A Case for David Buckel

In April, David used gasoline to set himself on fire in a public act of protest to symbolize our destruction of the planet with fossil fuels.

I worked with David Buckel at Lambda Legal during some of the years he was arguing the significant cases named in the reports of his death. Lambda’s work is in impact litigation which addresses and changes lives strategically and often at the level of critical mass. David’s work at Lambda Legal created access to the hundreds of rights and privileges associated with marriage to LGB folks. It held local authorities responsible for the safety of their students and crime victims in ways that affected entire states and judicial circuits. Each case was designed so that the benefit of its plaintiff would translate to the benefit of a class of people.

David Buckel was so soft spoken, so patient explaining the case, the project. He’s the one who talked about the importance of names, whether “mom,” “dad,” or “marriage.” He was a beautiful, truly a gentle man. Often smiled, seldom laughed, always always kind.

David was a story teller. He litigated the marriage case in Iowa when few expected the heartland to care about queer and genderqueer families. David made the heartland care. He litigated a case called Nabozny, about a gay teen who was relentlessly and mercilessly beaten at school, where the school administrators sort of threw up their hands and said, “Well, what do you expect?” And he made the school care and made the government care about gay kids having a safe place to learn. He litigated the Brandon case, the young trans man who was raped and murdered by his friends for not being who they expected him to be. David made the state of Nebraska care and made the Sheriff’s Department care about Brandon and about his mom‘s experience of his loss.

David was a deeply thoughtful man and he was essentially efficient and meticulous. When Lambda changed its email system, I remember David telling me that it took him twice as long afterward to file his mail. He used to be able to file it with two clicks, say, and now it took four. The inefficiency mattered to him; it was time he could be spending on substantive work. His reading glasses were often noticeably smudged and bleary, and I assume that he had done a similar cost analysis on the time to clean them and determined that it was not the best use of those minutes. He never stopped reading and typing even to wipe his glasses clean.

I always knew David to care about the environment and recycling. And he came to it with the same thoroughness and urgency as his litigation. It was from David that I learned to recycle even the small paper tab from my tea bag. I still do it. Anyone who has taken time to watch David’s Red Hook Community Garden instructional video of walk turning a windrow will have experienced a visual poem. It is a master class, not just on composting but also on efficiency, organizing, and volunteer appreciation. This is how David approached his work. He was sensible and well-reasoned, soft-spoken and forceful. He wanted to change the minds of the decision-makers, but he also wanted to encourage the people doing the work.

David chose his death with purpose. His end game was always to be persuasive: his thoughtfulness, his story telling, his meticulousness served the bigger goal of being compelling and convincing. In that light, his self-immolation as a last act does with his body in death what he had done in life with litigation and education. But self-immolation is designed to evoke horror, not sympathy. Not encouragement. By design, this act is meant to capture and hold attention. I believe the decision to destroy his body was intended to horrify us and to demand our notice.

He’s gotten my attention. I hadn’t spoken to David in fifteen years, and I am now preoccupied by, haunted by his absence. I am determined to reenergize my practices and up my conservation game and that of my colleagues and workplaces. To support the organizations dedicated to protecting and restoring the environment. To tell people what David did and try to persuade them, too. I am determined to do what I can to give David’s death the impact he hoped for.