At 9:44 on the morning of September 11, 2001, Mark Bingham called his aunt’s home in California.
United Airlines Flight 93 had been hijacked minutes earlier. Bingham had already tried the number once, connecting for only five seconds. This time, his aunt answered. He told her he was on a plane being hijacked and identified it as United Flight 93. She passed the phone to his mother, Alice Hoagland.
“This is Mark Bingham,” he said.
He used his first and last name. Then he told his mother he loved her.
Why a 31-year-old man introduced himself to his own mother by his full name in one of the final conversations of his life is something the historical record cannot explain. Twenty-five years later, America knows the name he said into that phone: Mark Bingham.
History recognizes another important name from that morning: Father Mychal Judge.
Judge, a 68-year-old Franciscan priest and New York City Fire Department chaplain, rushed to the World Trade Center after the first plane struck. After the South Tower collapsed, Judge was fatally injured. Rescuers carried his body from the building in a moment captured by photographer Shannon Stapleton, creating one of the most enduring images of September 11. The New York City medical examiner designated Judge as casualty 0001.
A rugby player aboard Flight 93 and a Franciscan priest inside the World Trade Center lived remarkably different lives. Both were gay men. Both became national symbols of heroism after their deaths. But neither became the person America remembers on September 11. They had already spent their lives becoming those men.
Bingham was 6-foot-4, athletic and adventurous. He owned a public relations company, played championship rugby at the University of California, Berkeley, and later joined the San Francisco Fog, a gay rugby club. He was openly gay at a time when stereotypes about gay men often left little room for someone like him.
A few weeks before his death, Bingham wrote to his Fog teammates about what rugby had meant to him. When he began playing at 16, he believed being attracted to men would be “completely repulsive” to his teammates and expected to hide his sexuality forever. Years later, playing alongside other gay men had changed that.
“My two irreconcilable worlds came together,” he wrote.
Bingham believed gay athletes could challenge assumptions simply by showing up.
“Gay men weren’t always wallflowers waiting on the sideline,” he wrote.
Judge’s relationship with identity unfolded differently.
Born Robert Emmett Judge in Brooklyn in 1933, he entered a Franciscan seminary at 15 and eventually became a priest. In New York, he worked with people experiencing homelessness, confronted his own alcoholism and ministered to people with AIDS as the epidemic devastated the city’s gay community.
He visited hospital rooms, counseled families and presided over funerals at a time when people with AIDS were often ostracized and abandoned. He was also gay.
Unlike Bingham, Judge did not live that part of himself publicly in the same way. People within LGBTQ+ Catholic circles knew, and he supported Dignity, an organization for LGBTQ+ Catholics. But many firefighters and others who knew him did not.
Where Bingham increasingly brought two worlds together, Judge spent much of his life moving among several. Both found ways to belong.
By the time Bingham reached his mother, passengers aboard Flight 93 were beginning to understand that their hijacking was part of something much larger. Through calls to the ground, they learned that hijacked aircraft had struck the World Trade Center. According to the 9/11 Commission, passengers and surviving crew discussed fighting back and voted on whether to rush the hijackers.
They decided to act.
At 9:57 a.m., the assault began and, six minutes later, Flight 93 crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. There were no survivors.
The 9/11 Commission concluded that the hijackers intended to crash the plane into the U.S. Capitol or White House and that the passengers’ actions prevented them from reaching their target. Bingham was one of those passengers.
Hundreds of miles away, Judge responded to the same catastrophe by going toward it. At the North Tower command post, he prayed and administered last rites to the injured and dying. When the South Tower collapsed at 9:59 a.m., Judge was killed. Police officers and firefighters carried his body from the building.
In death, Judge became one of the faces of September 11. Bingham became one of its most recognizable stories of resistance. And America began turning two complicated human beings into heroes.
For LGBTQ+ people in 2001, their identities were not incidental details. Same-sex couples could not legally marry in the United States. Gay and lesbian service members served under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Sodomy laws remained on the books in multiple states. Even as Americans mourned, some prominent religious conservatives blamed gay people, among others, for the attacks.
Against that backdrop, Bingham and Judge complicated the stories Americans told about LGBTQ+ people.
Bingham did so openly. He played one of the country’s most physically demanding sports and became known as part of a group that fought hijackers aboard an airplane.
Judge complicated something different. The priest Americans saw carried from the World Trade Center had spent years ministering to gay men dying of AIDS. His Catholic faith and sexuality existed within the same life, even when the institutions around him did not always make room for both.
Their deaths made them visible to millions who might never have encountered those lives otherwise.
But they should not be remembered only for how they died.
A few weeks before September 11, Bingham had written that gay rugby players could become role models for people who had wanted to play sports but never felt strong enough or good enough. They could change minds.
The following year, the San Francisco Fog helped establish the Mark Kendall Bingham Memorial Tournament. Today, the Bingham Cup brings LGBTQ+ and inclusive rugby teams together from around the world and is described by International Gay Rugby as the world’s largest amateur rugby union tournament. Twenty-five years after Bingham died, people are still walking onto rugby fields under his name.
Judge’s legacy followed a different path. His AIDS ministry and support for LGBTQ+ Catholics have increasingly become part of his public memory. Each September, people retrace the route Judge took on the morning of the attacks during the 9/11 Walk of Remembrance, beginning near the Franciscan friary where he lived and continuing toward the World Trade Center.
The walk remembers where he went on the final morning of his life. His life explains why he went there.
Twenty-five years is long enough for history to begin flattening people. Names become memorials. Photographs become symbols. The complicated lives behind them can disappear beneath the stories we tell about a single moment.
Bingham was confronting ideas about what a gay man could look like long before he and the other passengers aboard Flight 93 fought back. Judge was walking toward people others had abandoned long before he followed firefighters into the World Trade Center.
Their courage did not begin that morning.
One increasingly refused to separate being gay from the other parts of his life. The other spent decades navigating a church and communities in which being fully known was more complicated.
Twenty-five years ago, Bingham reached his mother and said his name.
Today, remembering that name means remembering more than what happened in the minutes that followed.
The same is true of Father Mychal Judge. He will be forever remembered for the actions he took in his lifetime, in addition to his life that was lost.
They should both be remembered for how they died. But to understand who they were when that moment came, we must remember how they lived.
This story is brought to you by Rosedale Health and Wellness and Dudley’s Place.
