Overall, this investigation of a queer workplace exposes how sexism and homophobia are undergirded by deeper economic and legal developments. It is not enough to countenance male flight attendants as just plain queer; they are also people with fluid legal standing and evolving economic value. Recounting the history of male flight attendants and the quest for queer equality allows us to consider these multiple factors—queerness, economics, and the law—in tandem, arguably even more effectively than in the ways queer community histories have been written to date.
CHAPTER ONE • The Pre–World War II “Gay” Flight Attendant
From histories of the flight attendant profession it would be easy to come away with the notion that America’s first flight attendant was a woman. Many accounts describe how a savvy Iowa nurse, Ellen Church, approached executives at Boeing Air Transport (the predecessor of United Airlines) in 1930 and prevailed on them to usher in a new female member of their flight crews who would keep passengers comfortable and assist them in emergencies. Far fewer accounts mention that such jobs actually existed before Church and that men, not women, held them. Pan Am’s inaugural flight between Key West and Havana on January 16, 1928, could be just as immortalized in flight attendant histories as Church’s first flight over two years later. An artist’s rendering of the 1928 flight (figure 1) shows the airline’s very first flight attendant, a nineteen-year-old Cuban American named Amaury Sanchez, standing in his black-and-white uniform and greeting passengers as they board the Fokker F-7 plane. While a few other men served before him, Sanchez was the first U.S. flight attendant on a so-called “legacy carrier,” and in that sense he represents the beginning of a line of men and women who would make their careers as airborne ambassadors of reassurance, charm, and service.1
Over time, however, Ellen Church’s hiring has been remembered and Sanchez’s almost entirely forgotten. After all, the more familiar understanding of the profession as female dominated begins with Church. Labor historian Kathleen Barry has correctly noted that the flight attendant career “took permanent shape in the 1930s as ‘women’s work.’”2 Certainly, by the 1950s, popular media like the Saturday Evening Post could matter-of-factly misreport the origins of the career: Ellen Church “was hired by United to work their flight between two Western cities, and to recruit other girls for similar duty. She did so and a profession was started.”3 Indeed, when Eddie Rickenbacker, then CEO of Eastern Air Lines, introduced his plans for a male-only flight attendant corps in late 1936, the Washington Post went so far as to belittle these men as “male hostesses,” suggesting they were interlopers in an already well-established female realm. “Capt. E. V. Rickenbacker confessed yesterday he is simmering in a nice kettle of fish,” the reporter noted, “because he proposes to install flight stewards or, if you prefer, male ‘hostesses’ on Eastern Air Lines planes.”4 In just half a decade, even as men like Sanchez still held all positions in Pan Am’s flight attendant corps, Eastern’s stewards were seen as gender misfits.
FIGURE 1. Artist John T. McCoy Jr.’s rendering of “Pan American’s first passenger flight-Key West, Florida, to Havana, Cuba, January 16, 1928-Fokker F-7,” 1963. Courtesy Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
Rickenbacker withstood these attacks, and significant numbers of men continued to take the job. In fact, Eastern maintained a male-only corps of flight attendants up until the labor shortage of World War II, and Pan Am did the same, from the time of Sanchez’s hiring until 1944. Thanks to these two airlines, men during the 1930s constituted around one-third of flight attendants.5 Thus, compared to the female-dominated fields of nursing or typing, where women in the 1930s held over 95 percent of positions, the flight attendant profession was still an extensively gender-integrated space.6 But these publicly disparaged “male hostesses” were clearly flying into cultural headwinds. As all-white or light-skinned Latino men performing servile work customarily reserved for women or men of color, they elicited deep anxieties surrounding the evolution of gender and sexuality norms in Jim Crow America.
It is anachronistic to speak of a “gay” flight attendant corps that endured “homophobia” in the 1930s. In those years, unlike the postwar years, homosexuality was a barely choate identity category. It found expression mainly in scientific tomes as a sexual pathology and in a rather limited urban nightlife that grew up alongside the other illicit pleasures of Prohibition-era America.7 In addition, explicit sources such as memoirs or corporate records on homosexuality in the steward corps do not exist, which means I have no ability to assess stewards’ actual sexual behaviors and attitudes.
To speak of “homophobia” is also, therefore, problematic. In fact, even if stewards’ sexual identities were known, it would be enormously difficult to discern when they experienced discrimination based on sexuality rather than gender. As these men walked the tenuous cultural line identified by Barry—and, more polemically, the Washington Post—that sought to cleanly divide male and female realms, we know they experienced discrimination that belittled these men as women. This cultural response is easily construed as homophobic, and I do, in fact, use the term in this manner.8 Yet such discrimination actually depended on the culture’s sexism that rigidly restricted male and female social roles. Similarly, the fact that the African American men performing the same servile tasks as Pullman porters on trains never elicited derision as “male hostesses” shows that such epithets depended on America’s racism as well.
My primary focus in this chapter is stewards’ unconventional gender performance in the 1930s. I especially scrutinize remnant public relations materials, assessing the degree that stewards were portrayed as either appropriately masculine or deficiently so. I also examine what links may have existed between the steward’s public image and the nascent gay (homosexual) subculture of the 1930s. The first half of this chapter examines the steward within his socioeconomic milieu, as an employee designed to appeal to the white, wealthy, cosmopolitan urban dwellers who made up the lion’s share of air travelers in the 1930s.9 These customers, who were predominantly men, had already acclimated themselves to what I call the “gay”—in quotation marks—lifestyle that arose in the Prohibition era, where opulence comingled with illegality and sexual adventure.10 While this social scene was not “gay” in a sense synonymous with “homosexual,” participants did embrace a softer version of masculinity that emphasized the pursuit of libidinal pleasure, and some homosexual encounters were tolerated, even if only a fraction of men chose to engage in them. While the steward could not aspire to participate fully in this eccentric lifestyle because of his working-class status, he was groomed by Pan Am’s and Eastern’s public relations departments to cater to this softer upper-class masculinity. In this sense, stewards of the day belonged—at least aesthetically, from an examination of their uniforms and other public relations materials—to the more fluid gender and sexuality norms that typified the “gay” life of the urban elite.
The second half of the chapter examines the first stirrings of homophobia (in the sense of a virulent sexism) directed at the steward. Interestingly, more than just external observers like the Washington Post journalist belittled stewards for their inadequate masculinity. Eastern’s and Pan Am’s own public relations materials betrayed a degree of apprehension that at times surpassed the Post’s. This section examines both an Eastern article on a steward’s “diaper drama” (changing a baby’s diaper in flight) and a violently demeaning comic published by Pan Am in their respective in-flight magazines. As indicated by the discomfort that even their employers displayed, stewards of the 1930s had undertaken a troubling social role, even if they were spared the more explicit homophobia of the postwar moment.
The chapter also details how technology played a vital role in casting the steward as a social outcast. Here my work relies heavily on previous historians, who have begun to stress the “mutual shaping” that occurs between technological and social innovation.11 In terms of gender, historians now realize that “the boundaries between how people designated male are expected to behave and how people designated female are expected to behave are sometimes redefined, negotiated,