The story of Hege Dalen and Toril Hansen, during the Norway massacre, is remarkable. I had not heard or read anything about it until this morning.
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The Guardian ran this story a couple of hours ago.
Two campers on the other side of the lake from the island of Utøya, where the Norwegian massacre happened, heard gunfire and screams while they were eating their supper. Without thought for their personal safety, they took their boat and crossed towards the firing. Bullets hit the boat, but they pulled the fleeing youngsters from the water and crossed back and forth repeatedly. It was not a very big boat, so it took four trips to save 40 teenagers who may otherwise have been shot, or drowned trying to escape. Without them, the massacre could have been considerably more bloody even than it was. So why have we hardly heard about them?
The question raised in this article and others is whether their story was ignored because they are two women married to each other. Is their story the inverse of Anders Breivik himself? Many people liked his views, but claimed to disapprove of his tactics.
American rightwing pundits that came close to saying "well, we disapprove of Breivik's methods but you have to understand that there is something quite sinister about a summer camp of leftwing youth activists" was never going to be happy with lesbian heroism, and married lesbian heroes would just have made their heads explode.
It is difficult for me to know what to think about this and how to talk about it. I am a heterosexual, white male, so I may not have much credibility to talk about it at all. Still, this is what I would like - a world in which their story of heroism was reported and acknowledged with gratitute and admiration, without any reference to their sexual orientation, because it shouldn't matter.
I know we are not there yet. If there story really was kept hidden because of their sexual orientation, then that in itself is a story.
Still, I can dream of a world where they are described with just one word, and no qualifiers.
HEROES!
9:10 AM PT: Update: This story has been the lead headline on yahoo.com for a while this morning. It is listed as "Were Norway massacre's lesbian heroes ignored by press?"