In this light, I treat the Diaz case as a vitally important precursor to future queer equality victories. Even though Diaz himself wasn’t gay, his victory in the courts helped establish limits on social conservatives’ use of homophobia to block gender-based civil rights and prevent the inclusion of gays and lesbians into mainstream civil society. Of course, Diaz’s victory also opened the doors for countless numbers of gay men to enter a relatively high-paying, unionized, and public relations-oriented career. The flight attendant corps would become a new sort of workplace by the 1970s, increasingly responsive not only to women’s rights but also to queer rights.
Chapter 5 examines the flight attendant corps of the 1970s, paying particular attention to how the workplace changed with this new influx of gay men. With thirty-five years of hindsight since first hiring a man, a former member of American Airlines’ hiring committee nowadays identifies a deeper import to the post-Diaz flight attendant corps: “The collision of women’s liberation and the outing of sexuality created an explosion that changed the airline industry beyond recognition.”16 To a certain degree, the whole of American society experienced a similar explosion in the 1970s, the heyday of women’s liberation and maturation period of gay rights. But because the flight attendant corps was disproportionately female and gay male, it experienced this culture shock much sooner and more acutely than the rest of U.S. society. Flight attendants were in the avant-garde of this major social upheaval. This chapter covers this “explosion” in greater detail, examining how women and gays cooperated—and sometimes fought—in both the workplace and the union hall to find common ground that respected all employees: male or female, straight or gay.
I also link these developments with the considerable backlash against a feminist, progay ethic, whether from airline executives or larger conservative social movements. These increasingly severe skirmishes in the culture war also influenced the legal legacy of Diaz v. Pan Am, as conservatives continued to portray women’s rights initiatives like the Equal Rights Amendment as backdoor pathways for queers to gain equal rights. Meanwhile, as progressives like Ruth Bader Ginsburg made male plaintiffs key to her legal strategy in the 1970s, others increasingly bemoaned such support for men as misguided and counterproductive. By the close of the decade, Diaz risked being orphaned even by champions of women’s rights and gay rights.
Chapter 6 begins to examine the most heart-wrenching, darkest days of the flight attendant corps. All of the flight attendants I interviewed regard AIDS as a deeply personal tragedy that took from them coworkers and dear friends. The workplace was filled with talk—though most of it still hushed—of funerals, extended sick leaves, new therapies, and the occasional hopeful signs of recovery. Tears still well up in many of my interviewees over a decade after the worst of the dying has ended. “AIDS was devastating for us,” was the common refrain.17 Male flight attendants also became more acutely aware than other workers of how AIDS was a political, not just a personal, tragedy. After all, their careers were being threatened both by the epidemic’s health dimensions and by the political response of conservatives seeking to use AIDS as a bludgeon against gay civil rights. The demonization of Air Canada steward Gaëtan Dugas, better known as “Patient Zero,” illustrates the ways that flight attendants became embroiled in these pitched social battles over AIDS. This chapter details the facts of Dugas’s life and the state of the “Patient Zero” myth circa 1984, before Shilts circulated the myth in his book.
I also chronicle the plight of another flight attendant with AIDS, whose legacy—while less known—warrants equal attention. United Airlines flight attendant Gär Traynor was also diagnosed with AIDS very early in the crisis. But his response to his diagnosis ultimately offered a more positive basis for overcoming AIDS phobia. When his employer, citing passengers’ and coworkers’ fears of contagion, permanently grounded him in June 1983, Traynor and his union fought back. In a key 1984 legal victory, Traynor became one of the first people with AIDS (PWAs) in the United States to win the right to return to work, a precedent that was replicated in subsequent court decisions and in the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act.
Chapter 7 traces these two rival legacies regarding AIDS and flight attendants—Dugas’s castigation as a scapegoat and Traynor’s role as an advocate combating marginalization—into the 1990s. The chapter begins with the 1987 release of Randy Shilts’s book And the Band Played On and his portrayal of Dugas as the origin of the epidemic in America. My analysis confirms long-standing assertions by scholars and AIDS activists that Gaëtan Dugas was not the first American with AIDS.18 Instead, Shilts’s editor, Michael Denneny, confirmed to me that Shilts manipulated the “Patient Zero” narrative to garner media publicity for the book. Denneny claims that the subsequent media frenzy saved And the Band Played On from obscurity, vaulting it onto the best-seller list. With so much attention focused on Dugas, flight attendants—though they certainly did not ask for such a role—were now implicated in the larger social and political battles over AIDS, post-Stonewall gay sexual practices, and workplace rights for PWAs. Flight attendants and their employers were more passive actors than Shilts, social conservatives, and AIDS activists in this fight, but they helped determine whether PWAs would be quarantined out of the public sphere.
Indeed, the airlines ultimately helped to defuse the hysteria embodied by “Patient Zero.” Just months after Shilts released his salacious account, United Airlines finally stopped its long-established practice of grounding flight attendants with AIDS. And by 1993, American Airlines was working hard to overcome its previous AIDS-phobic and homophobic reputation to become the United States’ first self-proclaimed “gay-friendly” airline. Such practices didn’t completely dispel the indignation directed at Gaëtan Dugas and his fellow male flight attendants, but it did decisively marginalize social conservatives, at least in the corporate boardroom and in corporately administered public spaces like airplanes. Airlines like American and United had rather abruptly switched allegiances in the culture war, even as AIDS hysteria was still potent.
Chapter 8 examines the increasingly gay-friendly era of aviation since the 1990s, during the peak of America’s neoliberal economic policies. Gay and lesbian flight attendants won more benefits as the 1990s progressed, including flight privileges for their domestic partners and, by 2001, health benefits for partners. While such developments seem to make the 1990s the ideal conclusion to the topsy-turvy history of male flight attendants and their encounters with homophobia, they are not as one-dimensionally optimistic. Indeed, following work of other queer scholars, I explain how expanding gay civil rights via the private sector is fraught with danger.19 Just as gay flight attendants have attained parity with their straight peers, all of them have endured unprecedented pay cuts and the loss of collective bargaining power. Along these lines, I consider the plight of disgruntled JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater, who became an instant celebrity in 2010 when he walked off his job by deploying the plane’s emergency slide and sauntering across the JFK Airport tarmac toward his waiting car. Slater embodies how male flight attendants, even if they are no longer discriminated for being gay or HIV positive, nonetheless experience their work as undignified and underpaid in the cutthroat economic age of deregulation, airline bankruptcies, and court-monitored reorganizations.
The conclusion summarizes my findings on the quest for queer equality in the eighty-plus-year career of the male flight attendant. It especially focuses on this fact: while these men have always stood out as plainly queer in the long expanse of commercial aviation history, the intensity of the animus directed against them has shifted considerably through the years. Certain decades stand out as particularly sexist and/or homophobic, while others have been more tolerant. These undulations, I conclude, are consequences of deeper economic and legal factors. Sexism and homophobia became most pronounced when there was economic gain to be had by marginalizing these men. Similarly, tolerance predominated when the airlines stood to benefit from treating these men well. All of these financial calculations