Gay New Yorkers and gay Washingtonians, according to activists, also seemed willing to take the first step in putting aside differences with those who have opposed them politically in an effort to work together to address the common enemy of terrorism.

"This kind of nightmare does more than anything to highlight that we are all one community, not many different communities," said Jay Fisette, the openly gay chair of the board that governs Arlington County, Va., and has jurisdiction over much of the emergency medical and fire fighting agencies that rushed to the Pentagon on Tuesday.

With large gay populations in both the New York and Washington areas, activists said the sharing of grief was clearly one of the things gays had in common with their fellow residents.

At Blade press time, the number of gays who lost their lives in the collapse of the World Trade Center towers and nearby buildings in New York could not be determined. But activists there said they fear the numbers could swell to enormous proportions.

In the aftermath of the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, gay activists joined their fellow New Yorkers in assessing the terrorist attack on the United States that many have compared to the Japanese air raid attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

"We'll never be OK again," Humm wrote in an e-mail message sent out the day of the incident. "Sure to have lost friends. Monstrous. Don't know what to do. Don't know where to go."

Veteran New York gay and AIDS activist Bill Dobbs said he bicycled to a location near City Hall, where he saw the streets littered with debris from the World Trade Center collapse. He said he picked up a letter addressed to a company on the 99th floor of one of the Trade Center towers.

"Trade Towers are a part of my daily life; seeing them and the Empire State Building is quintessence of Manhattan for me," Dobbs said. "Now giant clouds of gray smoke obscure where they would be."

Peter Staley, a long-time member of ACT UP New York City and an AIDS treatment activist, told of a conversation with a friend who was at work inside the first of the two World Trade Center towers to explode into flames after being hit by the jetliner.

Staley said his friend escaped physical harm. "I asked him how he was, and he said he was 'physically OK,' but then started to cry, and said he couldn't talk about it it hurt too much. The sound of his voice shattered me," Staley said. "This city will never be the same."

Lorri L. Jean, executive director of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force and a former official with the Federal Emergency Management Agency who supervised earthquake relief efforts in San Francisco in the 1980s, said emotional fallout from calamities like this week's terrorist attacks often affect more people than physical injuries.

Jean said that while disaster relief workers must devote their initial attention to the physically injured, the biggest problem in the long run is often those suffering emotional wounds.

"I've found that gay people are disproportionately affected because they often don't have a traditional family to provide emotional support," Jean said. "So our community institutions need to provide help for our people in the area of mental health."