Those who knew attorney and environmental activist reflect on his fight for gay rights and a sustainable future

“I am David Buckel and I just killed myself by fire as a protest suicide.”

The handwritten note was found added to a longer, typewritten explanation left in a plastic bag beside the burned body in a Brooklyn park.

David Buckel, a famed gay rights attorney and ecological pioneer, had set himself on fire in protest against fossil fuels, comparing his action in his typed note to Tibetans who set themselves alight in protest at China’s occupation of their country.

Friends said the qualities of his death were the same as those he displayed in life –methodical, passionate and conscientious. He wanted his self-immolation to serve as a wake-up call to save the planet.

“I apologize to you for the mess,” his handwritten note concluded.

David Buckel, prominent New York LGBT lawyer, dies after setting himself on fire Read more

In his more formal letter, described in detail by the New York Daily News, Buckel had written: “Pollution ravages our planet, oozing inhabitability via air, soil, water and weather. Our present grows more desperate, our future needs more than what we’ve been doing.



“My early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves,” he wrote. “A lifetime of service may best be preserved by giving a life … Honorable purpose in life invites honorable purchase in death.

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

Buckel had been key to the gender rights movement in the 90s – bringing a lawsuit involving Brandon Teena, the transgender teen who was raped and killed in 1993 and whose story inspired the 1999 movie Boys Don’t Cry, and later Varnum v Brien, a case that made Iowa the third state to recognize same-sex marriage – and he later served as a mentor and leader in New York’s community-based recycling efforts.

At the time of his death, he was the senior organics recovery coordinator with the NYC Compost Project, funded by the city sanitation department and based at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. The composting project he operated at the Red Hook Community Farm is a model of sustainability that operates entirely free of fossil fuels and, remarkably, rats.

“He really saw the big picture but also the importance of working locally and of engaging citizens and youth,” said Brenda Platt, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) and manager of its Composting Makes $en$e and Composting for Community projects. “He ran one of the best models in community composting in the country.”

Buckel’s death left friends and colleagues keen not, in the words of one, “to lionize a person’s death at their own hand even if it propelled a conversation in the long-term”.

But commentators on social media were quick to draw comparisons to suicides that have in the past propelled other radical social or political movements.

The New York attorney MJ Law wrote on Twitter: “David Buckel joins a long line of protest suicides by fire, including Buddhist warriors, Tibetan monks against Chinese rule, Czech student Jan Palach against Russian oppression, Tunisian Mohammed Bouazizi inspiring the Arab Spring. Listen to his plea.”

But Platt, who posted a tribute to her friend on the ILSR website, said: “It’s hard to know what David thought the outcome of his final act would be. He was a brilliant, smart guy and he sacrificed his life for this perceived public good. I don’t condone it, I don’t understand it. It just seems like a statement he wanted to make. He was methodical in that as he was in everything he applied himself to.”

Last week many chose to focus on Buckel’s achievements and service to others. Camilla Taylor, the Chicago-based director of constitutional litigation at Lambda Legal, an LGBT rights organization, recalled that before he became the organization’s marriage project director he helped create a program focusing on LGBT youth.

She recalled how Buckel had brought the landmark 1996 case Nabozny v Podlesny regarding the protection of Jamie Nabozny, a student in Ashland, Wisconsin, who had been harassed and bullied by classmates because of his sexual orientation.

Buckel argued that Nabozny had had his constitutional rights violated because school officials failed to protect him from bullying. A jury sided with Nabozny and awarded him $962,000 in damages.

“It’s hard to imagine that at that time there wasn’t a single decision that held that a school was responsible for protecting a child from anti-gay bullying,” Taylor said. “It put schools across the country on notice that they had an obligation to stop the bullying of LGBT students, and it was consistent with David’s firm belief that our cases could be a vehicle for introducing Americans to LGBT people.”

Later, Buckel worked on a preliminary case that reached the New Jersey supreme court in 2006 and in effect invalidated the state’s restriction of marriage to persons of different sexes. At the time of the Iowa decision, in 2009, there were only two other states – Connecticut and Massachusetts – that allowed same-sex couples to marry.

“He had a vision for equality for LGBT people that was before its time in numerous respects,” says Taylor. “He saw possibilities where other people doubted, and he believed that if we got a foothold in the midwest it would propel us to victories elsewhere.”

Buckel’s switch to environmental work came in 2008. Friends say he was burned out on same-sex marriage litigation and found new purpose in environmentalism. “He said that there were other things he wanted to accomplish and make a difference in other ways,” says Taylor.

He dedicated himself to the composting project at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. He walked to work from the home he shared with his husband, Terry Kaelber, and a lesbian couple with whom they raised a daughter, now of college age. Last week, Buckel’s family made clear in interviews they had had no knowledge of his plan to take his own life.

By 2014, Buckel was fully invested in his new role. He penned an entry in the Institute for Self-Reliance 2014 report titled Growing Local Fertility: A Guide to Community Composting, in which he described how composting “is an unusual opportunity in the recycling world for individuals to create something of value for their community with their own hands”.

Marisa DeDominicis, executive director of Earth Matter NY, worked with Buckel early in his work in recycling. His achievement, she says, was to create a mid-size facility producing significant amounts of composted material entirely without the use of the fossil fuel.

“His whole point was that there should be many community sites that are processing locally and there should be a small footprint based on many people having the ability and the space to have an environment small enough to not use fossil fuel,” DeDominicis says.

Buckel had up to 20 people at a time processing materials. His site, with its system of windows designed to deny rats habitat, was known for being systematic, efficient and practical. “He really managed his scale and operations so it could function that way.”

“His personality was being thorough and all-inclusive,” said DeDominicis. “He took the same kind of approach that he did in his legal practice to make sure no stone was left unturned. He felt with composting he could make a difference and he devoted himself to it wholeheartedly.”

Ultimately, colleagues such as DeDominicis have little choice but to take Buckel at his word – that his death was intended as a wake-up call to the rest of us to stop believing we are “going in the direction of a sustainable earth”, DeDemonicis said. “It was very important for him for people to stop feeling that comfort and to stop thinking that everything they’re doing is fine.

“But I’ve no doubt he wanted his actions viewed optimistically. He wanted this to be viewed as a positive act of love for the planet. I have no doubt in his mind he believed what he was doing was a way to effect positive change.”