Plane Queer. Phil Tiemeyer

in surprisingly large numbers. Indeed, their status as men that society perceived as queer—a good many of whom also self-identified as gay—who were also unionized, working-class employees in a relatively high-profile, public relations-oriented profession makes them particularly important historical actors in a larger struggle to combat sexism and homophobia in the American workplace.

      Male flight attendants’ contributions to queer equality developed in an ever-widening spiral, as they quietly sought acceptance first from fellow flight attendants and other coworkers, then from airline managers and union officials, and then—in the most far-reaching examples—in groundbreaking legal fights that influenced the larger trajectory of gender-based and sexuality-based civil rights in the United States. Plane Queer uncovers these moments when male flight attendants successfully expanded civil rights, focusing especially on Diaz v. Pan Am, legal actions filed by flight attendants to protect the work rights of people with HIV/AIDS, and the gradual bestowal of domestic partner benefits and other “gay-friendly” workplace rules that arose in the 1990s.⁵

      At the same time, I also focus on moments of retreat, when sexism and homophobia prevailed over queer equality, as when Pan Am and Eastern stopped hiring stewards in the late 1950s. Equally devastating for men in the career was the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, when various airlines exploited public panic to ground flight attendants with HIV/AIDS, even when medical experts dismissed the potential of such employees to endanger passengers’ health and safety. In particular, Air Canada flight attendant Gaëtan Dugas, known more often by his media-imposed alias “Patient Zero,” demonstrated the potential of male flight attendants to elicit fear and anger at this panicked time. Despite a distinct lack of proof, gay journalist Randy Shilts succeeded in planting the idea among readers of his 1987 book And the Band Played On that this attractive, gay, unabashedly promiscuous flight attendant was the origin of America’s AIDS epidemic.⁶ Shilts interlaced accounts of “Patient Zero” throughout his 630-page tome on the early history of AIDS, all the while promoting the salacious theory that Dugas was responsible for the virus’s entry into the United States and its initial spread from coast to coast.

      While queer flight attendants today enjoy fuller equality than they did in the 1950s or 1980s, their accomplishments are still in jeopardy. At first glance, the benefit parity that airlines offer to gay, lesbian, and even transgender workers is impressive, including domestic partner health care coverage and travel benefits. At the same time, however, these same employers over the past decade have dramatically reduced wages and benefits, often using court-protected bankruptcy proceedings to rewrite labor contracts to the disadvantage of workers. Thus the expansion of benefits to queer employees has occurred in a climate that increasingly deprives all flight attendants—female and male, straight and gay, gender conforming and otherwise—of the financial means necessary to secure a middle-class standard of living. Consequently, the quest for queer equality that flight attendants have undertaken through the last eighty-plus years of commercial flight has been fraught with ups and downs and today is in a nosedive (to use a graphic aviation metaphor), propelled by the neoliberal economic pull of lower ticket prices at the expense of workers’ livelihoods.

      I am not the first to write of flight attendants’ contributions to the U.S. civil rights legacy. In fact, I hope readers will examine my work alongside accounts by Kathleen Barry and Georgia Panter Nielsen.⁷ These scholars have accentuated how this career became an important locus of “pink-collar” labor and activism, where stewardesses fought against work rules that kept them underpaid and oversexualized. Indeed, stewardesses were among the first women to flood the EEOC with sex-based discrimination complaints once the 1964 Civil Rights Act came into effect, and their legal efforts helped to professionalize this career and many other female-dominated workplaces. Quite reasonably, stewards are neglected in these histories, since they never endured the same indignities: rigorous weight checks, forced retirement upon marrying or reaching age thirty-two, pregnancy bans, and employer-sanctioned sexual harassment.⁸

      

      Yet these preexisting histories thereby overlook the full extent of discrimination faced by flight attendants, including stewards’ virtual banishment from the job at midcentury and increased scrutiny during the AIDS crisis. Recovering these additional experiences highlights how gender nonconformists and homosexuals endured pernicious inequality of their own (alongside that faced by the young, attractive, gender-conforming stewardess corps) and fought just as vigorously to overcome it. Often, queer rights and disability rights are deemed auxiliary pieces to America’s civil rights legacy, which primarily foregrounds race-based struggles and women’s rights efforts. By recovering the steward’s neglected history dating back to the 1920s, we find that homophobia has been intimately entwined (and just as enduring) as sexism and that AIDS phobia, while more recent, has been just as intense.

      Like Barry’s Femininity in Flight, my work also occasionally follows flight attendants’ struggles for equality beyond the workplace and into venues such as labor union deliberations, congressional records, EEOC proceedings, and courtroom arguments. Plane Queer highlights previously overlooked chapters in legal history that pertain to the plight for queer equality, from the rise of the “homosexual panic” defense (used in 1954 at the expense of an Eastern Air Lines steward named William Simpson), to the entanglement of homophobia with sex-based civil rights in the wake of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and onward to the fight for equal workplace rights for people with HIV/AIDS.⁹

      Legal scholars to this day treat Diaz v. Pan Am as a groundbreaking interpretation in gender discrimination law, since it forced greater scrutiny on employers’ decisions to hire only one gender of employees for a certain job. But less familiar, even to many of these scholars, is Diaz’s standing as one of the first and most successful gender discrimination cases brought by a man. While the mainstream media and right-wing commentators during the Diaz trial ridiculed the notion of male gender discrimination as a bizarre misappropriation of the law, some feminist legal scholars were intrigued. In particular, future Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who headed the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project in the early 1970s, began to argue more cases on behalf of male plaintiffs. She envisioned a new and ultimately only partially accomplished legal goal: removing all government support for sexual stereotypes, whether for women undertaking notionally male roles or men like Diaz aspiring to notionally female roles.¹⁰ Plane Queer thus offers a unique rendering of feminist legal history, which gains new texture by foregrounding male flight attendants and other similarly situated men.

      Just as male flight attendants’ history deepens our understanding of civil rights and legal history, so too does it complement previous scholarship on the origins of America’s gay subculture. These histories have detailed the genesis of a gay community in realms as diverse as the medical world, homophile activist circles, federal government policy, and, perhaps most importantly, the nightlife in industrialized U.S. cities.¹¹ The case of male flight attendants and their contributions to gay society suggests a new and as yet overlooked venue for gay community building: the workplace.¹² For gay flight attendants (and the passengers who suspected their stewards of being gay), the aisles and galleys of airplanes, as well as crew hotels and crash pads, served the same role that other gays and lesbians found in bars: a place where they could meet others like themselves and even embrace their same-sex desires for the first time.

      This fact suggests a secondary meaning for the book’s title: much as gay men forged a foothold in cities’ bohemian scenes, they appropriated the airplane as a space where they belonged and secretly thrived. Planes—one of America’s cherished symbols of progress and modernity—acquired a gay presence, thanks especially to the stewards who worked in them. In other words, stewards made the plane queer. The book proceeds from the fact that a sizable cadre of gay men worked in the skies to their gradual agitation for queer equality. In this way, this workplace follows a script that queer historians have noted in the gay nightlife circles that cautiously prospered in postwar America: numerous individuals’ ostensibly apolitical motive of seeking out a place to belong ended up creating communities that could increasingly function as power bases in the fight for queer equality.¹³

      Connected with reflections on flight attendants’ contributions to gay life in America are two common sets of questions posed about my topic: Just how gay has the male flight