the 9/11 fund will take claims until 2090 and still cannot say whether it pays a same-sex partner

via Washington Blade, Watermark Out News and the U.S. Department of Justice.

The fund is still open. That is the first thing to know, and most people do not.

the fund runs until 2090

The September 11th Victim Compensation Fund takes claims until October 1, 2090, a deadline set by the VCF Permanent Authorization Act and posted on the Justice Department's own page. It has paid more than $18 billion to over 77,000 victims and their families since 2011. Roughly 750 new claims arrive every month, twenty-five years later, because the dust kept working long after the buildings came down.

Allison Turkel, the special master who has run it since March 2023, marked the anniversary this week: "Twenty-five years since that day, the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund has served tens of thousands of victims and their families."

Now the part that should not still be a question.

the question it cannot answer

The Washington Blade asked the fund a simple thing: does a surviving same-sex partner qualify. VCF spokesperson Nicole Nava answered that claims for someone who died "may be submitted only by the Personal Representative," and that state probate law decides who gets appointed one. Then she said she would inquire into whether same-sex surviving partners receive support. That was the answer available in September 2026. She would go and find out.

It lands the way it does because of how 2001 went.

what happened in 2001

Ross Levi, then executive director of Empire State Pride Agenda, described what happened at the relief stations. "Literally, gay people had to go there, turn around, go back home, and get some paperwork that spouses didn't have to get to prove a relationship existed." Widows walked in and were believed. Boyfriends of nineteen years were sent home for documents that did not exist, because the state had refused to issue them. Lambda Legal, Empire State Pride Agenda and the Human Rights Campaign had to build a separate pot of money, the September 11 Gay & Lesbian Family Fund, for the partners federal relief would not see.

Some of it got fixed by hand, one decision at a time. Governor George Pataki, a Republican, signed an executive order in October 2001 putting surviving same-sex partners in line for full spousal benefits from New York's Crime Victims Board. In January 2003, under director Kenneth Feinberg, the fund approved $557,390 for Peggy Neff, whose partner of eighteen years, Sheila Hein, was a 51-year-old civilian employee killed at the Pentagon. One award. One director deciding to count it.

And the people. Father Mychal Judge, 68, the gay Franciscan who served as chaplain to the fire department, killed by falling debris while giving last rites, logged as the first recorded victim of the attacks. Mark Bingham, a gay PR executive from San Francisco, one of the passengers who went at the cockpit door on United 93. David Charlebois, an out co-pilot and member of the Gay Pilots Association, in the cockpit of American 77. Daniel Brandhorst and Ronald Gamboa, a couple from California, who died with David, their three-year-old son.

Sixty-four years of filing time left on the clock, and the fund still has to go check.