Margot Canaday, Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023)

Margot Canaday’s award-winning Queer Career follows her book The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America. Where Straight State focused on bureaucracy, Queer Career engages “with a more human side of the practice of history.” (15) The human appeal comes from the 156 oral histories that accompany archival research on gay, lesbian, and trans workers in the post-World War II period through to the early 1990s. Much of the book is deeply moving, and this includes Canaday’s personal work history as told in the introduction. The oral histories provide beautifully suggestive insights into individual lives. “I was a typist, and I wanted to type!” one interviewee emphatically declared (19, emphasis in the original). This voice – in its joyful orality – is from an African American man whose declaration turned Canaday’s attention to low paid work. Despite her early research qualms about not being able to find sources, Canaday amassed a brilliant archive to demonstrate the long history of queer working lives and queer work. She compellingly argues that the precarity and vulnerability of queer workers in the long postwar period anticipated the current gig economy. In the introduction, Canaday emphasizes that her argument on precarity is nuanced. She writes, “queer people were among the first precarious workers across the class spectrum. (12, emphasis in the original). In bringing together the history of sexuality and the history of capitalism, Canaday explores the working lives of queer people in public and private sectors across corporations, law offices, hospitals, universities, and factories.

Canaday expands the discussions of queer work beyond the public sector purges of the so-called Lavender Scare and into the broader range of working lives. Although she addresses the purges and activism to end them, they are not the full story of work. She finds patterns and systems of exceptions drawing out the complex work worlds queer people navigated using everything from personal appearance to the law. Canaday finds evidence of a public secret of queerness at work, of tolerance accompanying silence, and of a “queer work world.” In workplaces that valued secrecy and silence, Canaday finds gay workers were valued because of the very precarity and vulnerability the closet engendered. Queer employees could be more readily exploited by being transferred across country or expected to put in longer hours because of their presumed lack of close, personal relationships. Canaday describes this phenomenon as “the bargain” wherein employers ignored knowledge of queer employees’ identities and in turn, employees were selected upon and expected to act straight for a measure of security or the possibility of advancement. Gay and lesbian members of the workforce could also be underpaid based on the erroneous idea that they did not have families to support. Heterosexual men earned a family wage, but queer folk, like women, were discount labour. Lesbian career women were expected to act and dress in particular ways and as “career woman” became code for lesbian, employers benefitted from their ambition. Fear, insecurity, and lack of opportunities for promotion shaped queer working lives, but so too did knowledge of how to manage and navigate straight working worlds. In a chapter on the “queer work world,” Canaday describes the self-employed and those in “queer occupations,” who brokered openness about their sexuality against job security or better wages. While what constitutes a “queer occupation” or “a queer work world” remains somewhat loosely defined, the book describes service occupations like hairdressers as well as factory work where men and women could be generally open about their sexuality at work.

A chapter in Queer Career carefully examines the activism of Frank Kameny, an astronomer dismissed from the federal government’s Army Map Service for “sexual perversion” in 1956. Kameny refused to go silently into lower paying, more precarious work. Helping to form the Mattachine Society of Washington in 1961, Kameny fought the Civil Service Commission and the withholding of security clearances though the courts and using other means. His support of other men got positive results but came at considerable personal cost. At times he starved, Canaday notes more than once. This chapter on federal employment leads to another on liberation and work in the 1970s. Despite the continuing stigma, liberation entered workforces and influenced individuals who refused to live separate lives at work. Canaday also charts the rise of professional organizations and businesses like the Gay Nurses Association and Diana Press. The opportunities for advancement and change were not universal and Canaday demonstrates how the openness of blue-collar work diminished in the period. In part, this change reflected a growing backlash against progressive movements like gay liberation, but also civil rights and feminism.

Two final chapters of the book discuss the aids crises at work and corporate work in the 1980s and 1990s, respectively. In the 1980s, a greater intensity regarding “the bargain,” with expectations of silence and vulnerability, and an accompanying hostility shifted workplace dynamics. Employees paid for medical treatment, rather than claim it through insurance to hide diagnoses; employers fired employees on the flimsiest of suspicions; stigma blunted legal claims. The eclectic examples in the chapter cover a breadth of workplaces. A few corporations, worried in part about productivity as workers in their prime of life died sought to make incremental change through education on transmission and risk. In San Francisco, the development of a dedicated aids ward in the early 1980s provides a unique example to explore nursing. Across the country aids provided work for lawyers willing to take cases, shored up fledgling gay and lesbian firms and bolstered legal advocacy groups. The final chapter addresses the significant role “the corporate grass roots” played in advancing gay workplace rights, especially in tech companies. Legal protections for queer workers were slow in advancing and piecemeal. Employees and corporations, at times, filled the breach.

With impeccable research and writing, Canaday’s book humanely renders the varied stories of queer folk’s working lives into a wider history of capitalism and activism to change workplaces.

Jane Nicholas

St. Jerome’s University in the

University of Waterloo

DOI: https://doi.org/10.52975/llt.2024v94.0012.