Airline Gossip, Travel Scandals and the Mile High Club: Inside Skyjack Magazine Issue 5

BY MARK CHESNUT

There are times in every editor’s career when a publication causes a bit of turbulence. Issue 5 of Skyjack Magazine is a perfect example.

I’m continuing my digital excavation of Skyjack, the LGBTQ+ airline fanzine I founded and managed from 1993 to 1997, by sharing the complete PDF of Issue 5. This one was a noteworthy for one reason in particular: It was, hands down, the most controversial issue we ever published. It attracted plenty of attention and new subscribers — but it also prompted a couple of subscribers to cancel because they found the subject matter a bit too provocative.

Apparently, even some readers of “the magazine for gay people who fly” had a cruising altitude they preferred not to exceed.

Today, those pages have acquired a different kind of significance. The complete Skyjack archive is now part of the permanent collection of Seattle’s Museum of Flight, the world’s largest independent aviation museum. That’s gratifying because Skyjack documented aspects of airline culture that traditional aviation publications generally ignored: LGBTQ+ employees, queer travelers, workplace discrimination, AIDS, pop culture, sexuality and the wonderfully obsessive subculture of people who find airplanes and airports just as interesting as their final destinations.

My first Skyjack retrospective explained how the magazine began as a DIY labor of love assembled with early desktop publishing, Xerox machines and staplers; by Issue 2, the mix had expanded to include RuPaul, airline history, queer travel and increasingly ambitious cultural reporting. Issue 5 demonstrates just how far that editorial experiment could travel.

And possibly why some passengers decided to disembark.

The cover story, “Cruising at 30,000 Feet,” dives headfirst into a subject that mainstream airline magazines were unlikely to touch: sex on airplanes.

Yes, I took the risky step of investigating the legendary Mile High Club, complete with a chart that details everything from “lavatory lust” and “in-seat iniquity” to cabin crew encounters, concourse cruising and the allure of hunky baggage handlers (wait near the baggage claim and say, “treat me like a Samsonite,” the chart recommends).

This issue was cheeky, deliberately provocative and perhaps a bit much for those two subscribers. But it also reflected something fundamental about Skyjack: We understood that travel isn’t merely transportation. Airports and airplanes are social spaces filled with fantasy, anonymity, possibility and sometimes very human behavior.

Three decades later, that approach also underscores the importance of understanding audiences. Throughout its run, Skyjack spoke simultaneously to aviation enthusiasts, airline employees, LGBTQ+ travelers and people who simply enjoyed watching social conventions and pop culture collide at 35,000 feet.

The “Ionosphere” news section on page 3 provides another type of fascinating time capsule.

One item reports on Virgin Atlantic Airways’ support of the queer press, the incorporation of the National Gay Pilots Association and the growth of the Travel Industry Alliance, an organization that raised funds for AIDSWalk New York — and included members of an American Airlines non-profit group that received fundraising support from Skyjack Magazine’s annual Turbulence event.

Issue 5 continues its fixation on human behavior with “Flying High,” a report by Jay Blotcher that profiles a single gay male flight attendant and his experiences mixing business and pleasure — a personal look at a profession long surrounded by stereotypes. Another piece, “Caught in the Act,” follows a flight attendant who discovers passengers doing exactly what the headline suggests.

For readers seeking something slightly less likely to get the magazine confiscated by a parent, “Fear of Falling…Apart” is a more reflective short story by award-winning writer Lawrence Schimel. And our recurring “More Movies the Airlines Won’t Show You” column tackles the 1986 thriller Night Flight, proving once again that aviation cinema becomes infinitely more entertaining when aircraft are treated as enclosed metal tubes into which filmmakers can insert sex, murder, panic or all three.

Every issue of Skyjack proves that we weren’t trying to be everything to everyone. Skyjack covered airlines through a queer lens with pop culture sensibility, at a moment when few publications were doing anything remotely similar, mixing serious industry issues with sex, humor, nostalgia and unapologetic aviation geekery.

So yes, Issue 5 lost us a couple subscribers.

But more than 30 years later, Skyjack Magazine also landed in a museum.

I’ll take that trade.

Read the complete PDF of Issue 5 here. 

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ABOUT MARK CHESNUT

Mark Chesnut is a New York City-based journalist, editor, travel industry consultant and public speaker with more than 30 years of experience. The winner of the 2019 NLGJA Excellence in Travel Writing Award, Mark is the author of the book Prepare for Departure. Follow him on Instagram!