By admin 
Just weeks before Mark Bingham became a hero aboard United Flight 93, he sent an email to his teammates on the San Francisco Fog rugby team.
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The first gay rugby team in California – the fourth in the world – had just been accepted into the Northern California Rugby Football Union, and instead of playing scrimmages with women’s teams, the Fog would be competing against men’s teams across the region.
“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,” Bingham wrote. “More importantly, we have the chance to show the other teams in the league that we are as good as they are … (that) Gay men weren’t always wallflowers waiting on the sideline.”
On Sept. 11, 2001, Bingham, a Los Gatos High and UC Berkeley graduate, joined fellow passengers in attempting to retake United Flight 93 from its hijackers. The terrorists crashed the plane in the Pennsylvania countryside before it could reach Washington, D.C.
Friends and teammates say Bingham’s courage challenged stereotypes about gay men. It also inspired an international rugby tournament named in his honor and stirred a debate that continues within the gay community: Was Mark Bingham a gay hero or a hero who happened to be gay?
Bingham’s email remains a touchstone for generations of Fog players, including many who were not yet born when he died. Its text appears beside his photograph on the team’s website, and every Sept. 11, players gather for beers at the Pilsner Inn, his favorite Castro neighborhood bar, to remember him.
“We all know gay people who are courageous and strong and loyal and hardworking, and you didn’t see a lot of that in the media,” said Bryce Eberhart, a co-founder of the rugby team in 2000 who played with Bingham in its first year. “Mark’s story was a kind of irrefutable example of that.”
In some ways, the acceptance of gay and inclusive rugby over the past quarter century and the success of the biennial Bingham Cup that grew from eight to more than 100 international teams mirror the broader gains – and continuing resistance – experienced by LGBTQ+ people.
In 2001, no state allowed same-sex couples to marry, and laws criminalizing consensual same-sex intimacy remained on the books in 15 states. The 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming was still fresh, and the AIDS epidemic had devastated a generation of gay men. But there were signs of progress: Vermont had just become the first state to legally recognize same-sex couples through civil unions, while men holding hands in San Francisco barely turned heads.
“We’re still struggling with many of the same things we were back then, but I think if there were steps in the right direction of greater understanding and acceptance, Mark was a big step,” said Jon Barrett, a former senior editor of The Advocate, which named Bingham Person of the Year that December. “I think his legacy is about more than changing stereotypes and maybe just opening people’s minds about our presence and our active roles in all aspects of life.”
Bingham’s mother, Alice Hoagland, who lived in the Santa Cruz mountains and died in 2020, spent years spreading that message, speaking at every Bingham Cup and receiving ovations with the crowd chanting her name.
“When Mark boarded that flight, he had no idea that in an hour he’d be standing shoulder to shoulder with a bunch of straight guys – one of them a wrestler, another a college quarterback, and a couple of rugby players, and they ran forward against all odds,” Hoagland told the crowd at the 2010 Bingham Cup in Minneapolis. “With about 10 minutes of preparation and a lot of determination and a lot of competitive sports under their belt, (they) made a big difference for America that day. And you all are carrying forward that tradition of pride and strength. And I’m so proud of you.”
Hoagland was a hugger, and became known at the tournaments as “Mama Rugby.”
“There was a special connection between those men and her,” Barrett said.
After the tragedy, she retrieved the voice messages left on his phone that day, including from Eberhart and other teammates. She also joined other Flight 93 families as federal officials played the cockpit voice recording of the flight’s final moments. She said she heard her son’s voice.
Other passengers who helped organize the revolt included Tom Burnett, of San Ramon, who told his wife during several phone calls that the group planned to fight back, and Todd Beamer, another Los Gatos High graduate who worked for Oracle in New Jersey. Beamer’s final words, “Let’s roll,” became an enduring rallying cry associated with the revolt.
Bingham, who founded his own public relations firm and split his time between San Francisco and New York, played rugby at Los Gatos High and then Cal, helping take the Bears to national championships in the early 1990s. He didn’t come out as gay to his teammates, or his Chi Psi fraternity brothers, whose chapter he led as president, until the week of his graduation.
“When I started playing rugby at the age of 16, I always thought that my interest in other guys would be an anathema – completely repulsive to the guys on my team,” Bingham wrote in his missive to his teammates. “I loved the game, but KNEW I would need to keep my sexuality a secret forever. I feared total rejection.”
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In playing for the San Francisco Fog, he wrote, “I finally felt accepted as a gay man and a rugby player. My two irreconcilable worlds came together.”
That sentiment has been shared by numerous players over the past two decades, said team coach Dany Samreth, who played rugby against Bingham as a student at UC Davis and joined the Fog soon after Bingham died.
The biennial Bingham Cup has become an international celebration of those irreconcilable worlds. Fifty teams competed in Brisbane, Australia, earlier this year and 140 convened in Rome two years earlier. Rainbow flags wave on the sidelines. Eyeliner donned by a player or two smudges with sweat on the pitch. And for the athletes who grew up manufacturing a “nongay voice” in competition, the Bingham Cup and the Fog field are safe spaces to express their “gay voice.”
“The Fog allowed opportunities especially for gay men who never felt comfortable in a contact sport or in a sporting environment in general to be themselves,” Samreth said. “I joke around that you can be as feminine as you want, but still hit as hard.”
Bingham, at 6-foot-4 and 220 pounds, was masculine, his friends say, a factor they say may have made his hero story more acceptable to a larger audience. And Bingham hit hard. One of his friends’ favorite Bingham stories was when Bingham rushed from the stands during the Stanford football Big Game in 1992 and tackled the Stanford “tree” mascot dancing on the Bears’ sidelines. Bingham pocketed one of the mascot’s floppy eyes, said Todd Sarner, a high school buddy and college housemate who was close behind Bingham on the field that day. Bingham was arrested.
“They fingerprinted him, and because of that, they actually had his fingerprints on file when they identified some partial remains,” Sarner said. “It’s very dark (humor), but Mark would absolutely love that. He would have laughed, really.”
Bingham would have also appreciated that the first league team to reach out to The Fog after Sept. 11 requesting a scrimmage hailed from the far rural reaches of California – the Shasta Highlanders. For years it became an annual event honoring Bingham, with the winner taking home a “Bingham Stein” beer sign.
That early embrace from the Shasta Highlanders contrasted with the Fog’s more recent experiences involving two Bay Area teams. During a game in the South Bay a couple of years ago, Samreth said, an opponent uttered a gay slur after being tackled.
“I made him apologize to the whole team,” Samreth said. “You would think it would have been the team at Shasta 26 years ago.”
Another team skipped out on a game day tradition called “the third half.” The home-team players who were supposed to host a shared meal after the competition didn’t show up.
“So the one guy who ordered pizza and drinks on their team was like, ‘I don’t know what’s happening,’” Samreth said, “and I’m like, ‘I think you know what’s happening.’”
Still, the Fog and gay rugby have come a long way. Samreth was invited to serve on the board of the Northern California league, while new gay rugby clubs are forming around the world, from Taipei to Chile, including in places where gay men face greater barriers to living openly.
Eberhart, who co-founded the Fog, met his husband at a Bingham Cup. They now live in Australia, where they are raising their 4-year-old daughter. Sarner, one of Bingham’s oldest friends, is in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, this week for the anniversary commemoration. In Los Gatos, a military jet will fly over the high school’s football field during Friday evening’s game to honor Bingham and Beamer, the school’s two alumni killed aboard Flight 93.
Eberhart and others still debate how Bingham would have liked to be remembered.
“Mark’s thing wasn’t that he was a gay rugby player,” Eberhart said. “Mark’s thing was that he happened to be gay.”
But Samreth said being gay had everything to do with his heroism that day.
“Accepting who the hell he is helped him to be brave,” Samreth said. “That has helped a lot of folks find their inner Mark Bingham, whether it’s on or off the field. That’s the beauty of it. Just remember that you have it in you, and here’s the opportunities because of his sacrifice.”
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