Ryan Patrick Murphy – författare

2025 Foreword INDIES Finalist for HistoryIn the 1950s, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters empowered poor immigrants who had grown up in the crowded blocks of the central city to move upward and outward to comfortable suburbs. It delivered unprecedented benefits to workers—especially to those in retail, services, and light manufacturing—locking in hourly pay that bought the patio furniture sets, the pontoon boats, and the station wagons that defined the consumer culture of the decade. Yet suburban comfort came with strict, new institutions that defined the middle-class culture of the era: the nuclear family, heterosexual monogamy, the husband breadwinner, and the dependent wife. Many workers yearned for the pleasures they left behind in the core of the industrial city, even as poor people, people of color, and queer people were locked out of the suburbs.Teamsters Metropolis argues that the union achieved unprecedented organizing success in the immediate postwar period precisely because its members defied bourgeois cultural standards. They wore overly flamboyant clothes, instigated jarringly violent confrontations, used aliases, extorted money, flouted the law, and often blended friendship, sex, and love in a way that challenged the boundaries of heteronormativity. Perhaps no one exemplified this freedom more than Jimmy Hoffa, who delivered better pay and worker conditions to marginal workers while also using coercive tactics, embezzling money, and colluding with the Mafia. Rather than impeding the union’s growth, unruly organizing, illicit business techniques, and dissident cultural practices appealed to prospective members and offered an opportunity to circumvent some of the suburban regulations, helping the International Brotherhood of Teamsters become the largest U.S. union of the mid-twentieth century.

2025 Foreword INDIES Finalist for HistoryIn the 1950s, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters empowered poor immigrants who had grown up in the crowded blocks of the central city to move upward and outward to comfortable suburbs. It delivered unprecedented benefits to workers—especially to those in retail, services, and light manufacturing—locking in hourly pay that bought the patio furniture sets, the pontoon boats, and the station wagons that defined the consumer culture of the decade. Yet suburban comfort came with strict, new institutions that defined the middle-class culture of the era: the nuclear family, heterosexual monogamy, the husband breadwinner, and the dependent wife. Many workers yearned for the pleasures they left behind in the core of the industrial city, even as poor people, people of color, and queer people were locked out of the suburbs.Teamsters Metropolis argues that the union achieved unprecedented organizing success in the immediate postwar period precisely because its members defied bourgeois cultural standards. They wore overly flamboyant clothes, instigated jarringly violent confrontations, used aliases, extorted money, flouted the law, and often blended friendship, sex, and love in a way that challenged the boundaries of heteronormativity. Perhaps no one exemplified this freedom more than Jimmy Hoffa, who delivered better pay and worker conditions to marginal workers while also using coercive tactics, embezzling money, and colluding with the Mafia. Rather than impeding the union’s growth, unruly organizing, illicit business techniques, and dissident cultural practices appealed to prospective members and offered an opportunity to circumvent some of the suburban regulations, helping the International Brotherhood of Teamsters become the largest U.S. union of the mid-twentieth century.

In the 1950s, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters empowered poor immigrants who had grown up in the crowded blocks of the central city to move upward and outward to comfortable suburbs. It delivered unprecedented benefits to workers—especially to those in retail, services, and light manufacturing—locking in hourly pay that bought the patio furniture sets, the pontoon boats, and the station wagons that defined the consumer culture of the decade. Yet suburban comfort came with strict, new institutions that defined the middle-class culture of the era: the nuclear family, heterosexual monogamy, the husband breadwinner, and the dependent wife. Many workers yearned for the pleasures they left behind in the core of the industrial city, even as poor people, people of color, and queer people were locked out of the suburbs. Teamsters Metropolis argues that the union achieved unprecedented organizing success in the immediate postwar period precisely because its members defied bourgeois cultural standards. They wore overly flamboyant clothes, instigated jarringly violent confrontations, used aliases, extorted money, flouted the law, and often blended friendship, sex, and love in a way that challenged the boundaries of heteronormativity. Perhaps no one exemplified this freedom more than Jimmy Hoffa, who delivered better pay and worker conditions to marginal workers while also using coercive tactics, embezzling money, and colluding with the Mafia. Rather than impeding the union’s growth, unruly organizing, illicit business techniques, and dissident cultural practices appealed to prospective members and offered an opportunity to circumvent some of the suburban regulations, helping the International Brotherhood of Teamsters become the largest U.S. union of the mid-twentieth century.

In 1975, National Airlines was shut down for 127 days when flight attendants went on strike to protest long hours and low pay. Activists at National and many other U.S. airlines sought to win political power and material resources for people who live beyond the boundary of the traditional family. In Deregulating Desire, Ryan Patrick Murphy, a former flight attendant himself, chronicles the efforts of single women, unmarried parents, lesbians and gay men, as well as same-sex couples to make the airline industry a crucible for social change in the decades after 1970.Murphy situates the flight attendant union movement in the history of debates about family and work. Each chapter offers an economic and a cultural analysis to show how the workplace has been the primary venue to enact feminist and LGBTQ politics.From the political economic consequences of activism to the dynamics that facilitated the rise of what Murphy calls the “family values economy” to the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, Deregulating Desire emphasizes the enduring importance of social justice for flight attendants in the twenty-first century.