OutRight

The Inferno and Us
Gay Americans’ relationship to the September 11 horrors in New York and Washington
by Dale Carpenter

"What kind of people do they think we are?" –Winston Churchill (speech to U.S. Congress, December 26, 1941)

The mind freezes the moment: the plane entering from the right of the television screen; the woman looking out her office window as 5,000 gallons of jet fuel come straight at the 200,000 tons of steel in which she will be entombed; the friends holding hands on the precipice, about to plunge a hundred stories together to escape the flames; the fireman ascending the stairs as the tower descends upon him; the husband hearing the message from the wife whose voice he will not hear again, too late to pick up the line. The next instant 5,000 souls rise like smoke from the ruins.

What did the attackers think they would accomplish?

They hate America’s values of liberty, pluralism, and religious tolerance. Perhaps they imagine they’ll defeat those values.

We need heroes on a day of infamy. So we surmised the 6’5" gay rugby player must have fought the hijackers to death to prevent them from running the board. He made them crash the plane into a deserted Pennsylvania field rather than let them destroy Camp David or the White House or the Capitol, we told ourselves.

We need someone to grieve for. So we learned, early on, of the purportedly gay chaplain for the New York City Fire Department who was killed while giving last rites to a dying comrade.

We need to share in the country’s tragedies. So we heard about the gay co-pilot wrested from his seat at the control of the plane that smashed into the Pentagon.

These are not entirely unfamiliar scenes. We know hatred because we have been its target. We recognize mangled bodies because we have seen them left limp outside our bars and tied to fence posts. We know what it means to have someone want you dead because God told them that’s the way things should be.

Hear Jerry Falwell explain September 11: "I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way–all of them who have tried to secularize America–I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.’"

Pat Robertson replied, "Amen."

To Falwell and Robertson, the United States is a country of sinners in the hands of an angry God exacting just punishment. On this point they and the jihad agree.

The writer Michael Lind called Falwell’s divisive diatribe "moral treason." He is right to suggest the deep immorality of Falwell and his cohorts, but he is wrong to call it treason. Treason is the act of a citizen who understands what he is betraying. Falwell has never understood what America means. He is beneath treason.

What does the "One Christian Nation" chorus think it will accomplish?

They hate America’s values of liberty, pluralism, and religious tolerance. Perhaps they imagine they’ll defeat those values.

We, by contrast, love and defend this country despite its many failings–despite its military ban and its idiotic adoption policies and its Bible-toting mullahs and all the rest of it–because we know it is alone among nations in its dedication to an idea larger than its petty bigotries. With not much history to speak of, with no race or ethnicity to bind its people to one another, with no single religion to unify its ambitions, it has only the idea of human freedom to cling to.

What they have never understood, and never will understand, is that that is enough to sustain us.

On TV, commentators talk excitedly about preparations for war. The president’s rhetoric escalates from the necessary (we will "round up the folks" involved in this) to the doubtful (we will "end" states that support terrorism) to the extravagant (we will "rid the world of evil").

If there is to be some kind of war, it will be like no other we’ve ever fought. No generals moving battalions across battle maps; no marines landing on the shores of Tripoli; no triumphant ticker-tape parades. We are fighting cells, not armies.

There are hard questions to answer now. Every nation, even Iran, condemns the attacks. But if everybody’s on our side, whom do we bomb? How will we know when we’ve won?

Whatever happens, we know gay Americans will be part of it. "The flag is a bit of bunting to one who insists on prose," said Oliver Wendell Holmes to another generation. "Yet... its red is our life-blood, its stars our world, its blue our heaven. It owns our land. At will it throws away our lives."

That has always been as true of gay people in this land as it has been of any other. No Jerry Falwell can separate us from it; no Pat Robertson can deny it.

We are in this with everyone else. We jumped from the towers in desperation. We climbed the stairs to save others. We called our lover in a frenzied last, "I love you." Our souls went up from the rubble.