What percentage of male flight attendants are gay

The ways in which straight men navigate this occupation and its gendered. About the Book In this vibrant new history, Phil Tiemeyer details the history of men working as flight attendants. [] Letting your guard down and finally breathing free. For one, working for the airlines provided a welcoming community.

The history of the gay men who still make up an unusually large percentage of the flight attendant labor force is not well known. [] Discovering culture and queer acceptance in cities around the world. Because of this, early uniforms for crew and pilots were also often military-inspired, featuring stripes, pilot wings, and caps some of these elements persist in uniforms today.

The findings provide valuable insights into the diversity of the workforce, shedding light on some surprising statistics. When did the gay steward become such a common stereotype? Flight Attendants: Soaring with Diversity At the forefront of the list, flight attendants emerge as the occupation with the highest LGBTQ+ representation, with an impressive 13% of their workforce identifying as gay or bisexual.

As one former flight attendant told Tiemeyer:. Beginning with the founding of the profession in the late s and continuing into the post-September 11 era, Plane Queer examines the history of men who joined workplaces customarily identified as female-oriented. [] Why flight attendant life is so appealing to LGBTQ folks.

They estimated that “between 30 and 50 percent of male flight attendants were gay in the s, and between 50 and 90 percent in the s.” These days, the numbers seem to be a bit lower. She was able to convince Boeing to hire her in part because she was also a registered nurse, and soon other airlines also saw nurses as ideal candidates, as long as they were also young, unmarried, and in possession of a dainty figure.

When truck driver Carlos Diaz, a heterosexual Miami man who was married with children, dreamed of being a flight attendant—his uncle had been one before World War II—his application was denied by Pan Am. So he brought a lawsuit, and succeeded in using the Civil Rights Act to pressure air lines into hiring more men, starting in Ever since, men have generally comprised about 15 percent of flight attendants, depending on the airline, and a high percentage of the men returning to the ranks of the flight attendant corps in the s were gay.

[] The hidden side of anonymity in aviation. Episode Highlights: [] Just in case you missed it — yes, we're married, and yes, very gay. The woman who broke down the cabin doors was Ellen Church, the first female flight attendant , who had been trained as a pilot but who only found work with Boeing Air Transport the predecessor to United Airlines as a stewardess.

Abstract Flight attendant work, although now referred to with gender-neutral terminology, continues to be archetypically feminine. The work was also often physically demanding, with the crew being asked to help haul luggage and row the passengers into shore from seaplanes.

What followed was a decade in which nearly all flight attendants were women. Copy Link Share Share Comment. Soon hem lines on uniforms began rising, even as wages for flight attendants went down. Male flight attendants are often assumed to be gay, which frequently includes an emasculated, hyper-sexualised dimension to the stereotyped minority within the female-dominated occupation.

By , only 4 percent of flight attendants were men. Slate homepage. 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.

Ironically, it was also from Miami that male flight attendants eventually returned to the skies. As Phil Tiemeyer points out in his book Plane Queer: Labor, Sexuality, and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendants , a new book which proved an invaluable resource for this post, the first flight attendants, in the late s and s, were actually men, and were expected to be traditionally masculine.

Around World War II. When commercial flight first started, the job of the flight attendant was thought to be appropriate only for presumably straight men.