The history of the gay men who still make up an unusually large percentage of the flight attendant labor force is not well known. Associate Professor of History at Kansas State University Phil Tiemeyer covered this topic in his book “Plane Queer: Labor, Sexuality, and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendants.” While the book covers almost a century of history, Phil sat down for an interview that focused on the HIV/AIDS crisis, and the way two flight gay male attendants with Pacific Northwest connections left their mark on history.
Full shownotes and transcript after the jump.
Link to donate to The Museum of Flight
Link to Lynda Eck Episode, where she talks about being a stewardess for United Airlines
Link to Mary Hoy episode, where she also talks about being a stewardess with United Airlines
SEAN MOBLEY: The Flight Deck is made possible by listeners like you. Thank you to the donors who sustain The Museum of Flight. To support this podcast and the Museum’s other educational initiatives, visit museumofflight.org/podcast.
[Music]
SM: Hello, and welcome to The Flight Deck, the podcast of The Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington. I’m your host, Sean Mobley.
The history of flight attendants in the United States is a fascinating area of study because of how unique the airplane cabin has been as a workplace. It’s well known that it’s an environment that was largely dominated by women, and those women were on the leading edge of feminist activism. The history of the gay men who still make up an unusually large percentage of the flight attendant labor force is less well known.
Author and Associate Professor of History at Kansas State University, Phil Tiemeyer, covered this topic in his book Plane Queer: Labor, Sexuality, and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendants. Now, while the book covers almost a century of history, Phil sat down with me for an interview that focused on the HIV/AIDS crisis and the way two gay male flight attendants with Pacific Northwest connections left their mark on history.
00:01:26
A content note about this episode: This is a conversation about HIV/AIDS, and as it is transmitted either through contact with blood or as an STD, it’s hard to honestly discuss it without referencing the realities of human sexuality. This episode is not explicit. It’s an academic exploration of history. But some listeners might consider the content mature. With that in mind, let’s welcome Phil to the podcast.
[Music]
SM: Phil, thank you so much for joining me today on the podcast.
PHIL TIEMEYER: My pleasure. Thank you for the invite, Sean.
00:02:01
SM: Well, we’re here to talk a bit about the flight attendant world.
PT: Yeah, it’s interesting. Just this week a friend of mind kind of posted a news clip that flight ‒ male ‒ the flight attendant profession is, statistically speaking, the gayest profession that we still have in the United States.
[Laughter]
PT: So, male flight attendants, despite being in the minority, are very much a prominent fixture for a lot of us in the gay world. It’s been a place that’s been, you know, attracting ‒ It’s been a welcoming enough place to work now for about 40 years so ‒ and, definitely, the love affair that many of us have for flying is something that seems to be kind of shared [laughs] in the DNA for so many LGBTQ folks.
SM: Well, and it’s funny you say that because when I shared your research with a group once, afterwards a male flight attendant who was one of the ‒ in that first batch when men were allowed to be hired again ‒
PT: Yeah.
00:03:14
SM: So he’s long retired. He came up to me afterwards ‒ and as far as I know, he’s straight and he’s married to a woman ‒ and he said, “You know, when I was hired ‒” And his wife was also a flight attendant. He said, “When I was hired, like they wanted to make sure I was married, and the subtext really was that if I’m married to a woman that I’m not gonna be homosexual.”
[Laughs]
PT: Gay, right. [Laughs] Yeah, so even in the ‘70s ‒ that would have been the early ‘70s ‒ it was still a little bit stigmatized there. Airlines didn’t know what they were getting, and they wanted, you know, a little bit of quality control, if you will, in the homophobic age to make sure that not everyone that they were going to hire who was a man was also going to be gay because they were afraid of, you know, the public relations ramifications thereof.
[Laughs]
SM: Yeah. So let’s zoom in just a little bit, and then we’ll zoom back out to kind of this bigger picture that you’ve been sharing. So we’re going to talk today about two individuals, Gär Traynor and Gaëtan Dugas. Gär, a Pacific Northwest person, why don’t we start with him? If you were making a documentary about him, what would kind of be your two or three sentence summary of that story for the executives? What would be your pitch?
PT: Yeah, so it’s interesting. Gär Traynor, born Gary in rural Oregon, is someone that the historical record has very little knowledge of. I was able to find his name in a couple ways, in a couple important ways, really, and we’ll talk about that more in-depth, but otherwise, I mean, this is someone that, unfortunately, lived what by all accounts seems like a pretty good life based in LA and San Francisco as a United Airlines flight attendant in the 1970s and into the 1980s, contracted HIV/AIDS, one of the very kind of early generations thereof.
00:05:18
So, by 1982, he had a diagnosis, right? And, you know, unfortunately, he passed away in 1987, and it’s been really hard to find people who know anything about Gär. But in those brief five years, ‘82 to ‘87, he’s vitally important for the flight attendant profession, for gay activism, for HIV activism, because he was one of the very first people in the United States who ‒ whose employer tried to permanently remove him from the workplace even though his doctors said, “No, he’s good enough to work.” And he fought back, and he won the first kind of legal type proceeding, a labor arbitration case, in which it was decided ‒ kind of like Philadelphia the movie ‒ that people with AIDS still had the right to be treated like all of us. If you’re healthy enough to work, then you get to work. And that’s why Gär is important.
SM: And shifting kind of the same question for Gaëtan, a very different tone to his story and definitely someone who’s very much remembered even if people don’t know his name.
PT: Yeah. [Laughs] So Gaëtan is a bit more famous, maybe not by his real name Gaëtan Dugas but by the moniker Patient Zero. This was a [unintelligible 00:06:51] flight attendant who flew for Air Canada, pretty local to you all in Vancouver for much of his career with Air Canada, though he was based all over, certainly ended his career at Air Canada based at Vancouver, and Gaëtan was even earlier than Gär in terms of when he contracted HIV/AIDS.
00:07:21
By 1980, he was already sick, and by 1982, he was one of the first, say, 250 patients in the United States who were getting medical care for this crazy new epidemic. Gaëtan is famous, like I said, as Patient Zero because of what happens after his death. He ends up getting sort of scapegoated, targeted as, perhaps, the man who brought AIDS to America, and being a flight attendant was a big part of that story that we’ll talk about.
SM: So let’s zoom back out then. The context here, you mentioned earlier that the profession ‒ I mean, to this day there’s a lot of stereotypes about flight attendants. To be clear, it’s not true about everybody, obviously.
PT: No, not at all. Not at all, no. It’s a pretty diverse workplace in all ways.
SM: Of course. But it is a unique workplace in so much of its history that’s been documented both in like it’s one of the few workplaces that was dominated by women. That’s a whole ‘nother discussion. It’s fascinating in labor history of a union that was really by, for, and led by women and a pretty essential workplace in the country, but you also said that it was ‒ has been a relatively safe place for a long time for gay men. Can you just share a little bit about how that happened, how we got there, especially in those early days which we think of being a pretty homophobic kind of ‒ we think of the Lavender Scares of the Cold War ‒
00:09:00
PT: Yeah.
SM: ...and stuff like that so ‒
PT: And, honestly, not even this profession was immune from it. In fact, while we think of it as a pretty gay open profession, in the reality, if you kind of do the whole trajectory of aviation history ‒ and there’s only been airlines effectively since 1928, so it’s only not even a hundred years old ‒ but, you know, what happens is that in the early years there’s plenty of men who were working at airlines in the United States, so from 1928, ‘29, ‘30, all the way to World War II, there’s plenty of men working in this profession. They’re increasingly outnumbered by women but, you know, very prominent in the profession.
But what happens after World War II ‒ and you mentioned the Lavender Scare and ‒ you know, there was no more homophobic decade in American History, I would argue, than the 1950s, and what ended up happening is that after World War II and the men come back from war, many of them reenter these jobs as flight attendants that they had; but starting in the 1950s, because of homophobia, airlines that used to hire men in the United States ‒ Pan Am, Eastern are the two big ones ‒ they stopped, and the reason that they stopped was very much tied to homophobia. There were a couple scandals, one big one in the city of Miami in which a flight attendant was kind of caught in a sexual scandal, and he was actually ‒ Yeah, it was not a good story, but he was murdered on Lovers Lane by a male prostitute. And it was big news, right? and a huge embarrassment to Eastern Airlines, his employer, to the other airlines who kind of in the United States in the 1950s were like, “We just don’t want to take this risk of having another scandal hit the papers.” Right?
00:11:02
So, by the mid ‘50s, even though, right? historically speaking this career was always open to men, they stopped hiring new ones. Right? The old ones didn’t go away. They continued. [Laughs] You know, by 1968, about 2 or 3% of flight attendants were still men, but then there ‒ the Civil Rights moment in the United States especially ‒ and here, as people doing the history of LGBTQ America, have to kind of acknowledge our struggles are kind of tied together very closely with women’s struggles in the workplace especially. To gain more footing for women ultimately could help other sort of gender queer folks like us, gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender eventually, who could kind of work the same sort of Civil Rights magic that women did to open certain workplaces. In this case it was reversed. This was a women’s oriented career by 1968, and men started using the Civil Rights language of equal access to all workplaces to start to try to apply to become stewards, right? to become flight attendants. So they won. I mean, the cases went through the courts and so forth, but by 1971, it was clear that the courts had sided for men entering the women’s workplace, that airlines across the United States would have to hire men equally, on equal terms as women if they wanted to be flight attendants, and every one of them did it. The only big one that didn’t was Southwest Airlines who stubbornly refused to hire men into the 1980s when they too were sued by a man wanting to be a flight attendant, and he also won.
00:13:11
SM: So you say that there were a lot of gay men in that role and then also that the airlines tolerated that, so why ‒ It’s kind of a two-pronged question here. But why were gay men kind of drawn to that career? And why did the airlines accept it in this pretty macho masculine era of the ‘50s?
PT: Yeah. So, again, not in the ‘50s, but by the ‘70s, gay men and all men had the opportunity to apply for these jobs, right? And I think at that moment what was attracting gay men to the profession? Great question. I mean, there’s a variety of reasons. One is that, historically speaking, if you were out as a gay person in, even in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, you probably weren’t going to get the 6-figure job at an accounting firm or a law firm, etc. A lot of LGBTQ folks were being forced into service jobs or, you know, kind of think of hairdressing, think of florist shops, think of, you know, nursing and these other kinds of positions that were lower income, lower demand for skills, right? in terms of getting a college education was somewhat optional ‒ not for nursing but for other sorts of positions. And you know what? Being a flight attendant was sort of the creme de la creme of these service professions, right? because this was relatively equivalent to being a waiter or a host at a restaurant and yet way more cool, way more a fancy ‒
00:15:08
SM: [Laughs]
PT: ...way more attractive just because you got to see the world while you were doing it, right? And so there was a natural kind of ‒ you know, gay men were clustered in these service jobs, and then this job opens up that’s like service job plus coolness. Why not? You know? Other men kind of talk about why they were attracted to the profession. Well, do you know what? They loved kind of that attention to detail that ‒ that’s required of a good flight attendant, someone who’s careful about how they present themselves, courteous, kind, always smiling, wants to give everyone a maximally pleasing kind of adventure, so that kind of counted. Others were attracted to, the way I am, sort of just the flair of the industry, right? I mean, these were well-dressed people, cool uniforms ‒
SM: [Laughs]
PT: ...stylish interiors, I mean, living in hotels that, you know, a lot of them are 5-star, and it’s just like it’s kind of posh, you know?
SM: [Laughs]
PT: And so there’s that. I mean, the other side of the coin is, like, well, why did airlines tolerate? And my research showed that, for the most part, airlines were probably aware that they were hiring a lot of gay men by the 1970s, but they weren’t sure who was who. [Laughs] They never asked in the interview process. What really ended up happening is that the hiring committees at airlines were ‒ at one point in the job interview process, there is actually kind of a roundtable of flight attendants that interview you and make a recommendation to the company about whether they should hire you or not. Now, by 1970, ‘72, ‘73, ‘74, these hiring committees are made up entirely of women, right? because they’re the only ones flying for most of the airlines. And so, what these women are looking for in male applicants is the same thing they’re looking for in female applicants: a good team player, someone who listens to their co-workers. And, interestingly ‒ and this says a lot about patriarchy, right? ‒ the men who were able to listen to women, who were good team players, who could listen, right? knowing that they were going to go into a workplace, taking orders from a more senior stewardess, the men who could play this role turned out to be gay men, right? Not that gay men are perfect ‒ have perfect scores in terms of being nonsexist, but I think because of our oppression based on sexism in our own lives, maybe even by the 1970s we were a little bit better listeners to women, a little bit more collegial with women, a little bit more willing than most men to take orders from women. [Laughs]
SM: So, what did having these gay men and these presumably straight women kind of working in this very tight-knit environment ‒ what did that do for the women? Like, how did it expand their views and their worlds? Or did it?
00:18:22
PT: Yeah. So, I mean, conventional wisdom might suggest that if you’ve got a women-identified workplace and women finally have seniority and women finally have power in labor unions and then men come in, that’s a threat, right? By most accounts it went the other way, right? because there already were men working in planes with these women. They were in the cockpit. They were pilots and copilots and so forth. And those men in the cockpit tended to be more conventionally sexist in their behavior, heterosexist in their expectations that they would put on stewardess. “Hey, honey, why don’t you make a cup of coffee for me?” or “Hey, what are you doing tonight at the crew hotel because I’m lonely?” That sort of stuff, right? And so, when these gay men ‒ [Laughs] Again, not all are gay. But when this cohort of gay men become co-workers with these women, there’s a lot of synergy. They can now go out and have fun together without the threat of sexual harassment or sexual abuse, they have a lot more in common generationally because they tend to be younger than the pilot corps, and it changes crew dynamics in a way that sort of gives the back of the plane a little bit more clout than the cockpit, at least in the free time and at least, you know, in terms of how things are being managed in the back of the plane regarding passengers and their safety and comfort.
SM: Yeah, for sure. And then there’s other broader changes happening in the industry at this time around safety and, again, the discussion of, like, the women’s perspective on this and how their fights ‒ it’s ‒ There are so many fascinating books, people, that everyone needs to read about all of these topics. Anyway, so at some point here the HIV/AIDS, HIV/AIDS as a disease emerges. Can you set the stage a little bit, kind of not necessarily within aviation, just in the wider US ‒
PT: Yeah.
SM: ...about what we know about the early days of HIV/AIDS and how it impacted the community?
00:20:44
PT: Sure. I think the epidemiology of AIDS, the origin story of AIDS and the way it got to the United States, is absolutely fascinating. I won’t bore you with all the details, but we probably ‒ most of us kind of listening in the audience know that AIDS is a disease that originated in Southern Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa. And that was true, right? I mean, it seems to have crossed over from some sort of monkey species in the 1920s into the human species and made its way along colonial corridors of power from, say, Cameroon down to the Congo following river routes, and then, you know, once it got to the Congo, Kinshasha, the capital city of the Congo becomes an epicenter of AIDS by the 1950s. Well, that’s still, you know, a continent away from the United States.
Cool theories, really good work has been done in the origins of the virus by looking at old samples and kind of doing blood tests on historical samples from the 1950s into the present day, and what seems to have happened is that it could be that Haitians were the key connector between the Congo and North America. A lot of ‒ After independence of Congo from the Belgians, there were not enough educated Africans. Thank you, European colonialism, for keeping African people destitute for decades. So Haitians were better educated, went over to work in the Congo, made money, came home, and brought this disease with them to the island of Haiti. And then, thanks to immigration patterns, Haiti’s own struggles with poverty and colonialism from back in the 1700s, there’s desperation on the island of Haiti, encourages migration to the United States, and so it seems that the virus enters the United States at multiple points of entry in the course of the late 1960s at the least. And then it’s here, and it’s spreading.
00:23:11
And guess what? No one notices because the people who are getting it tend to be poor and non-white. And you know what? If you don’t have ‒ If that’s your makeup, chances are you don’t have access to doctors in this country, right? in the 1960s, ‘70s, and, you know, it’s still a problem today, so it goes ‒ it starts to circulate, and it’s unnoticed from, say, the 1960s all the way until 1981, ‘82. This is the moment when there’s more and more people who are candidates to get this otherwise pretty difficult disease to get. Thankfully, it’s way harder to get HIV/AIDS than it is to get corona, for example, right?
[Laughter]
PT: It’s not passed by the air. It’s passed in only, you know, if you have blood line exposure to someone else’s blood or semen, right? or other bodily fluids. And not including saliva, right? So we’re talking about sexual body ‒ bodily fluids is the only way to get ‒ or blood ‒ is the only way to get this disease. Thank goodness, right? Otherwise, we’d ‒ [laughs] we’d have a lot more ‒ I mean, the devastation from HIV/AIDS has been horrific in this country and globally, and yet it would be so much worse, right? if it were airborne or otherwise easily communicated.
So, anyway, one particular group that is particularly at high risk for HIV exposure are gay men through sexual acts that involve semen and blood contact, right? And so, what happened by the early 1980s, ‘81, is that doctors are now treating wealthy white people in their doctor practices in Beverly Hills and New York City, and they’ve got this crazy, crazy disease that manifests itself in a weak immune system in people who are, like, 25.
00:25:31
Cancer, skin cancer that’s very rare, seen only in people in their 50s and 60s with Mediterranean blood lines called Kaposi sarcoma is what I’m talking about. This is a disease that now people in their early 30s are getting. And the only connective tissue, again, amongst this clientele of white, upper middle class folks is that they’re gay, right? And this is when the alarm bell goes off in the United States. “Oh my God, we have a pandemic on the loose.” As of 1981, what the doctors were saying is, “It’s gay men.” They ‒ The first name for AIDS was GRID, Gay-Related Immune ‒ Immune Deficiency. Right? It was so clear to these doctors that it was a gay illness. Completely untrue, right? Because for every gay, white gay men that’s got the illness in 1980, there’s dozens of non-white, lower-economic-class folks in the United States who have it as well, right? But there we are.
SM: One of the things that stands out to me in the HIV/AIDS story too is that it really ‒ one of the things that really galvanized the public, and by that I mean the white public, into action was when a young white boy, kind of this image of like this pure, young, white boy got AIDS. Therefore, now we’re gonna pay attention.
00:27:04
PT: Yeah, yeah, because he didn’t get it sexually, and, you know, he was 12 or so. He got it from a blood transfusion is my understanding. I could be wrong on that fact. But Ryan White of Kokomo, Indiana ‒ I’ll never forget, right? ‒ he was the one that sort of humanized the face of AIDS, and this was, you know, in the mid ‘80s. It wasn’t 1981, ‘82. In fact, it might have even been a little bit later. But Ryan was the one who allowed America to be more compassionate because what you have as of 1981 is that the public is like, “There’s a new killer illness out there, and it’s effecting only gay men.” Okay. Who cares, right? And 2) “Shame on those gays. Whatever they’re doing is causing them to die.” Right? When Ryan White gets HIV and then contracts ‒ it advances to AIDS, then it’s not shame on him, right? This starts to see ‒ You start to see the more human dimension and a more humane response of people going, “Wow, these people are really victims of something that’s brutally cruel that Mother Nature has wrought on people for no good reason.” Just like COVID, right?
SM: Yeah. So, in terms of the response, you’ve brought up COVID a few times, and it’s an interesting comparison, of course not a one-to-one comparison, very different diseases, but I was kind of tracking how the Government responded to COVID versus HIV/AIDS. So, by the time ‒ [laughs] It wasn’t until 20,000 Americans had died that the president at the time, Ronald Reagan, even publicly acknowledged HIV/AIDS.
PT: Yeah. That’s actually, unfortunately, correct. Ronald Reagan becomes president in January 1981, and he doesn’t mention AIDS until the last year in the White House, between 1987 and ’88, after his friend Rock Hudson passes away of AIDS, so he waited a long time.
00:29:13
SM: And just by comparison, whether you agree with what the Government did or not, by the time 20,000 Americans had died of COVID, we were, like, in lockdown, and a vaccine was being developed, and months later we had a vaccine.
PT: Yeah. And again, I mean, we have to respect the difference between these two viruses, right? The HIV virus is, thankfully, hard to get, but your other point is that, especially in the early years, the mortality rate was as close to a hundred percent as you could get. Right? I mean, there are a few people that can get HIV and have some sort of crazy natural immunity to the worst consequences of getting it, but, you know, the way I was raised, probably the way you were raised, is that you get ‒ you know, and this was in the ‘80s. “If you get HIV, you’re going to die,” right? And that is different than COVID. The mortality rate from COVID, I guess it ended up hovering in the worst of it around 2% and then quickly went down into the 1s after that. That’s different than close to a hundred percent, right? So that’s ‒ So there’s two things. You know, COVID is scarier because it’s easier to get.
SM: Of course.
PT: But HIV/AIDS is way scarier in terms of its mortality rate, and that ‒ You know, inexcusable, right? that the president waits seven years to utter the word much less mobilize against this disease.
00:30:51
SM: So we have HIV/AIDS in the U.S. It’s seen as a gay disease even though clearly it’s been here for, as you explained, at least a decade if not more before that.
PT: Yeah. There’s a kid in 1969 in my hometown in St. Louis that died in City Hospital of what we now know was AIDS, right?
SM: And yet stories persist. You know, when I was growing up in the late ‘90s, I heard what we’ll call playground talk [laughs] back in my elementary school ‒
PT: Yeah.
SM: ...because HIV/AIDS was still around, but it wasn’t nearly ‒ it didn’t have nearly the impact that it did in the late ‘90s, and I remember hearing that it came about because a flight attendant had slept with a monkey. Like, that’s what had filtered down to 4th grade Sean on the playground in elementary school in the late ‘90s.
PT: Yes. And that flight attendant has now been outed as Air Canada’s Gaëtan Dugas, by the way, much to the chagrin of Gaëtan and his family, I might add, who never wanted the name to be in the public sphere, but here it is. And it has been out in the public sphere since 1987, right? And, no, he did not sleep with a monkey and never had a flight to Africa because Air Canada did not fly to Africa, okay? But, yeah. But, yeah, that’s what you heard on the playground. And what’s your sense? How much of it is true?
00:32:18
[Laughter]
SM: As I’ve come to learn, it’s very much not the story, so why don’t you share a little bit about what really happened and who Gaëtan really is? Because his name has been associated with this Patient Zero thing for decades, wrongfully so.
PT: Right. So remember how scary HIV/AIDS is circa 1981 all the way through, let’s be honest, until we have a treatment regimen around 1993, ‘94, that keeps people alive in really hopeful ways, right? so that the mortality ‒ By the way, the mortality level for HIV/AIDS has sunk from, you know, in the early years near 100% to something where it’s now much more manageable arguably than, say, diabetes, right? that you can live a very happy, prosperous life thanks to the drugs. But from, say, 1981 when the first ‒ ‘81, ‘82 when the first news stories are appearing all the way until 1993, ‘94, ‘95 when the drugs start working, you’ve got over a decade of death, of fear, of anger and of scapegoating. “Damn these gays,” right? “for bringing this killer pandemic to America.” And Gaëtan was the perfect scapegoat for this disease. I’ll be honest. Gaëtan himself dies in 1984. The Patient Zero myth dates from 1987 when a gay journalist by the name of Randy Shilts publishes a book called And The Band Played On, which is in a lot of ways great journalism right? because he does about 500 or 600 pages of the ins and outs of how America responded and ultimately failed to respond to the AIDS crisis from, you know, late ‘70s all the way to 1987 when it gets published, but he also adds the salacious, unfactual material where he insinuates ‒ hardcore insinuates I might add ‒ that it was this Air Canada flight attendant, beautiful blond, who knew as of 1981, ‘82 that he had cancer, which we now meant that he had AIDS, but refused to stop having sex.
00:35:09
And that’s the crucial part of the story, that this guy as a steward on Air Canada was ultra mobile. He’d be in San Francisco one weekend, LA in the next weekend, Toronto the next weekend, New York the next weekend, that he was highly mobile thanks to his airline job, he was beautiful, he could have sex when he wanted, and he didn’t stop having sex when it was clear that he was sick, right? He told the CDC that he had on average about 250 sexual partners a year. This was in 1983, about a year before his death, right? So he’s perfect as a scapegoat because it’s the classic story of a gay man with an uncontrollable sexual libido being ridiculously irresponsible with his libido. I want to say in defense of Gaëtan his diagnosis in 1982 was cancer. Guess what. When you have sex with someone and you have cancer, you cannot give cancer to the other person.
[Laughter]
PT: So it’s okay. For those of us dealing with cancer, it’s okay to be sexually active, all right? And so this is what Gaëtan was dealing with, right? is the cloud of medical mystery in the early years about what his diagnosis meant, right? Now, by ’84, we’ve got evidence that it’s sexually transmitted, right? It’s a virus, not cancer, and it’s sexually transmitted. There’s hunches that doctors have in ‘81, ‘82, ‘83, but, you know, concrete evidence comes, say, in ’83, and Gaëtan’s dead in ‘84, right?
00:37:08
So he’s ‒ You know, it’s a little bit disingenuous to the Randy Shiltses of the world and those of us who perpetuate the Patient Zero myth [laughs] to say that Gaëtan was being selfish, conceited and irresponsible.
By the way, for anyone listening that is interested in the Patient Zero narrative, yes, of course, my book has a couple chapters on it, but also a great scholar, Richard McKay, Canadian scholar, has done a whole book on Patient Zero, so check it out, as well as mine, Plane Queer.
SM: So, how did that happen? How did that association happen?
PT: So, basically, Randy Shilts was desperate to get his book published, and he and his editor realized that there was very little interest in this book, this massive chronicle of ‒ 600-page chronicle of how Ronald Reagan F’d over the gay community during the AIDS crisis, right? No one wanted to read it, and so they made kind of a, you know, a Faustian compact because they were told, “Oh, I know how you can get this published. I know how you’re gonna get it reviewed in The New York Times. I know how you’re gonna make a million bucks. You just kind of take these little narrative pieces that are already there by Gaëtan Dugas, this Patient Zero guy, this promiscuous, conceited, has no morals character, and you just highlight that.”
00:38:44
So, what they did is they dropped ‒ they assembled all the Patient Zero pieces into a press release and then kind of did some advanced kind of work with magazines to publish this material in advance, and it was all the Patient Zero stuff, and sure enough that press release goes out, and the next day the New York Daily News, not known for its hardcore journalism but great tabloid sensationalism, runs the headline the next day that says, “The Man Who Gave Us AIDS.” Wow, right? And from that moment the Patient Zero myth that Gaëtan Dugas somehow slept with a monkey in Africa and brought AIDS to America, right? becomes the lore of the playground, right?
SM: [Laughs]
PT: And the reason is because we want it to be true. We want this horrible, awful disease that is a freak of Mother Nature, right? which, you know, we now know sometimes happens with pandemics ‒ this cruel, cruel disease, we wanted it to be true that there was some sort of malicious human agency behind it, that gay men were somehow responsible for this disease that was wreaking havoc first and foremost on the LGBT community, again because they’re the ones with healthcare ‒ but then on ‒ you know, to the extent that, you know, all these other communities that were infected, plus, you know, by 1987, the regular straight community has to start using condoms for more than just child care, has to start getting tested for HIV, and that really is the minute where it sort of ‒ we need a scapegoat, we need someone to blame for this, and Gaëtan was perfect for it.
00:40:35
SM: And if people want a more detailed kind of personal story about the impact of HIV/AIDS, make sure you go back and listen to the first episode of this miniseries, which was with Michelle Evans, a transgender Air Force veteran who lost one of her close friends to HIV/AIDS. It’s a very poignant, powerful story. So you can find that earlier on the feed.
So there’s still a lot of stigma around HIV/AIDS, but another thing that the community can be proud of is the advocacy kind of against that stigma. And we can turn to our other individual talk about Gär Traynor to really hone in on that, right? There was this period back when he was alive where to have HIV/AIDS had stigma, both meant you were gay, so this was still a time of a lot of homophobia, meant you had this disease, lots of misunderstanding about how it could be communicated, including in Gär’s own workplace. Why don’t you move us to his situation?
PT: Yeah. So Gär is a flight attendant at United Airlines as of the early ‘70s is my understanding and ‒ or at least mid ‘70s. Gär comes to United Airlines, like many of these men who were hired in the ‘70s. He’s got, you know, a good high school education from rural Oregon and moves to California to a bigger city to kind of that Harvey Milk moment of going to somewhere where you know you could be out and gay, and Gär ends up signing up with United Airlines, and he’s kind of got, you know, this kind of great gay liberation world as far as I can tell, right? Again, we don’t have too much ‒ we don’t have much of a written record on Gär, Gary Traynor, in his own words or even in the words of people who knew him well. But, you know, by the late ‘70s, he’s living between LA and San Francisco. He’s, you know, he’s an out gay man. He’s got a decent paying job with United Airlines. He’s seeing the world, and it’s a different experience than what he experienced in the Pacific Northwest out in his town, you know. By all accounts it seems like he’s a very steady employee.
00:43:04
Sometime in these years, right? when the AIDS crisis is still underground, right ‒ I mean, 1981 is when doctors kind of announce that AIDS is on the loose and that they’re concerned about it, especially in the gay community, but probably before then is when Gär contracts HIV because he’s ‒ he gets sick for the first time in the spring of 1982. Actually, he may even have been sick before then, but that’s when he starts to get cancer treatments. In other words, by the summer of ‘82, he’s got purple lesions on his skin, Kaposi sarcoma, and is getting treated with radiation to eliminate the cancer, right? Again, it’s cancer, and so you’re giving someone who’s immunocompromised chemotherapy, which is kind of awful. But, yeah, so this is Gär’s life as of the summer of ‘82. He’s going to chemo treatments and is also surprisingly able to continue working, with many sick days, but he makes the choice in ‒ sometime in that year to tell his employer “Hey, here’s what’s going on. I have AIDS. And here’s also a note from my doctor that says except for when I’m in chemo treatment, I can work, so I want to keep working.”
This hits United Airlines right at this moment before the public starts to kind of panic more pronouncedly about the spread of AIDS and so forth, so Gär is able to continue working for several months as United is trying to assemble its first ever medical policy on employees with AIDS.
00:45:17
That comes out in 1983, and it’s written by their medical doctor, who was based at John F. Kennedy Airport, which used to be a place where United Airlines serves but no longer. They moved over to Newark. But the JFK MD for United Airlines wrote what was ultimately a company-wide memo that said ‒ In part it’s good. “Hey, don’t worry. There is no evidence that AIDS can be transmitted through casual contact,” which is exactly what fellow flight attendants wanted to hear. By this time they’ve noticed a few of their co-workers getting sick. They’ve seen the purple lesions, right? on people like Gär, and they started to get worried, right? “What if I bring this home to my home, to my family, to my kids?” “What are my risks?” So the medical note from United, United’s physician, was trying to be reassuring to them that they were at little to no risk but was also trying to be a little bit prude [laughs] given that this was the early ‘80s, and so he said, “There’s no need to worry because all the evidence speaks to the fact that this is transmitted through ‘bodily fluids,’” and that’s as far as he explained. He didn’t mention the word “blood” and certainly didn’t mention the word “semen,” right? And so you could see a flight attendant or a pilot or a gate agent reading this memo and going “Bodily fluids? Oh my God. Like, this guy, like, you know, he was talking to me, and some saliva came out of his mouth, and it ended up on my body. Like, what am I gonna do?” [Laughs] So it sort of reinforced panic in a way.
00:47:31
And again, this is shame on the 1980s for being so sexually prude, right? And this is the Reagan years, and family values were in, and the religious right was part of the Reagan coalition, and they did not want open and frank conversation. Obviously, Reagan didn’t write the memo. It was Corporate America that wrote the memo. But you can see the ethos at the time was such that open and frank talk was not encouraged, and this sort of complicated the scenario as well. Let’s put it that way.
United, in the course of the following months after this memo, also creates a secret policy in which any employee that manifests as having AIDS is not fired but is put on permanent medical leave, so Gär is ‒ even though his employers have known for a few months that he has AIDS and is seeking treatment but his doctor says he’s okay to work, all of a sudden he gets called in and he gets put ‒ taken offline. He can’t work anymore. And he will never work another day at United Airlines, right? So this is the injustice, right? “I have a disease. It’s not communicable in a workplace unless I’m having sex with someone ‒” which, you know, there’s other grounds to fire someone if they’re having sex in the workplace ‒ “and, you know, I’m also ‒ my doctor says it’s okay I can work, I’m healthy, so why are you depriving me of the right to work?” This is 1983. This is about 10 years before, you know, Denzel Washington and Tom Hanks win an Oscar for Philadelphia, right? I believe that’s a 1993 movie about, right? a person with AIDS who is unjustly fired for ‒ from his job, right? But Gär is 10 years ahead of that, right? And that’s where the story starts. He combines with his labor union, the United Airlines flight attendants labor union, which is now the AFA, the Association of Flight Attendants. They may have had a different name at that time. But the AFA supports Gär, sues the company and demands that Gär gets his job back. It goes through a labor arbitration case, sort of like a courtroom case, right? Medical professionals are interviewed, experts of all kinds, etc. and so forth.
00:50:28
And what seems to be one of the very, very first cases of a person with AIDS winning one of these legal cases, Gär wins the right to go back to work at United. In 1984, I believe, is when the decision comes down. This is groundbreaking for people with HIV/AIDS across the United States. It sets the precedent that the Supreme Court is going to also uphold in a different case in 1987. Right? So that after 1987, at least in workplaces that have any sort of government funding, you can’t get fired if you have AIDS as long as your doctor says it’s okay to keep working. So Gär becomes a bit of a Civil Rights hero here, which is pretty good from ‒ for a rural kid from Oregon. [Laughs]
SM: And yet no one remembers his name.
PT: And yet no one remembers his name, and that’s the ‒ kind of the personal tragedy. By all accounts, from what I could find in the labor union archives, Gär, when he contracts the illness, is still healthy enough, obviously, to work even though he’s getting chemo and obviously has to be rundown and have, you know, nights where he can’t sleep. He’s volunteering in LA ‒ he was in LA at the time ‒ at a group called the Shanti Project, which kind of used new-age medicine to support people with AIDS, a really cool ‒ sort of one of the very first grass roots groups in the United States to support people with AIDS. He also joins the Los Angeles people with AIDS activist group and gets put on the LA ‒ the Los Angeles County AIDS Action Network, so he’s actually mingling with politicians and doctors, making AIDS policy for the city of Los Angeles, and at one point he even travels to a national conference, the very first national conference of NAPWA, the National Association for People with AIDS. He is someone ‒ Even as his life energy is being threatened by this killer illness, he’s always giving back. It’s freaking incredible how much this man must have cared.
00:53:04
SM: What happened when he got this right to work back?
PT: So United Airlines now recognizes that they have to bring Gär back to the workplace. However, they have completely unwilling to do so for fear of co-workers, about their own safety, and for fear of passengers. What would a passenger say if they see lesions? What would a passenger say if they’re being served their food by someone who is ‒ visibly, perhaps, looks gay and visibly, perhaps, looks sick, right? And so United refused to countenance, putting Gär and others in his position back on the regular kind of work schedule, so what they decided to do is that they ‒ United Airlines created a policy where they paid people with HIV/AIDS to stay home for the rest of their careers. As long as they were alive and had doctors’ notes that said that they were healthy enough to work, United would say, “Okay, well, don’t come to work, but here’s your paycheck anyway.” This is a policy that lasted into the ‒ Within 10 years of today, they were still paying people to stay home because they had HIV/AIDS. It’s pretty scary the amount of intransigence and fear that was behind this policy.
00:54:33
So Gär spends most of the rest of his life ‒ He dies in 1987, unfortunately, as a United Airlines employee but is never ‒ never puts the uniform on again, but he gets all his paychecks, all his medical insurance through the company until he can no longer work. Pretty crazy.
The other way that Gär appears is, by the end of his life, he’s kind of moved to San Francisco from LA and is kind of close ‒ is friends with many people who are going through HIV/AIDS, knows ‒ There’s a beautiful note from one of his nurses at San Francisco Hospital where people with AIDS are being treated just, you know, just kind of love and kindness in all places. He talks about, you know, “I just heard Rock Hudson went to Paris. Maybe I’m going to go to Paris too to get this cool treatment that is kind of cutting edge even though it’s not approved in the United States.” He’s always trying and hoping and fighting until the end. He ‒
The one other way that ‒ really the only way, I guess, that Gär is sort of immortalized is his name is on the AIDS quilt. Apparently, from what I was told by the person who worked in the AIDS quilt office in San Francisco in 1987, a distraught man came in one day, was just kind of bawling, and he said, “I’ve got a list of 40 of my friends who have died.” And Gär is one of them, right? And he said, “I need their names on the quilt.” So, yeah, Gär made it on to the quilt that day with volunteers who probably never knew him making a patch for him with his name and some glitter, and so he’s still there.
SM: And the quilt has been digitized so people can actually ‒ And Gaëtan is on there too.
PT: Yeah.
00:56:48
SM: And the quilt was also talked about in the Michelle Evans episode we talked about. You can go look up all those names if you want to see them yourself. So a lot of the stories that you’ve shared over the last hour are in your book Plane Queer.
PT: Yeah, P-L-A-N-E. There’s a play on words there.
[Laughter]
SM: That’s a good point. Thank you for clarifying the spelling.
PT: This is about aviation and queerness. [Laughs]
SM: And a striking cover image, but that’s a story for another time. But you wrote that book ‒ You did a lot of the research during a fellowship at the Smithsonian, correct?
PT: Yeah. So the Smithsonian was ‒ This was my PhD dissertation as well. I did a PhD program at the University of Texas and so started the research by, you know, going to the archives of Pan American Airways and then ‒ you know, but you can’t find anything on, say, the AIDS crisis there, so went to the labor union archives, as I mentioned that kind of had ‒ that kind of opened me up not just to Gary’s file, right? and his fight with United Airlines but several other men who were United Airlines employees in the 1980s that were going through the same thing, fighting their employer as they were, you know, struggling to live and ultimately died, just really awful stuff but ‒
00:58:17
So that’s where it started. And then, you know, yeah, the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. gave me a place to kind of put the finishing touches on the book and do some research in the Washington area. It was really a great experience too.
SM: Yeah. And [unintelligible 00:58:34 ] and Space Museum podcast, not The Air and Space Museum podcast, Museum of Flight Air and Space Museum podcast ‒ and a lot of times we talk about the air and space part but not the museum part, so I wanted to focus on that for a few minutes. How did being in that museum environment kind of allow you to do some of the research that maybe you weren’t able to previously, or did it ‒ did you find that it lets you approach the topic in any different ways or connect you to resources?
PT: Yeah, that’s a great question. Does being in a museum devoted to aviation kind of help tell these stories? I think the answer is yes and no. I was energized personally by not just the exhibits, right? where, you know, it was so committed to flight and really helped me kind of understand, you know, the technical aspects of the kinds of things that I was talking about, this relationship between workers and airplanes, right? but also just the staff.
00:59:34
Like, the curators at a place like the National Air and Space Museum are just sort of top-notch scholars who focused ‒ you know, they live, sleep and breathe airplanes and aviation, so that was great. But, you know ‒ and this is a struggle for all aviation museums ‒ I think we get sucked into the things and the technology, the planes themselves, the engines, etc., and we have a harder time telling the story of the people, right? especially people like Gary, right? who are gay men with limited, you know, education, no fault of his own, but he’s not an engineer, and he’s not a scientist. He’s not a test pilot. He’s, you know, he’s not even a soldier, right? So, where do we find people like Gary Traynor and Gaëtan Dugas in aviation museums?
It’s a tricky thing, I think, to kind of create museums that speak to that diversity of experience and that tell the hard stories of aviation, right? This is not a glorious and glamorous story except that, you know, because it’s not great that United Airlines laid people off, effectively refused to let them work for having AIDS. It’s not great that Southwest Airlines refused to hire men into the 1980s, right? These are embarrassing stories of flight and yet, right? this is part of our history; this is part of our legacy. So, as I was there, I was kind of like enthralled with how much I had to kind of work with but also very aware of how little our museums currently offer in terms of telling these other sides of aviation history.
SM: Yeah. And, you know, I can speak from being on the museum side. It’s generally not from a lack of desire. It comes from a lack of ‒
PT: Right?
SM: ...what we call material culture.
01:01:51
It’s exactly what you said, and that’s one of the ‒ Folks who have listened to this miniseries have, hopefully, heard kind of the call to action at the end of episodes, that we’re hoping that this is a chance to collect more stories and kind of get it out there, that the museum much flight is interested in ‒
PT: Yeah, yeah.
SM: ...hearing these things and telling these stories, and our struggle is always ‒ Like, we use Gär as an example. I run our social media at the museum. When I came across this story in your writing, I wanted to share it. Being on social media ‒
PT: And I think that’s what museums are great for, right? Because you’ve got this social media blast. You’ve got the opportunity to have guest lectures. You’ve got the opportunity to do workshops. It’s not just the things, the exhibits that museums do. They’re also these places where we can kind of further our knowledge and deepen our appreciation of aviation even in ways that don’t tell a thing-based, artifact-based story so ‒
01:02:54
SM: Well, but that even, even that kind of illustrates the struggle with telling stories of marginalized people, including LGBTQ+ folks, people with AIDS. When I wanted to share Gär’s story, I needed some sort of image of something because this is going out on Instagram ‒
PT: Yeah.
SM: ...so, like, you’ve got to have a picture, and I could not find anything. Like, it took me a while to figure out what was going to be the stand-in so that there’s at least something visual to catch people’s attention, and that’s where the struggle comes in from the museum side and why it’s so important that places like the Smithsonian, places like The Museum of Flight, are getting it out there and letting it be known. There’s a sign when we revamped our World War II exhibit a couple years ago, and we kind of just put it front and center in the exhibit. Like, stories are missing, and we know this.
Another social media post I did, speaking of World War II, we had ‒ there’s a day of the year called Love Letter Day, and I found some love letters in our archives that people had written from World War II back ‒ guys had written to their sweethearts back home, and I wanted to make sure that we were including different perspectives in the story. And I know just from my own research and work that there were a lot of gay men writing letters to their sweethearts back home too, but those don’t exist anymore. They were either written in code or they were found and destroyed. The only thing I could find in our archives was an oral history from a World War II fighter ace talking about how someone in his squadron ‒ did not use very flattering terms ‒ was caught writing a letter to a man, and that’s, like, the only love letter referenced, so it’s like ‒
01:04:51
And this is a discussion again for a whole ‘nother day, and, in fact, we do talk about this on a different episode in this miniseries that will be coming out later of how do you even acknowledge the absence. Like, how do you tell the story in the absence of stuff? And that is a struggle.
PT: Yeah. I’ll have to say, like the whole impetus of my book, like the thing that got me on to this topic in the first place is I was sitting in the archives of Pan American Airways there at the University of Miami ‒ for those of you who are Pan Am freaks, you should visit the library there ‒ and there, you know, when you go through old papers, they’re usually in big boxes, and then they’re subdivided into folders, right? So there’s this one folder I see amongst flight attendant paraphernalia called Male Stewards. [Laughs] I’m like, “Well, this is interesting.” So I open it up, and there’s an article of Pan American Airways’ newsletter from 1972, the year that they put ‒ start hiring men because of the court case that forced them to hire men, and the story in the newsletter is “Oh, by the way, Pan Am used ‒” All the, all the stewards, all the flight attendants at Pan Am were men from all the way from the first one in 1929, 1930, all the way until 1941 when World War II starts. Then they hire women. I’m like, “Well, that’s fascinating.” And then they’re like, “And then there was this court case in the ‘60s where a guy applied to be a Pan Am steward and Pan Am told him no, and he sued, and he won.” And I’m like, “Well, that’s fascinating. I’ve never heard about that.”
01:06:37
And so I go to the archivist at the University of Miami, and I’m like, “Look at this folder, and listen to all this history. Where are the documents for that?” And he kind of looked up at me and he said, “Phil, I think you just found your book topic, didn’t you?” [Laughs] And it’s all about the absence of stuff. For those of us who write queer history, we have to be very attentive to those freaky moments where people ‒ where either documents talk or oral histories talk, as you were talking about, Sean, and it’s like, “Wait, that’s weird. Where did ‒ Where’s the rest of the evidence for this?” And that’s where our journey starts, right?
SM: I’m curious. For you, was it cathartic in any way to be doing this research in the halls of power of the Smithsonian?
PT: I think more broadly as someone from the age of 4 growing up ‒ So I grew up in the suburbs of St. Louis, and for me, the most exciting thing that could happen was to, like ‒ when someone was visiting us and we had to go pick them up at the airport, right? [Laughs] You know, like I got to go in, and I got to see the sign of all the places you could fly that day, right? And you could watch the jets land, and it was just like, “Wow, I so want to be ‒ I want to be part of this world,” right? where my life wasn’t as tied to the suburbs of St. Louis, right? stultifying as they are. [Laughs] And so, you know, from the time I was a kid, I always had a fascination with aviation. It didn’t manifest itself the way it does with so many people that, you know, that I was making model airplanes and wanting to be a pilot or wanting to be a flight attendant.
01:08:28
None of that, none of that was in me. It was more just travel and be a part of this kind of cosmopolitan world that existed above my head as it was flying over my house in St. Louis. [Laughs] And, ultimately, it was deeply satisfying, I have to say, to write this book that kind of chronicled ‒ It was my way of participating in the air world. That’s super cool. And I’m continuing to write about the air world. I just think it’s just one of the most fascinating spaces.
SM: Well, Phil, thank you so much for being so generous with your time and sharing these stories. Remind people the title of your book.
PT: Yeah. So, again, the title of the book is Plane Queer, P-L-A-N-E Queer, Gender, Sexuality, and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendants, and my name is Phil Tiemeyer. That’s T-I-E-M-E-Y-E-R.
SM: Phil, thank you.
PT: Thanks, Sean.
[Music]
01:09:34
SM: Thank you for tuning in to this episode of The Flight Deck, the podcast of The Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington. A special thanks to our donors.
Phil talked in this episode about the importance of grappling with difficult stories, and your monetary support enables us to keep bringing those vital discussions to audiences around the world.
If you’d like to check out Phil’s book, you’ll find a link in the show notes. You’ll also find a link to the episode featuring Michelle Evans that I referenced and also a few other episodes that I pulled from the show’s archives where I interviewed female flight attendants if you’d like to learn more about that perspective. The show notes are at museumofflight.org/podcast.
Did something in this episode stand out to you, or are you an LGBTQ+ person in aerospace with an experience that you’d like to share? We’re leaving space for listeners to react to what they’ve learned this season. You can send your story to podcast@museumofflight.org. If we collect enough stories, we’ll do a follow-up episode where we share your reactions, of course with your permission.
If you like what you heard, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you downloaded us from. It really helps new people find the show.
Until next time, this is your host, Sean Mobley, saying to everyone out there on that good earth, “We’ll see you out there, folks.”
[Music]
END OF PODCAST