Rare 1st Issue of SKYJACK — the 1990s Queer Air Travel Zine — Finally Re-Released

BY MARK CHESNUT

A piece of LGBTQ+ air travel history is now online for the first time. After more than three decades, the first issue of Skyjack Magazine — a queer air travel zine that I created in the 1990s — is fully scanned and ready for you to explore.

Why did I spend countless hours building a fanzine with a queer take on the world of airlines? Well, if you’ve known me for more than five minutes, you may be aware that I’m a lifelong airline geek. I was the kid who decorated his bedroom like an airport departure gate. I was the kid who begged his mother to drive him to the airport just to watch planes and people (and sometimes steal airline signage; but that’s another story — and I’ve written about it in my memoir, Prepare for Departure: Notes on a Single Mother, Misfit Son, Inevitable Mortality and the Enduring Allure of Frequent Flyer Miles).

By the early 1990s, I was working as an editor and writer, although I wasn’t yet a travel writer. But I didn’t let that stop me. Inspired by a desktop-publishing course, I combined my air travel obsession with my interest in queer culture and activism. The result: Skyjack Magazine, “the fanzine for gay people who fly.”

For five years, from 1993 to 1997, Skyjack celebrated the magical, maddening and sometimes messy intersection of air travel, life and pop culture. At the beginning, I wrote most of the articles, did the layout, drew the art, and after work I’d stand at a Xerox machine, making copies and stapling them together by hand. But I slowly gathered an array of interesting people to contribute as writers — flight attendants, travel experts, artists and even a gay pilot who shared his stories about the challenges he and his colleagues faced.

Skyjack Magazine sold for $3 a pop, and was available at airline memorabilia collector shows, indie bookstores and through a scrappy little mail-order subscription list that topped out at a few hundred readers. Our audience grew to become an interesting mix of LGBTQ+ frequent flyers, airline enthusiasts and travel industry professionals — airline employees, travel agents and others.

We attracted enough attention, in fact, that a small publishing company in New York City decided to buy Skyjack from me and then retain me as the editor in chief; when that company went under (no fault of Skyjack, I assure you!) I negotiated to take the rights back for the fanzine and relaunched it as a team effort with a new publisher and advertising sales manager. We may not have been a circulation powerhouse, but we were having fun — and addressing topics that other media outlets ignored.

Now, for the first time ever, I’m sharing the very first issue in full — just click the PDF link in this post to start your journey to the world of 1990s queer air travel in all its glory.

Skyjack was equal parts pop-culture tribute and airline industry gossip rag, with a bit of queer travel guide thrown in. Think of it as a love letter to aviation with a sly wink. Each issue was jam packed with a variety of articles — covering everything from airline travel news to critiques of airline uniforms, tips for meeting people in airports and reports on discrimination faced by LGBTQ+ employees in the industry. It was my “labor of love” — and it now serves as a simultaneously glossy and gritty time capsule of 1990s airline culture and LGBTQ+ involvement in the airline industry.

My friend and fellow writer Alex Martis recently wrote a fantastic paper about Skyjack that reminded me just how unique it really was: we published columns by pilots and flight attendants about their own lives, ran tongue-in-cheek features about the best and worst airline meals, and — through our annual fundraising event, which we called Turbulence — we even raised thousands of dollars for nonprofit organizations that served airline employees with AIDS and other serious illnesses. Not bad for a zine that started life on a copy machine.

Since this is the digital debut of Issue 1, allow me tease you with a few highlights. This premiere edition kicked off with a roundup of airline movies (remember Airport ’77?), plus a cheeky humor piece, “Secret Confessions of Gay Airline Enthusiasts.” Also included: a tribute to the final days of Eastern Airlines and an in-depth report on the progress of LGBTQ+ people working in the airline industry.

Future issues explore a range of other topics, including the depiction of air travel in sitcoms, the life of a gay pilot and a guide to the ins and outs of the “mile high club.” I’ll be uploading more issues soon.

Honestly, I’ve been sitting on these issues for years, thinking they were just fun artifacts from my own past. But as Alex’s report reminded me, Skyjack captured something that deserves to be preserved: a mix of queer history, travel history and DIY publishing culture, long before the existence of blogs, online gay travel and LGBTQ+ travel guides. Skyjack Magazine was a snapshot of a time when LGBTQ+ airline employees were still fighting for benefits, when most airlines didn’t even acknowledge Pride, and when our community used humor and creativity to carve out a space in the skies — even if it was just on 8½ x 11 Xerox paper.

So here it is: Skyjack Issue 1, ready for its digital maiden flight. Click the PDF link, dive in, and enjoy a heaping dose of 1990s nostalgia and queer aviation history. Whether you’re a travel pro, a fellow aviation nerd or just here for the quirky stories, you may find something of interest in these pages.

Fasten your seat belt — we’re cleared for takeoff.