A similar situation was evident at Eastern Air Lines. Both the straight and gay men I talked to agreed that gays had composed anywhere from 20 to 40 percent of the flight attendant corps, at least at the Miami base where they were stationed. One straight steward, who was among the few men hired after the Simpson murder, remembers, “There were gays when I started [in late 1955]. Of five hundred flight attendants at the Miami base, probably fifty were gay men.”14 Given that only half, or even less, of Eastern’s flight attendant corps were men, such a percentage of gays was quite large.
These sizable numbers forced a modicum of tolerance for gays among straight flight attendants and even airline management. Both gay and straight flight attendants largely reported a social ease with each other that was highly uncharacteristic of 1950s society. One straight steward recalls that there were “no problems” with the gay stewards: “We accepted it, and that was it.” He even remembered being teamed with a gay steward for the first month of flying, as flight schedules at the time were generated on a monthly basis. In the course of the month, the gay steward was quite open and friendly toward him, even inviting him to “one of their parties.” While the straight flight attendant never ended up socializing with the gay stewards, he never felt alienated from them either.15
Yet the situation for gays was not entirely open and easy. While some men were forthcoming about their sexuality, others at both Eastern and Pan Am were far more reticent. Attending crew parties with other flight attendants and pilots could mean a risk of exposure: “I didn’t like to go to crew parties...because there were so many gay stories [being told],” says one former steward who kept his sexuality largely private at work. He added, “The vast majority of the gay male flight attendants were circumspect.” For this particular steward, the homophobia of the 1950s was understandable enough: “The gay scene was so raw and behind the scenes and so remote in a lot of people’s minds....A lot of people didn’t know gay people....So I felt I could understand this [intolerance]. It made sense to me. It was difficult for people to understand this way of life....It was perfectly natural to be negative about it.”16
Another Pan Am steward, while insisting that his overall experience at the airline had been free of harassment, nonetheless recounted several incidents at the San Francisco base when straight flight attendants had made an issue of homosexuality: “There was a group of ‘studs’ that...were nasty, nasty guys. They were supposedly straight. I remember one guy carried around a list of everyone who was supposedly gay and would show it to his buddies.” Still, this steward insisted that management had never followed up on the concerns of these men and said that his female flight attendant peers had tended to be very supportive: “The women liked the gay [stewards] because they knew they could go out on a date and wouldn’t get thrown in the sack.” For him, life at Pan Am had been a mixed experience of coming out to fellow gay men and some stewardesses, while being much more circumspect around pilots or straight stewards. Around these more hostile audiences, “You just didn’t come out....They knew, they suspected. You just kept it quiet.”
Others, however, were more open about their sexuality, sometimes because they had no choice. This was especially true of the more effeminate gay men who were more quickly presumed to be gay. Even other gay men at the time referred to these men condescendingly as “gay fags” or “fag ladies.”17 These men, one interviewee suggested, incurred much more harassment from their straight male peers, who “would talk about people that were obvious. And to this day, I’ve felt guilty
because I never stood up for people. I just kept my mouth shut and did my business.” Another straight steward at Eastern, whose career began in 1948, suggested that tensions had never boiled over, even with regard to the effeminate stewards: “We had a number of limp-wristed guys. We knew who they were. Their comportment gave them away. But as long as there was no scandal, they stayed on the job. It never got out of hand.”18
A vignette from former Pan Am steward Roy Orason in his autobiographical novel Plight of a Flight Attendant suggests that even effeminate gay stewards could be accepted, at least in limited ways, by their coworkers. The novel describes, from a straight man’s viewpoint, the intermingling of all sorts of gay and straight employees at a dinner party of Pan Am personnel at the New Orleans base in 1954:19 “Every stewardess that was in town...showed up. Two of the pilots from the base showed up without their wives, although they too had been invited....Some [non–Pan Am] guys brought girlfriends but most of them wanted to meet the stews who would be there. There was even one of the faggot stewards with his friend there and they turned out to be the life of the party.”20 Orason’s account fits into a larger pattern noticeable in my interviews: despite moments of animosity, straight flight attendants knew a good deal about the lives of their gay colleagues, even those “faggots” in the group. And such interactions were usually tolerant, potentially even collegial.
While Pan Am management heatedly denied this a decade later during court proceedings, it is clear that airline executives were quite aware of the homosexual presence in their workforce. In the words of one Pan Am steward, “If there was no scandal involved, I don’t think it would be incriminating to be known as gay by a supervisor.”21 The hiring process, management’s main mode of controlling the composition of the flight attendant corps, was also devoid of probing investigations into one’s sexuality. Applicants weren’t asked questions about the subject, and the company did not consult military records to isolate homosexuals who might have avoided or even been kicked out of the services.22 In fact, not only were gays unafraid to interview for such positions, but an informal gay network in places like San Francisco also circulated word that the job was gay-friendly. One future flight attendant chatted up a gay flight attendant in a coffee shop. The steward, named Kenny, encouraged him to apply and also prevailed on the chief steward doing the hiring: “The guy who was the chief steward was in the closet, and he liked Kenny, and Kenny was able to get him to hire me.”23
That said, some gay men blamed their interview failures or their poor progress reports as employees on perceived homophobes among the hiring committee and base managers. One man applying with Pan Am in San Francisco noted, “There was a panel...of seven for the final interview. And I got one ‘no’ of the seven, so that blackballed me. And this one [woman] said, ‘We all wanted you so much, but we couldn’t talk this one guy out of it.’ I think [he] was a homophobe and had read my beads.”24 A decade later, a gay purser at TWA made it through the hiring process, only to have major troubles with his first base manager. The manager, according to this individual, “hated gay men” and sought to weed them out of the job. Before releasing a purser from probation, “he would have you walk across the room and smoke a cigarette, to see how you held a cigarette,” a decidedly unscientific manner of discovering homosexuals.25 Overall, however, such incidents seem to be exceptions from the general tendency of hiring committees and managers to be tolerant of gay men and to overlook this aspect of their lives if the men showed potential.
Though scandals were rare, when they did happen relations between management and gay stewards became tense. Pan Am endured a series of gay-related problems in the 1950s, though these never received publicity outside company circles. Most arose from the company policy forcing stewards to double up in hotel rooms while on layovers. While pilots received their own rooms as a consequence of their more lucrative collective bargaining agreements, stewards shared their rooms with another steward, or even with a flight engineer from the cockpit. Placing stewards in this situation when their coworkers often knew them to be gay exposed them to all sorts of potential abuse. “There were a lot of problems for gays on layovers,” recalls one Pan Am steward. “We’d double up. And very often there