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A Gay Man Reflects on How Sept. 11th Brought Him Fully to the Gay
Community
On that fateful September 11 morning, as John Winter watched the horrors of
the World Trade Center Towers burn, then crumble, he knew his life would be
changed forever.
What he didn’t know at the time is how it would bring him closer to his
own gay community.
Winter, now 49, lived with his lover, Tony Karnes, then 37, in an apartment
just three blocks south of the twin towers. Karnes worked on the 97th floor
of One World Trade Center, or the north tower. Until September 5, 2001,
Winter worked on the 99th floor of the same tower. In a twist of luck that
saved Winter’s life, his company relocated their offices from the World
Trade Center less than a week before the attacks.
Karnes had left for work at about 8:30 a.m. that fateful morning, minutes
before the American Airlines plane crashed into the building, turning it
into a towering inferno. At the couple’s home, Winter heard “what
sounded like a loud thunder.” The curious noise caused him to peek out the
window, where he saw several floors of One World Trade Center spewing smoke.
“I looked out the window and realized the smoke was covering the area
right where Tony’s desk was,” says Winter.
Winter grabbed his cell phone, but Karnes’ work line had gone dead.
Panicking, Winter rushed out of the apartment and ran toward the building
that would become his lover’s grave. He was forced to turn back by
dangerous flying debris and by firemen who prevented him from getting any
closer to the building.
Karnes and Winter had met three years earlier at a technology convention in
Memphis, Tennessee. In 1999, they moved together to New York City, and
Karnes was simply enamored by its glitz and energy. He loved movies and the
spicy hot ethnic foods from around the world, especially Indian cuisine.
“New York was one big adventure to him,” says Winter. “We were still
discovering all the different little exciting new areas of it.”
Though both men were comfortable with their sexuality, and certainly had
other gay and lesbian friends, Winter says that before the tragedy they were
“not very much part of the gay scene.” They didn’t go to bars or pay
much attention to gay and lesbian political rights groups or read the gay
papers. “It seemed being gay together was enough,” says Winter.
It wasn’t until Winter lost the man he loved that he realized how much he
needed his community.
While Winter’s company set up bereavement sessions for people who lost
loved ones at the World Trade Center, Winter says he felt “isolated and
disconnected” at the group meetings.
All the other participants were heterosexuals. Winter was the only one
who’d lost a gay partner. At times, he says, others acted as if his loss
was somehow not as equally devastating as the loss of a husband or wife.
“I wanted to talk to people who understood,” he says.
So he phoned the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center of
New York, and began attending a bereavement group there. Ironically, at that
group, none of the other surviving partners had lost their loved ones during
the attacks on the World Trade Center.
Many had lost lovers to AIDS. But how a person lost a lover turned out to be
less important than the understanding of what that loss really meant. Winter
felt much more at home with the gay group from the Center than with the
bereavement group from work.
And that was just the beginning of how Winter would lean on his community
for help during the most devastating time of his life.
Several weeks after the tragedy, Winter received a call from the Empire
State Pride Agenda (ESPA), a New York State gay and lesbian rights group.
The organization had seen Winter’s name in the press as a surviving
partner, and called to offer Winter help in applying for aid from relief
agencies.
ESPA helped Winter collect all the documents and evidence he needed to prove
to relief agencies like the Red Cross that he and Karnes were indeed a
couple who were financially as well as emotionally intertwined. “I was
numb from the trauma” of losing a lover and witnessing the attacks on the
World Trade Center, says Winter. “I wasn’t up to filling out forms and
going through paperwork.” To help him, a member of ESPA—indeed, Matt
Foreman, at the time ESPA’s executive director—personally escorted
Winter to the offices where he could apply for assistance.
And later, Winter would get advice from the Lambda Legal Defense and
Education Fund about how to settle Karnes’ estate, and how he might apply
for a settlement from the federal Victims Compensation Fund, the federal
fund set up as an alternative to suing the airlines to compensate family
members of people who died on September 11.
Gay relationships are not recognized in any legally significant ways by the
state or federal governments. In addition, Karnes died without a will,
making any claims by Winter as Karnes’ lover all the more complicated.
The painful experience of losing his lover has shown Winter, however, that
he is not alone. That in the most difficult time of his life, the gay and
lesbian community was there for him.
Winter has never considered himself a gay
activist, and he still doesn’t. But one thing he has learned from this
horrible experience, he says, is just how important it is to have
organizations that fight for the recognition of our relationships. “It was
almost as if my life with Tony was legally invisible,” he says.
Today,
he has joined ESPA, as well as the Human Rights Campaign, and continues to
go to the gay and lesbian community center. “I’ve never felt more a part
of the community.”
Mubarak Dahir
receives e-mail at MubarakDah@aol.com.
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