A reporter recalls 9/11

It was my usual routine. I was up until 4 a.m. writing and rewriting a story for the Bay Area Reporter to make a deadline. Back 10 years ago, in order for a story to have a good chance of making the front page, it had to be filed by Tuesday morning.

I knew I had a front-page story with my second exclusive jailhouse interview with alleged killer Adam Ezerski, who police say targeted gay men. It was a huge local and national story. Ezerski was compared to Gianni Versace's murderer, Andrew Cunanan. I wanted to make the most of the exclusive and I wanted to be sure the story was well-written.

Despite my all-nighter, the story would never make it on the front page. That Tuesday morning was September 11, 2001.

About 7:15 a.m., three hours after I went to bed, my phone rang. It was my neighbor, a Taiwanese immigrant. She asked me to explain to her what she was watching on TV. I got out of bed and turned on the TV and told her in slow, simple, English what I was hearing for the first time.

I was tired but the fight-or-flight adrenaline kicked in. As worn out as I was, it was impossible to get back to sleep. I volunteered to work at KGO-TV, where I worked and still work as a weekend assignment editor.

What stands out for me most that day was an interview I conducted in the Marina District with a man who got a frantic voicemail message from his wife who was in the World Trade Center when it was hit. The man hoped the media attention would help him find out what happened to her. The memory of sitting with him as he played the message is chilling. He had held out a small amount of hope, in vain, that his wife survived.

Back at the station, I also remember getting a couple of calls about a man named Mark Bingham. The callers said what a great person he was and asked us why we weren't doing stories on him. I explained that one of our reporters had set up an interview with his family in the South Bay and that we would have a story on him during our local newscast at 11 p.m.

I got home after midnight and searched the Internet for a possible local gay angle that I could report on for the B.A.R. I kept my eyes open for an LGBT 9/11 story when I was at KGO but nothing jumped out. I kept Channel 7 on while I continued to search the Internet. I was turning up nothing. By then, it was after 1 a.m. and the station was re-running its 11 p.m. newscast. I was too busy to watch it when I was working at the station.

I was half-listening to the station when I heard the story come up about Mark Bingham. I was glad they were running the story since I told the callers we were covering it. Bingham's mother, Alice Hoagland, spoke of her son. I was still half-listening until I heard her say her son was "sensitive." There was something about how she said it, possibly the tone in her voice, that I just kind of knew she was saying her son was gay without saying it.

Through some Internet searches, I found Bingham's name on a Yahoo group for the gay rugby team, the San Francisco Fog. The Fog's website had posted an e-mail from Bingham about how important the team was to him.

"I finally felt accepted as a gay man and a rugby player," Bingham wrote.

I used quotes from his e-mail in my story. It was too late to call team members but I e-mailed them through the site. Teammate Bryce Eberhart happened to be up late and he e-mailed back with information and a photo of Bingham. He told me how important Bingham was to so many on the team and others that he touched from all walks of life.

It was about 7:30 a.m. on September 12 by the time I finished writing the story. I remember that I still had so much adrenaline in my system that I still couldn't get to sleep even after being up for 24 hours. I went to the gym and worked it off and eventually went to bed about 10 a.m.

The story that ran in the B.A.R. on Thursday, September 13, 2001, centered on Mark Bingham because he was the only local LGBT victim I could find. I remember writing the following week about Jeffrey Collman, a gay flight attendant from the North Bay who was on the first plane that crashed into the World Trade Center. His partner, Keith Bradkowski, told me that Collman shouldn't have been on that flight but was picking up extra flights so he would have time off later so the pair could celebrate his 42nd birthday together on September 28.

The story of Bingham's flight, United Flight 93, touched a chord among Americans because it represented the only victory, albeit a bittersweet one, against al-Qaeda on September 11. More reports and more stories came out about Bingham and the other passengers' heroism.

Because it was the last hijacked plane, the passengers onboard had the advantage, through air phone and cell phone calls, of knowing they had nothing to lose by fighting back. The hijackers' promises of safety if they cooperated were false.

Bingham had worked on the campaign of Arizona Senator John McCain when he sought and subsequently lost the Republican presidential nomination to George Bush in 2000. McCain attended Bingham's memorial service at UC Berkeley. In a speech, McCain said that he may owe his life to Bingham for helping to keep the plane from the Capitol, which was speculated to be one of the hijackers' intended targets.