Stewards were particularly invested in whether postwar society would heed Kinsey’s advice. While my research on the 1930s analyzed circumstantial evidence about “gay” stewards, my work on the postwar era confirms that a decidedly large number of stewards were openly gay. Especially helpful in this regard have been interviews with former flight attendants from the 1940s and 1950s, who estimate that anywhere from 20 percent to more than 50 percent of stewards in the first postwar decade were gay.5 Moreover, because notions of homosexuality at the time were so easily confused with effeminacy in men, even the stewards who were straight had to worry about how they were perceived. As we have seen, stewards received raises and promotions just like many other men after the war, but they still were on the wrong side of the airplane’s demarcated gender line. The profession may have been only a fifth or a half gay, but it was fully queer, simply on the basis of the fact that these men were performing women’s work and could therefore easily be read as gender benders and homosexuals.
Unfortunately for stewards and millions of gays and lesbians, the country as a whole chose not to heed Kinsey’s words. Instead, following equally esteemed voices of authority, society redoubled its efforts to identify homosexuals and remove them from the workplace and other public realms. Sodomy laws remained in place, continuing to be both a legal menace for those engaging in same-sex sexual activities and a source of potential blackmail. The scientific community also remained largely convinced that homosexuality was a mental illness, despite a minority of voices like Kinsey’s urging a reevaluation of the sickness paradigm. Furthermore, as Americans returned in record numbers to churches and synagogues after the war, the voices of religious authorities castigating homosexuality as a sin carried even greater weight than previously.6
Politicians, police, judges, juries, and journalists followed these experts in sounding the alarm against the suspected intrusion of homosexuality into the American mainstream. The primary reaction of legal authorities was to create a more extensive framework of laws and policing tactics designed to eradicate homosexuality, especially cracking down against gay nightlife venues. Various cities in the 1950s passed ordinances forbidding the sale of alcohol to homosexuals, outlawing same-sex dancing, and prohibiting cross-dressing.7 As we shall see, the city of Miami led a particularly zealous campaign against public gay life in August 1954, a consequence of the murder of Eastern Air Lines steward William Simpson in a salacious gay sex tryst.
Simpson’s death in Miami also ties into a larger effort begun by the federal government to eliminate homosexuals from employment. This crusade first began with the military (the government’s largest employer) just before World War II. As of October 1940, all enlistees were screened to weed out homosexuals, while those already in the military faced expulsion if they were found out.8 In the 1950s, however, such discrimination expanded rapidly into new realms. President Eisenhower’s Executive Order of April 1953—signed within his first hundred days—outlawed the employment of homosexuals in any federal government office. At the height of the cold war, fears ran rampant that the government could be infiltrated by foreign agents or homegrown communists. Homosexuals, because of their perceived mental illness and susceptibility to blackmail, were considered too great of a risk to hire, even in government fields unrelated to national security.9 The Eisenhower executive order set a precedent for the entire military-industrial complex, as defense firms and other private sector employers whose workers required a security clearance also fired and refused to hire homosexuals. Thus the federal government under Eisenhower, fueled by cold war–era paranoia against all forms of deviance, spearheaded what would become a far broader campaign to eradicate homosexuals from gainful employment.
In fact, the airlines’ choice to stop hiring stewards in the 1950s is possibly the most expansive, and arguably the most draconian, application of the Eisenhower precedent. Stewards, after all, were not directly tied to the military-industrial complex. The airlines’ refusal to hire stewards therefore pushed the logic of seeing homosexuals as a threat to an extreme, into an industry only loosely tied to the nation’s defense. The indiscriminateness of a policy forbidding all men, not just homosexuals, to apply for flight attendant positions also represents a high-water mark of extremism. It is as though airline executives took Kinsey’s words regarding homosexuality and ran in the opposite direction. Kinsey used his findings that many men were situationally bisexual to push for decriminalization and normalization of homosexuality. However, the airlines’ refusal to hire new stewards suggested a more pernicious model: if no true distinction could be drawn between straight and gay, and if all stewards were suspected of homosexuality, then all men would be kept out of the job.
This chapter considers the William Simpson murder as a pivotal moment for male flight attendants. This is not because the scandal was the singular direct cause of stewards’ expulsion from their jobs but rather because it demonstrates the tarnishing of the steward’s public image after the 1930s. While prewar stewards were given a potentially alluring and attractive image through Pan Am’s advertising of “Rodney the Smiling Steward” and Eastern’s creation of stylish uniforms, postwar stewards could not hope to be so positively portrayed. They disappeared from ad campaigns and promotional materials, attracting media attention only as moral pariahs. Eastern responded to Simpson’s 1954 murder at the hands of two male hustlers by drastically curtailing its employment of stewards. Delta Airlines also articulated homophobic concerns when questioned about firing its stewards in the late 1940s, and Pan Am had similar concerns when it changed its hiring practices in the late 1950s. Thus postwar homophobia, most vividly exemplified by the Simpson scandal, is partly to blame for the steward’s demise. This prejudice worked in tandem with the economic dynamics and sexism of the cold war era to drive men out of the stewarding occupation.
The Simpson murder case also highlights male flight attendants’ significant role in legal deliberations that ultimately expanded queer equality. The trial of Simpson’s murderers provides a baseline for the following chapters, articulating the desperate legal status of homosexuals in the 1950s, before civil rights innovations improved their lot. In particular, the trial holds an inauspicious role in helping to introduce into U.S. jurisprudence the “homosexual panic” defense, which arose to legally justify, or at least mitigate responsibility for, violence against homosexuals.10 In the Simpson proceedings and an unknown number of other cases, this meant that murderers were spared the death penalty and even life in prison and were convicted instead of the lesser penalty of manslaughter when their target was gay. Simpson’s case thereby illustrates how “homosexual panic” effectively exempted gay men from the promise of equal protection before the law.
Some legal theorists and lawmakers wedded to traditional gender norms were willing to expand further on this logic in the 1960s and ’70s, developing additional homophobic legal arguments to thwart moves toward gender-based civil rights. Subsequent chapters profile these attempts to deploy homophobia, from the framing of the sex discrimination clause of the 1964 Civil Rights Act through efforts to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. As a result, male flight attendants, beginning with Simpson and continuing through the events discussed in the following chapters, became embroiled in crucial civil rights debates on gender and sexuality.
HOMOSEXUALITY AND STEWARDS
My various interviews with former flight attendants confirmed a widely presumed notion: the flight attendant corps in the 1950s harbored far more gay men than was statistically expected. The Pan Am stewards I interviewed contended that