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

Reviewed by Ryan Reft

When George Chauncey published Gay New York in the early 1990s, it fundamentally shifted the historical field and, eventually, the public’s understanding of gay life at the turn of the twentieth century. Building on work by John D’Emilio and others, Chauncey demonstrated that rather than isolated, publicly fearful, urban denizens, as the then dominant narrative suggested, gay men and women were active participants in city life, building their own worlds through coded lexicon and dress as means of signaling to one another mutual interest or membership. Margot Canaday accomplished a similar achievement in her 2011 work The Straight State, in which she explored the various ways the federal government increasingly stigmatized and penalized homosexuality even as it expanded rights to women and non-whites and as state governments grew increasingly tolerant of LGBTQ rights.

Canaday’s findings engaged other fields of history; for example, Kim E. Nielsen cited The Straight State in her 2012 work, A Disability History of the United States, noting that the same bureaucratic measures that marginalized citizens for their sexuality functioned similarly for those with disabilities. “Similarly, the story of U.S. history told here suggests…that another means by which the modern bureaucratic state developed was through the definition and implementation of this definition, of disability.”[1]

Canaday’s latest contribution to the field, Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America, proves no less insightful and as crosscutting and, as she notes in the introduction, is in direct dialogue with The Straight State: “The first book is about the state discovering queer people and writing anti-homosexualism into the architecture of the law, while this book is about capital taking advantage of that aggressive state policing.”[2] With the rise of neoliberalism in the last quarter of the twentieth century, Canaday’s study of LGBTQ labor and its interaction with both the market and the state serves as a critical window into how gay, lesbian, and trans workers have fit into the neoliberal economic model that has run roughshod over the nation for the past several decades.

Where The Straight State covered the first half of the twentieth century, Queer Career covers its second half. Divided into three sections—“Gay Labor,” “Law and Liberation,” and “Civil Rights in a Neoliberal Age”—Queer Career, writes Canaday, attempts to provide “a persuasive historical account of gay workers across changing employment regimes in the postwar United States” with an emphasis on the high levels of precarity LGBTQ workers faced.[3] In addition to the use of archival sources, Canada conducted over 150 interviews of gay, lesbian, and trans workers, creating an incredibly rich archive from which to draw upon.

Though not an urban history by definition, and Canaday does include examples from rural areas, many, if not most, of the individuals and organizations featured in the book worked and/or were established and active in cities. As evidenced by historians Lillian Faderman, Nan Boyd, Daniel Hurewitz, the aforementioned Chauncey, and others, cities have long served as spaces for LGBTQ culture to develop and flourish. The Gay Nurses Association (Philadelphia), Boston’s Gay and Lesbian Labor Activists’ Network (GALLAN), and Diana Press, the Furies Collective, and Olivia Records, divided between Baltimore and Washington, DC, serve as just a few examples of this history.

One of Canaday’s strongest insights addresses the persecution of homosexuality of United States government employees during the mid-century Lavender Scare, documented perhaps most notably by Daniel K. Johnston, which though accurate for a significant portion of gay and lesbian workers in the federal government, Washington, DC, and some state governments, does not fully explain the trajectory of LGBTQ labor during this period.

While acknowledging the brutality of the Lavender Scare narrative, Canaday cautions readers against using it “as shorthand for this period,” because many employers also realized a fearful workforce was an exploitable one in which bargains abounded, since a gay or lesbian workers with superior talents and skills would acquiesce to a lower position or status in return for the promise of employment. Fear, argues Canaday, enabled employers to hire skilled workers for less pay and retain them.[4]

Those who wished to be out but also employed opted for what Canaday labels the “queer work world,” “stereotypically gay occupations as well as other casual, temporary, low-paid, low-status work, often in the service sector, where gay people clustered in part because they could be fairly open.” Predictably, it functioned as both refuge and cage.[5]

Canaday deftly weighs the varying landscapes facing gay men and lesbians; though similar, they remained far from identical due to gender and class issues. As Canaday notes, the Feminist Movement, for all its prickliness toward the LGBTQ community, proved incredibly influential for many lesbians in terms of how they related to each other, saw themselves as women, and how they approached class differences. While there is no shortage of examples pertaining to gay men and cross-class sexual interactions including fetishization, “only lesbians made a political project out of it,” observes Canaday.[6] Due to the dual whammy of embedded sexism and homophobia in the labor market, lesbians were among the poorer members of the LGBTQ community; thus, employment emerged as a political issue and project more generally due to the “centrality of economic structures to their own oppression.”[7]

As Fordism transitioned into the neoliberalism of the 1980s, the labor landscape changed further. If menial jobs in industry had facilitated the employment of gay men in earlier decades, during the 1970s the decline of unions, the rise of feminism, and the backlash from the largely male-dominated world of organized labor to both made life ever more difficult for gay men in these areas: “Gay men across racial lines thus began to disappear from blue-collar jobs.”[8]

During this same period, historian Jeffrey Escoffier argues LGBTQ politics remained a “mélange of sexual liberation, civil rights activism, alternative social activities, and feminist consciousness raising groups.”[9] Homophiles, such as Frank Kameny and Barbara Gittings, helped to open up the federal workforce to gay men and lesbians during the 1960s and 1970s; Gay Liberation furthered this effort but in more militant and arguably flamboyant fashion. Its impact on the community proved unsystematic and uneven, but pervasive, manifesting “in distinct ways in blue collar and white collar jobs for men and women, as well as by individual temperament.” Though for many of Gay Liberation’s most dedicated activists, unemployment was a frequent reality.[10] This was true for some homophiles as well. Kameny lived much of his life on the edge of poverty, a testament to the cost of activism. Regardless, Gay Liberation’s impact undermined the previous Fordist arrangement in which “employers tried not to see homosexuality among employees and those employees tried not to be seen.”[11]

The AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s devastated the community; however, amid the darkness there were faint silver linings. Though it amplified antigay politics, the crisis also forced a larger conversation about sexuality, moving the LGBTQ community into the center of national debates. Gay men and lesbians organized nonprofits to address the crisis and other burgeoning issues important to the community, which not only created a civic and political culture, drawing in individuals who otherwise might have avoided such engagement, but also created jobs for folks in the community.

Still, there were costs. As LGBTQ activist Urvashi Vaid noted, gay rights issues took a backseat to efforts to combat AIDS for a decade, so despite the intense political activism and increased visibility, few real gains in employment protections developed.[12] Though disability and AIDS activists skillfully collaborated to include the illness in the groundbreaking 1991 Americans with Disabilities Act, LGBTQ rights remained limited.

The inability and/or unwillingness of the state to address LGBTQ employment rights helps to explain how, as Canaday puts it, rights moved more through the market than “legal mandates.” The tech sector led the way on both coasts, at AT&T’s Bell Labs in New Jersey and Lotus in Silicon Valley. The former, the largest company in the nation at the time, recognized the gay employee resource group formed within its ranks well before any comparable corporation did the same; the latter became the first “large, highly visible, for profit company” to grant domestic benefits to same-sex partners.[13]

Of course, these “two axial movements” were driven by employees themselves, such as those who organized into groups like the Lesbian and Gay United Employees (LEAGUE) at AT&T, which branched out into thirty different chapters and over one thousand members nationally. Within five years of its founding, LEAGUE was if not the largest ERG in the nation, one of the largest.

In contrast, from its founding Lotus had been a place for “nontraditional” workers. While much of Silicon Valley’s leadership was white and male, the general environment at the time was “countercultural” and somewhat gender fluid. “Early computer programming was, for example, dominated by women,” points out Canaday, and “many of these companies…had a high tolerance for nonconformists.”[14] For example, Lotus, under the leadership of Janet Alexrod, eliminated dress codes and included sexuality in its nondiscrimination policy. In 1986 Lotus became the first company to fund an AIDS walk.

Such accomplishments took time and effort. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force had been issuing reports on employment, attempting to establish benchmarks for LGBTQ workers from which to judge their current employer and push for improvement. Internal employee groups advocated from the inside while organizations like the High Tech Gays operated on the outside, liaisoning with companies and meeting with local and federal politicians.

Paradoxically, the Reagan administration’s hostility to affirmative action coincided with the growth of the diversity industry, which framed diversity not as an “onerous legal requirement” but rather as a focus on “business efficiency and becoming an employer of choice.” The best businesses were those that could adapt to an increasingly diverse workforce.

The LGBTQ corporate alliance, as evidenced by Pride-themed months at your local Target and elsewhere, which seems so ubiquitous today, took over a decade to cultivate. On the left, critics argue that corporate “gay washing” benefits only the affluent in the LGBTQ community, undermines collective rights in favor of individual ones, obscures the damage that corporations have done otherwise, to say nothing of their troubled histories regarding sexuality, and perpetuates the myth that gay and lesbian couples live in affluence, when significant portions of the LGBTQ community struggle economically.

Canaday acknowledges these worries but also points out that “it’s hard to imagine marriage equality or the repeal of the military ban, for example, without the Fortune 500’s trumpeting of gay workplace rights for the proceeding several decades.” While admitting these achievements have been “patchwork” in nature and tend to favor well-off classes, Canaday sees these accomplishments less as “the privileged” securing said privilege and legitimizing neoliberalism, than folks doing the best they can, “exhausting every avenue open to them” on an uneven playing field.[15]

If the book has a weakness, it is probably related to the paucity of coverage given to trans individuals. Canaday did conduct interviews with several trans people but acknowledges that she was unable to gather enough material to draw many hard and fast conclusions. However, Canaday closes the book with a chapter on the surprising majority opinion of Justice Neil Gorsuch in Bostock v. Clayton County, though less from his perspective and more from that of the aggrieved.

While noting that trans legal fights have benefitted the LGBTQ community more broadly, Canaday also draws out the story of one of the three plaintiffs at the heart of the case, Aimee Australia Stephens. Stephens died from renal disease before the Bostock decision, which held that gay and transgender employees are protected against discrimination, was announced. And in several ways, Stephens’s story encapsulates the theme at the center of Queer Career. A skilled funeral director, she was fired from her job after transitioning. She took menial jobs that were far below her training and skills, in part because she was accepted in those workplaces. Her death during the legal proceedings challenging her dismissal echoed the fate of so many persons in the 1980s and 1990s afflicted with AIDS, who challenged their dismissals and firings but died before their day in proverbial and real court.

Stephens’s story abounds with tragedy, determination, and even hope, but it is one that cost life—metaphorical and real—in the process. We are not our work, but nor can our identity be divorced from our employment; it undoubtedly shapes us. It has shaped the LGBTQ community. In Queer Career, Margot Canaday endeavors to tell us how, and succeeds in delivering vital insights.

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Featured image (at top): High Tech Gays, a LGBTQ organization comprised of gay and lesbian workers in Silicon Valley’s tech sector worked toward equality in the workplace. Photo from booth at San Francisco Pride Parade, 1984. http://hightechgays.com/photos.

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[1] Kim E. Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States, (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012), xviii.

[2] Margot Canaday, Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023), 13.

[3] Canaday, Queer Career, 19.

[4] Canaday, Queer Career, 68-70.

[5] Canaday, Queer Career, 39, 76.

[6] Canaday, Queer Career, 164-165.

[7] Canaday, Queer Career, 164-165.

[8] Canaday, Queer Career, 158.

[9] Canaday, Queer Career, 149.

[10] Canaday, Queer Career, 153.

[11] Canaday, Queer Career, 230.

[12] Canaday, Queer Career, 225.

[13] Canaday, Queer Career, 229.

[14] Canaday, Queer Career, 252.

[15] Canaday, Queer Career, 262, 272.