Gays on a plane: two guys in love snuggle in their seats. A flight attendant reprimands them. An ugly incident ensues. Dreading this kind of embarrassment, many of us "cover"--hide our love in public. But if we're hiding, how can we make progress?

We all have a breaking point. One American Airlines purser found hers on August 22 on Flight 45 from Paris to New York City. I imagine it was like Snakes on a Plane. Only it wasn't snakes; it was gays. I envision her paraphrasing Samuel L. Jackson's character: "Enough is enough. I have had it with these motherfucking gays on this motherfucking plane."

The gays in question were a couple--TV journalist George Tsikhiseli and writer Stephan Varnier. They had been together for only four months, so they were still in a doting mood. Shortly after takeoff, Varnier nodded off with his head on Tsikhiseli's shoulder. A flight attendant came over and told them the purser wanted them to "stop that." Varnier didn't know what she was talking about. The flight attendant specified that they should stop "the touching and the kissing," and she walked away.

The couple hailed the purser. To their surprise, she said she had made no such demand. She asked them to point out the flight attendant, whom a passenger seated behind them described to the purser as having "Texas hair, like from the 1960s." According to David Leisner, a man seated behind the couple, the purser rolled her eyes and said, "Oh, say no more. I know." After listening to a description of what they had been doing, she agreed that their behavior had not been out of order.

Tsikhiseli then asked if the flight attendant would have hassled them if they had been a straight couple. The purser, they say, "became very rigid" and opined that "kissing is inappropriate behavior on an airplane." She left them to take care of other passengers. When she returned half an hour later, she said other passengers had been complaining about their behavior. [For a statement from American Airlines, see page 45.] Though pressed by the gay couple, the purser refused to identify the passengers, name the flight attendant, or arrange for an American Airlines representative to meet them when they landed. She then said that if they did not settle down, the flight would be diverted. Half an hour later, the captain reaffirmed to Tsikhiseli that he would indeed divert the plane if they did not drop the matter.

When asked to comment, an American Airlines representative defended all three employees: "Our passengers need to recognize that they are in an environment with all ages, backgrounds, creeds, and races. We have an obligation to make as many of them feel as comfortable as possible." He also elaborated that the airline's "understanding is that the level of affection was more than a quick peck on the cheek." But as Leisner clarified in an update posted on the Internet: "You can assure anyone that questions the degree of affection these guys were showing that it was very innocent--hand-holding, resting one's head on the other's shoulder, and repeated kissing (but not French kissing)."

I first encountered this story in The New Yorker's Talk of the Town, a section to which I repeatedly turn for consolation after confirming that I have once again failed to win the Cartoon Caption Contest. I found the story oddly riveting. A spin through the blogosphere showed I was not alone. Why was the incident so compelling to so many? I came up with three answers.

First, the gays on the plane expected equal treatment. When Varnier was woken from his happy slumber on his boyfriend's shoulder and told to "stop that," he didn't know what "that" meant. Before that rude awakening, he didn't think of his "kissing" and "touching" as extraordinary. It was less like a gay kiss-in than a 1980s straight honeymoon.

The right to canoodle is not in the Constitution. The couple's assumption that they had that right, however, marks a milestone in gay rights. When I teach gay history to my students I tell it as a history of weakening demands for conformity to straight norms--the demand to convert, the demand to pass, and the demand to cover. Through the middle decades of the 20th century gays were routinely pressured to convert to heterosexuality, whether through psychoanalysis, electroshock therapy, lobotomies, or even castration. After the rise of the gay rights movement the demand to convert shifted in emphasis toward the demand to pass-we were told that we would not be witch-hunted out of our closets so long as we spent our entire lives in them. And at the turn of the millennium the demand to pass is shifting toward the "demand to cover"--sociologist Erving Goffman's phrase for how people experience pressure to downplay known stigmatized traits, even after we reveal them. Gays are increasingly told that we can be openly gay so long as we don't "flaunt" our sexual orientation by being too "flamboyant," too "militant," or, as in this case, too "public" in our displays of affection for each other.

My students ask what comes after the demand to cover. My answer is full equality. Such liberation would mean that gays would be entitled to engage in any activity straights currently engage in, whether that is a one-day Britney Spears-type marriage or a lifelong commitment to an adopted child. What's so heartening about Tsikhiseli and Varnier is that they assumed that in some rarefied climes like the airspace between De Gaulle and JFK--such equality has already been achieved.

I find this inspiring because I'm still careful to a fault about public displays of same-sex affection. A moment that has made my personal hall of shame occurred a decade ago when I accompanied my then-boyfriend to the hospital. He was getting a diagnosis that could have been serious. After we sat down, Paul's right leg started going like a jackhammer, and he instinctively reached for my hand. The waiting room was crowded. I brushed his hand away.

At the time I rationalized that I just didn't believe in public displays of affection. That was a lie. I would of course have held his hand had he been a woman. But because we were both men, I was afraid. I was afraid the eyes of strangers on our hands would not be neutral. I was afraid that, crazed as we were by anxiety, we would get pushed over the edge by some hateful remark. And I was afraid of the perennial threat of violence that hangs over our community.

In the intervening decade the movement and I have grown stronger. But I still don't know if I would have the chutzpah to fall asleep on another man's shoulder on a plane. The closest I've come is holding a man's hand for comfort while flying through some serious turbulence. Without a word passing between us, we draped a blanket over our interlaced fingers. Even then, I wondered from whom we were hiding. The woman vomiting into a bag across the aisle? The handsome steward who checked us out and gave us free cocktails? But the blanket stayed put.

The second interesting dimension of the American Airlines story is that gay people who cover out of fear of reprisal are not being paranoid, even in ostensibly gay-friendly spaces. The flight attendant's response is the most predictable. There's probably some projection involved in the couple's description of her as having "Texas hair, like from the 1960s." The enemy is supposed to look like this. The reference to 1960s hair suggests that the brain underneath it was also stuck in that homophobic era. And the reference to Texas conjures not just a state but a state of mind. The Lone Star State not only criminalized same-sex sodomy until the U.S. Supreme Court declared that prohibition unconstitutional in 2003 but also barred individuals convicted of sodomy from certain professions. (When I learned that people convicted of same-sex sodomy in Texas were prohibited from becoming interior designers, I felt I finally understood how Texas interiors came to be.) But kidding aside, this is why I don't kiss on planes. There's always at least one homophobe on board, whether she looks like one or not.

The truly interesting person in this story, however, is not the flight attendant but the purser. The purser starts out as a sympathetic character, complete with a conspiratorial eye-roll about her benighted employee and a blanket affirmation of the couple's activity. But when Tsikhiseli asks whether the flight attendant would have treated a straight couple in the same way, she stiffens and snaps. One can almost hear her corporate training take over: "The moment a passenger alleges discriminatory treatment, the company is in a litigation posture. Exactly the right words must come out of your mouth. You must make explicit that a person in the dominant group would have been treated in the identical manner. If the passenger persists in pressing the claim, you must cast him as the troublemaker."

What makes this Dr. Jekyll--and--Mr. Hyde performance so fascinating is that you can see that the purser, like the main character of Robert Louis Stevenson's novel, is herself trapped. Ironically, the triumphs of the gay rights movement mean that corporations that are otherwise gay-friendly (as American Airlines is) have incentives to flip into monster mode when accused of discrimination. If the purser had continued to agree with the Tsikhiseli, American Airlines would have been more vulnerable in court. Much safer, then, for the purser to engage in stout denial.

One wonders, though, whether she (and the captain) didn't overreact in threatening to divert the plane. Don't get me wrong; I agree that diverting a plane is an appropriate response to terrorists, hijackers, or time-release crates filled with venomous snakes that a vengeful mobster has put in the cargo hold. But I wonder if it's the best response to passengers who want to confront a flight attendant who has accused them of inappropriate behavior. Enquiring minds also want to know the location to which frisky gays get diverted. Is it Lesbos?

This brings me to my third and final observation about why this story seizes our imagination: It occurs on a plane. It struck me that the history of civil rights has been a history of trains, planes, and automobiles. "Separate but equal" litigation began when the light-skinned "octoroon" Homer Plessy was kicked out of a whites-only railway car. Rosa Parks sparked a revolution by refusing to go to the back of a bus. And these two men made national news when they kissed on a plane.

It makes sense. All of these venues are relatively enclosed spaces occupied for a relatively long period of time by a relatively diverse cross-section of society. (Remember that the airline's defense was that the plane had people of "all ages, backgrounds, creeds, and races" who needed to be kept "as comfortable as possible.") If a neighborhood is saturated with kissing gays, homophobes can avoid it. If a restaurant is similarly overtaken, homophobes can order in. But most Americans cannot entirely avoid travel on trains, buses, and planes. No surprise, then, that this is where we fight out the culture wars.

It's as good a place as any to start. American Airlines would never back a flight attendant who told a Jewish passenger to take off a yarmulke because the plane contained people of "all ages, backgrounds, creeds, and races" who needed to be kept comfortable in their anti-Semitism. If the airline is committed--as it says it is--to gay equality, it should not pander to homophobes. In fact, it's well settled in civil rights law that a corporation cannot rely on the bigotry of clients to justify its own discriminatory practices.

At this year's MTV Movie Awards, Samuel L. Jackson made the crowds go wild when he said: "No movie shall triumph over Snakes on a Plane. Unless I happen to feel like making a movie called More Motherfucking Snakes on More Motherfucking Planes."

While I'm not sure we need to bring mothers into it, I do think gays have achieved the same aura of triumph. We now have too many ordinary heroes who, like Tsikhiseli and Varnier, are willing to show open love in closed spaces. Americans--and America--will soon be forced to acknowledge that it is not gay behavior, but antigay attitudes, that need to be adjusted. When that happens, gays will finally find themselves alongside straights on the plane of full equality.

THE ADVOCATE Poll Do you "cover"--refrain from showing affection for your partner--when you're traveling or out in public together?

Photographed by Steven Lam