http://www.nyblade.com/frntpage.htm

By Inga Sorensen

On 19th Street, just off of Seventh Avenue, sits the unassuming firehouse nestled in Chelsea that Tom Ryan and the other firefighters of Ladder Company 12 call their second home.

Like so many fire stations throughout the city, a makeshift shrine now decorates the station's entrance. There are buckets full of vibrantly colored bouquets, fluttering pinwheels, and an assortment of stuffed animals — a zebra, a green Beanie Bear, a little red rooster — left by neighborhood children.

There are dozens upon dozens of handcrafted cards, many colored in red, white and blue, from students thousands of miles away wishing the firefighters well and thanking them for their sacrifice.

There is a picture of the twin towers in their previously majestic state, standing tall. And then there are the photos of the five firefighters from Ladder Company 12 who never made it back on Sept. 11 after the colossal World Trade Center was downed by terrorists.

"That's Mike Mullan," said Ryan, a strapping man with gray-blue eyes and muscular forearms. He was pointing to the picture of one such firefighter. "Boy, we used to get into it," he laughed. The let-me-push-your-buttons subject? Who's better — Clinton or Bush?

Ryan, after all, is an out gay firefighter and professed liberal. "I'd like to see Hillary Clinton become the first female president. She's just so smart," he assessed. Bantering buddy Mullan, meanwhile, was what Ryan warmly tagged as an "arch conservative."

Heck, said Ryan, if there were an occasion ripe for Mullan to somehow emerge from the wreckage, it would have been when President Bush recently visited Ground Zero. "That would have been the moment he would have stood right up," Ryan figured.

But there was no such magic; only a grim reality that Mullan and thousands of other men and women perished on a day that has forever altered this city and country.

The fateful day

Ryan was home in the Bronx community of Riverdale when the planes struck the World Trade Center. When the severity of the events became clear, firefighters and police officers from around the city were called to duty.

Ryan dashed to Ladder Company 12. The trucks were long gone, having brought the team initially on call down to Ground Zero. He snagged his gear, hopped into a van with some other firefighters and headed downtown, where the towers had just collapsed.

"Anybody who's been to New York and seen a ticker-tape parade, it was like an evil ticker tape parade. It was just smoke and dust in the air, and papers flying everywhere," Ryan recounted.

He made his way toward the devastation, looking for the familiar faces of Ladder Company 12 through the thick smoke and dust.

"Every firefighter who went by, you kinda looked at their face, looked at their number," he said.

A pause for Father Judge

Ryan and the others came upon St. Peter's Church, a few blocks from the massive destruction, and some firefighters mentioned that NYFD's beloved chaplain, Father Mychal Judge, was in there.

"They said he was dead; it was numbing," said Ryan.

He stopped with the others for a moment to go into the church to pay their respects.

"Everything outside was covered in dust, but you stepped into the church and everything just opened up, and there was color. Outside there was no color, but inside the church there was color," he remembered.

"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, he said, of "how bad this was going to be."

In an earlier Blade interview, Ryan described how he came to be a pallbearer at the funeral for Judge, a gay Catholic priest.

"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 [a] 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."

A worried partner

When Ryan left the church on Sept. 11 and got to what was left of the World Trade Center, he — like the other firefighters, police officers and emergency service personnel — tried to do whatever he could to assist.

Nearly 3,000 miles away in California, Ryan's partner Scott Arigot, who was away on business, heard the news of the tragedy but had no way of contacting Ryan. All Arigot knew was that some firefighters had been caught in the collapse, but he had no way of knowing if Ryan was among them.

"Every firefighter down there couldn't get through to their families," Ryan recounted. "It was very intense."

The two finally spoke the next day.

"To call and tell the people in your life that you're alive is a very weird emotion," said Ryan. "You know, it's great that you're alive, but it reminds you of all of those who aren't so lucky to be going home and calling people to tell them they're alive."

A personal journey

The 41-year-old Ryan has been with the Fire Department of New York since 1982. His father and brother are also firefighters.

"I think it's my calling," he said. "It's a very unusual job to say the least. Mostly, everything you do is some form of helping someone else. You're responding to everything from backed-up toilets to major fires to terrorist attacks now. There's boring times and there's incredible adrenaline rushes that you can't describe."

Becoming a firefighter came somewhat naturally for Ryan, who was born in Brooklyn but spent many years living in upstate New York. Dealing with something else that came naturally — his sexual orientation — has been more difficult.

"It's been a lifelong struggle with sexual orientation," said Ryan, adding he knew he was gay "probably starting with when I came out of the womb."

He said he always knew he was different. "And when I knew what it was when I was young, I knew it couldn't be," he explained. "I grew up in an Irish Catholic home, and you knew at an early age what you could and couldn't be — and 'gay' wasn't on the 'could be' list."

And so began the circuitous route to his status today as an out gay men. Ryan went into the military, got married at the age of 25, raised "three beautiful children," and later divorced.

Ryan came out in his 30s. He met Arigot, and the two have been together for seven years.

"He's shown me what true love is," said Ryan.

The two actually met for the first time when Ryan was in the service, some two decades ago.

"I was stationed at West Point when we first met, and I met him all these years later at a West Point football game," mused Ryan, adding, "It was meant to be."

Coming out on the job

Ryan came out at work in the late 1990s. One of the reasons he decided to was his kids, who have been very accepting of his sexual orientation.

"Here I am telling them that it's OK to be gay, but I can't be out at work. That's one of the reasons I came out. To show them this is who I am, and this is what I do, and I just happen to be a gay man also," he said. "If I'm going to teach them that this is perfectly normal, then I have to be perfectly normal about it."

He also saw a screening of "It's Elementary," a documentary that looks at anti-gay prejudice and how it can be prevented if children have an opportunity to have discussions about it when they're young.

Following the screening, a man stood up and recounted how his grandson had been tormented in school — and how nobody bothered to intervene.

"So he turned to Smith & Wesson and that helped," Ryan said. "And this poor man was literally shaking and in tears because he had to bury his grandson because no one would help him for no other reason than he was gay. From that moment I knew I had to be involved in this, and had to stand up and try and help others. I know I lived a tormented life as a teenager and I don't think anybody should live a life like that."

So Ryan came out in the tight-knit machismo world of firefighters. He was the only gay New York City firefighter to march in uniform in this year's gay pride parade.

"It's a hard job to come out on. There's quite a few gay people on the Fire Department of New York City, but there's this tremendous fear of coming out," said Ryan.

Many gay firefighters, he explained, don't want to risk the ribbing and possible alienation from their colleagues.

"It's kind of a weird group," Ryan said of firefighters. "It's a group of people who will put their lives on the line and do anything to save anybody without questioning it, but sometimes when you hear them discussing politics or personal opinions, the two don't go hand in hand. What they do and what they say just don't go hand in hand sometimes. Sometimes they can be homophobic."

That homophobia manifests itself when firefighters use the terms "faggot" and "queer."

"I don't hear that a lot anymore because people kind of know who I am, which is good," he said. Still, it happens.

Ryan recounted an episode in which a fire official from another house came to the station, which was near a gay bookstore that recently closed.

"The first thing he said was, 'Where are all the fudgepackers gonna go now?'" Ryan recalled. "It's ridiculous; it really is."

Ryan said sometimes he'll speak up and address such remarks, sometimes not.

As for that particular incident, he reflected, "I think I said, 'We shop everywhere.'"

Ryan said he has lost some friends since coming out, "but I kind of look at it now that if they have a problem with it, it's their problem, not my problem."

And, Ryan said, the department brass has been great. Commissioner Thomas Von Essen has marched in the gay pride parade — the first New York City fire commissioner to do so.

Additionally, some of Ryan's station mates have shown a level of protectiveness.

Around gay pride, for example, Ryan was going to be interviewed at the firehouse by a local television station.

One firefighter told Ryan: "I don't care what you are, you're in this house and whatever you need we'll do."

"That was very nice," said Ryan. "The guys are really shy anyway when the cameras start rolling, but this guy got up and got in the kitchen with me and was willing to be in the video. That was good."

That firefighter, Angel Juarbe, is among the missing men of Ladder Company 12.

Making a difference

Ryan hopes that just being out is making a difference. But he has taken it even further. For instance, Ryan is president of FireFLAG/EMS, a peer support group for gay and lesbian firefighters and emergency service personnel, among others. And he has gotten involved with the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network, where he goes into schools and talks about being a firefighter — who also happens to be gay.

"I feel a tremendous responsibility now as a firefighter and as a man and as a father that I get to send the message out saying anyone can grow up to be a firefighter," he said. "I think it's very important to be doing that kind of stuff. You can't change the whole world, but you can change a little piece of it."

What really ticks him off are remarks by the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, blaming gays for bringing on the terrorist attacks. And then there's the recent statement from Lou Sheldon, of the Traditional Values Coalition, saying that public and private relief agencies providing assistance to survivors of the attacks should not give aid to surviving members of gay partnerships.

"If we've learned anything from this, we've learned we have to live our lives more fully," said Ryan. "The stupid nonsense of letting Lou Sheldon and Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell and more religious fanatics toss verbal bombs, well, stuff like that drives me so insane right now. That makes me want to be more of an activist, and stand up and say, 'Screw you! Let's see you run into a burning building. I want to see you try to protect someone.'"

A new reality

Firefighters, said Ryan, tend to live life fully every day, because of the implicit dangers of their work. But the events of Sept. 11 have perhaps made them even more aware of their vulnerability. Those who lived through it now spend their hours consumed by the enormity of the loss. Their days are filled with wakes and funerals.

"It happened on Sept. 11, but it hasn't ended yet," Ryan said, noting that more than 300 firefighters were lost that day. Only a few bodies have been recovered.

"For us it doesn't close until we get everybody back," he said. "That's the hard part. You rely on everybody when you go into a building; you know nobody's going to leave. I think there's a great many of us right now who feel like we left them in there."

This article appeared in the issue of:
October 17, 2001

E-mail New York Blade News

Copyright © 2001 New York Blade News, Inc.

Close Window to Return to TBC Web Site