The release in 1936 of the two most advanced pre-World War II aircraft—the DC-3, heralded as the first modern passenger aircraft, and the Pan American Clipper, the largest passenger plane to date—played a particularly important role in defining stewards as unmanly. These innovations allowed the airlines for the first time to credibly domesticate the cabin and assert this realm as decidedly feminine.13 Airplanes were now safe and comfortable, thereby permitting an influx of new female passengers and even children. With his work increasingly devoted to catering to customers as they reclined in spaces more evocative of their own living rooms, the steward seemed increasingly out of place. Technology was thus central to ostracizing this group of men, opening them to derision as laughable “male hostesses.”
“GAY” TAKES OFF
It was sheer coincidence that the 1920s marked both the rise of commercial aviation and one of the most formative moments for gay male communities. Yet the location of both these innovations in America’s largest cities increased the likelihood that they would become intertwined. As historian George Chauncey points out, the term gay held multiple meanings during this period. When referring to the lifestyle of America’s Prohibition-era elites, it connoted flamboyance, awareness of cultural fashion, fun, and transgressions that could be enjoyed by straights and gays alike. It also held strong overtones of illegality, because of patrons’ indulgence in alcohol and their dabblings in sexual vice, including renowned Broadway “pansy shows.”14 The sexual connotations of the term go back at least to the nineteenth century, when gay referred to female prostitutes and brothels. In the 1920s and 1930s, however, the term was innocent enough that a morally upstanding person could use it to express her enjoyment of a night out at the theater, but still edgy enough to suggest sexual illicitness.
For men in this upper-crust “gay” culture, traditional notions of masculinity were being reworked. Prohibition-era cosmopolitan men were expected to indulge in customarily feminine activities: they knew how to dress well, manicure themselves, and dance like Fred Astaire. Their social lives often revolved around Broadway shows, speakeasies, and, for some, brothels, all venues that tolerated more promiscuous heterosexual and/or same-sex desires. As Chauncey summarizes, these men lived in a “time when the culture of the speakeasies and the 1920s’ celebration of affluence and consumption...undermined conventional sources of masculine identity.”15
Note that these “gay” developments were affecting heterosexual men at the time, ostensibly having nothing to do with one’s sexual object choice. That said, homosexuals moved in the 1920s and 1930s to appropriate gay as a self-identifier, regardless of their class status. The more effeminate so-called “fairies” were the first to do so, since they more fully embodied the traits of fashionability, gender transgression, and emotional excess that the term denoted even in the larger culture. Thus, by the early 1930s, at least in major cities like New York, gay maintained two separate but closely related meanings. It was now synonymous with fairy but also retained a nonhomosexual meaning of frivolity, whose potential impact was to increase effeminacy in all men.16
The airlines saw an influx of “gay” culture from two different sources. First, the same wealthy patrons of the “gay” nightlife were also the airlines’ core customer base, which is hardly surprising given air travel’s status as a prohibitively expensive luxury in the 1930s. Only the very rich could afford to pay the significant premium over rail tickets. And only men were expected to be daring enough to fly on airplanes, much less be gainfully employed by the few corporations willing to pay for plane tickets. In addition to these wealthy cosmopolitan customers, Pan Am hired male flight attendants, who became “gay” icons themselves, because the airline proceeded to ensconce them in the style and opulence expected by the elite men they served. Following the example of other white male service professionals in cities—think of bellhops, doormen, ship stewards, and elevator attendants—Pan Am stewards became fashionable accessories catering to this elite, adorned in military-inspired suits, and changing into white sport coats and gloves when serving meals aboard planes.
Stewards’ fashionable dress and access to high-society clientele, even if they didn’t share their customers’ exalted class status, also probably drew envious attention from some in the “fairy” community. In his study of early twentieth-century gay erotica, art historian Thomas Waugh notes a particular fascination with men in service-related jobs. He asks rhetorically: “What to make of the recurring iconography of young men in service occupations such as bellhops?”17 Waugh is particularly struck by the contrast with post-World War II pornography. While this later material emphasizes more macho imagery, the prewar items tend to fetishize male softness. Something about a man’s servile softness stood out, to many “fairies” at least, as deeply homoerotic.
Ideas about male softness and homoeroticism aside, the work aboard airplanes in commercial aviation’s earliest years was a mixture of both notionally masculine and feminine tasks. For this reason, it would be inaccurate to see early stewards as transgressors into a decidedly feminized realm. Air transport until the mid-1930s was quite dangerous and downright unpleasant. One early customer on a twelve-passenger Ford tri-motor plane, one of the first planes large enough to accommodate a flight attendant, confessed: “When the day was over, my bones ached, and my whole nervous system was wearied from the noise, the constant droning of the propellers and exhaust in my face.”18 The cabins were not heated or air conditioned, nor were they soundproofed or pressurized. Vomiting was so prevalent that all passengers were furnished with “burp cups” akin to spittoons. Facing such unpleasantness while paying a premium over the cost of rail travel, early air passengers surely welcomed the added touch of a flight attendant to cater to their comfort. But airline executives were uncertain whether the hostile environment required a flight attendant with manly fortitude or the comforting touch of a woman.
Reflecting how this job rested atop America’s gender fault line, the initial flight attendant work descriptions, whether at Pan Am or at airlines like United that hired only women, were more varied than in later years. All flight attendants were expected to pitch in on notionally manly ground duties. As Inez Keller, an original stewardess at United in 1930, remembers, “We had to carry all of the luggage on board....Some of us had to join bucket brigades to help fuel the airplanes [and] we also helped pilots push planes into hangars.”19 Along these lines, Pan Am’s stewards also were responsible for rowing passengers ashore from their seaplanes (which the airline favored until after World War II), handling customs paperwork, and buying provisions in South American markets for the return flight.
Once everyone was on board, however, the job description was more tied to comforting passengers: after assigning seats, flight attendants passed out packages of cotton for the droning noise and chewing gum for the altitude shifts. They then served food, which in the earliest years was typically a boxed lunch of cold or steamed chicken. Other than that, as Pan Am’s first steward, Amaury Sanchez, noted, “My only instructions were to keep people happy and not too scared.”20 This rather open job description led flight attendants to improvise a great deal and undertake a wide variety of tasks that straddled the nebulous line between men’s work and women’s work: changing diapers, shining shoes, reassuring nervous flyers, or playing a quick game of gin rummy.
These service-oriented tasks drew far more attention from the airlines’ public relations departments than flight attendants’ safety roles or physically demanding work. This was especially true of the stewardesses, all of whom were required to have a nursing certificate to better prepare them to assist in emergencies. Yet any focus on nursing skills reinforced just how dangerous even routine air trips could be. Public relations departments therefore preferred to highlight stewardesses’ regard for passengers and their sexual availability. With an assist from Hollywood’s first of many stewardess movies, Air Hostess, in 1933, female flight attendants became associated with comfort and sexuality. The film’s advertising poster contained the provocative moniker, “She went up in the air for romance and thrills...”21
While Air Hostess marked the beginning of America’s decades-long and well-publicized heterosexual love affair with