The Washington Blade

The media and Mychal Judge
http://www.nyblade.com/frntpage.htm

Media lauds fallen chaplain as hero, ignoring that he was also a gay man

Mainstream press accounts reported extensively on the life and heroic death of Father Mychal Judge, the beloved chaplain of the Fire Department of New York, but it has been the gay press that has reported that Judge was open to many about being a gay man.
(AP)

By Inga Sorensen

Media worldwide reported on the death of Father Mychal Judge, the beloved Fire Department of New York chaplain, killed Sept. 11 while administering last rites to an injured rescue worker at the World Trade Center.

But the fact that the 68-year-old Franciscan priest was known by some to be gay went unreported in the myriad stories churned out by mainstream press outlets following the felled chaplain's passing.

Some speculate that most reporters didn’t know about Judge’s sexual orientation, couldn’t confirm it, or felt the topic was too sensitive to publicly address.

A priest's orientation

In coverage immediately following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the New York Blade News reported that local gay journalist Andy Humm had noted on his cable television program, "Gay USA," that Judge had been open about being gay.

"When gays were kept out of the St. Patrick’s Parade, he gave me an interview on the street telling me how terrible it was for us to be discriminated against and for the church to be doing it," Humm told gay journalist Rex Wockner, a contributor to many gay media outlets, including the Blade.

"I saw him at many demonstrations for gay and AIDS causes, showing up in his Franciscan monk’s cassock. And he was equally beloved by the fire department, there at every major fire tragedy in the city lending moral support to firefighters," Humm told Wockner at the time.

According to Wockner, editors from two of the estimated 100 papers he works with called to request further information about Wockner's report on Judge's sexual orientation. (The Blade was one of the two outlets to contact him to fact-check the report, he said.)

Wockner said he received the information from a trusted source, and confirmed it with other sources. "We were very careful to make sure we weren’t outing him," Wockner said. "[Judge] was out to all kinds of people."

Humm told the Blade this week that the popular Catholic priest "was out to people he trusted, and he seemed to cast the net rather wide." Humm, who is writing an article about Judge for the Village Voice, estimated the chaplain was out to hundreds of people.

"I had heard he was gay," said Tom Ryan, a 20-year veteran of the FDNY who came out in the late 1990s. "But I never wanted to compromise [Judge’s] position as chaplain by him associating with an out gay firefighter."

"I heard about him through other people, especially in the gay community, that behind the scenes, he was very active within the gay community and fighting for gay rights," Ryan said. "From what I’ve been told and what I’ve been led to believe, he championed our causes, especially with Cardinal O’Connor."

In the late 1980s, Judge provided a home for Dignity's AIDS ministry at the Church of St. Francis of Assisi in midtown Manhattan after it was expelled from St. Francis Xavier Church by John Cardinal O'Connor, who has since died.

Ryan, who is president of Fire FLAG/EMS, a group for gay firefighters and emergency services personnel, said, "As far as I know, the rank and file [firefighters] didn’t know he was gay."

Some New York City gay rights advocates also said they were surprised to either learn that Judge was gay, or that he was openly gay.

"I wouldn’t call it a double life," said Humm. "I would say he was one of those people who never lied about his life — that’s a double life, when most people think you’re straight and you’re really gay. I don’t know if he projected to anyone that he was straight. There’s a 1996 profile of him in the Times with him selling ‘The Hunk’ calendar for the firefighters."

Humm said that over 10 years of interacting with Judge, the priest "shared a lot about himself in the sense of his love for men and that kind of stuff. Admiring men on the street and all those kinds of things."

Judge was reportedly out to FDNY Commissioner Thomas Von Essen, who has marched in the city’s gay pride parade. Ryan described FDNY brass as "very supportive." The FDNY did not respond by press time to a request for comment from the Blade.

Longtime gay rights advocate Brendan Fay, a friend of Judge’s, said while some people knew of Judge’s sexual orientation, it is new information for many. And, he added, "It was just one aspect of Mychal’s life, not the totality.

The Archdiocese of New York referred inquiries for this story to the Church of St. Francis of Assisi.

Father Bryan Carroll, director of counseling at the Church of St. Francis of Assisi, knew Judge for 20 years and viewed him as his mentor.

"I think he was like so many people in the community who work for stock brokerage firms, work for banks, work for institutions, who swim in and out of groups of people who carefully balance their lives," said Carroll. "The thing about Mychal is that he was just a thoroughly decent human being. … He made you feel safe about who you were, and also made each person feel safe about how they chose to reveal themselves, and how they chose to be a part of whatever community they were in."

He added, "I think he wanted gays and lesbians, particularly gay and lesbian Catholics, which would be the world he lived within, to feel that they were whole … and had a place at the table."

Is sexual orientation relevant?

Nearly all the media coverage about Judge has depicted him as a beloved hero; a kind and caring man who loved, and was wholeheartedly loved by, his firefighters.

At the Mass of Christian Burial for Judge, Rev. Michael Duffy from Philadelphia said it was just like Judge to be among the first to perish while helping others at the decimated World Trade Center.

"I think he planned it so he could be the first to lead the other firefighters into heaven, and I see him now standing before the pearly gates with that big, Irish smile of his welcoming the rest of the firefighters," Duffy said at the service.

Such was the tenor of most of the media coverage. Judge’s Irish heritage was laced through reportage; his sexual orientation was not.

Humm said by failing to incorporate that component of Judge into its coverage, the media fail to provide a better understanding of the man’s life and work.

"I think his gayness is completely central to his ministry. … I’m a white kid from the suburbs, too; he’s an Irish kid from Brooklyn. Gayness is what gives me my outsider status. It’s what gives me most of the feeling I have for people of color, for women, or anything else. [It’s] based on my outsider status," Humm said.

"Otherwise I’m just out there playing golf or selling insurance or whatever," he said. "Why was he so dedicated to serving the homeless, to working for social justice, being the first one to help people with AIDS? Duh, I mean, it doesn’t come from nothing. It doesn’t come from nowhere."

Ryan agreed. "I don’t know anything about his personal life, … but I do know that what made him was the fact that he was a gay man."

"His death was a great loss to the gay and AIDS community," said gay state Sen. Tom Duane, a Manhattan Democrat.

Mitchell Stephens, professor of journalism and mass communication at New York University said that, despite a slew of mainstream media coverage about Judge’s death, he was not aware that Judge was gay.

"Was he?" Stephens responded when contacted by the Blade this week. "I felt like I was learning a fair amount about Judge; that he was gay was not among what I learned."

"Certainly it would be important to include that Judge was gay," said NYU’s Stephens. "I think it’s important for the community to understand that gay people die heroes, just as straight people do."

Stephens said media can sometimes be too reticent when reporting on the lives of gay people.

"You wouldn’t hide his religion or ethnicity," he said. "Why would you hide this?"

"They won’t write it," Humm said bluntly. He suggested that’s because reporters are too afraid or too lazy.

"The local press, the American press, they’re interested in telling stories that reconfirm people’s notion of things," he said. Those notions include the notion that everybody is straight, Humm said.

Wockner, meanwhile, argued that reporters didn’t know of Judge’s sexual orientation, or couldn’t confirm it. "Why should we hide this?" Wockner said, defending his own decision to go forward with the story. Not reporting the information, said Wockner, it would be "buying into the homophobia."

Wockner also noted that it made sense to report about Judge’s sexual orientation because gay newspapers were compiling lists of gay men and lesbians who died in the terrorist attacks.

"Why should we leave [Judge] out?" Wockner said. "It would be dishonest to leave him out."

A need to share stories

Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum of the New York City gay synagogue Congregation Beth Simchat Torah agreed that people should be made aware of the contributions that gay men and lesbians make both in general and in times of crisis. And, Kleinbaum added, in light of the controversial remarks made by televangelist Jerry Falwell in part blaming gays for the terrorist attacks, it’s important to shatter the myth that all religious figures are anti-gay zealots.

"That simply isn’t so," she said.

As a chaplain beloved by firefighters, the political elite, people with AIDS and the homeless, Judge was a man with his "feet in a lot of different worlds," said Cathy Renna of Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, a media watchdog group.

All that made for quite the human interest story, she said.

"And it doesn’t do justice to who he was by not reporting that he was gay," she said. "Our stories die with us if we don’t do something."

Ryan shared one of those poignant stories. During that surreal morning of Sept. 11, Ryan and other members of the Chelsea-based Ladder Co. 12 went to the World Trade Center site. It was just after 11 a.m., and the squad was getting in position and assessing what they could do.

"At one point we came to the corner of St. Peter’s Church, and there was a group of firefighters there. They said the fire department chaplain was in there. I was thinking he must be in there as a rallying point for the troops, and they’re like, ‘No he’s dead.’ I was absolutely shocked," Ryan recounted.

"In the middle of all this going on we just had to go in the church and pay our respects," he said. "We went in there as a group, and it was eerily beautiful. … They had placed his body right in front of the altar. … He had his badge and his ID card on his chest, and his religious stole was folded just beautifully on his legs. It was a beautiful moment. It was also a signal of how bad this was going to be."

A few days later, Ryan attended Judge’s funeral, and watched as the pallbearers made their way toward the church.

"Right in front of me one of the guys started having trouble — literally almost dropped the coffin — so I just jumped out immediately and grabbed the coffin," he said. "The other guy stepped out, and I became [Judge’s] pallbearer. And it struck me that it was a sign from him, that here he was a gay priest, and here I was a gay firefighter, and I don’t know how, but I became his pallbearer.

"I got to carry him into the church and out of the church. … I felt he reached out to me after death and sent me a sign from above that it’s OK."

He added, "And I do regret now not having come to know him more in life."

This article appeared in the issue of:
September 28, 2001

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