It exemplifies every single reason why our work is as relevant as it was on September 10." That word is still okay with some people, and these are the kinds of things you might see if you happened to be gay and were serving in the military. It gets to something we need to discuss, which is that it's okay to be in the Navy and to write 'fag' on a bomb and drop it on a terrorist. "I actually want the picture to run, but with context. "Is taking the picture down the right response?" asks Cathy Renna, GLAAD's New York spokeswoman. The AP removed it from the wires a day later. Within hours of the photo's worldwide release, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, a media watchdog group, was on the case. 11, an unidentified sailor on the USS Enterprise flight deck, in the Arabian Sea, according to the wire service's caption, had just signed a bomb bearing a line of graffito that reads: In a photograph transmitted by the Associated Press on Oct. government property about to be dropped on the Taliban. Then came a certain picture of a certain piece of U.S. The list goes on - the beloved gay chaplain of the New York Fire Department, killed in the World Trade Center collapse two men and their adopted toddler killed on one of the planes the many who lost longtime partners and are now navigating an iffy situation of relief aid and death benefits for non-traditional couples. And there was the 6-foot-5 rugby player from San Francisco, Mark Bingham, who is thought to have helped fellow passengers confront terrorists in a plane over Pennsylvania.
Gays are intimately, tragically part of this war: David Charlebois, a fixture of Dupont Circle's upper set, was a pilot on one of the doomed airliners Sept. It's almost nothing, except it's an interesting case study about where gay men and lesbians fit into the new world disorder, and where they still do not.