By

Originally published on Advocate.com December 24 2001 1:00 AM ET

It took a while
for Alice Hoglan to muster the courage—not to mention
the technological know-how—to check the
messages on her son’s mobile phone. Mark
Bingham had had the phone with him when he boarded United
Airlines Flight 93 nearly two months earlier. So, of
course, it was destroyed along with everything else on
board when the plane crashed in a field in Somerset
County, Pa. But like some sort of space-age time capsule
that captured the terror and the confusion that has
become known as September 11, Bingham’s voice
messages sat on an AT&T Wireless computer waiting
to be retrieved.

Hoglan knew there
were at least two messages because she had left them
herself. Mark woke her up at 6:44 a.m. Pacific time with an
air phone call to tell her that his flight had been
hijacked. However, it wasn’t until after the
call was disconnected and Hoglan turned on the TV that
she realized the hijackers’ probable plan for her
son’s plane.

“Mark,
this is your mom,” she said in her first message.
“It’s 9:54 a.m. [Eastern time].
It’s a suicide mission, and the hijackers are
planning to use your plane as a target.” Today,
she corrects herself when she repeats the message:
“Of course I meant to say
‘weapon.’”

Her messages were
two of the 44 left on Mark’s phone in the wake of the
hijacking. One was from Mark’s father, Jerry Bingham,
in Florida. “I’m looking at this big
wreck and I’m hoping you’re nowhere near
it,” he said, according to Hoglan. Others were
from rugby teammates, fraternity brothers, business
associates, and boyfriends. And at least one was from
his roommate in New York City, Amanda Mark. “Mark,
call me!” she pleaded.

Mounting evidence
suggests Mark had access to the information his mother
was trying to get to him. Cockpit recordings support the
theory that he and the others on board took amazing
measures in attempting to overcome the hijackers. The
victims of Flight 93 have been heralded as citizen
soldiers who, when faced with then-unimaginable
circumstances, gave their own lives to save thousands
of others. Mark, meanwhile, has been singled out by
the media as the “gay hero.”

It’s a
distinction that makes many of those who were close to him
uneasy. Not that they were uncomfortable with
Mark’s sexual orientation. Most of them
don’t hesitate to mention his nickname, “Bear
Trap.” He liked his men big and hairy, they
say. It’s just that the moniker “gay
hero” says so little about a man who was as
varied as the 44 unheard voice messages his mother
found on his phone.

The word giant
better represents Mark Bingham, his friends might say. But
even then they wouldn’t be talking about his
6-foot-4, 220-pound frame. They would be describing
the life they watched him lead.

One of Alice
Hoglan’s most vivid memories is from the summer of
1970, when she split from her husband and moved from
Phoenix—the town in which Mark was born on May
22 of that year—to Miami. “I ran to the
airport with him stuck like a football under my
arm,” she says.

Mark—who
at the time was called Jerry, after his father—knew
that day only through the stories his mom told him.
But it was nevertheless one of the most significant in
his life in that it marked the start of his
partnership with his mother.

“We were
always a team, and I depended on him way too much,”
Hoglan says. “It was too much emotional strain
for a little boy to have a single mom thrashing about
for support.”

After eight years
in Miami, where Mark and his mother lived on a
houseboat in the shadow of the Orange Bowl—hence
Mark’s lifelong obsession with the Miami
Dolphins—the pair moved to California.

Soon after her
divorce, Hoglan decided to take the K from her son’s
middle name, Kendall, and call him Kerry—a name she
says he hated because “it sounded like a
girl’s.” So when her son was 10 and about to
start a new school in Redlands, Calif., she gave him
an opportunity few people ever have. “I said,
‘Kerry, you’ve been complaining about your
name, and now’s the time to change it, because
people here don’t know you yet.’”
After thinking about his mom’s proposition for just a
minute, he responded, “OK, I’ll be
Mark.”

“It was a
brave and very definite thing. He just chose it,”
Hoglan remembers. “And when we got to the
classroom and the teacher said ‘This is Mark
Bingham,’ I heard a kid say, in a whining voice,
‘Another Mark!’”

The two of them
didn’t stay anywhere long those first few years in
California. In addition to Redlands, they were in Riverside,
before being inspired by one of Hoglan’s
favorite authors—John Steinbeck—and moving to
Monterey. There they lived in the back of a pickup for a few
weeks while Hoglan looked for work and, more than a
couple of times, depended on the fish Mark could catch
at the wharf for supper. “I look back on it now and
say, ‘Wow, that was a really cool, character-building
experience,’ ” Hoglan says. “But
it was pretty grim. There was never a lot of money, and
that may have been the nadir of our existence.”

Mark was a
sophomore at Los Gatos High School in Los Gatos,
Calif.—where he and his mom had moved a few
years earlier—when he met Todd Sarner. “I
think what brought us together originally is that we
didn’t fit into any of the cliques,”
says Sarner, also a sophomore at Los Gatos at the time.
“We weren’t really jocks, and we
weren’t really the nerdy, brainy kids.”

Sixteen years
later their relationship was so strong that Mark had been
the best man at Sarner’s wedding, and Sarner was the
one who dropped Mark off at the San Francisco airport
in late August for what turned out to be his last
flight out of the city. But Sarner is the first to tell you
that their friendship didn’t start out that
way.

“We kind
of had a cantankerous relationship at the beginning,”
he says. “Back then a lot of the fights were
about what heavy metal band was the best. Mark was
really into a band called Queensryche, and I was into a
Japanese metal band called Loudness.”

Sometimes Mark,
Sarner, and other friends would collaborate on music
videos—complete with big hair, makeup, and air
guitar—that they would videotape at
Mark’s house, usually when Hoglan, who is a flight
attendant for United Airlines, was away on a trip.
“They would get made up in these outrageous
Metallica and Iron Maiden getups, using my makeup,”
Hoglan says.

Mark and Sarner
also collaborated on the rugby field. And though the
sport didn’t exactly suit Sarner, it was perfect for
Mark. As physical a sport as rugby is, it no doubt
helped cultivate the sense of fearlessness in Mark
that Sarner later addressed in his eulogy on September 22 in
Berkeley, Calif. “I tend to believe that the truth is
that Mark did have fear,” he said, “but
that he took action anyway.”

Mark traveled
overseas with his high school rugby club—breaking
several of his bones along the way—and was
recruited to play for the University of California,
Berkeley, where he helped the school win two national
championships. But when 19-year-old Mark met 38-year-old
Mark Wilhelm, his athletic accomplishments must have
paled next to the seemingly insurmountable task of
keeping his sexual orientation a secret.

Wilhelm had
placed a personal ad in a San Jose, Calif., newspaper, and
Mark was one of the men who responded. His letter reflected
a tug-of-war between the gregarious, confident young
man everybody knew—the guy who could roll over
any foe on the field while winning the friendship of any
face in the crowd—and a private life he was only
beginning to accept himself. “I’ve got
no idea what I want to do with my life, but I know
I’ll be a success at something,” he wrote
Wilhelm. “I’m naïve but smart,
funny but shy. I’ve lots of friends, but I’m
lonely for a buddy that can share my secret.”

Mark, who Wilhelm
said was in the physical shape “few of us ever see
past 19,” shared more about himself after the
two of them met in person. He told Wilhelm that he had
known he was gay since he was 12. He also said, while
probably adding a dramatic bent to what was undoubtedly a
very real fear, “If my family or friends ever
found out, I’d have to kill myself.”
Wilhelm adds, “Mark was very closeted, but it was
almost as if he was leaning against the door.”

In fact, it was
less than two years afterward that Mark came out to
Sarner, who laughs now when he remembers his initial
reaction: “When did that happen?” And
only months after that, Mark came out to his mother
when they were driving around California’s Sonoma
County.

“I was
just loving being with my son that day,” Hoglan says,
pulling her long hair back with one hand. “Then
he said, ‘Mom, I have something to tell you,
and I’ve promised myself that I was going to tell you
before the sun went down.’ And when he said
that, the sun was streaming into our faces—it
was setting.

“I was
really astounded [when he told me]. I hadn’t any idea
that my son was gay, and up until that time I had been
vaguely antigay,” Hoglan says. “So with
those words, I began a journey.”

Mark was on a
journey as well. His best friend and mother knew he was
gay, but to most people Mark was still the outstanding rugby
player, the Chi Psi fraternity president, and the guy
who would get so blasted on vodka and orange juice at
Cal football games that he sometimes dashed onto the
field in often-successful attempts to tackle the opposing
team’s mascot. His softer side was no less
remarkable. Friends say he had a Clintonian ability to
bring people out of their shells, to make them feel
like no one else was more important. He made a concerted
effort to be both the life and the lifeblood of all
his social circles.

He was also a
mama’s boy who, along with some college friends,
parked in front of his mom’s house a car that
was painted from front fender to back bumper with the
words ALICE HOGLAN IS A GODDESS. “I don’t know
where he got that,” Hoglan says, still
blushing, with a mixture of embarrassment and pride.
“I never told him that I was a goddess!”

Mark was fresh
out of college and in classic form when in December 1993
he met Paul Holm at a Christmas party. “I noticed him
standing at this table, where he proceeded to eat a
whole bowl of shrimp,” Holm says. Mark noticed
Holm too and walked over, stuck out his hand, and with a big
grin said, “Hi, I’m Mark Bingham. Who
are you? ” The two of them spent the rest of
the party talking about a number of things, not the least
among them Cal Berkeley, where Holm had also gone to
school.

At 7
o’clock the next morning a telephone call and
Mark’s voice on the answering machine woke Holm
up. “I don’t know if you remember me,”
the voice said. “It’s Mark from last
night, and I wanted to see if you wanted to get
together today.” The two of them were together for
the next six years.

“We had a
very intense and wonderful relationship,” says Holm,
who shared with Mark his home in San
Francisco’s Castro district for five of the
years they were together. “We did everything from
sitting in front of the TV watching football to
traveling to France once or twice a year.”

The couple also
had a fondness for feasting on fine food and wine while
chewing on each other’s hopes for the future. It was
during one such meal that Mark first mapped out an
ambition to start his own public relations firm.
“We spent hours and hours talking about everything,
including business,” says Holm, who started his
own firm, the Holm Group, when he and Mark were
together. “When I was going through some memorabilia,
I found an old menu where, on the back, we had written
the potential names for our companies. And there was
THE BINGHAM GROUP in big letters among all the
others.”

Upon graduating
from Cal in 1993 with a degree in social sciences, with
an emphasis in international relations, Mark went to work
for high-tech PR powerhouse Alexander Communications
(now Alexander Ogilvy) and later took a job with 3Com.
High-tech PR, like rugby before it, was a perfect fit
for Mark, who as a teenager knew his Commodore 64 inside and
out. And there was no better place to ride the rising
high-tech wave of success than San Francisco in the
mid ’90s.

Soon the going
got so good that Mark decided to realize the dream he
first outlined on the back of a restaurant menu. The Bingham
Group officially opened for business in 1999 in a loft
space Mark shared with a friend’s Web-design
firm. By focusing on what he knew best—high-tech
PR—Mark was able to secure a number of clients, hire
several employees, and, in May 2000, open his own
office on San Francisco’s Lafayette Street.

“At the
office-warming party there were probably 200 people, and it
took me 20 minutes to get in the door and another 15
minutes to get a spot inside,” Hoglan says.
“But by that time in my life I had become much more
accustomed to having Mark be a larger-than-life figure. He
wasn’t famous, exactly, but he was extremely
popular, and I kind of basked in his
reflection.”

Derrick Mickle
was playing in a flag football game at San
Francisco’s Dolores Park when he first ran
head-on into Mark. “Here was this huge guy who
was just tearing people up,” he says. “And it
was kind of frustrating because I had played a lot of
pickup football growing up and there was always an
unspoken rule that you didn’t showboat.”

Mickle soon
learned that Mark wasn’t showing off but that he just
“never dumbed down his game to placate
anyone.” It wasn’t long before Mickle,
who played rugby at Vassar College, tossed the idea of a gay
rugby team Mark’s way. When the idea was no
more than a “what if,” Mark was
enthusiastic, he says. But when Mickle got serious, Mark
became “dead against” the prospect.
“He said, ‘You’ll never get accepted by
the [rugby] union’; ‘The guys out there
will tear you up’; and ‘You won’t
ever find enough players.’ ”

Mickle went ahead
without Mark’s blessing, and just two months after he
first fielded a “rag-trap of rugby players”
for the San Francisco Fog’s first practice in
October 2000, Mark had a change of heart. “He came
out for a practice and proceeded to act the same way
as when I met him. He just plowed through the field,
leaving a sea of bodies,” Mickle says, adding
that after the team’s initial response of
“What the hell is this guy doing?”
Mark’s intensity eventually helped raise the level of
everyone’s game.

And after
practice, “Mark’s great, nurturing spirit came
through,” says Bryce Eberhart, who was among
those Mark ran over on the field that first practice.
“He went up to everyone and patted them on the back
and told them they were doing a great job.”

Once again Mark
had fallen in step with a program that was just right for
that point in his life. And in the summer of 2001, when the
Fog was accepted as a permanent member of the Northern
California Rugby Football Union, he didn’t
hesitate to share his enthusiasm in an E-mail to his
teammates:

“When I
started playing rugby at the age of 16, I always thought
that my interest in other guys would be
anathema,” he wrote. “I loved the game
but knew I would need to keep my sexuality a secret forever.
As we worked and sweated and ran and talked together
this year, I finally felt accepted as a gay man and a
rugby player. My two irreconcilable worlds came
together.

“We have
the chance to be role models for other gay folks who wanted
to play sports but never felt good enough or strong
enough,” he continued. “More
importantly, we have the chance to show the other teams in
the league that we are as good as they are. Good rugby
players. Good partyers. Good sports. Good men.”

Despite the tone
of his E-mail, Mark never considered himself a gay
activist. In fact, he thought of himself more as a man of
action than a man of example. He supported John
McCain’s 2000 presidential bid, for instance,
despite the Arizona senator’s stand on gay
issues—he opposes hate-crimes legislation and
the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. McCain, who
spoke at Mark’s September 22 memorial service and
calls him “an American hero,” tells The
Advocate he won Mark’s support in the campaign
because “I was straightforward and not your typical
politician.”

Says Holm:
“Mark was very proud of being a gay man, [but] it
wasn’t the first thing he would define himself
as.”

But whether Mark
intended it to be or not, 2001 was turning out to be a
transitional year for him in many ways, including the way in
which he integrated his sexual orientation with the
rest of his life.

“The two
things in his life that he thought would never come
together, did,” Mickle says, referring to
Mark’s E-mail to the team. “When they
fused, it was like a lightbulb going off in his
head.”

After his
six-year relationship with Holm ended in 1999, Mark was for
the first time socializing as a single and openly gay
man. And, along with Eberhart and other new friends
from the Fog, he liked to mix it up while going out on
the town—maybe stopping by a straight club before
hitting a gay bar, such as the Lone Star Saloon, which
uses the slogan “Bears, Bikers, and
Mayhem!”

“If we
were going to do some sort of nasty shot in a bar and no one
wanted to do it, Mark was always the first one to give it a
try,” Eberhart says. “He would be the
one to eat the worm.”

Mickle says Mark
was not “straight-acting,” as some people have
suggested since September 11. “He was just
acting like Mark. Sure, your gaydar would hit 0 every
time [you saw him], but you would be so wrong.”

Things were
changing at work as well. Business was so good when Mark
opened his firm that he was basically able to pick and
choose what clients he wanted to work with, says
Peer-Olaf Richter, an account executive who started
working for Mark in January 2001. But by that summer
the bottom had fallen out of the technology market, and the
Bingham Group’s roster had fallen from six full-time
clients to two. That was incredibly hard for Mark.

“I learned
very early on that he was really good at making immediate
contact, chitchat, and building bridges between
people,” Richter says. “Then, when the
industry turned sour and it got to be much more about
hard facts, I don’t think he really enjoyed the
profession. Essentially, everything he had built up in
that short amount of time had basically crumbled and
fallen to pieces.”

Mark, a man who
friends say hated to lose at anything, started to spend
less time at his San Francisco office. He also was
considering relocating full-time to New York City,
where he already was living part-time and had opened a
satellite office in the Chelsea apartment he shared with
Amanda Mark.

And, Richter
says, while he and his colleagues were in the office
worrying about the loss of clients and the shrinking
budgets, Mark was checking in from Hawaii, Las Vegas,
Monaco, or Pamplona, Spain—where he took his
now-infamous run with the bulls. “At the time, we
were sitting in the office saying to ourselves,
‘What is that man doing?’ ” Richter
says.

Hoglan
acknowledges that her son was a “wild and
unpredictable boss” at times. She also concedes
that there were times that as a mother she wanted to
urge him to settle down. “He spent a lot of money,
goofed off with his friends, worked like a dog, and
lived the life that I have always dreamed of,”
she says. “And now I’m just really glad that
he did.”

Mark spent Monday
night, September 10, at Matt Hall’s home in Denville,
N.J., where the two men ate ice cream, watched Monday Night
Football, and then chatted while Mark trimmed his
goatee in front of the bathroom mirror.

The two met on
America Online in June, and after several dates they spent
a week together in early September at the Southern Decadence
festival in New Orleans. A shy guy who says he
“never made the first move,” Hall was
amazed with the confidence Mark exuded. “He took me
by the hand in front of the Phoenix bar and said,
‘Let’s go meet people,’ ” Hall
says. “Then he started going up to people and
saying, ‘Hi, I’m Mark Bingham from
California. This is Matt from New Jersey.’ ”

Their time
together had been romantic, but Hall says they had an
understanding that they were to be “just
friends.” Nevertheless, that Monday night in
Denville, Mark turned to Hall and asked, “When do we
talk about making this relationship more
exclusive?”

“I just
looked at him and said, ‘You need to be on this coast
full-time,’ ” Hall says, admitting that
even though Mark’s question took him by
surprise, he was excited about the possibility of a more
serious relationship with him.

The tension from
Mark’s question hung over the men well into the next
morning, and by 7 a.m., when they were racing toward Newark
airport, it was heightened by the stressful
possibility that Mark was going to miss his flight
home to San Francisco. He ended up being the last to board
the plane, getting to his seat so late that he had
only enough time to make a quick mobile phone call to
Hall before turning off “all electronic
devices,” as the flight attendants were instructing.

“He called
me at 7:49 a.m. and said, ‘Hi, thanks for driving so
crazy to get me here. I’ve made the plane,
I’m sitting in first class, and I’m
drinking a glass of orange juice,’ ” Hall
says. “I said, ‘OK, have a good trip.
Give me a call when you get there.’ I never told him
how much I loved him,” Hall adds. “With
Mark, you were always going to see him again. You were
always going to talk with him again.”

Nobody knows for
sure what Mark did those two hours after he hung up with
Matt Hall. One can imagine that he ate a first-class
breakfast, rummaged through the newspaper for the
latest on the Dolphins, who were scheduled to play the
Buffalo Bills that weekend, and reached across the aisle to
introduce himself to his fellow passengers.

We do know that
at 9:44 a.m. Eastern time, he called his mom. “Hi,
Mom, this is Mark Bingham,” he said when she
picked up the phone. “I just wanted to say that
I love you. I am on a flight from Newark to San
Francisco, and there are three guys on board who’ve
taken over the plane, and they say they have a
bomb.” It’s the minutes after that call to his
mother, those between when the hijackers took control of the
plane and when it crashed in Pennsylvania, that have
everyone really guessing.

Todd Sarner says
that one of the most frustrating things he’s
experienced since September 11 has been knowing
“more than anything I’ve known in my
life” that Mark was involved in taking the plane
down—but then not knowing how to adequately
explain how he knows.

“I keep
having this image from watching Mark play rugby a couple of
years ago,” he adds. “His team had just
kicked the ball, and there were probably 15 people
between Mark and the guy who caught it. And I just
remember watching Mark do something I’ve seen him do
a thousand times—duck down his head and go
through the crowd fearlessly, like he wasn’t
even there, and then tackle that guy.”

Did Mark Bingham
help tackle the terrorists on September 11?
Investigators will be combing through the wreckage of Flight
93 and listening to the cockpit voice recorder for
months and maybe years to find out. But the people who
knew Mark and watched him live his life say they have
all the proof they need.