Gay Today: Viewpoint

Two Gay Heroes;
Two Different Eras

By Rodger Streitmatter
Media Matters

Oliver Sipple thwarted an assassination attempt on President Ford in 1975

Oliver Sipple and Mark Bingham were two gay men who became national heroes.

They had much else in common as well. At the moment that their names leapt onto the front page, they were both in their early thirties and living in San Francisco. They were both strong and healthy-Sipple played football in high school, Bingham was a member of a national college champion rugby team in the early 1990s. They were both ruggedly handsome with well-toned physiques. And on their respective early fall days when circumstances called, they both responded quickly and without concern for their own well-being, only that of others.

But the two men lived in very different eras-for society, for the media, for Gay America.

On September 22, 1975, Oliver "Billy" Sipple, 33, had gone to Union Square to hear President Gerald Ford speak. He happened to be standing next to Sara Jane Moore when she pulled out a .38 caliber revolver and aimed it at the President. Instinctively, the former Marine-twice wounded in Vietnam-lunged at the would-be assassin and knocked away her gun. The bullet went wild and lodged in a building. Ford was whisked away to safety.

Two days later, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen announced to the world that the national hero was, in fact, a national gay hero. Harvey Milk, Sipple's long-time friend, was making a serious run for the city's board of supervisors at the time, while also trying to break down stereotypes by showing the public that all gay men did not wear eye shadow, heels and a dress. Billy Sipple was the perfect role model.

But the story did not play so well in Detroit. Sipple's working-class parents were shocked to hear that their son was a "faggot." They were so ashamed that they publicly disowned him. The estrangement between Sipple and his father, an auto worker, grew so deep that when his mother died in 1979, it was made clear that Sipple was not welcome at the funeral. So he stayed in San Francisco.

The news reports had damaged Sipple's relationship with his family so severely that he filed a $15 million invasion-of-privacy suit against seven major newspapers, including the Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times. "My sexuality is part of my private life," he insisted. After a superior court judge dismissed the suit, Sipple ceased to take proper care of himself. He drank too much and ate too much. After he died in his rundown apartment in 1989, at the age of 47, no one found the body until two weeks later. A half gallon bottle of bourbon was next to Sipple's bed, and he had ballooned to 298 pounds.

On September 11, 2001, Mark Bingham, 31, raced through Manhattan traffic to catch United Flight 93 from Newark back to San Francisco after attending a friend's 30th birthday party. The founder of his own public relations firm sat quietly in first class, seat D-4, for the first 97 minutes of the flight. But then the pilot came on the intercom and told his passengers that their flight had been hijacked. Bingham used his cell phone to call his mother back home in California. "We've been taken over," he told her. "There are three men that say they have a bomb."

Related Articles from the GayToday Archive:
Alan Terl: A Leading Warrior for the Good, the True & the Fair

Timothy R. McVeigh: Making Big Suckers of the Pentagon Snoopers

What to Say to Barney Frank?

Related Sites:
Oliver Sipple

GayToday does not endorse related sites.

The details of exactly what happened next aboard the airliner are unclear, but three or four men apparently rushed the cockpit to overpower the terrorists, forcing the Boeing 757 to the ground in a remote section of western Pennsylvania and thereby sparing Washington, D.C., from a second attack-saving an untold number of lives.

People who knew Mark Bingham have no doubt that he was one of the men who fought the hijackers. The 6-foot-5 Bingham "loved mixing it up on the rugby or football field," said Jim Buzinski, one of his fellow players. Bingham also had run with the bulls at Pamplona, Buzinski said, and, during the halftime of UC Berkeley's big game with Stanford, had rushed on to the field and tackled the mascot. "Such a man would not hold back as other passengers decided to make a move."

In the days since the tragedy, neither the news media nor members of Bingham's family have hesitated to discuss either his sexuality or his bravery. "He's not one to sit on the sidelines," his father told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "He never was." When the reporter asked Jerry Bingham to characterize his son, he said softly, "If you knew him, you loved him, and that was it."

The public homage to Mark Bingham has been abundant. The Washington Post published a highly laudatory profile of him, written by one of the paper's openly gay reporters. The San Francisco Fog, a gay rugby team that Bingham belonged to, has posted a tribute page to him. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) presented an American flag to Bingham's life partner. Congressional leaders are talking about awarding the Freedom Medal to the passengers who diverted Flight 93 from its target, Bingham among them.

Mark Bingham: Hero of Flight 93

Oliver Sipple and Mark Bingham were both gay heroes whose lives ended too soon and too tragically. Although the events of recent days are too heinous to speak of in terms of silver linings, those who knew Mark Bingham-as well as gay men and lesbians who did not-may take some small comfort in knowing that the reaction to his untimely death, by both his family and the larger society, has provided dramatic evidence that Gay America has advanced a great distance in the last quarter of a century.

Rodger Streitmatter, Ph.D. is a member of the School of Communication faculty at American University in Washington, D.C. His latest book,Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America has just been published by Columbia University Press. He is also the author of Unspeakable: The Rise of the Gay & Lesbian Press in America (Faber & Faber, 1995) and Raising Her Voice: African American Women Journalists Who Changed History (The University Press of Kentucky, 1994)