Plane Queer. Phil Tiemeyer

enough seniority bid on the same routes together, the only way to guarantee that their roommate wouldn’t harass them.²⁶ Interestingly, Eastern avoided such problems, at least in the 1950s. At that time, the airline simply provided each flight attendant with a per diem, which they could spend as they saw fit. This made lodging a completely private decision and gave gay stewards much more security.

      The lone Pan Am policy that explicitly addressed problems tied to homosexuality involved the Beirut base in the mid-1950s. This outpost was the hub of Pan Am’s extensive Middle Eastern operations tied to the growing U.S. oil interests in the region. Perhaps being so far from corporate headquarters enabled the flight attendants based there to be less circumspect than their U.S.-based employees. According to a few flight attendants I interviewed, the base was well known for its gay stewards, so much so that it drew the attention of the corporate office.²⁷ In response, the company temporarily refused to transfer any stewards to Beirut—a blanket exclusion on all men, without any attempt to distinguish between gay and straight personnel, much less those with stellar or below-average service records. The company lifted the ban in 1958, apparently in the face of strong union opposition, since it circumvented the collective bargaining agreement stipulating that positions be filled on the basis of seniority, not gender. Nonetheless, the temporary policy followed a pattern for handling homosexual scandals that would recur: when faced with potential embarrassment, the airlines resorted to the draconian measure of excluding all men from certain posts.

      While the airlines hiring men dealt with difficult issues tied to same-sex desire, they also faced potential public relations troubles from their stewards’ perceived effeminacy. The more the public and other airline personnel perceived the flight attendant job as women’s work, the more they harassed men who were employed in it. Several former stewards, both gay and straight, confirmed that humiliating incidents occasionally occurred on the job. One straight ex-steward recalled being asked by a repeat male customer, “Where’s your dress?” He initially attempted to defuse the situation with humor, by replying, “I hope you forgive me, sir, but I decided to dress legitimately today.” After this response failed to end the customer’s abuse, the steward informed the flight captain that he wouldn’t work the flight because, as he said, “My masculinity in a very flippant and demeaning way is being questioned.” In this case, the captain stuck up for the steward, proceeding back to the cabin and forcing the customer to apologize.²⁸

      

      Another steward recalled that pilots were often the source of the most demeaning attacks. “They could make your job miserable,” he said of the pilots, some of whom preferred that the women serve their meals in the cockpits. One pilot even ordered a steward to make him coffee in the employee lounge of an airport, since there were “plenty of twenty-year old stewardesses willing to do that for me.”²⁹ The former stewards overall confirmed that problems with the pilot corps, while isolated, were still quite troubling: “We had some wonderful captains.... By far I would say the majority were nice guys, but then we had some real bastards.” Meanwhile, interactions with customers overall were easygoing and uneventful. But there were occasionally demeaning inquiries from male passengers: “Where are the babes?” or “Why all these men working in first class?”³⁰ The answer to the last query was simple: men tended to accrue more seniority than women and therefore could claim the more desirable jobs on their assigned flights, including working the first-class cabin.

      DELTA’S HOMOPHOBIC PRECEDENT

      While Pan Am and Eastern found some sort of modus vivendi with regard to accommodating a gay presence among their flight attendants, Delta found that their male pursers were not worth the trouble of keeping. The airline began hiring men as pursers in 1946 but dismissed all of them by late 1948. Without a labor union in place, the men involved had no recourse when they were terminated, and the event probably would have disappeared from public memory, hidden in inaccessible corporate archives, if, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had not questioned Delta about its decision almost twenty years later. The EEOC by 1966 was pursuing the Celio Diaz case and other complaints brought by male applicants to flight attendant positions. To better understand the history of men’s exclusion from the job, they asked Delta to explain its short-lived experiment with male pursers.

      Delta replied that its experience with men had been “completely unsatisfactory.”³¹ Foremost among its concerns were sexual issues, especially homosexuality: “While the matter must be delicately stated, it was a fact that the least trace of effeminacy on the part of the purser resulted in the individual being tagged as a sex deviate (in most cases without fault on his part) and, at the other extreme, the least aggressiveness on the part of a more virile steward was subject to misinterpretation by female passengers.”³² Perhaps most significant about this claim is that it confirmed a gay presence among Delta’s small corps of pursers, however coyly the company’s lawyers framed the letter. After all, the airline noted that the effeminate men were not culpable for being labeled sex deviates “in most cases.” This official, though hardly public, admission by an airline that it had gay employees was extremely rare. In fact, I have uncovered only one other admission of this sort from before the 1970s.³³