Within days of Sept. 11, a rumor began wafting through media circles: Law enforcement was actively pursuing a theory that Mohamed Atta, the suspected ringleader of the Sept. 11 hijackings and the pilot of the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center, was a homosexual.
INVESTIGATORS have never confirmed the line of inquiry. Yet that hasn’t stopped the speculation: “World Trade Center terrorist Mohamed Atta and several of his bloody henchman led secret gay lives for years,” reported the National Enquirer in its Nov. 6 issue. It’s enough to make many a gay man or lesbian seethe with rage.
This line of thinking brings back painful memories of sensational media stories that have time and again equated gay with evil—from the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer to the Gianni Versace murderer Andrew Cunanan. The latest is a new book by a German scholar that claims that Adolf Hitler was gay.
What, after all, should it matter if Atta were gay? The fear is that such a line of inquiry seeks to establish, willfully or not, that murderous homosexuals—perhaps an entire network of them—are behind the terrorist attacks.
As outlandish as the Atta speculations may sound, it’s the kind of narrative we’ve seen all too often in America. From the McCarthy era purges of homosexuals throughout the government in the 1950s, to the investigations into the assassination of President Kennedy (think Joe Pesci and Kevin Bacon in Oliver Stone’s “JFK”), the notion of a dangerous homosexual conspiracy has reared its ugly head over and over again.
What is perhaps most galling about the subject right now is that while there may be a keen interest in proving that the enemy was homosexual, there has been much less interest in showing the heroes and victims of the attacks in the same light. In much of the media coverage since Sept. 11, gays and lesbians have been made invisible among the victims of the attacks while heterosexual victims have been focused on with great intensity. A “Dateline NBC” segment that featured Mark Bingham, the rugby player who was among the heroes on United Flight 93 (which crashed into a Pennsylvania field after several passengers overtook the hijackers), omitted the fact that Bingham was openly gay, proud and accepted by his family. But the program delved deep into the personal lives of the other heroes on the flight.
And yet, the desire to paint the enemy as gay seems to be quite strong. Two weeks ago, the Associated Press ran a photo of a Navy officer standing next to a bomb about to be dropped on Afghanistan on which somebody had scrawled HIGH JACK [sic] THIS, FAGS. That the photo got through the scrupulous military censors and that the AP chose to run the photo without commenting on the slur was yet another indicator of an impulse, unconscious as it might be, to paint homosexuals as villains in the national psyche. (Responding to angry complaints by gay groups, the Navy later apologized, as did the AP, saying it had made a “journalistic error.”) In frightening times there are always scapegoats, and gays are certainly an old standby.
That’s what makes the inquiries into Atta’s sexuality all the more dubious. Ironically, bells went off for many gay people themselves who read the New York Times interview on Sept. 18 with Atta’s father. In it, the elder Atta talked of his son as incapable of hijacking a plane because he just wasn’t man enough. “Toughen up, boy!” the father said he used to tell his son. (Harper’s later noted that the father described his son as “girlish.”) That’s certainly a father-son relationship many gay men know intimately. The father also railed in the interview against the moral depravity of the United States, specifically singling out “homosexual marriages.” And let’s not forget the subsequent story in which it was revealed that Atta, who has been portrayed as hostile toward women, wrote in his will that he didn’t want women near his body upon his death.
But gay people also know that these indicators more often than not are stereotypes that are all wrong—there are plenty of macho gays, like the rugby player on Flight 93, and there are plenty of straight men who are gentle aesthetes who have sour relationships with their more manly dads. For those speculating about Atta’s sexuality, there had better be a lot more to go on than these superficialities. And they’d better answer the most pertinent question their line of inquiry raises: why does it matter?
Michelangelo Signorile has written on gay and lesbian issues for numerous publications including The Advocate, New York magazine and the New York Times. He can be reached at mike@signorile.com.
© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.