The article begins just below the headline with an unusual choice of words, given the steward’s prominence in the evening’s festivities: “Gay guests at the Rainbow Room, Radio City’s smart nightclub, recently were jolted pleasantly out of their top-hat, white tie complacency when EAL zoomed in.”50 Of course, those in the audience wearing top hats and ties were the men, not the women. So, what about Eastern’s presentation would have aroused them? If the passage is read in a nonsuggestive way, these male guests, having a perfunctorily good time, started to really enjoy themselves (and thus could be identified as “gay guests”) when Eastern enticed them with a free ticket to Washington. Arguably, men could be “jolted pleasantly” when presented with a chance to fly on an airplane.
Yet, among the sexually savvy in 1930s New York, another more flirtatious reading of the text would be obvious: the good-looking, fashionably dressed steward is jolting the “gay guests” among the men. Without question, the steward would have made quite an impression not only on straight women in the audience but on the gay men as well. But whether this interpretation dawned on more than a few readers, and perhaps a clever copywriter, is impossible to know. The word gay had definitely acquired its double meaning by the late 1930s, but only for those knowledgeable about the homosexual underworld. At the very least, the homoerotic juxtaposition of a male steward arousing even male patrons among the evening’s “gay guests” probably struck many readers as peculiar. At the most, though, it suggests an awareness of the polymorphous sexual desires that Eastern’s fashionable steward corps incited.
THE RISE OF HOMOPHOBIA: CASTING THE STEWARD AS ANTIHERO
As stewards increasingly straddled the lines between masculine/feminine and straight/gay with the rise of new aircraft technology, they also became lightning rods for a very real but still inchoate homophobia. This homophobia was expressed in more subtle ways than outright accusations of sexual impropriety or full-throated castigations of the stewards’ gender performance. Instead, it was often cloaked in humor and sarcasm, marking it as more muted and less violent than America’s outbursts of the 1950s, when gay bashings and other forms of vigilante justice become prominent. Surprisingly, the public relations materials from Eastern and Pan Am—the same media that promoted the steward as attractive, dapper, and doting—also partook in the steward’s hazing. Both airlines devoted pages of their in-house publications (circulated both among employees and passengers) to poking fun at stewards for their gender-nonconforming work and persona. Even stewards’ employers recognized that their softened masculinity, while advantageous for luring female passengers onto their increasingly safe and comfortable planes, was out of sync with much of the culture.
Just a few months after Eastern unveiled their stewards, the airline’s public relations department playfully poked fun at their compromised masculinity. The humorously sensationalized article “Flight Steward Reveals Drama” from the April 1937 edition of the airline’s in-flight magazine actually covers the mundane activity—when not performed by a man, that is—of changing a baby’s diaper. The “drama” of the story involved a six-week-old baby who was traveling with his father and grandfather and whined incessantly until the doting steward realized he had a wet diaper.
Playing the proper male-privileged role, the child’s father and grandfather were completely unaware of how to change a diaper. “Their knowledge of diaper technique, I soon learned, was minus nil,” noted the steward who penned the article. “Well, something had to be done.” For the steward, acting heroically in this scenario meant exposing himself as someone able to do the womanly work of changing diapers. So potentially emasculating was this onerous duty that he chose to withhold his name for the article. At the same time, he desperately—to the point of agitation—clung to his manhood by suggesting his status as a dad had given him this gender-bending ability: “The flight-steward who contributes the following picture out of his gallery of memories prefers to remain anonymous, but submits that he is a father in his own right as proof positive of his knowledge of the details described below. ‘What certificate,’ he asks a trifle aggressively, ‘what certificate can serve better than a marriage certificate as a diaper diploma?’”51 A marriage certificate certainly provided some cover for the steward. At the very least, it allowed him to present himself as a conventionally heterosexual man despite his feminine skill set. Yet the baby’s father and grandfather also presumably had marriage certificates and had managed to keep their manly reputations unscathed by the burdens of child care.
What drove this steward to the abjection of anonymity was the tension between his own masculinity and the airline’s financial success in the age of the DC-3. The airline sought to assure its ever-diversifying clientele that stewards could assist with the “motherly” tasks of changing diapers or feeding babies, even though the steward’s gender made many passengers suspect he would perform them poorly. At the same time, such work raised eyebrows among other men, who sensed that stewards’ manliness was more deficient than they had initially suspected. In lieu of their stewards’ enduring this concern unchecked, the airline opted to poke fun at the situation, surely hoping that laughter would defuse the tension between their stewards’ role and society’s more chauvinistic notions of acceptable manly behavior.
An even more striking example of homophobic humor is the short-run comic Tale Wind, found in the Pan American Air Ways magazine that was distributed to Pan Am employees and customers (figure 5). In the summer of 1938, an in-house artist named Vic Zimmerman published the first of eight comic strips that followed the travails of Barney Bullarney, a fictitious Pan Am steward. Already with his debut, the reader learns that Barney is a lightning rod for other employees’ aggression. The first comic strip portrays a pilot looking for “our glib young ambassador of good will” as he passes through the hangar where mechanics and copilots are busy playing cards. Noticing that Barney is actually approaching the hangar from the other direction, the mechanics prepare to welcome him by hurling wet sponges at his face. Meanwhile, Barney’s foremost nemesis, the mammoth mechanic Blimp McGoon, gives the reader a grand introduction just as Barney sets foot in the room: “Well, here he is, folks—That dizzy young dean of stewards, with 687,000 passenger smiles to his credit—Folks, we give you Barney Bullarney!” The following frame shows the “dizzy” (a term laden with feminine connotations) Barney with a smile on his face and a big wave, as though the repeated hellos and good-byes aboard the aircraft had been fixed in his muscular memory. Barney, who is round-faced, with pronounced dimples, and dressed impeccably in his three-piece steward uniform, is completely unaware of the sponge soaking that awaits him. Instead, he greets the men warmly, calling out, in a peculiar dialect, “My frans!”
The publication date of early July 1938 means Barney Bullarney debuted within days of a far more famous comic strip character, Superman. With his premiere at Action Comics on June 30, the Man of Steel ushered in a new genre of comic book hero, a man so strong and possessing such otherworldly skills that he came to be known as a “superhero.” In comparison to this flying superhero, Barney was far inferior. In fact, rather than heroic, he was coded in multiple ways as a classic “screwball” character, whose appeal to audiences was his zany behavior and his ability to evoke laughter.52 Barney’s screwball contemporaries were the cartoon film stars Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, and Elmer Fudd, who premiered at roughly the same time.53 Each of these screwballs, like Barney, shared a peculiar speech impediment that softened him to the extent that he couldn’t be taken seriously. The only “superhuman” trait of screwball characters was their masochistic ability to endure endless abuse and violence without ever showing its effects. (Daffy and Elmer in particular would be shot in the head, dropped off cliffs, or beaten to a pulp in nearly every film.) These tropes are already evident in Zimmerman’s first depiction of Barney, who comes across as dim-witted and unmanly as he walks right into a hostile crowd of men ready to unload on him.
FIGURE 5. The debut of Tale Wind. Pan American Air Ways, July-August 1938, 10. Courtesy Smithsonian Institution