How Joseph Fenity Captured 9/11’s Missing Voices

“One of the reasons I became a journalist is because I can’t stop talking to strangers,” says Joseph Fenity. “I’m just so curious. I find people fascinating. I’ve missed planes because I was talking to a stranger at the airport.”

A gay independent journalist who has written for Rolling Stone, The Hollywood Reporter, and Out Magazine, Fenity grew up in a conservative Texas town along Interstate 35 between Austin and San Antonio. His natural curiosity, combined with a degree of fearlessness, has served him well.

He got an early start in the field through a world-altering event: the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which occurred when he was 16.

“I was in my junior year of high school,” Fenity recalls. “My friend and I were heading to school, and she was asking me, ‘Did you hear the news?’ I said, ‘No.’ And she said, ‘There was like a terrorist attack or something.’

“By the time I got to school, TVs were on and it was clear there was a terrorist attack. Even being a time zone and fifteen hundred miles away, it was scary. I was looking around the classroom, to the teachers, who always had an answer to everything. And that Tuesday morning, they didn’t have any answers. Kids were asking, ‘What’s happening? What’s next? Is anything going to happen closer to where we are? Are we going to get dismissed early?’ Big questions, small questions. And it was just clear that there were no answers.”

As the day’s events unfolded, Fenity watched wall-to-wall news coverage from New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. National security experts, reporters, survivors, family members of victims, and first responders were interviewed. But something was missing: the voices of young people affected by the attacks.

“I noticed that it was adults interviewing adults, tossing to adult reporters, to adult witnesses,” Fenity recalls. “And one of the themes in my career is I go after the story or the thing that’s missing. You’re not going to find me in line with a bunch of other people. You’ll find me looking for an angle or an opportunity somewhere where the light isn’t shining, but should be.

“That day really had an impact on me, rocked me to my core, and I wasn’t even there, hadn’t even been to New York. But I endeavored to say, ‘Okay, let’s go find out: How did the events of 9/11 impact the youth of America?'”

Fenity had previously completed a twice-weekly internship for school credit at a local news radio station in Austin. Because his school allowed students to pursue independent study, he proposed interviewing young people his age who attended school in the shadow of the Twin Towers and gathering their perspectives on the historic global event.

“Before I knew it, I was on a flight from Austin to New York City, meeting with students at Stuyvesant High School,” he continues. “I was talking to the kids, because no one else was.”

Stuyvesant, a racially and socioeconomically diverse specialized public high school drawing students from across New York City, is located less than half a mile from Ground Zero, where the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers once stood. Fenity found students from a variety of backgrounds and social circles willing to share their accounts of the day and discuss their experiences after the attacks.

As he interviewed students, Fenity absorbed their accounts of being dismissed in the middle of the day and — especially for those from the outer boroughs — having nowhere to go because Manhattan was locked down.

They told him that the FBI had come to Stuyvesant and urged administrators to clear the campus. As students walked out, first responders carried wounded people covered in blood, soot, and dust into the school, which was being used as a makeshift hospital. The students struggled to reach their families and figure out how to get home.

“I learned from the kids at Stuyvesant that young people are the most resilient people on the entire planet. I learned that when you are in your youth, you are typically so much better able to see the dawn of the next day, that there’s still so much life ahead of you,” Fenity says. “They were horrified and scared, but at the same time, were putting one foot in front of the other.”

Fenity edited the interviews into a short documentary. A local news station aired excerpts, but the film otherwise remained in local school libraries and was not widely seen. He largely forgot about the project until the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020.

At the time, Fenity was living in Los Angeles under California’s strict lockdown restrictions. He took a road trip to his hometown to clear out a storage unit and found a box labeled “Project NYC.” Inside was a trove of notes, printed emails, and other relics of the Y2K era — including four cassette tapes containing the interviews.

“The documentary was only about fifteen minutes long,” he says. “But once I was able to find a machine that could read these late ’90s, early 2000s tapes, I was reminded of how there were so many pieces that had not made the final cut.”

“If it weren’t for COVID, honestly, I wouldn’t have rediscovered those tapes,” he adds. “I immediately started the process of digitizing them and began revisiting the project. As I’m listening to the interviews, it dawns on me that this is an untold story, an unheard record, of just a few more of the millions of accounts of what happened on that Tuesday morning. And I thought, ‘Well, this doesn’t belong in a storage unit.'”

In 2025, Fenity learned that the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress was seeking historical documents and oral histories for its collection. He contacted the center about the interviews.

“They said, ‘Send this over. This sounds like something we’d like,'” he recalls. “Within a few days, I got a phone call saying, ‘We need this in our center.'”

The interviews will officially be added to the center’s collection later this month.

“Who would have thought that a class project from decades ago could resurface and reemerge and be a part of the American historical record?” he reflects. “It’s such an honor, of course, but the fact that I’m sitting here, as a 41-year-old, talking to you about a school project from when I was 16 is just a really strange and special thing.”

With 2026 marking the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Fenity is mindful that many younger Americans have no firsthand memory of that day and know the attacks only through history.

In the decades since, former Stuyvesant students have been repeatedly interviewed for news reports and historical retrospectives, while some alumni and staff members have developed chronic illnesses linked to their exposure to contaminated dust and smoke from Ground Zero.

“About every five years, when the big anniversaries or milestones come up, I will do a quick Google search of these kids,” he says. “I’ve found about half of them, and they’ve gone on, for the most part, from what I can tell, to do great things.”

But he is sensitive to the fact that revisiting those memories may be traumatic for some, particularly those dealing with physical illness or post-traumatic stress disorder. Others may simply be tired of interview requests around major anniversaries and prefer not to be defined by their association with 9/11.

Fenity recalls being moved by Americans’ resilience and the sense of national unity in the months following the attacks.

“Remember those ‘Never Again’ bumper stickers?” he says. “There was something about that sentiment. Even though I never really liked that exact phrase, I love the attitude behind it…. That’s probably why I was so open to having these audio recordings in the Library of Congress, because I don’t want people to forget.”