Famed Gay-Rights Lawyer Sets Himself Afire To Protest Environment

PROSPECT PARK, NY — David Buckel, a nationally known activist for gay rights and environmental preservation, doused himself with gasoline and set himself afire Saturday in a wide-open section of Prospect Park West, dying in a "protest suicide" to draw attention to the continued damaging of the environment.

The body of Buckel, 60, was charred but still smoking when joggers and bicyclists began arriving at the park early Saturday morning. Several people later told reporters they had seen the smoke but had no idea a person was involved until after firefighters arrived to answer a call about a fire. Police said Buckel was pronounced dead at 6:30 a.m.

Buckel left a handwritten note he wrote identifying himself and apparently was fully aware his death would be particularly gruesome.

“I am David Buckel and I just killed myself by fire as a protest suicide,” read Buckel's note left, with a typed letter steps from a patch of black grass that had burned beneath his body. “I apologize to you for the mess.”

The typed letter also was sent to several news outlets, according to The New York Times, which reported the letter arrived in the paper's newsroom at 5:55 Saturday morning.

In his letter, Buckel laid out why he killed himself, framing his suicide as a noble sacrifice and his decision to hasten his death with the gasoline as a metaphor for the damage fossil fuels and other contaminants are inflicting on the environment.

“Pollution ravages our planet, oozing inhabitability via air, soil, water and weather,” he wrote. “Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels, and many die early deaths as a result — my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves.”

Buckels death as an environment activist followed distinguished career as a lawyer who worked on behalf lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. His involvement with several high-profile issues and his legal maneuvering in closely watched court cases helped make him widely known as an astute political strategist, a brilliant lawyer and before long a leading voice for gay rights.

He was the lead counsel in a Nebraska case he won for the the family of Brandon Teena, a transgender man raped and murdered in Nebraska and whose story would later be the basis of the 1999 film "Boys Don't Cry."

Buckel showed a special concern for gay youth and represented several of them in difficult cases involving such groups as the Boy Scouts of America, the U.S. military, the I.R.S. and a number of public school systems.

Many people, though, would consider his key role in the Supreme Courts ruling on gay marriage to have been his most important contribution to advancing gay rights.

Susan Sommer, a former attorney for Lambda Legal who is now the general counsel for the New York Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, told The New York Times Buckel was “one of the architects of the freedom to marry and marriage equality movement.”

“He deserves tremendous thanks for recognizing this was in many ways at the heart of what it meant to be gay for many Americans and making it a priority,” she said. “I learned so much from him about the emotional center of what it means for a gay person not to be able to have all the protections for the person they love and that it’s worth fighting for.”

Beckel handled several important gay marriage cases that ended with significant rulings that indicated increasing acceptance of gay marriage, including one in New Jersey where the state's Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples and their children were harmed because they were excluded from the rights granted via marriage.

When he decided to challenge a ban on gay marriage in Iowa, his colleagues were skeptical. Hs did so anyway, and the state became one of the first in the country to permit gay marriage when the Iowa Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the ban violated the state's constitution.

Those victories behind him, Buckel largely left law and dove in as an energetic environmental activist. He took a job as the senior organics recovery coordinator with the NYC Compost Project, an environmental friendly program based at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden.

Death, he apparently determined, was his best bet at success.

“A lifetime of service may best be preserved by giving a life," he wrote. "Honorable purpose in life invites honorable purchase in death.

“I hope it is an honorable death that might serve others.”

Photo via Patch