My grandma is ultimately responsible for this book. When I was six years old, she took me on my first flight, whisking me away from my backyard in St. Louis to the desert landscape of New Mexico. All these years later, our time there stands out less in my memory than my flight on TWA with Grandma by my side. She loaded me up with gum to keep my ears from popping and only let out the slightest chuckle when I asked her, quite concerned, if our jet was going to do flips like the ones I saw on TV. Grandma held my hand all the way to Albuquerque and let me fall asleep in her lap, giving me just the security I needed to plant the seeds of a lifetime love affair with travel.
Over the years, Mom and Dad have nurtured this love affair. Often confused as a homebody, those of us who love Dad know that he’s most in his element driving a car on a family vacation. He’s at his funniest and most revealing with eyes on the road and hands on the wheel, destination westward, mountains just coming into sight. Meanwhile, Mom taught me that it’s okay to explore even more distant horizons. She showed me Europe for the first time and remains my favorite travel companion to this day. Most importantly, Mom and Joan, my “second mom,” showed me that I would still be loved even if I pursued my passions far away from home. The suburban backyards of St. Louis weren’t for everyone, and Mom would come find me wherever I ended up. She has, and so has Dad. In my life’s various changes of course and the occasional emergency landing, they’ve held my hand, just like Grandma on my first flight. And that backyard in St. Louis is still there, too, nurtured by Mom and Dad’s fifty-year love affair.
I owe tremendous gratitude to Charlie for taking me deeper into love than I ever dared to dream as a child. We had a great voyage together, to places as disparate as Minneapolis, Newfoundland, and Austin. I’m delighted that we still get to travel together as family, if not as co-pilots. We’ll probably settle down close by each other in a fabulous flight attendant getaway, ideally on the set of the Golden Girls, still fighting over which of us gets to be Dorothy. It’s me, by the way, and you’re Rose, and Brian is our Blanche.
As I mature, I find myself increasingly enamored by history’s voyagers who chart a new course halfway through their lives. In the process, some of them discover a second naïveté, a deep sense of exhilaration every bit as wonderful as their first adventures. Falling in love with you, Shaun, has made me one of these fortunate characters. With my hand in yours, I’m a little kid again, venturing out on a TWA flight from St. Louis to who-knows-where. When you smile at me the way Grandma did, and I fall asleep in your arms, I know we belong on this voyage together forever. I think of our wonderful times in D.C., Philly, Colombia, and—most especially—Montreal, and proclaim with the joy of a newly minted flight attendant in aviation’s gayest years: Tu me donnes des ailes.
March 22, 2012, Philadelphia, PA
Introduction
The idea for this book came to me back in 2004, while I was sifting through a box of materials in the Pan American Airways Archives at the University of Miami. Among the archives’ vast collection of papers, I found dozens of folders, enough to fill an entire box, marked “Stewardesses.” One folder in this box jumped out at me: a relatively thin one marked “Stewards,” whose contents, though not extensive, were fascinating. I first noticed newspaper clippings from the late 1960s, which spoke of a court case filed by a young Miami man named Celio Diaz Jr. Diaz invoked the clause of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that forbade “sex discrimination” when Pan Am refused to hire him, or any other man, as a flight attendant. He thereby began a legal assault on the corporate sphere’s gender norms, one complemented by far more numerous efforts from female plaintiffs. Hundreds of women were fighting at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and in federal courts to gain access to higher-paying male-dominated professions, while Diaz and a few dozen other men demanded entry into female-only service sector jobs.
When Diaz finally won his case in 1971, a new era for flight attendants was born: not only Pan Am but all other U.S. airlines were forced to integrate men into their flight service crews. This was a little-known, highly controversial consequence of the landmark civil rights legislation passed in 1964. A clipping from the Wall Street Journal cast the ruling as an affront to America’s heterosexual, male-privileged hierarchy that kept flight attendants young, female, and attractive: “To the extent male stewards replace glamorous stewardesses,” the Journal scornfully mused, “the [Diaz] case ... may prove to be one of the more controversial interpretations of the 1964 law among members of the male-dominated Congress.”1
Deeper in the folder, I found much older photographs of Pan Am’s first flight crews from the 1920s and ’30s. Interestingly, the entire crew were men: pilots, copilots, and stewards. It turns out that this most storied of U.S. airlines didn’t hire a single stewardess until the labor shortage of World War II, and it continued to hire stewards in sizable numbers well into the 1950s. Only in 1958 did Pan Am switch to the female-only hiring policy that Diaz successfully challenged a decade later. The same was true of another of America’s great legacy carriers, Eastern Air Lines, which imitated Pan Am by introducing all-male flight crews in 1936 and continuing to hire a sizable number of stewards until the mid-1950s.
Once again, the photos were remnants of a history I had never heard before: I was unaware that male flight attendants had been in the career even before stewardesses, the first of whom had started in 1930, a couple years after Pan Am’s first steward. This small folder’s contents held tremendous promise to uncover a seemingly forgotten history, chronicling how one group of men struggled to maintain their foothold in a profession that gradually went from being originally male, to almost exclusively female, to sexually integrated by the 1970s.
Excited by my discoveries, I walked into the office of Dr. Craig Likness, then the university’s head archivist, to discuss the folder on stewards. I told him how men seemed to have played a key role in various moments of the career and turned to him plaintively for more records. Surely this material was rich enough to warrant more folders—or, ideally, boxes—on stewards. First came the bad news: Craig was familiar enough with the collection to know that everything explicitly about stewards was in the meager folder. Then came the good news: he too was fascinated by my findings, both what they revealed and the promise of all the things they concealed. “Well, it sounds like you’ve found a great book topic,” he smilingly concluded.
From that day onwards, with the help of devoted archivists and patient former flight attendants who sat for hours of interviews, I have been cobbling together the history of the male flight attendant. Though far from exhaustive, this book reconstructs the key contours of this history, all the while demonstrating how male flight attendants have held a broader significance beyond aviation history. The fact that these men have been treated as gender misfits and suspected homosexuals since their debut makes them an important case study of gender discrimination and homophobia in an American workplace. Plane Queer thereby offers nearly a century of civil rights history that typically has been overlooked, especially examining the various successes and setbacks flight attendants experienced in striving for queer equality in the United States.2
Thanks to social norms that took root in the early 1930s, the male flight attendant has stood out, as the book’s title suggests, as plainly queer for almost the full run of this profession. After all, these were white men who performed what large segments of U.S. society deemed servile “women’s work” or “colored work” and who thereby invited scrutiny as failed men and likely homosexuals. According to Kathleen Barry, whose book Femininity in Flight is the most authoritative history of the career to date, “The flight attendant occupation took permanent shape in the 1930s as ‘women’s work,’ that is, work not only predominately performed by women but also defined as embodying white, middle-class ideals of femininity.”3 The historical record confirms this finding, as stewards in the late 1930s constituted just one-third of the nation’s flight attendants. Thereafter, their numbers declined significantly, receding to a mere 4 percent when Diaz v. Pan Am was being argued in the late 1960s.4
Yet a countervailing fact