“For many girls,” she said, “this is all very exhilarating. When you’re busy kicking off the traces of East Jesus, Kansas, there’s something very exciting about all this. The sense of movement, you know, can be very stimulating. The idea that you are in New York in the morning and Chicago in the afternoon and Los Angeles at night and New Orleans the next day, and so on. And sexually there’s the same sense of movement. One night it’s an advertising man and the next night it’s a professional basketball player and the night after that it’s a businessman, each night a different man in a different city. A girl can get a tremendous sense of freedom this way. She’s not only free from home-town restrictions and parental supervision but she’s free from the limitation of any set situation. There’s the feeling that you never have the chance to go stale because your entire world changes every time that you get on that plane and meet new passengers and a new crew and head for a new scene, and that it changes the same way every time you get into bed with a new man.”
She enjoyed this excitement, this exhilaration, at first. But the enjoyment didn’t last.
“For a while it was very thrilling. I suppose I can understand the thrill a real nymphomaniac gets. One man after the other, and not even knowing their names. Not that I was having sex on anything like that kind of a scale, but I can extend the experience mentally and get some appreciation of what it must be like . . . and it was exciting, and there was a great sense of freedom. I would only accept a date if a man seemed interesting and appealing, and I wouldn’t invariably go to bed with him. Some girls absolutely take it for granted that they will sleep with anybody they date. They feel the man expects it—which is perfectly true, the bastards always take it for granted—and they also feel that, if they aren’t going to sleep with him, they shouldn’t accept the date in the first place. I always felt that a girl has a right to change her mind, and certainly there are times when a man will seem all right on a plane but will later turn out to be a total shit for one reason or another. I don’t think it’s right to force yourself to have sex with a man out of a sense of duty.
“But after a while, and here again this is what I would guess a nymphomaniac feels eventually, after a while there was just no pleasure in it at all, in this constant emotionless sex. And I couldn’t get past this tremendous sense that I was being used by all these men. That it was sort of an unpaid part of my job, that I was just continuing to service them as I did on the plane.”
In time, Shirl lost all respect for men. “Perhaps it was the setting, the way I met them all. Men really feel liberated the moment they step on a plane, you know. And the first thing that comes out is their sexual yearnings. What a hung-up collection of idiots they are! So many of them act as if they’re on stage. I wonder whether they’re showing off to the stews or to themselves or each other or what. The grabbers are the most obviously disgusting ones, but in a way the really smooth and suave fellows are every bit as bad. Even worse. The grabbers use their hands, and you find a way to put them down, and they keep their hands to themselves, and while they may be disgusting they never get to you. They touch you literally, but on a deeper level they don’t touch you at all. But the really nice guys who pitch you cleverly and wine you and dine you and talk oh so pleasantly to you, all so that they can get you in bed and give you a nice efficient screw and roll over and go to sleep. Oh, they’re the worst. They’re usually married, and they’re always scared you’ll fall in love with them and contemptuous of you if you do and twice as contemptuous of you if you don’t—because how could you be so sluttish as to go to bed with them if you don’t love them? You know, sooner or later they all look alike to you, they all sound the same, they all speak the same words. Sooner or later every man is just the same as all the men who have gone before him. Every penis is identical, an instrument for probing you and piercing you and leaving you without really touching you at all.”
“I found myself losing respect for myself,” she went on. “I think what bothered me the most was the way I was able to go on with this way of life without finding any joy in it. And the way I was going to bed with these men without taking any pleasure in it, and, worse than that, without liking them at all. There’s something pretty grim about that. I felt at times like a dreary dismal whore. And an unpaid one at that.”
How long had she been flying before she began to feel this way?
“That’s hard to say. It happened gradually, you know. I suppose you could say that by the end of the first year of flying I was a confirmed man-hater. I still dated from time to time, but I was beginning to turn down dates more often than not, and I was pretty sick of what went on when I did go out with a fellow.”
And was she aware of lesbian impulses at the time?
“Not at all. I was never really aware of the impulses as such. Everybody has homosexual impulses, you know, whether or not you ever give into them or even consider but most people go through life without ever being consciously aware of this.” She grinned impishly. “A girl takes a set early; she likes fellows, so how could she possibly like girls? Of course everyone on God’s earth is born bisexual. You take a baby and tickle between its legs, and it couldn’t care less whether the tickling is being done by a guy or a gal. All that a wee child knows is that it damn well feels good.
“It takes society, I think, to make people either heterosexual or homosexual. And most people, once they decide which they are, they aren’t inclined to question that decision.”
“That’s less true now than it once was.”
“The sexual revolution and all that? I suppose.”
“Beyond that, the whole stress placed upon sex and the increasing amount of writing and talk on the subject. The average person is apt to spend more time contemplating his own sexuality. And he’s more open to new ideas because he knows everybody else is in the same boat.”
She thought it over, nodded. “I guess so. Guess I’m just a child of my time. But as far as I was concerned, I didn’t figure it all out for myself that I was a lesbian. I got taught.”
“Another girl?”
“Uh-huh. Another stew, actually. I had a few blue moods over the years, oh, and I tried to tell myself that I had been seduced, which I suppose was literally true, and that this girl had corrupted me, which was a lot of crap, if you’ll pardon the expression. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was already pointing hard in that direction. I don’t know how long it would have taken for me to get there under my own power. You can never know about something like that, can you? But I don’t suspect it would have taken too long. I had the inclination.
“And I was sort of, oh, drawing away from men in general. I don’t mean sexually as much as emotionally. There were no men that I really talked to outside of the context of the job. Every man was another passenger, someone to be waited on, someone to be supplied with coffee, tea or milk. And at the same time I was drawing closer and closer to a variety of other girls. You really learn the meaning of friendship in this line of work. Stewardesses become close in about the same way as combat soldiers or any other isolated group, I would guess. We lead a life that is so utterly removed from the ordinary run of things, and we have so many stresses all our own. Other people have their own frames of reference. A home, a fixed point to which they can relate the rest of their lives. We aren’t like them and we don’t have anything comparable. We fly through the air, and it’s not always with the greatest of ease. Sometimes it’s pretty rough, and if you don’t have each other to lean on, it gets close to impossible.
“I had never really had friends before I became a stew. Not really. I was kind of off by myself as a kid, and by the time I did open up socially it was as a teenager and I was in a dating situation, so most of my rapport was with the boys I dated. I didn’t have a really close girlfriend all through high school.
“So this was a big change for me, and I really warmed to this sort of friendship. Looking back on it now I can see how my feelings toward certain girls were sexual in nature although I
didn’t realize it at the time.
“For example, I had this one girlfriend whom I would frequently room with on layovers because we often wound up working the same flight. A very sweet, loving girl from Minnesota, a Finnish girl, tall and absolutely gorgeous. She went back home about a year ago and married some husky farmer and gets up every morning to milk the cows, if you can believe it. I’m not sure I can myself. I was invited to the wedding, which was sweet of her. I didn’t go.
“Anyway, Cara was a really sexy kid. She had been holding out on the Minnesota farmer, but when she got her wings she really cut loose and let herself fly. She went out with passengers almost every night, and always went to bed with them, and as often as not she would get involved in some pretty far-out orgy scenes. A couple of times she got taken to nude parties and got herself laid by half a dozen men in the course of the evening, and got into some threesomes and things like that.
“This wasn’t unusual in itself. Face it, a lot of stews get into a lot of crazy scenes. We’re attractive and we’re liberated and men like us. But the unusual thing with Cara is that she liked to talk about it. I think she got as much of a kick out of coming back to the hotel room and telling me about it as she did in doing it.
“I know that I got more of a kick from the talk than the actual sex. We would lie there in our beds and tell each other stories about what we had done and what the men were like and how we enjoyed it, everything. There were times when I would be out with a man and I would go to bed with him and it would be a big nothing for me as far as I was concerned. And I would let my mind wander, the way you’ll do when sex isn’t working out as well as it might, and I would imagine myself back at the room telling Cara all about it.
“The thought of that would actually get me going. I would concentrate on that during the actual sex itself, and the thought would be more exciting than what we were doing in bed. You would think it would be the other way around, wouldn’t you? You would think that talking about it would be exciting because it would bring back the mood of the original act. Here I was reversing this completely, which I suppose is about the same as imagining that you are masturbating while you’re having intercourse.”
“Some people do that.”
“They do?” She shook her head. “Well, I can believe it. I can believe almost anything where sex is concerned . . .
“With Cara, I’ve thought recently that maybe she was just waiting for me to make a pass at her. If she was involved in all those orgies she must have had some experience with women. I’ve never been to those parties myself, but from what I hear every other woman at those things is bisexual and knows it, and the rest of them go along with it for the hell of it, and some nights there’s more girl-girl stuff going on than anything else. So it stands to reason that Cara had had a girl’s face between her legs somewhere along the way, and that she wouldn’t have minded getting something like that going with me.
“But she never mentioned it. Maybe she was worried that it wasn’t my scene, which it wasn’t at the time, at least as far as I knew. Maybe she was afraid of offending me. Maybe she was in the same boat as I was, ready for the gay scene but unaware of the fact. If that’s the case, I don’t suppose she’ll ever learn now. Not up in Minnesota with all those cows.”
• • •
JWW: You say your first homosexual experience was with another stewardess?
SHIRL: That’s right. The odd thing, or at least I’ve always thought of it that way, is that it was with a girl I didn’t know too well at the time. If Cara and I had worked ourselves into an affair, or into a little experimentation, that would have seemed natural enough. But I barely knew Margot at all, and it all happened in what the tabloids would call one torrid night. Shall I tell you about it?
JWW: Sure.
SHIRL: Well, let’s see. How to begin? It started with a perfectly terrible flight, for openers. I was on a New York-Milwaukee non-stop. It was I think January and the weather was purely awful. We got off all right in New York—we flew out of JFK—and then everything began going wrong. We lost one engine almost immediately. Now this isn’t as dangerous as it sounds, but just to make things that much more pleasant one of the shithead passengers in the first-class cabin happened to notice the engine was out, and instead of keeping it to himself like a good little boy he had to spread the word around. So we had a nice little silent panic scene; nobody said anything because no one wanted to look like a sissy, but the entire first-class section wore a look of collective terror.
Then we hit bad air all the way over the Great Lakes. If you’re going to fly into bad weather that’s a logical place to do it, but at the time I was personally convinced that the pilot was doing it on purpose. Every once in a blue moon some pilot gets a hair up his ass and bounces the plane through air pockets just for the hell of it. Rough air doesn’t much bother them because they’re used to it and because they can anticipate the bumps. But it’s hell on a stew. We’re walking around serving drinks and dinner, not strapped into a nice comfortable seat. If a pilot has a gripe against a stew, the simplest way for him to settle it is to pop the plane into an air pocket and let her wipe her face off the ceiling. This pilot and I weren’t as close as we might have been, and I was certain he was being cute with the plane.
There were other things. just take it as gospel that it was a terrible flight. The capper was that we couldn’t get down at Milwaukee. There was thick fog really socked in at Mitchell Field and we circled for a full hour waiting for a chance to get in. The pilot would rake the plane down looking for an opening and then control would wave him off and up we would go again. Passengers vomiting right and left, other passengers pulling out rosary beads and praying their heads off—oh, you can imagine the rest. It was grim. After a full hour of this we gave it up as a bad job and went south to O’Hare and made a choppy landing there and packed the poor passengers on a bus to Milwaukee. And throughout all of this I had had this one persistent pain in the ass trying to get a date with me, and handing me a line, and letting his hands wander whenever I got near him, and, oh, it was charming.
JWW: You didn’t date him, I don’t suppose.
SHIRL: God, no. I shipped him off to Milwaukee and then tried to find a place for myself. We were all going to stay over in Chicago, but the problem was finding a place to stay. The inn at the airport was where we normally put up in Chicago but they were filled that night, for a change. The management sifted us in with various other airlines personnel, which was how I wound up rooming with Margot.
I had met her, oh, maybe three or four times before. She wasn’t a beautiful girl by any means. There was something a little too solid about the set of her face and the way she carried her body. She flew for one of the more successful trunk lines and she had been in the air for a long time. I guess she must have been about thirty at the time. Dark hair, dark complexion, very penetrating eyes . . .
It was pouring in Chicago, so neither of us wanted to go anywhere. We had dinner in the dining room of the inn. She was a perfect listener, and I tucked a couple of drinks under my belt and started talking. I had plenty to talk about, just from that one flight alone. If you can get bad experiences like that out of your system then it’s no strain to go up again the next day. It’s the kids who keep it all inside and never let it out that panic one day and find themselves physically incapable of boarding the plane. But when you learn to let it out before it can build up, then you’re all right.
So I got going, and she kept me talking and fed me more drinks, and by the time we got back to her room—our room—I was feeling the drinks and also feeling very damned close to Margot. Nothing sexual yet, or if there was I wasn’t aware of it. Just an emotional closeness. Also I remember that I respected her enormously. She was quite a bit older than I was and she seemed so poised, so self-possessed, as if she had caught on to some secret of life that was still out of my grasp.
In the room I kept up my talking jag, only now I wasn’t talking about the flight or flights in general
but about men and sex and the whole wretched mess that it was.
This must have been what made up Margot’s mind for her, this along with the actual circumstances, which did make it easy for her. But from what I know of her—and I still don’t know very much about her, as it happens—she doesn’t make a practice of seduction. If she did, she wouldn’t still be a stewardess. You can be gay and go on flying, but if you let too many people know about it you’re going to get your wings cropped. And if you make passes at girls who aren’t interested, that’s all, sister.
JWW: So you feel that you invited a pass?
SHIRL: There’s really no question about it. I made it pretty clear to Margot that I had the potential, that I was gay as a jay and was waiting for someone to bring me out. And even if this hadn’t been the case, the sleeping arrangements and my own conversational fix reinforced all of this. Margot had been originally scheduled to occupy the room as a single, and instead of twins there was a double bed for the two of us to share. And meanwhile I was stretched out on the bed in my bra and panties babbling about what this man had wanted to do to me and what I had done with this one and so on, the usual sort of sex talk that I had been having off and on with Cara.
Then Margot got undressed, not stripping down to her underwear but all the way. And I went on talking like a ninny. And she was on the bed, and she offered to help me off with my bra, so I rolled over with my back to her and she unfastened it, and I rolled back and she drew it off, and then I squirmed out of my panties, and I finished another boring anecdote, and this time she didn’t say anything at all.
Sex and the Stewardess (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior) Page 5