Karen McLeod reflects on her time working as part of British Airways cabin crew
IMAGE PROVIDED BY PR
It is 1997 and I have just been awarded runner-up in The World’s First Lesbian Beauty Contest, held at London’s Café de Paris. I imagine this event will help me find a future in performance art. But like most young, working-class women, I must balance my dreams with a day job.
This same year I take a left turn and join British Airways as cabin crew (my mother’s idea). Restless, I am looking for adventure. What I don’t foresee is what happens on my first flight. Picture me: age 25, over six foot in heels and towering over the passengers. My long French bob is fastened by a hairband, and over this is the stipulated uniform scrunchie which I loathe. Hair is everything. It is how we know who the lesbians are, short hair means you are daring, possibly gay; long hair means you “pass” as straight, which is not cool.
It is three in the morning and my head is aching. At the back of the plane, I am in the crew rest area attempting sleep. Nicky, a senior crew member, is getting dressed, pulling up her tights. She wears matching underwear like a lingerie model. I’m in my sports bra and big knickers. Her underwear makes me feel uneasy, but I do not know why.
“I’m Nicky by the way,” she says. “Your first flight, isn’t it?”
I nod as she fastens her hair in a bun.
“Bet your boyfriend misses you?”
“Oh no. I’m gay,” I blurt out.
“Right,” she says, fastening her pearl earrings. “Look, between us, I wouldn’t go spreading it about. The other girls do not like it.”
I feel my stomach drop, as if the plane is in descent. Later, when alone, I pull my hair back fastening the scrunchie. Did that just happen? The shackle of the heterosexual scrunchie takes hold; the sky is not a free place for us lesbians.
In that moment, everything changed. I had been out before, and now I had been told to go back in.
Through writing my memoir, Lifting Off, I got to sit with these experiences and hold them up to the light. Since its publication in June, I have received several top reviews, but one less positive reviewer contests my experience, that there was a disparity between how gay men could be out when gay women could not.
So, when a stewardess, now retired and in her seventies, wrote to me describing her 24-year flying career, in the closet, all because of gossip and homophobic slights, I realised how much ignorance there was out there still. I have since had streams of messages in my inbox from other women who couldn’t just be themselves.
I know now why the scrunchie is so repellent. It represents a ruched life, pulled in, uniformed and gathered, a hetero imitation. A forced performance. Thank goodness I got to live.
Lifting Off by Karen McLeod is available to buy now (Muswell Press, £10.99)
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