National
5 questions as Supreme Court considers marriage
Justices poised to issue most significant rulings on gay rights
There are many legal questions to ponder as observers await the Supreme Court decision on Prop 8 and DOMA. (Washington Blade photos by Michael Key)
In the wake of last week’s announcement that the Supreme Court will hear lawsuits challenging California’s Proposition 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act, observers over the next several months will wait on pins and needles for what may be the most significant ruling on LGBT rights in history.
Here are five questions that advocates are pondering as they await decisions in Hollingsworth v. Perry, the challenge to Prop 8, and Windsor v. United States, the lawsuit against DOMA.
1. Will the Supreme Court overturn same-sex marriage bans in all states?
By taking up the Prop 8 case, as opposed to letting stand a more narrow ruling from the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that applied only to California, the court has an opportunity to make a ruling that not only says the same-sex marriage ban in California is unconstitutional, but marriage bans in all states throughout the country are as well.
David Boies, a co-counsel representing plaintiffs in the lawsuit on behalf of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, said during a conference call last week justices would produce a ruling that’s more expansive than California if they decide the Prop 8 case on its merits and find it violates the U.S. Constitution.
“That would mean there would be a fundamental right to marry in every state in the country because obviously the federal constitution applies to every state in the country,” Boies said.
Much in the same way that the 1967 ruling in Loving v. Virginia ended bans on interracial marriage in all states, such a sweeping decision from the Supreme Court in Prop 8 would require the 41 states that don’t have same-sex marriage on the books to allow gay couples to marry. Not only would marriage equality be restored to California, it would be extended to the estimated 646,000 same-sex couples throughout the country.
Jon Davidson, legal director at Lambda Legal, said this outcome is one of several possible ways the Supreme Court could rule if justices find a constitutional right to marry under either the due process clause or the equal protection clause.
“Either finding that we share the fundamental right or finding that it violates equal protection generally to not allow same-sex couples to marry when different-sex couples can would extend the right to marry to all 50 states,” Davidson said.
Still, the general consensus among legal experts is that the court isn’t likely to reach this outcome when it’s possible for them to reach a ruling on more narrow grounds that would just affect California or a limited number of states.
Doug NeJaime, who’s gay and a law professor at Loyola Law School, posited that since California allows domestic partnerships but not same-sex marriage, the court could produce a ruling requiring all eight states that offer either domestic partnerships or civil unions to provide full marriage rights for gay couples. Those states are California, Illinois, Rhode Island, Delaware, Hawaii, Oregon, Nevada and New Jersey.
“The middle course would be one that says states that have allowed same-sex couples to have comprehensive domestic partnerships or civil unions don’t have an adequate justification for preventing them from marrying,” NeJaime said. “That would affect more than just California, but it wouldn’t affect every state.”
2. What happens if the Supreme Court upholds both Prop 8 and DOMA?
In what he might be considered the opposite scenario compared to the situation described above, the Supreme Court could also deal a devastating blow to LGBT advocates by upholding either or both Prop 8 and DOMA.
A loss for LGBT advocates in the court in the Prop 8 case would mean they would need another voter-initiated ballot campaign to repeal the measure ballot, much like the divisive and expensive 2008 campaign that led to its passage by voters.
John O’Connor, the newly appointed executive director of Equality California, said “everything’s on the table” for discussion in the event that the Supreme Court determines the ban on same-sex marriage in California is constitutional.
“The question about would we go back to the ballot — it’s absolutely a possibility,” O’Connor said. “The timing and the tactics and all of that remain to be determined between now and the time the decision comes down but it’s absolutely a priority for us to plan that.”
Asked whether he’d rule out the possibility of going back to the ballot in 2014 at this point, O’Connor replied, “Absolutely not. I wouldn’t rule it out. That’s definitely a possibility that we’ll be considering.”
Similarly, a decision upholding DOMA would mean that Congress would have to act to repeal DOMA — mostly likely using the Respect for Marriage Act as the vehicle to undo the law. That would be a difficult task as long as Republicans remain in control of the House.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), the chief sponsor of the Respect for Marriage Act, said in a statement he intends to work with Congress to build support for the legislation even before the court renders a decision on DOMA.
“As the Supreme Court reviews DOMA, I will continue to spearhead the participation of Members of Congress who believe that DOMA is unconstitutional in the Windsor case,” Nadler said. “At the same time, I will keep working with my colleagues to increase support for the Respect for Marriage Act, my bill to repeal DOMA and remove official discrimination from our legal code.”
3. Will the U.S. government weigh in on the Prop 8 lawsuit?
Amid news that the Supreme Court will take up the Prop 8 lawsuit, a new call has emerged for the Obama administration to weigh in on the lawsuit to assert a constitutional right for same-sex couples to marry.
Ted Olson, co-counsel for plaintiffs in the Prop 8 case, said during the conference call last week that participation from the Obama administration in the litigation would have “great effect” on the outcome of the case.
“I would hate to predict what the United States government is doing, but given the stand the president of the United States and the attorney general of the United States made with respect to marriage equality, we would certainly hope that they would participate,” Olson added.
Although President Obama asserted his personal view in May that same-sex couples should be able to marry, the Obama administration hasn’t yet answered the question of whether that’s a guaranteed right under the Constitution. The Obama administration could participate by filing a friend-of-the-court brief along with other parties, or less likely, by asking to intervene in the case.
Asked Tuesday during a White House press briefing about the Obama administration’s position on the Prop 8 case, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney declined to comment, saying, “For comment on the court’s actions on that case, I would point you to the Department of Justice. As you know the administration is not a party in that case, and I just have nothing more for you on it.”
Following the briefing, Tracy Schmaler, a Justice Department spokesperson, told the Washington Blade, “No updates at this point.”
Richard Socarides, a gay New York advocate who’s called on Obama to take an active role in supporting marriage equality, said arguing in favor of the constitutional right to marry — for all states and not just California — is “a logical extension” of the position already articulated by the administration when it determined DOMA was unconstitutional.
“If you apply that [heightened scrutiny] test that they advocate to any of the 30 states that have constitutional amendments that ban gay marriage, then all of those state amendments go out the window,” Socarides said. “So, obviously, that’s very important to us, and that’s the government position, and I think it’s important that they say so clearly rather than trying to duck it.”
Additionally, Socarides said the Obama administration won’t be able to run from the issue because justices will likely ask U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. or whomever is representing the administration during oral arguments about its position on Prop 8.
“They’re kidding themselves if they don’t think some judge isn’t going to ask them,” Socarides said. “During the argument of the DOMA case, [Samuel] Alito or [Clarence] Thomas or [John] Roberts or [Antonin] Scalia is going to say to them, ‘If we apply the test you are advocating to Proposition 8, what would happen?’ They’re going to get asked this question. That’s what’s silly about this.”
Lambda’s Davidson agreed that a friend-of-the-court brief from the Obama administration would have an impact on the Supreme Court.
“They’re more likely to read a brief from the solicitor general than from other parties,” Davidson said. “And I think that they care what another branch of government says to them, so I think it will be significant. I don’t think they will decide a certain way just because the executive branch says so. They will make up their minds, but to have one branch of government telling another what they think the outcome would be, they’d pay attention to that.”
But the notion that participation from the Obama administration would be helpful to convincing justices to overturn Prop 8 isn’t universal.
Nan Hunter, a lesbian law professor at Georgetown University, said the Justice Department has articulated that laws related to sexual orientation should be subjected to heightened scrutiny and an additional brief wouldn’t have much sway.
“I don’t really think it makes much difference, frankly, to the court,” Hunter said. “The political alignment of the Obama administration is very clear on this, so I don’t really think it’ll make much difference.”
4. What happens if the Supreme Court denies standing to anti-gay forces in the lawsuit?
In addition to announcing that it would take up cases challenging Prop 8 and DOMA, the Supreme Court also called for attorneys involved in the lawsuit to answer questions about whether certain parties involved in the lawsuit have standing to present their views before the court. The standing issue will be resolved as part of the final ruling the Supreme Court makes before its term expires in June.
For the Prop 8 case, the standing question is singular: Do anti-gay groups that helped pass Prop 8 at the ballot have the right to defend the law in court because California Gov. Jerry Brown and Attorney General Kamala Harris have declined to do so? That was the opinion of the Ninth Circuit, which determined ProtectMarriage.com could defend the law after the group’s standing was certified by the California Supreme Court.
But in the DOMA case, there are issues of standing on both sides. The court asks parties to respond to whether the court has standing to hear the DOMA case because the U.S. Justice Department, the party that won the case at the district court, appealed the case as opposed to the losing side. Additionally, the court asks if the House Republican-led Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group — which took up defense of DOMA after the Obama administration announced it would no longer do so — has standing to defend the law.
The questions open up the possibility for the Supreme Court to strike down Prop 8 on technical grounds without getting into the merits of the anti-gay ban. It could assert that anti-gay groups don’t have standing to defend the law, nullifying the Ninth Circuit decision and leaving in place retired U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker’s decision finding that same-sex couples in California have a guaranteed right to marry under the U.S. Constitution.
NeJaime said asking about the standing issue in the Prop 8 case may be an attempt for the court to open the door to striking down the same-sex marriage ban without ruling on the merits of the case.
“This court has been interested in standing for a long time,” NeJaime said. “The conservatives on the court have consistently cut back standing, so it’s not shocking to me that the court is at least interested in that standing question, and I also think it could be slightly strategic so that there is this other issue in the case that would allow the court to avoid a ruling on the merits if they decided that they don’t want to do that.”
The question of what would happen if parties lack standing in the DOMA case gets a little murkier because the issue affects both the plaintiffs (the Justice Department) and the defendants (BLAG). On Tuesday, the Supreme Court announced that it had hired Vicki Jackson, a Harvard lawyer, to argue that neither the Obama administration nor BLAG have standing to petition the court in the case.
Still, the consensus among legal experts is that justices would likely conclude both parties have standing in the DOMA case to evaluate the law on its merits, even though many raised questions about BLAG because it’s a five-member committee and not reflective of the position of Congress, or even the House, as a whole.
Hunter said precedent exists for the Supreme Court to hear a case in which the Justice Department has declined to defend a law and members of Congress have taken up defense of the statute instead.
“The reason here that I think five members of the court will reach the merits in the DOMA case is that the practical necessity for them to do so is just overwhelming,” Hunter said. “I just don’t see them allowing a federal statute to just kind of evaporate in this situation without consideration of the merits. I’m cautiously optimistic that when they do consider the merits, they will find DOMA unconstitutional, but my hunch is that the standing question is more likely to end up being important in the Prop 8 case than it will be in the DOMA case.”
5. What would happen if the Supreme Court applied heightened scrutiny to its ruling?
Another outcome in the cases that would be beneficial to the LGBT community is a determination by the Supreme Court that laws related to sexual orientation should be subjected to heightened scrutiny, or a greater assumption they’re unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court has never declared that laws related to sexual orientation should be subjected to a higher level of scrutiny as it has for race, national origin, gender and alienage even in high-profile cases such as Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down state sodomy laws throughout the country, and Romer v. Evans, which struck down Colorado’s anti-gay Amendment 2. Still, the belief that sexual orientation laws merit this level of scrutiny is the view held by the Obama administration and the U.S. Second Circuit of Appeals, the court from which the DOMA case was appealed.
Legal experts said such a ruling from the Supreme Court in which justices applied heightened scrutiny would benefit lawsuits challenging other anti-gay laws throughout the country — whether they be the Arizona law stripping away domestic partner benefits from state employees or the Tennessee law prohibiting municipalities from passing non-discrimination ordinances.
While it seems that making a decision on laws related to sexual orientation are subjected to heightened scrutiny would automatically institute the first outcome enumerated in this piece — the invalidation of all restrictions throughout the country — legal experts say that might not be the case.
NeJaime said the application of heightened scrutiny in the DOMA case would make it more likely for them to strike down Prop 8 as well, but it wouldn’t necessarily apply to same-sex marriage bans elsewhere.
“They could apply heightened scrutiny to Prop 8, which they could frame as a very specific question, and then it would take a future case to apply heightened scrutiny to some marriage ban, like a ban in Arkansas where there’s no domestic partnership,” NeJaime said.
Some observers have speculated that the Supreme Court selected the Windsor case as the vehicle to determine the constitutionality of DOMA because that’s the only case in which a federal appeals court has ruled the anti-gay law is unconstitutional by applying heightened scrutiny to the statute.
But Hunter disputed that notion and said the decision to take up Windsor is the result of U.S. Associate Justice Elena Kagan’s involvement in the other lawsuit in which an appeals court made a ruling against DOMA — the consolidated case of Gill v. Office of Personnel Management and Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. Department of Health & Human Services — when she was U.S. solicitor general and the Obama administration was still defending the law in court.
“What makes the most sense is to have all nine justices participate in that decision, and Kagan can’t participate in Gill.” Hunter said. “I think they were waiting for a second court of appeals to produce an opinion, and I think they would have taken whatever case wasn’t Gill. It was sort of anything but Gill, and that’s purely because of the Kagan recusal problem.”
(Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)
National
Multi-billion-dollar 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund to continue until 2090
Eligibility for same-sex partner survivors remains unclear
As part of its commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, a federally operated program, released information during the past week showing it has awarded more than $18 billion to over 77,000 9/11 victims and their families since 2011.
Officials with what’s now referred to as the VCF point out that it was created to provide compensation to individuals or to a court-approved personal representative of a deceased individual who were present at one of the three sites where the hijacked jetliners crashed.
Among those supported under the program are thousands of rescue workers, clean-up crews, and residents living near the World Trade Center Twin Towers destruction site who became ill, many of whom later died, by being exposed to the toxic fumes created by the fire and falling debris.
“Twenty-five years since that day, the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund has served tens of thousands of victims and their families, and we continue to receive over 750 new claims each month — a clear indication of the ongoing importance of our mission,” said Allison Turkel, VCF’s leader, who holds the title of Special Master.
In a Sept. 2 briefing for the news media in advance of the 9/11 anniversary commemoration, Turkel pointed out that the VCF operation was upgraded and expanded by separate laws passed by Congress in 2011 and 2019, with the 2019 law signed by President Trump providing full funding to “pay all eligible claims and extended the filing deadline to Oct. 1, 2090.”
LGBTQ advocacy organizations in New York and nationwide have reported that during the time shortly after the 9/11 attacks same-sex surviving partners of 9/11 victims learned they were ineligible for compensation benefits because their same-sex relationships were not legally recognized.
Nicole Nava, a VCF spokesperson, told the Washington Blade she would inquire into whether same-sex couple surviving partners were being supported under the VCF program in more recent years.
She said under long established VCF procedures, all applicants for benefit claims regarding a deceased person, whether same-sex or opposite sex, must be appointed as a Personal Representative of the deceased person by a state court. For D.C. residents, the probate division of the D.C. Superior Court appoints a Personal Representative.
“Claims for deceased victims (regardless of the cause of death) may be submitted only by the Personal Representative,” a statement on the VCF website says. “Each state has laws that define the process for appointment of the Personal Representative and the specific authority granted to that Personal Representative,” it says.
The Washington Blade couldn’t immediately determine the criteria for being approved as a Personal Representative by the D.C. Superior Court and various state courts, including whether a same-sex survivor partner would be eligible for such an appointment.
A spokesperson for the District of Columbia LGBTQ+ Bar Association, which includes many local attorneys who specialize in a wide range of specialized legal issues, couldn’t immediately be reached to find out if one or more of their members might be able to determine the same-sex partner eligibility for Personal Representative status.
In her news media briefing, VCF Special Master Turkel said detailed information about how best to file a claim for 9/11 victim compensation is available on the VCF website.
“Twenty-five years since the events of September 11th , 2001, we know it has become increasingly challenging for claimants to find documents needed to prove their presence at an eligible location, which is one of the key requirements to be eligible for compensation,” she said.
She was referring to the requirement that 9/11 surviving victims seeking a claim for support for injuries or illnesses related to the 9/11 attacks must prove they were present at the World Trade Center site, the Pentagon site, or the Shanksville, Pa. site where the hijacked jetliners crashed. Those requirements are separate from the less clearly defined criteria for same-sex couple victim survivor eligibility.
“Our team is committed to ensuring no claimant feels lost or overwhelmed when submitting a claim,” Turkel said at the briefing. “We have a great helpline with real live people who can answer or refer any questions that come in,” she added. “They engage in over 4,000 calls a month on average. We encourage folks to call 1-855-1555 with any questions.”
The VCF website, which has additional detailed information, can be accessed at www.vcf.gov.
National
Remembering the LGBTQ heroes of 9/11 terrorist attacks
25 years later, ‘the heartbreak remains strong’
Many in the LGBTQ community in the D.C. area and throughout the country were expected to join friends, co-workers, and family members this week in commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the New York World Trade Center’s Twin Towers and on the Pentagon just outside D.C. as well as the jetliner hijacking that ended in a fatal crash in an open field in Shanksville, Pa.
A total of 2,996 people died in the 9/11 attacks, including 19 terrorists who hijacked four jetliners whose passengers included Americans and citizens of many other countries.
Activists involved with local and national LGBTQ advocacy organizations recall witnessing a coming together of LGBTQ people and their co-workers, neighbors, and family members to support one another during a time of unimaginable horror and grief.
Among those who lost their lives in the 9/11 terrorist attacks was American Airlines co-pilot David Charlebois, an out gay man and member of the Gay Pilots Association, who was on American Airlines Flight 77, which the terrorists crashed into the Pentagon.
Also among the terrorist victims in the 9/11 attacks was gay public relations executive and rugby enthusiast Mark Bingham of San Francisco, who was among several passengers of the hijacked United Airlines jet who reportedly stormed the cockpit to regain control of the jetliner before one of the hijackers crashed the jet into the countryside in rural Pennsylvania.
The jet had taken off from Newark, N.J. with its destination being San Francisco. Investigators learned the hijackers turned the plane around and were heading to Washington, D.C., with plans to crash it into the White House or the U.S. Capitol.
The passengers, including Bingham, who stormed the cockpit and were among the 44 passengers and crew who lost their lives in the crash are credited by investigators and family members and friends with saving the lives of hundreds of others if the hijackers succeeded in crashing into the White House or Capitol.
Among the other LGBTQ people known to have lost their lives in the 9/11 attacks was Father Mychal Judge, 68, a gay Franciscan priest who served as a Catholic chaplain for the New York City Fire Department. According to the National Catholic Reporter, Judge rushed to the scene of the World Trade Center shortly before the Twin Towers collapsed. He was fatally struck by debris falling from the south tower while giving last rites to a fallen firefighter, the Catholic publication reported.
“He was a decent, wonderful human being,” said New York gay journalist Andy Humm, who had interviewed Judge for LGBTQ-related stories prior to the 9/11 attacks. “I saw him at many demonstrations for gay and AIDS causes, showing up in his Franciscan monk’s cassock,” Humm told the Washington Blade five years ago at the time of the 9/11 20th anniversary. “And he was equally beloved by the fire department, there at every major fire tragedy in the city, lending moral support to firefighters,” Humm said.
Francis DeBernardo, executive director of New Ways Ministries, a Maryland-based LGBTQ Catholic group that advocates for LGBTQ supportive policies within the church, reported five years ago that his group was supporting an effort to call on the Catholic Church to officially recognize Fr. Judge as a saint by canonizing him. But DeBernardo told the Blade this week that those efforts failed to obtain the needed support from various Catholic entities, including the Franciscan Order of Friars Minors, of which Judge was affiliated, ending efforts to canonize Judge as a saint.
DeBernardo has written a book about Judge’s life and legacy published in 2023 called “Mychal Judge:Take Me Where You Want Me to Go.”
Among the other widely reported LGBTQ victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks were a gay couple from California, Daniel Brandhorst and Ronald Gamboa, and their adopted son, David, who were among those who died aboard the United Airlines flight that crashed in Pennsylvania. The Los Angeles Times reported that Brandhorst, an attorney, and Gamboa, the manager of a Santa Monica Gap store, had adopted three-year-old David when he was an infant.
For many LGBTQ residents of New York and the D.C. area, the suffering over the loss of loved ones, including same-sex partners, was heightened a short time later when they learned they were initially ineligible for local and federal programs aimed at providing financial assistance to survivors of the 9/11 attack victims because same-sex couples were not legally recognized.
At the urging of LGBTQ rights organizations, state and local officials in the New York and the D.C. area took steps to address the initial denial of financial support for surviving same-sex partners In programs under their control. Officials with a massive federal aid program for 9/11 survivors, however, said they did not have legal authority to authorize payments to same-sex partners.
The officials, in the administration of then-President George W. Bush, said the best they could do would be to leave it up to local authorities to determine whether state probate laws would recognize a same-sex partner as a family member for eligibility in the federal aid program for 9/11 survivors, many of whom lived in states outside the New York and D.C. area.
Nicole Nava, a spokesperson for the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, a federally funded program established to compensate for physical harm or death caused by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, including support for surviving family members, said she would inquire into whether same-sex surviving partners were being supported under that program in subsequent years in response to a request from the Washington Blade.
Jenny Pizer, an attorney for the LGBTQ litigation group Lambda Legal, which supported LGBTQ partner survivors of victims of the 9/11 attacks, said the information she and her organization had showed that many if not most of the LGBTQ partner survivors were unable to obtain the federal Victim Compensation Fund payment benefits that married heterosexual spouses obtained. She said she didn’t have a definitive answer on whether some LGBTQ surviving partners were compensated.
However, at least one case where an LGBTQ partner was compensated was reported by the Washington Post in a Jan. 22, 2003, news story about Peggy Neff, the lesbian partner of 18 years of Sheila Hein, 51, a civilian employee at the Pentagon, who was killed when the terrorist hijacked jetliner crashed into the Pentagon.
The Post reported that the Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund, under the leadership of its director, Kenneth Feinberg, approved an award of $557,390 for Neff in compensation for the loss of her partner. The Post story quoted a spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign as saying, “It is our sincere hope that this signals that other gay families who have suffered the loss of a loved one will be treated similarly.”
The compensation program, which is operated by the U.S. Department of Justice, remains in operation until 2090. The Blade will report on any additional similar awards for LGBTQ surviving partners if Nava provides such information.
Events commemorating the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks were scheduled to take place this week at memorial sites honoring the 9/11 victims located outside the Pentagon in Arlington, Va., at the site of the World Trade Center Twin Towers in New York City, and the site of the jetliner crash in Shanksville, Pa., which is operated by the U.S. National Park Service.
The U.S. Congress in 2017 and 2021 approved separate bills signed by President Donald Trump during his first term in office and President Joe Biden creating the Global War on Terrorism Memorial and its construction, to be built on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. that’s scheduled to be completed in 2028.
The memorial, to be located near the Lincoln Memorial and Vietnam Veterans Memorial close to 23rd Street and Constitution Avenue, N.W., is intended to honor people who served and were lost in the wars and counterterrorism operations that followed the 9/11 attacks, including U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Longtime LGBTQ rights advocate Jay Fisette, who at the time of the 9/11 attacks held the elected position of chair of the Arlington County Board, which serves as the county’s governing body, was among the Arlington officials that came to the Pentagon’s grounds in Arlington to oversee efforts by firefighters to rescue Pentagon workers on the day of the attack.
At an Oct. 7, 2001, 9/11 Day of Remembrance and Appreciation ceremony held in Arlington, Fisette expressed the views of many in the community in response to the 9/11 attacks.
“Tonight, our community gather as a family,” he told the gathering. “We gather in sorrow and in disbelief, in remembrance and appreciation,” he said. “But we come here, too, with resolve and pride. We come together as Arlingtonians who love our country, as Americans who love our country,” he said.
“Our enemies may hurt our bodies and destroy our buildings, but they will never defeat our determination to make this a world of peace and a community in which our children grow up safe and secure,” Fissette said.
Although some of the same-sex partners of those killed in the 9/11 attacks faced obstacles in obtaining financial support through the federal 9/11 relief program, Tom Hay, the surviving partner of 14 years of American Airlines pilot David Charlebois was treated with respect and honor by American Airlines officials and colleagues at Charlebois’s funeral mass at D.C.’s St. Matthew Cathedral.
More than a dozen uniformed company pilots and flight attendants attended the mass. And a press release issued by American Airlines mentioned Charlebois’s relationship with Hay and told how Hay stood with Charlebois when Charlebois advocated for equal rights for LGBTQ people in the airline industry through his involvement with the National Gay Pilots Association.
“David was an early member of the NGPA,” the American Airlines statement said. “His contribution helped ensure ongoing progress toward fairness and solidarity.”
Activists in New York have said the 9/11 attacks drew attention to the need for legal protections for same-sex couples, including the need for recognition of same-sex marriage, which the U.S. Supreme Court legalized nationwide in its landmark ruling in 2015.
But LGBTQ advocates in New York pointed to the difficulties LGBTQ surviving partners faced when desperately seeking to find out if a partner had survived at the site of the World Trade Center attack where the Red Cross and other emergency relief agencies set up a station near the site of the attack.
“Literally, gay people had to go there, turn around, go back home, and get some paperwork that spouses didn’t have to get to prove a relationship existed,” said Ross Levi, who at the time served as executive director of the New York LGBTQ advocacy group Empire State Pride Agenda.
“You were nervous and scared and sad and then you had to go through that,” Levi told the Blade in 2011 at the time of the 10-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. “And worse yet, other people turned them away, even with the paperwork, saying sorry you’re not a family according to our guidelines.”
Activists said New York City and New York State officials quickly recognized the inequities faced by same-sex partner survivors and took steps to change polices and laws to correct the situation. Among other things, New York’s then-Gov. George Pataki (R) issued an executive order in October 2001 that included surviving partners of gay and lesbian victims of the World Trade Center attacks in receiving full spousal benefits from the state’s Crime Victims Board.
In a separate development, the LGBTQ litigation group Lambda Legal, ESPA, the Human Rights Campaign, and other LGBTQ advocacy groups created the September 11 Gay & Lesbian Family Fund to provide some support to surviving same-sex partners who were ineligible for help from the federal relief fund program.
“The terrorist attack on September 11th is a tragedy that touched every American, impacting people and families from all walks of life,” Jonathan Lovitz, the Human Rights Campaign’s Senior Vice President for Campaigns and Communications told the Blade in a statement this week.
“As in all moments in American history, LGBTQ+ Americans were there, and feel the impact of this day,” he said. “As we remember the lives lost 25 years later, the heartbreak remains strong and the work to ensure that every person can live safe from violence in this country continues.”
2026 Midterm Elections
Chris Pappas wins NH Democratic Senate primary
Gay congressman running to succeed retiring U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen
New Hampshire Congressman Chris Pappas on Tuesday won the Democratic primary in the race to succeed retiring U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) in the U.S. Senate.
Pappas defeated Karishma Manzur, who was his primary challenger, by a 61.8-36.1 percent margin.
The gay congressman will face off against former U.S. Sen. John E. Sununu, who defeated former U.S. Sen. Scott Brown in the Republican primary.
“Tonight’s victory sends a clear message that voters are looking for leaders who will fight for their rights, their freedoms, and to be treated with dignity and respect,” said Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson in a statement.
She campaigned for Pappas in Manchester, New Hampshire’s largest city, on Aug. 30.
“Chris Pappas has delivered results, stood up for equality, and showed up for the people he serves,” said Robinson in her statement. “HRC was proud to mobilize Equality Voters across New Hampshire to help power this win. We don’t have a second to waste between now and November. We look forward to continuing our work with Rep. Pappas as he drives toward victory in November so he can help return a pro-equality majority to the United States Senate.”
A poll the University of New Hampshire Survey Center released on Aug. 26 showed Sununu ahead of Pappas by a 45-43 percent margin if they were to face off in the general election. The margin of error is +/-2.1 percent.
Pappas would become the first openly gay man elected to the U.S. Senate if he were to win in November.
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