Читать книгу Plane Queer - Phil Tiemeyer - Страница 11

CHAPTER THREE • “Homosexual Panic” and the Steward’s Demise

The 1950s were arguably America’s most homophobic decade of the twentieth century, even though many people at the time worked to promote greater tolerance for gays and lesbians. Most famously, sexologist Alfred Kinsey and his associates laid out the basis for a more inclusive society with their 1948 study, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.¹ Known simply as the Kinsey Report, the taboo-breaking best seller had a lot to say about homosexuality that raised eyebrows. Most shocking were the findings that 10 percent of men preferred sex with men and that 37 percent of men had experienced same-sex stimulation leading to orgasm at least once in their lives.² In the face of these unsettling findings, Kinsey himself was boldly reassuring. He recommended that the country simply accept that sexual attractions fluctuate from person to person and over time in the same person. He also advocated for the elimination of morality-based sex laws, especially those criminalizing adultery, prostitution, and sodomy, since upwards of 95 percent of men had broken such laws at least once in their lives.³ More specifically, Kinsey called for tolerance of homosexual behavior, admonishing his readers that “males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats.”⁴ Any attempts to criminalize and marginalize homosexuals would be extremely difficult to enact, implicating far more men than a neatly identifiable, small minority.

Stewards were particularly invested in whether postwar society would heed Kinsey’s advice. While my research on the 1930s analyzed circumstantial evidence about “gay” stewards, my work on the postwar era confirms that a decidedly large number of stewards were openly gay. Especially helpful in this regard have been interviews with former flight attendants from the 1940s and 1950s, who estimate that anywhere from 20 percent to more than 50 percent of stewards in the first postwar decade were gay.⁵ Moreover, because notions of homosexuality at the time were so easily confused with effeminacy in men, even the stewards who were straight had to worry about how they were perceived. As we have seen, stewards received raises and promotions just like many other men after the war, but they still were on the wrong side of the airplane’s demarcated gender line. The profession may have been only a fifth or a half gay, but it was fully queer, simply on the basis of the fact that these men were performing women’s work and could therefore easily be read as gender benders and homosexuals.

Unfortunately for stewards and millions of gays and lesbians, the country as a whole chose not to heed Kinsey’s words. Instead, following equally esteemed voices of authority, society redoubled its efforts to identify homosexuals and remove them from the workplace and other public realms. Sodomy laws remained in place, continuing to be both a legal menace for those engaging in same-sex sexual activities and a source of potential blackmail. The scientific community also remained largely convinced that homosexuality was a mental illness, despite a minority of voices like Kinsey’s urging a reevaluation of the sickness paradigm. Furthermore, as Americans returned in record numbers to churches and synagogues after the war, the voices of religious authorities castigating homosexuality as a sin carried even greater weight than previously.⁶

Politicians, police, judges, juries, and journalists followed these experts in sounding the alarm against the suspected intrusion of homosexuality into the American mainstream. The primary reaction of legal authorities was to create a more extensive framework of laws and policing tactics designed to eradicate homosexuality, especially cracking down against gay nightlife venues. Various cities in the 1950s passed ordinances forbidding the sale of alcohol to homosexuals, outlawing same-sex dancing, and prohibiting cross-dressing.⁷ As we shall see, the city of Miami led a particularly zealous campaign against public gay life in August 1954, a consequence of the murder of Eastern Air Lines steward William Simpson in a salacious gay sex tryst.

Simpson’s death in Miami also ties into a larger effort begun by the federal government to eliminate homosexuals from employment. This crusade first began with the military (the government’s largest employer) just before World War II. As of October 1940, all enlistees were screened to weed out homosexuals, while those already in the military faced expulsion if they were found out.⁸ In the 1950s, however, such discrimination expanded rapidly into new realms. President Eisenhower’s Executive Order of April 1953—signed within his first hundred days—outlawed the employment of homosexuals in any federal government office. At the height of the cold war, fears ran rampant that the government could be infiltrated by foreign agents or homegrown communists. Homosexuals, because of their perceived mental illness and susceptibility to blackmail, were considered too great of a risk to hire, even in government fields unrelated to national security.⁹ The Eisenhower executive order set a precedent for the entire military-industrial complex, as defense firms and other private sector employers whose workers required a security clearance also fired and refused to hire homosexuals. Thus the federal government under Eisenhower, fueled by cold war–era paranoia against all forms of deviance, spearheaded what would become a far broader campaign to eradicate homosexuals from gainful employment.

In fact, the airlines’ choice to stop hiring stewards in the 1950s is possibly the most expansive, and arguably the most draconian, application of the Eisenhower precedent. Stewards, after all, were not directly tied to the military-industrial complex. The airlines’ refusal to hire stewards therefore pushed the logic of seeing homosexuals as a threat to an extreme, into an industry only loosely tied to the nation’s defense. The indiscriminateness of a policy forbidding all men, not just homosexuals, to apply for flight attendant positions also represents a high-water mark of extremism. It is as though airline executives took Kinsey’s words regarding homosexuality and ran in the opposite direction. Kinsey used his findings that many men were situationally bisexual to push for decriminalization and normalization of homosexuality. However, the airlines’ refusal to hire new stewards suggested a more pernicious model: if no true distinction could be drawn between straight and gay, and if all stewards were suspected of homosexuality, then all men would be kept out of the job.

This chapter considers the William Simpson murder as a pivotal moment for male flight attendants. This is not because the scandal was the singular direct cause of stewards’ expulsion from their jobs but rather because it demonstrates the tarnishing of the steward’s public image after the 1930s. While prewar stewards were given a potentially alluring and attractive image through Pan Am’s advertising of “Rodney the Smiling Steward” and Eastern’s creation of stylish uniforms, postwar stewards could not hope to be so positively portrayed. They disappeared from ad campaigns and promotional materials, attracting media attention only as moral pariahs. Eastern responded to Simpson’s 1954 murder at the hands of two male hustlers by drastically curtailing its employment of stewards. Delta Airlines also articulated homophobic concerns when questioned about firing its stewards in the late 1940s, and Pan Am had similar concerns when it changed its hiring practices in the late 1950s. Thus postwar homophobia, most vividly exemplified by the Simpson scandal, is partly to blame for the steward’s demise. This prejudice worked in tandem with the economic dynamics and sexism of the cold war era to drive men out of the stewarding occupation.

The Simpson murder case also highlights male flight attendants’ significant role in legal deliberations that ultimately expanded queer equality. The trial of Simpson’s murderers provides a baseline for the following chapters, articulating the desperate legal status of homosexuals in the 1950s, before civil rights innovations improved their lot. In particular, the trial holds an inauspicious role in helping to introduce into U.S. jurisprudence the “homosexual panic” defense, which arose to legally justify, or at least mitigate responsibility for, violence against homosexuals.¹⁰ In the Simpson proceedings and an unknown number of other cases, this meant that murderers were spared the death penalty and even life in prison and were convicted instead of the lesser penalty of manslaughter when their target was gay. Simpson’s case thereby illustrates how “homosexual panic” effectively exempted gay men from the promise of equal protection before the law.

Some legal theorists and lawmakers wedded to traditional gender norms were willing to expand further on this logic in the 1960s and ’70s, developing additional homophobic legal arguments to thwart moves toward gender-based civil rights. Subsequent chapters profile these attempts to deploy homophobia, from the framing of the sex discrimination clause of the 1964 Civil Rights Act through efforts to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. As a result, male flight attendants, beginning with Simpson and continuing through the events discussed in the following chapters, became embroiled in crucial civil rights debates on gender and sexuality.

HOMOSEXUALITY AND STEWARDS

My various interviews with former flight attendants confirmed a widely presumed notion: the flight attendant corps in the 1950s harbored far more gay men than was statistically expected. The Pan Am stewards I interviewed contended that roughly half of men working as stewards had been gay. One of them noted, “They would hire four, five, six, seven at a time at the Seattle base—that was the size of the classes—and almost all the men were gay, with few exceptions.”¹¹ Another San Francisco–based steward whose career began in 1951 noted, “I would say at that particular time, that maybe 60 percent were straight and 40 percent of us were gay.”¹² When addressing why this preponderance of gay men arose, several men theorized that gay men tended to be better attuned to the job’s demands of good grooming and a charming demeanor. Many of these men had “the personalities that they can mix with any kind [of person],” and they were able to serve customers with flair: “That’s basically what that job is, wanting to give service.”¹³

A similar situation was evident at Eastern Air Lines. Both the straight and gay men I talked to agreed that gays had composed anywhere from 20 to 40 percent of the flight attendant corps, at least at the Miami base where they were stationed. One straight steward, who was among the few men hired after the Simpson murder, remembers, “There were gays when I started [in late 1955]. Of five hundred flight attendants at the Miami base, probably fifty were gay men.”¹⁴ Given that only half, or even less, of Eastern’s flight attendant corps were men, such a percentage of gays was quite large.

These sizable numbers forced a modicum of tolerance for gays among straight flight attendants and even airline management. Both gay and straight flight attendants largely reported a social ease with each other that was highly uncharacteristic of 1950s society. One straight steward recalls that there were “no problems” with the gay stewards: “We accepted it, and that was it.” He even remembered being teamed with a gay steward for the first month of flying, as flight schedules at the time were generated on a monthly basis. In the course of the month, the gay steward was quite open and friendly toward him, even inviting him to “one of their parties.” While the straight flight attendant never ended up socializing with the gay stewards, he never felt alienated from them either.¹⁵

Yet the situation for gays was not entirely open and easy. While some men were forthcoming about their sexuality, others at both Eastern and Pan Am were far more reticent. Attending crew parties with other flight attendants and pilots could mean a risk of exposure: “I didn’t like to go to crew parties...because there were so many gay stories [being told],” says one former steward who kept his sexuality largely private at work. He added, “The vast majority of the gay male flight attendants were circumspect.” For this particular steward, the homophobia of the 1950s was understandable enough: “The gay scene was so raw and behind the scenes and so remote in a lot of people’s minds....A lot of people didn’t know gay people....So I felt I could understand this [intolerance]. It made sense to me. It was difficult for people to understand this way of life....It was perfectly natural to be negative about it.”¹⁶

Another Pan Am steward, while insisting that his overall experience at the airline had been free of harassment, nonetheless recounted several incidents at the San Francisco base when straight flight attendants had made an issue of homosexuality: “There was a group of ‘studs’ that...were nasty, nasty guys. They were supposedly straight. I remember one guy carried around a list of everyone who was supposedly gay and would show it to his buddies.” Still, this steward insisted that management had never followed up on the concerns of these men and said that his female flight attendant peers had tended to be very supportive: “The women liked the gay [stewards] because they knew they could go out on a date and wouldn’t get thrown in the sack.” For him, life at Pan Am had been a mixed experience of coming out to fellow gay men and some stewardesses, while being much more circumspect around pilots or straight stewards. Around these more hostile audiences, “You just didn’t come out....They knew, they suspected. You just kept it quiet.”

Others, however, were more open about their sexuality, sometimes because they had no choice. This was especially true of the more effeminate gay men who were more quickly presumed to be gay. Even other gay men at the time referred to these men condescendingly as “gay fags” or “fag ladies.”¹⁷ These men, one interviewee suggested, incurred much more harassment from their straight male peers, who “would talk about people that were obvious. And to this day, I’ve felt guilty

because I never stood up for people. I just kept my mouth shut and did my business.” Another straight steward at Eastern, whose career began in 1948, suggested that tensions had never boiled over, even with regard to the effeminate stewards: “We had a number of limp-wristed guys. We knew who they were. Their comportment gave them away. But as long as there was no scandal, they stayed on the job. It never got out of hand.”¹⁸

A vignette from former Pan Am steward Roy Orason in his autobiographical novel Plight of a Flight Attendant suggests that even effeminate gay stewards could be accepted, at least in limited ways, by their coworkers. The novel describes, from a straight man’s viewpoint, the intermingling of all sorts of gay and straight employees at a dinner party of Pan Am personnel at the New Orleans base in 1954:¹⁹ “Every stewardess that was in town...showed up. Two of the pilots from the base showed up without their wives, although they too had been invited....Some [non–Pan Am] guys brought girlfriends but most of them wanted to meet the stews who would be there. There was even one of the faggot stewards with his friend there and they turned out to be the life of the party.”²⁰ Orason’s account fits into a larger pattern noticeable in my interviews: despite moments of animosity, straight flight attendants knew a good deal about the lives of their gay colleagues, even those “faggots” in the group. And such interactions were usually tolerant, potentially even collegial.

While Pan Am management heatedly denied this a decade later during court proceedings, it is clear that airline executives were quite aware of the homosexual presence in their workforce. In the words of one Pan Am steward, “If there was no scandal involved, I don’t think it would be incriminating to be known as gay by a supervisor.”²¹ The hiring process, management’s main mode of controlling the composition of the flight attendant corps, was also devoid of probing investigations into one’s sexuality. Applicants weren’t asked questions about the subject, and the company did not consult military records to isolate homosexuals who might have avoided or even been kicked out of the services.²² In fact, not only were gays unafraid to interview for such positions, but an informal gay network in places like San Francisco also circulated word that the job was gay-friendly. One future flight attendant chatted up a gay flight attendant in a coffee shop. The steward, named Kenny, encouraged him to apply and also prevailed on the chief steward doing the hiring: “The guy who was the chief steward was in the closet, and he liked Kenny, and Kenny was able to get him to hire me.”²³

That said, some gay men blamed their interview failures or their poor progress reports as employees on perceived homophobes among the hiring committee and base managers. One man applying with Pan Am in San Francisco noted, “There was a panel...of seven for the final interview. And I got one ‘no’ of the seven, so that blackballed me. And this one [woman] said, ‘We all wanted you so much, but we couldn’t talk this one guy out of it.’ I think [he] was a homophobe and had read my beads.”²⁴ A decade later, a gay purser at TWA made it through the hiring process, only to have major troubles with his first base manager. The manager, according to this individual, “hated gay men” and sought to weed them out of the job. Before releasing a purser from probation, “he would have you walk across the room and smoke a cigarette, to see how you held a cigarette,” a decidedly unscientific manner of discovering homosexuals.²⁵ Overall, however, such incidents seem to be exceptions from the general tendency of hiring committees and managers to be tolerant of gay men and to overlook this aspect of their lives if the men showed potential.

Though scandals were rare, when they did happen relations between management and gay stewards became tense. Pan Am endured a series of gay-related problems in the 1950s, though these never received publicity outside company circles. Most arose from the company policy forcing stewards to double up in hotel rooms while on layovers. While pilots received their own rooms as a consequence of their more lucrative collective bargaining agreements, stewards shared their rooms with another steward, or even with a flight engineer from the cockpit. Placing stewards in this situation when their coworkers often knew them to be gay exposed them to all sorts of potential abuse. “There were a lot of problems for gays on layovers,” recalls one Pan Am steward. “We’d double up. And very often there would be someone making moves on you, or you’d hear of a straight guy, ya know, punching out somebody who made a pass at him in the room, trying to get into bed with him.” Other stories circulated of gay stewards being forced into sex by chief pursers, who could report them as negligent on the job if they refused. In response, several gay men who attained enough seniority bid on the same routes together, the only way to guarantee that their roommate wouldn’t harass them.²⁶ Interestingly, Eastern avoided such problems, at least in the 1950s. At that time, the airline simply provided each flight attendant with a per diem, which they could spend as they saw fit. This made lodging a completely private decision and gave gay stewards much more security.

The lone Pan Am policy that explicitly addressed problems tied to homosexuality involved the Beirut base in the mid-1950s. This outpost was the hub of Pan Am’s extensive Middle Eastern operations tied to the growing U.S. oil interests in the region. Perhaps being so far from corporate headquarters enabled the flight attendants based there to be less circumspect than their U.S.-based employees. According to a few flight attendants I interviewed, the base was well known for its gay stewards, so much so that it drew the attention of the corporate office.²⁷ In response, the company temporarily refused to transfer any stewards to Beirut—a blanket exclusion on all men, without any attempt to distinguish between gay and straight personnel, much less those with stellar or below-average service records. The company lifted the ban in 1958, apparently in the face of strong union opposition, since it circumvented the collective bargaining agreement stipulating that positions be filled on the basis of seniority, not gender. Nonetheless, the temporary policy followed a pattern for handling homosexual scandals that would recur: when faced with potential embarrassment, the airlines resorted to the draconian measure of excluding all men from certain posts.

While the airlines hiring men dealt with difficult issues tied to same-sex desire, they also faced potential public relations troubles from their stewards’ perceived effeminacy. The more the public and other airline personnel perceived the flight attendant job as women’s work, the more they harassed men who were employed in it. Several former stewards, both gay and straight, confirmed that humiliating incidents occasionally occurred on the job. One straight ex-steward recalled being asked by a repeat male customer, “Where’s your dress?” He initially attempted to defuse the situation with humor, by replying, “I hope you forgive me, sir, but I decided to dress legitimately today.” After this response failed to end the customer’s abuse, the steward informed the flight captain that he wouldn’t work the flight because, as he said, “My masculinity in a very flippant and demeaning way is being questioned.” In this case, the captain stuck up for the steward, proceeding back to the cabin and forcing the customer to apologize.²⁸

Another steward recalled that pilots were often the source of the most demeaning attacks. “They could make your job miserable,” he said of the pilots, some of whom preferred that the women serve their meals in the cockpits. One pilot even ordered a steward to make him coffee in the employee lounge of an airport, since there were “plenty of twenty-year old stewardesses willing to do that for me.”²⁹ The former stewards overall confirmed that problems with the pilot corps, while isolated, were still quite troubling: “We had some wonderful captains.... By far I would say the majority were nice guys, but then we had some real bastards.” Meanwhile, interactions with customers overall were easygoing and uneventful. But there were occasionally demeaning inquiries from male passengers: “Where are the babes?” or “Why all these men working in first class?”³⁰ The answer to the last query was simple: men tended to accrue more seniority than women and therefore could claim the more desirable jobs on their assigned flights, including working the first-class cabin.

DELTA’S HOMOPHOBIC PRECEDENT

While Pan Am and Eastern found some sort of modus vivendi with regard to accommodating a gay presence among their flight attendants, Delta found that their male pursers were not worth the trouble of keeping. The airline began hiring men as pursers in 1946 but dismissed all of them by late 1948. Without a labor union in place, the men involved had no recourse when they were terminated, and the event probably would have disappeared from public memory, hidden in inaccessible corporate archives, if, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had not questioned Delta about its decision almost twenty years later. The EEOC by 1966 was pursuing the Celio Diaz case and other complaints brought by male applicants to flight attendant positions. To better understand the history of men’s exclusion from the job, they asked Delta to explain its short-lived experiment with male pursers.

Delta replied that its experience with men had been “completely unsatisfactory.”³¹ Foremost among its concerns were sexual issues, especially homosexuality: “While the matter must be delicately stated, it was a fact that the least trace of effeminacy on the part of the purser resulted in the individual being tagged as a sex deviate (in most cases without fault on his part) and, at the other extreme, the least aggressiveness on the part of a more virile steward was subject to misinterpretation by female passengers.”³² Perhaps most significant about this claim is that it confirmed a gay presence among Delta’s small corps of pursers, however coyly the company’s lawyers framed the letter. After all, the airline noted that the effeminate men were not culpable for being labeled sex deviates “in most cases.” This official, though hardly public, admission by an airline that it had gay employees was extremely rare. In fact, I have uncovered only one other admission of this sort from before the 1970s.³³