Father Mychal Judge was officially recorded as Victim 0001 on September 11, 2001.

He was an FDNY chaplain.

A Franciscan friar.

And he was gay.

But long before his name became tied forever to the attacks on New York, Mychal Judge had already spent years showing up for people who were sick, frightened, grieving and often pushed to the margins.

During the AIDS crisis, that included gay men who sometimes felt rejected or abandoned by the institutions around them.

A Priest Who Went Toward People In Pain

Judge was born in Brooklyn in 1933 and entered the Franciscan order as a young man.

His ministry eventually brought him to New York City, where he became known for an unusually direct and personal way of caring for people.

He visited hospital rooms.

He prayed with people who were dying.

He sat with partners, friends and families.

And when AIDS devastated gay communities in the 1980s and 1990s, Judge became deeply involved in ministry to people living with HIV and AIDS.

He helped establish a Franciscan AIDS ministry that provided practical support as well as spiritual care.

People could receive food, toiletries, prayer and companionship.

Sometimes the most important thing Judge offered was simply his presence.

He once told a young volunteer who worried about not knowing what to say to dying patients that if the words did not come, the answer was simple: just be present.

That idea would become a defining theme of his life.

He Was Gay Too

Judge was gay, something known to close friends and later documented by biographers and people who knew him.

He did not live as a publicly out gay priest in the modern sense.

But he was connected to gay Catholic communities and was open about his sexuality with some of the people closest to him.

That gave his AIDS ministry an especially personal dimension.

He was not simply serving a community from the outside.

He understood something about the fear, secrecy and exclusion many gay men were living with.

And he kept showing up.

September 11, 2001

By 2001, Judge was serving as chaplain to the New York City Fire Department.

When hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center, he went downtown with firefighters and other emergency workers.

He entered the North Tower area and ministered to the injured and dying as the disaster unfolded around him.

Judge was inside the lobby when the South Tower collapsed.

The force of the debris killed him.

He was 68 years old.

His body was carried from the rubble by firefighters and other emergency personnel in an image that became one of the most haunting photographs of September 11.

His death was officially recorded as Victim 0001.

That designation did not mean he was definitively the first person to die in the attacks.

It meant he was the first victim formally recorded by the medical examiner.

A Life Of Showing Up

Twenty-five years later, the FDNY is again honoring Judge’s life and legacy.

But the story of Mychal Judge did not begin at Ground Zero.

It began in hospital rooms.

In churches.

With men dying of AIDS.

With partners and families who needed somebody willing to sit beside them.

With firefighters who knew their chaplain as someone who would come when things were at their worst.

That is what makes his final day feel less like an exception and more like the culmination of a pattern.

When people were afraid, Judge went toward them.

When people were sick, he stayed.

When people were grieving, he listened.

And on September 11, when New York was in chaos, he went where he had always gone.

Toward the people who needed him.

Father Mychal Judge.

1933–2001. ❤️🌈

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Some gay sons did not know how to tell their mothers they were gay.

So they turned on Days of Our Lives.

More than a decade later, Deidre Hall has revealed just how deeply one of the soap opera’s landmark gay storylines reached beyond television.

In April 2012, viewers watched Will Horton, played by Chandler Massey, come out as gay to his grandmother, Marlena Evans.

Deidre Hall, who has played Marlena for decades, says the show soon began receiving letters from young gay men who had watched the scene.

Some told her they had used the episode to help begin their own coming-out conversations at home.

When Marlena Simply Loved Will

The scene was powerful partly because Marlena did not turn Will’s revelation into a crisis.

She listened.

She reassured him.

And she made it clear that being gay changed nothing about her love for her grandson.

For gay viewers watching in 2012, particularly those who had not yet come out to their own families, that response could represent something they desperately hoped to hear themselves.

Hall told Out that the show received “so much mail from young gay men” afterward.

One message she remembers was devastatingly simple.

“I didn’t know how to tell my mom, so I put on the show.”

In other words, some viewers did not have the words yet.

So they borrowed Will’s.

A Soap Opera Became A Bridge

Coming-out stories had appeared on television before Will Horton’s, so the importance of the moment does not depend on claiming it was the first.

What makes it remarkable is the response Hall says the show received from actual gay viewers.

For them, the storyline was not simply representation happening safely on the other side of a television screen.

It became a tool they could use in their own homes.

Imagine sitting beside your mother knowing you need to tell her something that feels enormous, but being unable to make the first sentence come out.

Then imagine putting on a television episode where somebody else says it for you.

Will tells Marlena.

Marlena responds with love.

And suddenly there is somewhere for the real conversation to begin.

That is an impact television ratings cannot really measure.

From Coming Out To A Gay Wedding

The storyline did not end with Will coming out.

His relationship with Sonny Kiriakis became an important part of Days of Our Lives, taking the characters from dating to marriage.

In 2014, Marlena returned to the center of their story for another major moment.

She officiated Will and Sonny’s wedding.

The ceremony has been described as daytime television’s first wedding between two male characters.

For viewers who had watched Will nervously come out to his grandmother two years earlier, seeing that same grandmother proudly marry him to another man created a particularly lovely full-circle moment.

When Representation Leaves The Screen

Hall has now played Marlena for more than 50 years, through the kind of spectacular twists only a long-running soap opera could produce.

But her memories of the letters from gay viewers show why quieter scenes can sometimes matter most.

There were no supernatural possessions or impossible returns from the dead required.

It was simply a young gay man telling someone he loved the truth about himself.

And someone he loved telling him that everything was going to be okay.

For some young men watching at home, that fictional conversation became the beginning of a real one.

That is more than good representation.

That is television stepping out of Salem and into somebody’s living room at exactly the moment they needed it. ❤️🌈

📷 @dayspeacock

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