The history of the queer worker is not well understood either by labor unions or mainstream LGBTQ advocacy organizations. The dominant LGBTQ narrative in the United States, having relied on neoliberal rhetoric and tactics to promote assimilation into the the consumer hegemony, ultimately caters to and represents an elite class of gays unblemished by the damning signs of class struggle. On the other hand, a vein of thought exists in labor unions that views LGBTQ struggles as “identity politics”, suspicious for their divisive capacity, culturally deviant and “decadent” presentation, representing a possible distraction from simple labor issues. Both of these understandings miss the gendered dimension of work, the role employers play as gatekeepers of normative relationships, and the importance of queer politics as a public-oriented service industry grows and a new generation of young queers begin to enter the workforce.

I begin by analyzing Phil Tiemayer’s Plane Queer: Labor, Sexuality, and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendants in order to provide the reader with a case study on how jobs are gendered and on how the construction of LGBTQ identity flowed through class and race. Next I argue that this dominant construction of LGBTQ identity became a force rank-and-file activists had to contend with in fighting for the space and control over a Lesbian and Gay Issues Committee (LAGIC) in New York’s DC 37. Finally, I look critically at the implications of these challenges for young queer workers entering a workforce comprising mostly of service industry, public-oriented jobs.

Tiemayer begins his history of male flight attendants by cautioning that in the early years of commercial air travel, these workers were neither feminised nor queered in the same way they would be later in the century. In fact, he asserts that “it is anachronistic to speak of a ‘gay’ flight attendant corps that endured ‘homophobia’ in the 1930s. In those years, unlike the postwar years, homosexuality was a barely choate identity category”. It was only through both the attendants’ proximity to the “gay” culture of their wealthy customers and through the later entrance of women into stewarding that over time queer men began to be attracted to the profession. At the time of commercial air travel’s inception, it was both considerably less comfortable and more expensive than it is now. The inherent danger in early, more rudimentary air travel meant management sought male over female flight attendants. Meanwhile, its cost and aura of danger meant a clientele consisting of fabulously wealthy men traveling without their families. In the early 1920s and 30s, such men surrounded themselves in decadent “gay” culture, which, while not linked to homosexuality in the same manner as today, did celebrate a more ambiguous, playful masculinity.

All these factors shaped the service corps that originally staffed these planes. Tiemayer writes that “while the [male] steward could not aspire to participate fully in this eccentric lifestyle because of his working-class status, he was groomed by [airline] public relations departments to cater to this softer upper-class masculinity. In this sense, stewards of the day belonged-at least aesthetically, from an examination of their uniforms and other public relations materials—to the more fluid gender and sexuality norms that typified the ‘gay’ life of the urban elite”. Thus one sees the “inchoate” nature of homosexuality in this context. Elite “gay” culture had very little to do with actual sexual relations and more to do with consumption, exhibition, and an uninhibited lifestyle. It was an affect borne of privilege that was not accessible to working class men in other industries with less proximity to such wealthy urban dandies. This is why in its’ early years, stewarding represented a certain “fashionable servility” more than it did a specific queer identity.

This points to a conundrum that will be a common theme in this paper; that the gendered nature of work and larger social perceptions have, and continue to, make “worker” and “queer” appear mutually exclusive. Stewards could only be handmaidens to the sexually playful masculinity of their clients, not full benefactors of the affluence and security it rested on. This was seen as homosexuality did begin to form into a “choate identity category” in the postwar years and affluent “gay” culture became unfashionable in decades of war and nationalism. Without its association with wealth and gentility, the conflation of “gay” with “deviant” deepened in American society. In this context, working class queers struggled for a secure identity not only among dominant gender and sexuality norms but also among class ones. For example, Tiemayer documents the media response to the murder of a young gay steward, William Simpson, in 1954 and how the media dealt with the question of his homosexuality. There were no “investigative reports about Simpson’s work at Eastern and the preponderance of gay men in the flight attendant corps. The reporting suggested that homosexuality was an identity that manifested itself only in the leisure world-in neighborhoods, bars, beaches, and public parks—rather than at work”. The worker and the queer, in the popular imagination, stood as aberrations to one another. The supposedly immoral and antisocial nature of homosexuality made questions of queerness questions about pathology. This would continue to haunt the LGBTQ movement for many years as it struggled to clarify and challenge the material bases of its’ oppression, while loud voices from both inside and outside the community insisted that the primary challenges had to do with sexuality and pathology.

At the Lusty Lady in San Francisco, a strip club whose dancers organized in the 90s, this material basis was being directly dealt with. Julia, a worker at the club, argues that the largely lesbian and bisexual workforce of the Lusty Lady faced unique economic challenges that in part drove them to organize. “Because we were largely gay women”, she says, “we did not have any fantasy at all of having a man support us in the future. We understood this job to be our sole support […] You just don’t have fantasies when you’re a lesbian that you’re going to have another lesbian who’s going to support you. There’s so few of those, and they wear really bad blazers”(124). The Lusty Lady had consistently marketed itself as woman-friendly and queer friendly, and management surely maintained a certain cultural freedom around these identities. However, this belied and even actively obscured the economic precariousness of its workers and how that precariousness was linked to their queer identity. In 2011, white women were earning 82 cents for every dollar earned by men; African-American women 69 cents; and Latina women 60 cents. As Julia aptly points out, lesbian women cannot hope to access the added economic security of partnering with a man that straight women can. Furthermore, those few lesbians that could provide more support than the average woman wore “really bad blazers”—in other words, they belonged more to the corporate world than to a working class one, and held only tenuous solidarity with lesbian workers like Julia.

Another unique challenge faced by these workers was the stigmatization, and devaluing, of sex work in the general culture. One of the dancers points out that “we don’t pathologize therapists for providing emotional support for money. But even though women are trained to be coquettish […] we are pathologized if we do that for money. We’re expected to do it for free in a variety of jobs, like being a receptionist, a stewardess, almost any support position job”(128). As discovered by the stewards of Tiemayer’s account, public-oriented service jobs require an emotional labor that is gendered in specific ways. Even, for example, as the airline industry continued to employ and attract gay men, it made a conscious effort to sell both the caregiving and sexually attractive capacities of it female stewardesses. Sex work clarifies this gender performance as labor rather than nature, as partly material rather than pathological. For this it is not easily understood by LGBTQ activists that campaign largely for assimilation into the neoliberal order, rather than against the ways employers benefit from gender performance and act as gatekeepers to normative relationships. Similarly, the deviance sex work represents in popular imagination means that “people don’t want to see that [dancers] are just like them. They’re on an assembly line and we’re in a peep show. But it’s just basic labor issues”(128). A layer of stigmatization makes it difficult for these workers to find legitimacy in labor.

The demystification of gendered and sexualized labor provided by the Lusty Lady campaign allows us to look at client-focused, service jobs more widely and begin to create an analysis of how it affects LGBTQ workers. Starting with food service, the Restaurant Opportunities Center New York produced a report on gender justice in the restaurant industry that illuminates many of these issues. In the study, ROC-NY focuses on the fine-dining sector because they “tend to be the most elite, visible, and influential establishments in the industry”. What these restaurants do set the tone for the rest of the industry. Furthermore, because they are so competitive and serve a wealthier clientele, they offer some of the only living-wage jobs. As a worker, the ability to access and retain a job in one of these restaurants can mean a real difference. The report was compiled using census analysis, surveys of over five hundred restaurant workers in New York City, demographic canvassing, and interviews with both workers and employers.

What emerged was striking evidence of a stratified division of labor along the lines of gender, race, and language within restaurants. Women of color are almost wholly pushed out of fine-dining and instead concentrated in quick-service, or fast-food, establishments. They comprise 28.1% of the industry’s workforce but 34.9% of total quick service positions. Furthermore, within fine dining women are pushed out of the higher-earning front-of-the-house positions, which are 55.0% less likely to be female. Accordingly the ROC report refers to a “double tax” imposed on women of color for their gender and race in the form of lower wages.

In this context, wherein gender and ethnic presentation heavily influence hiring and earnings, “women are often confronted by blunt image-consciousness, sexism, and stereotypes. Frequently, they are completely excluded from accessing certain positions and relegated to traditionally “female’ roles”. Pushed out of more manual back of the house work (one female cook mentioned that in order to maintain her job, she avoided “looking like a woman with makeup and everything”) the jobs women have access to are the ones directly servicing clients where they are subject to more intense scrutiny towards their appearance and mannerisms. Head shots are often required in the interview process and female servers are continuously surveilled and policed to look more feminine and sexy. One worker recounted that their manager “always pestered the hostesses to wear heels… he wanted us all glammed out”, despite their protests that working in heels for eight hours at a time would be excessively painful. There is a rationalization of careful gender presentation and sexual availability as part and parcel of service that female workers must accommodate in order to maintain their employment and tips.

This type of gendering of service has broad implications for LGBTQ workers. In particular, it entirely pushes out individuals who are gender non-conforming and transgender who cannot or do not wish to “pass” as a cisgender man or woman in order to fit the requirements of particular positions. This is especially urgent considering the rates of unemployment for young trans* individuals. A 2011 survey found that unemployment rates for trans and gender non-conforming people was 14%, double the national average. For transgender people of color the rates went up to four times the national average. Just as women of color faced a “double tax” on their earnings for their gender and race, “Injustice at Every Turn”, a 2011 report on transgender discrimination found that “discriminaton was pervasive… yet the combination of anti-transgender bias and persistent, structural racism was especially devastating”. Almost half of respondents said they had experienced being fired, not hired or denied a promotion for being transgender or gender non-conforming. The effect on transgender and gender non-conforming communities is unmistakable, with the homeless rate mirroring the unemployment rate at nearly double the national average.

A CNN piece details the struggle of Keisha Allen, a transgender woman of color who makes less than $12,000 a year doing sex work. This isn’t uncommon, with 16% of respondents to the Task Force report saying they were forced to work in the underground economy for income. “She has applied for hundreds of entry-level jobs that don’t require a college degree—from dishwashers to cashiers”, says CNN, “without making it to the first interview”. As a result she is homeless and often forced to stay in the men’s section of her shelter. In the face of the overwhelming risk of falling to the edges of survival, almost three quarters of respondents sought to hide their gender or gender transition in the workplace. This is a daunting task in the context of the meticulous gender and image policing seen in restaurants. In particular, female-identifying LGBTQ workers informed ROC they “often felt humiliated and angered for feeling pressured to play traditional feminine stereotypes in order to obtain employment, avoid harassment or retaliation on the job, be respected, or simply fit in”(15). Such compulsory gender performance is especially degrading for those who have had to struggle to reconcile their sexuality and gender to themselves, their families, and their communities.

Conversely, male-identifying LGBTQ workers may find themselves pressured to play up stereotypically flamboyant mannerisms. Their gender non-conformity was advantageous in “certain restaurants in which being a gay man was considered chic or trendy”. As we saw in Plane Queer, LGBTQ-identifying people often follow one another through workplaces that provide a modicum of acceptance and protection. However, management sometimes exploits this by playing on the way homosexuality is commodified and exoticized in mainstream culture. One bartender remarked that “Many male homosexuals find a haven working in restaurants, where you can often be yourself; however, ‘being ourselves’ often means playing into stereotypical notions of what it is to be homosexual and male”. At the Lusty Lady, too, LGBTQ workers were attracted to the establishment because of its image of acceptance, but often lesbian and bisexual employees felt that a specific stereotype of their sexuality was being fetishized and exploited for profit.

This “image work” is not just enforced in restaurants, but, as we’ve seen, in a wide swath of service-based jobs, including retail. This is what artist Coco Layne explored in “Warpaint”, a photo series that was inspired by her part-time job at a conservative womens’ retailer. Layne describes herself as a “hardcore feminist and valiant queer queen” who comments that “It was comical how off-brand” she was for the job. She even wore a wig for the interview to hide her undercut, in which the sides of one’s head are shaved as a queer signifier. The series is a montage of self-portraits that run the spectrum from a masculine to feminine gender presentation. In the first photo, she wears a dark collared shirt buttoned all the way up with her hair slicked back and no makeup. Throughout the montage she makes subtle changes to her appearance, such as allowing her hair to fall gently over one eyebrow, adding progressive amounts of makeup, and changing into a bright floral top until she reaches a totally feminine gender presentation.

“I identify as a femme queer woman”, said Layne in an interview with the Huffington Post, “Sometimes I’ll feel like being super femme and I’ll wear a lot of eye makeup and lipstick while on other days I won’t do anything besides fill my brows in”. Despite already identifying as falling somewhere on the feminine spectrum, the compulsory nature of a feminine gender presentation in her workplace revealed new elements to her ideas about gender presentation. “It’s fascinating to see the nuanced correlations between how I present myself and the way people treat me”, she says. The process, for her, went beyond a playful commentary on makeupping to confront the economic and social consequences of presenting as visibly queer or gender non-conforming.

In September 2013 Reuters reported that in August the pace of growth in the U.S. services sector hit an eight-year high. The National Employment Law Project found in 2012 that 43% of the jobs created during the economic recovery were in low-wage service industries including retail, food services and employment services. Increasingly, available jobs are concentrated in these sectors which require both frequent interfacing with the general public and pressure to embody a company’s “brand”. Businesses who wish to differentiate themselves from exploding competition may increasingly put the weight of “branding” and providing a specific experience for their clients onto their employees. The unwaged and normalized nature of additional emotional, sexual, and appearance-based labor makes this a low-cost option for companies in a shareholder-beholden landscape. Businesses can skimp on branding and expand the ways in which workers are disciplined.

So how are labor and queer activists to address the diverse issues LGBTQ-identifying workers face? For answers we can turn to the Lesbian and Gay Issues Committee in D.C. 37, the public employees union in New York City. Tamara Jones asserts that “LAGIC’s [accomplishments] can be found in its ability to balance members’ commitment to supporting and strengthening their union against the need to challenge and broaden the union’s institutional structure and practices in order to better represent lesbian and gay workers”(176). If D.C.37 members wanted to address their unique concerns as both LGBTQ people and workers, they needed legitimacy in their union. At the same time, they were fearful both of being sidelined as a special interest group and also of the union’s structural power to “set the agenda, and try to control what the issues were” (177). LAGIC accordingly adopted an approach that blended collectivist internal organizing and accommodating the union chain of command. This way, they could build their agenda democratically but also validate their issues as genuinely working-class ones through the union’s sponsorship.

An early, central campaign spearheaded by LAGIC was for domestic partner benefits. Through this campaign LAGIC was able to elicit widespread labor solidarity. They “consistently defined domestic partners to include unmarried heterosexual couples. By doing so, the group was able to link the specific needs of lesbian and gay workers to those of another category of unprotected workers, moving beyond rigid identity politics”(188). In doing so LAGIC was an important pioneer in discarding arguments over pathology and deviance in order to address root material oppression, creating a common language between “labor” and “queer”. They also illuminated the underlying problem of domestic partner benefits; they ability of the employer to regulate the relationships of the working class. In my census track in Washington Heights, 65.1% of residents are family households, but only 24.4% are married-couple family households.¹ The statistics show that there is great variation in the makeup of each family and their arrangements that go beyond questions of queer or straight households. Limiting the forms in which people can access the economic stability and benefits of marriage is another way for employers to discipline the working class.

Thus we can see the multiple, intersecting ways employers use gender and sexuality to both exploit workers and control their relationships outside the job. We can also see that there is difficulty in organizing for queer, working class issues outside of the dominant LGBT framework. LAGIC’s campaign for domestic partner benefits is a vital note in the history of LGBTQ activism. But it also advocated for something that was somewhat digestible and beneficial to a straight audience. In contrast, a New York organization called Queers for Economic Justice sought to “challenge and change the systems that create poverty and economic injustice in our communities, and to promote an economic system that embraces sexual and gender diversity”. They do so because “although poor queers have always been a part of both the gay rights and economic justice movements, they have been, and continue to be, largely invisible in both movements”. Their vision was not digestible to the straight community, challenging to the mainstream LGBT narrative, and economically subversive (perhaps more so than most labor unions). As a consequence, in December 2013 they were forced to close as they “looked down the barrel of the funding-world shotgun” and found no one willing to support their work.

The crisis Queers for Economic Justice faced should be a wake-up call to LGBTQ activists in the labor movement. Queer activism that addresses the deep economic roots of LGBTQ oppression simply cannot survive in the grant-writing world. It will either change to please donors or shut down. Labor unions are perhaps the only organizations that can provide the space, framework, and funding to organize poor queers. Activists will have to fight their union in order to do it, and do it well, but it is possible in an age where most labor leaders espouse social justice unionism. The consequences of the new economy—from performative gender labor to increased precariousness—for queer workers will be broad and often opaque. The challenges will go beyond anti-discrimination clauses to necessitate a more countercultural resistance. Questions of how to organize and what to organize for will have to be resolved through trial and error, through discussion and disagreement. But the need for the closing of the gap between “queer” and “worker” is clear, and the possibilities of LGBTQ organizing through a labor perspective are endless.