A more successful, though less empirical, way to address these questions is to follow the line that historian Allen Bérubé developed in his work on queer ship stewards. His understanding of how and why certain careers become gay identified stresses the relationship between sexual identity and regimes governing gender and race in the workplace. Ship stewards, like airline stewards, performed work that was notionally feminine, primarily undertaking servile tasks to comfort customers. One ship official, when asked why his company hired so many gay men, simply replied, “If it wasn’t for these boys, who else would we get to do this kind of women’s work.”14 Yet as Bérubé aptly adds, men of color could also credibly perform such work in trains, hotels, and wealthy homes without raising suspicions of queerness. Indeed, the work that the all-male corps of African American railroad porters performed was quite similar to air and ship stewards’ work, though porters never developed a reputation as gay.
Only when white men undertook such work did it become a noticeably queer job. Thus the air steward’s gayness—presumed for all stewards and true for a good many of them—relied on U.S. airlines’ racist hiring policies that largely remained in effect until after the 1964 Civil Rights Act. For several decades, no member of the flight crew at any airline could be African American or another racial minority, except for light-skinned Latinos whom Pan Am hired for their Latin American Division or Hawaiian-born stewards hired by United for their Honolulu flights after 1950. The result, as Bérubé states of ship stewards, was that “white gay men on the liners learned to racialize gay as white.”15 Simply stated, queer careers arose out of America’s Jim Crow past. It took a series of exclusionary choices based on both gender and race for white men like flight attendants to stand out as gay. Indeed, for these men to become plainly queer, they first had to enter workplaces that were notionally feminine and predominantly white. When this career became queer is thus something we can pinpoint, even without knowing the details of how stewards identified sexually: it occurred in the very first decade of U.S. commercial aviation—in the 1930s—when stewardesses began to outnumber stewards and African American applicants were uniformly turned away.
The chapters of this book detail the undulations of tolerance and discrimination experienced by male flight attendants from the dawn of commercial aviation in the late 1920s through the post-AIDS crisis years of the late 1990s and 2000s.
The development of the career shows that these men experienced sexism and homophobia as fluid, ever-changing variables. At certain times, male flight attendants—and, more specifically, gay male flight attendants—enjoyed a modicum of tolerance from the public and their coworkers. At other times, the animosity they faced threatened their livelihoods. While we might think that queer equality developed in history along a progressive trajectory, starting with very little traction in the earliest years and gaining increasing momentum as time went by, this is not the case. The deeper reality is that each decade has experienced a tenuous interplay between progress and regression. Even in ostensibly homophobic decades like the 1950s, flight attendants made impressive strides toward forging a gay-tolerant career. Yet at the very same time male flight attendants risked becoming objects of ridicule for segments of society that pushed back against such gains. Thus flight attendants’ hard-won achievements toward gaining tolerance were rarely ever decisive, and even their most stellar victories, such as the Diaz court case, often were tinged with regressive characteristics as well.
Chapter 1 considers the late 1920s through the beginning of World War II. These years were the de facto heyday of stewards, even as stewardesses gradually became established as the preferred employees for this job. The 1930s saw varied reactions to stewards, from tolerance and even playfully campy portrayals of stewards as dapper fashion icons to deeply phobic responses to these seemingly unmanly men. In trying to explain this variety of responses, I place early aviation within its upper-class social milieu: the “gay” (in the sense of over-the-top and fun) nightlife of Prohibition-era cities. Since the airlines drew their customers from the cosmopolitan elite who frequented this opulent and flirtatiously androgynous nightlife, Pan Am and Eastern enjoyed greater freedom to hire stewards and promote them as dapper and sexually desirable. But especially as World War II loomed on the horizon a deeper discomfort with stewards surfaced, including the first evidence in the media and from airline archives that stewards fostered homophobic derision and animosity.
Chapter 2 is the first of two chapters that examine the steward’s demise in the post-World War II era. This chapter focuses on the economic rationale behind the steward’s expulsion, linking it to the cold war’s military-industrial complex that took hold after the war. In the immediate postwar era, civil aviation settled into a second-class status versus military aviation in terms of aircraft development and supply. The airlines inherited thousands of decommissioned military planes, creating a vast oversupply of aircraft that altered their financial strategies considerably, forcing every airline to become more cost-efficient. I argue that stewards were the indirect casualties, “collateral damage,” if you will, of this militarization of the industry. The oversupply of aircraft brought on by the war meant that stewards, with their higher salaries and longer tenures, were now less cost-effective than stewardesses. By reshaping the flight attendant corps as female only, postwar airlines realized significant payroll savings. The more the career was treated as women’s work, the less the airlines had to pay flight attendants. Airlines were then also free to impose egregious work rules on stewardesses that men would never be expected to tolerate, including marriage bans and forced retirement in their mid-thirties.
Chapter 3 examines a related social development, the rise of homophobia in the postwar era, which also led to the steward’s demise by the close of the 1950s. As normative models of American manhood increasingly embodied the ruggedness and adventuring of a soldier, stewards raised more eyebrows as failed men. In the early 1950s, insinuations against stewards circulated not only in rumor mills but also in salacious front-page headlines. Miami’s newspapers took the lead, sensationalizing a gay sex tryst gone wrong: the murder in 1954 of an Eastern Air Lines steward, William Simpson, at the hands of two young male hustlers on a lovers’ lane. The antigay hysteria in Miami following the murder solidified the link between gender transgression (men doing women’s work) and sexual perversion, and it portrayed stewards as threats to normalcy and decency. In this climate, pressure grew on Eastern and Pan Am—both with strong ties to the Miami market—to stop hiring stewards. The career, seemingly, had become irretrievably feminized and the stewards too tied to homosexuality in the public’s eyes. This homophobic stance was also adopted in the legal world, as the jury for the Simpson case acquiesced to the defense’s claims of “homosexual panic” and refused to find his killers guilty of first-degree murder. This legal argument, effectively refuting gay men’s standing as equal under the law, serves as important background for the civil rights legal discussions in the ensuing chapters.
Chapter 4 describes the social shock waves generated by the return of male flight attendants to the job after Celio Diaz successfully used the 1964 Civil Rights Act to reverse the airlines’ female-only hiring practices. Diaz’s legacy, though virtually unknown today, attests to queer Americans’ deep investment in the civil rights moment of the 1960s, even though they were often seen as unwelcome in this movement. While many citizens were increasingly ready in the 1960s to extend legal equality to African Americans, they were far more reluctant to