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In this vibrant new history, Phil Tiemeyer details the history of men working as flight attendants. Beginning with the founding of the profession in the late 1920s and continuing into the post-September 11 era, Plane Queer examines the history of men who joined workplaces customarily identified as female-oriented. It examines the various hardships these men faced at work, paying particular attention to the conflation of gender-based, sexuality-based, and AIDS-based discrimination. Tiemeyer also examines how this heavily gay-identified group of workers created an important place for gay men to come out, garner acceptance from their fellow workers, fight homophobia and AIDS phobia, and advocate for LGBT civil rights. All the while, male flight attendants facilitated key breakthroughs in gender-based civil rights law, including an important expansion of the ways that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act would protect workers from sex discrimination. Throughout their history, men working as flight attendants helped evolve an industry often identified with American adventuring, technological innovation, and economic power into a queer space.

This article examines the civil aviation sector to demonstrate Yugoslavia's growing economic ties to the Global South thanks to nonalignment. It also considers U.S. reactions to Yugoslavia's growth as an aviation hub, in an effort to reassess the “wedge” strategy that dominated U.S. policy toward Yugoslavia during the Cold War.

The 1960s were effectively a lost decade for male flight attendants. The historical norm, established in the 1930s and still true into the mid-1950s, of having men compose a sizable percentage of the flight attendant corps had been broken. The career was now preponderantly female, so much so that only 4 percent of flight attendants were men by 1966.¹ This small vestige of men tended to be well-paid, very senior employees at Pan Am and Eastern, men hired back in the post-World War II years. Others were pursers at other international carriers, while the remainder were Hawaiian men hired at

The airplane’s success as a piece of military hardware during World War II had a profound impact on postwar civil aviation, stimulating immense growth for the industry. Wartime output included vast supplies of the airlines’ favored DC-3 aircraft, modestly modified for military purposes, which became a major workhorse for deploying troops and replenishing supplies across Europe and the Pacific. When the war ended, the military decommissioned many of these planes, selling them at discount prices to a variety of airlines and charter services, some of them founded before the war and others entirely new start-ups. This glut of newly available

AIDS had a devastating impact on the flight attendant corps. As members of one of America’s gayest professions, many of them belonged to the communities hardest hit when the epidemic officially began in 1981. Flight attendants’ experiences with AIDS extended beyond the sensationalized media reports written for general readers, who typically had no firsthand interaction with the disease.¹ Practically every flight attendant in these years lost colleagues, friends, or loved ones from among their coworkers. And it was almost always the gay men who were falling sick in the prime of their physical health, at the dawn of their adult

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

While the period since 1993 is heralded by the airlines themselves as gay-friendly, the reality has been more complex for queer flight attendants. After all, the courting of gay consumers and the expansion of LGBT-based employment benefits have coincided with a more advanced phase of airline deregulation that has destabilized the industry. The 1990s and 2000s have seen the dissolution of industry giants like Pan Am and Eastern (both were liquidated in 1991), the disappearance through mergers of other legacy carriers like TWA and Northwest Airlines, and recurrent Chapter 11 filings by every other major network carrier that existed prior