Twenty-five years.
For those old enough to remember September 11, 2001, that number can feel almost impossible. The television screens. The confusion. The silence that fell over classrooms and offices. The phone calls to people we loved.
But September 11 is becoming something else, too. History.
More than 100 million Americans were born after the attacks. They have no memory of that Tuesday morning. What they know about it is what the rest of us choose to teach them.
So as America marks the 25th anniversary of September 11, we want to make sure one name remains part of that story.
Mark Bingham.
He was 31 years old. He was a businessman, an adventurer, a son, and a rugby player.
And he was openly gay.
Bingham was aboard United Airlines Flight 93, traveling from Newark to San Francisco, when hijackers seized the plane. After passengers learned through calls with people on the ground that other hijacked aircraft had been deliberately crashed into the World Trade Center, passengers and crew aboard Flight 93 made a decision that has become part of American history. They fought back.
The plane crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, about an hour and a half east of Pittsburgh, killing everyone aboard. Their resistance prevented the hijackers from reaching Washington, D.C., where investigators concluded the intended target was most likely the U.S. Capitol.
Among those who fought back was a gay man. That shouldn’t be reduced to trivia.
At 9:37 that morning, Bingham reached his mother, Alice Hoagland, by airphone.
“This is Mark Bingham,” he told her. It was an oddly formal introduction to his own mother, something she would later speculate was instinctive, perhaps his way of making absolutely certain she knew who was speaking.
He told her he loved her. He told her the plane had been hijacked and that the men who had taken it claimed to have a bomb.
According to the FBI account of the call, Bingham sounded calm and focused. Then the connection went dead. Minutes later, passengers began their counterattack.
At 10:03 a.m., Flight 93 crashed into a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania.
Twenty-five years later, the names of its passengers and crew are again being read aloud at the Flight 93 National Memorial. Mark Bingham is among them. But there is another part of his legacy worth saying aloud.
Mark was gay. Don’t erase that.
There can be a strange impulse when queer people enter the history books to treat our identities as incidental.
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Yes, Mark Bingham was a hero, we’re told. And he happened to be gay. Except Mark didn’t merely “happen” to be gay.
He lived openly at a time when doing so still carried enormous consequences. He loved men. He had been in a long-term relationship with Paul Holm. He played the aggressively masculine sport of rugby while refusing the lie that masculinity and homosexuality were somehow incompatible.
He helped establish the San Francisco Fog, a gay-inclusive rugby club, in 2000.
Bingham understood something queer people have understood for generations. Sometimes merely refusing to make yourself smaller is its own kind of courage.
That matters because the version of LGBTQ+ history Americans are taught is still painfully incomplete. Queer people weren’t standing outside American history waiting to be admitted.
We were already there.
We were soldiers and nurses. Teachers and organizers. Artists and firefighters. We built families, communities, and movements. And on September 11, 2001, a gay man was aboard Flight 93 when ordinary people were confronted with an unimaginable decision.
He fought back.
Mark’s story didn’t end in Pennsylvania.
After his death, the international gay rugby tournament was renamed the Bingham Cup in his honor. What began with a handful of teams grew into a global celebration of inclusive rugby.
His mother became a passionate supporter of LGBTQ+ people and inclusive rugby before her death in 2020. And generations of queer athletes who once wondered whether there was a place for them in sports found one bearing Mark Bingham’s name.
Today, memorials will rightly remember the nearly 3,000 people killed on September 11.
At Shanksville, people will gather again in the field where Flight 93 came down. Families will hear the names of their loved ones spoken. A generation with no firsthand memory of that morning will learn what happened there.
That makes the stories we choose to tell especially important. “Never forget” has to mean more than remembering an event. It means remembering people. Whole people.
Mark Bingham wasn’t courageous despite being gay. We don’t need to strip away his queerness to make him acceptable as an American hero.
He was Mark. Gay, athletic, adventurous, complicated, loved, and by all accounts larger than life.
He was someone’s partner. He was someone’s son. He was someone’s teammate. He was one of us. And twenty-five years after Flight 93 fell into a Pennsylvania field, the queer community should still say his name.
Mark Bingham.