From Patient Zero to Ground Zero: Flight Attendants, AIDS, and the Queering of U.S. Organized Labor

Consistent with the panel’s larger focus on how aviation has altered identities, my paper examines how a subset of airline employees—the flight attendant corps—has altered identity politics in the United States.  In particular, I consider the response of flight attendants and their labor unions to the AIDS crisis, which devastated the flight attendant corps in the 1980s and 1990s, especially the vast numbers of gay men in this field.  Flight attendants’ resistance to AIDS discrimination impacted the larger AFL-CIO, whose subsequent strong support for gay rights was heavily informed by flight attendants’ battles.

Male flight attendants became a public face of the AIDS hysteria, thanks to the myth of Patient Zero (a steward who, according to media hype, first spread AIDS throughout America).  In fighting against such potent stereotypes, flight attendant unions gradually became outspoken advocates for gay rights.  Most importantly, they fought airlines’ moves to banish all HIV-positive flight attendants from active duty.  This initial victory by the mid-1980s led to other pro-gay efforts amongst flight attendants and other AFL-CIO unions, such as promoting non-discrimination policies in CBAs, and fighting for domestic partner health benefits.  With this, a new political reality crystallized in the US: organized labor, despite its historical animosities, became a steady and devoted advocate for gay and lesbian equality. 

September 11, 2001 was to be a glorious day for the flight attendant unions, as a federal judge finally ordered the airlines to heed the City of San Francisco’s law requiring them to provide domestic partner benefits.  Yet, the day’s tragedy overshadowed this impressive civil rights victory.  Since 9/11, the unions’ hard-won gains are again in jeopardy due to the economic fallout from the attack, and their legacy as civil rights advocates who helped incorporate labor unions into the gay rights coalition risks being forgotten.