Seeking a Queerer Queer Career

Margot Canaday's Queer Career is an important book that will no doubt inspire new works and threads for scholars to pursue. It's also a massive undertaking. With it, Canaday seeks to reinvigorate the field of LGBTQ history with that of capitalism and work. She follows many of the inclinations long since in the field, including several highlighted in John D'Emilio's seminal work, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” originally published in 1983 but delivered as a lecture as early as 1979. In this way, the book's connective tissue has been many decades in the making. Take the Combahee River Collective, a Black womanist and lesbian organization based out of Boston. Its 1977 statement, which powerfully addressed concepts of intersectionality before the term had been formally coined, argued: “A combined anti-racist and anti-sexist position drew us together initially, and as we developed politically we addressed ourselves to heterosexism and economic oppression under capitalism.”1Indeed, Canaday's Queer Career builds on decades of work by academics, those involved in the labor movement and unions, and people who were either professional activists or who became activists by default simply by virtue of existing and demanding that they be treated with dignity and respect. Queer Career also complements Canaday's monumentally influential first book, The Straight State. That work showed how—through the bureaucracies of welfare, immigration, and the military—the state defined “homosexuals” as second-class citizens.2 In Queer Career, Canaday demonstrates how capital has taken advantage of the very policies and structures of surveillance and policing that led to that second-class citizenship.Canaday accomplishes several key things with this work. She seeks to offer a long-view narrative of the LGBTQ experience in the workplace, roughly from the end of World War II to about the early 2000s. The epilogue delineates the importance of the 2020 US Supreme Court decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, which ruled that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act protected employees against discrimination because they are gay or transgender. She sees that as the culmination of the decades-old battle she details in the new book. For Canaday, the experience of LGBTQ people in the workplace is one of constant precarity and vulnerability. It is part of what Canaday refers to as “the bargain.” That is, for some employers and managers, lesbians and gays (or, presumably, also those suspected of being lesbian and gay) were sometimes an even more desirable labor force because of their well-known vulnerability and marginalization. That bargain, according to Canaday, required discretion and the strategic brokering of one's sexual or gender identity and affect at work. LGBTQ people could be had for lower prices, exploited as needed, and discarded at will. For businesses seeking higher profits, they proved a great resource in the Fordist era that has otherwise been largely associated with stability, loyalty, and higher wages.Queer Career also seeks to reassess or reinterpret the Lavender Scare. David K. Johnson's field-defining 2004 book, The Lavender Scare, helped shape this framework and paradigm. It inspired works that encompass a wide range of historical narratives, from domesticity and the family to foreign policy and diplomacy to immigration. Canaday offers a different dimension to the Lavender Scare by decentering the narrative of the purge or exclusion of gay people in the state's employ during the 1950s and 1960s. Instead, she argues that the political culture functioned to keep them in a constant state of precarity in the workplace. LGBTQ people became a “Fordist pressure-release valve” (63). Canaday bifurcates their experiences into what she calls “straight work” and “queer work,” defining the latter as a form of labor that can affirm one's sexual or gender identity or expression.The book's second section is largely told through the lens of queer resistance. It tells the story of how homophile and gay liberationist impulses helped break down “the bargain” LGBTQ people contended with. This includes the familiar story of Frank Kameny, the astronomer and cofounder of the Mattachine Society of Washington who was among the thousands of gay workers fired or dismissed during the Lavender Scare. Canaday shows how Kameny's decades-long fight helped create a solid foundation for employee rights for LGBTQ people. She also highlights lesbian feminist and separatist efforts to remake the workplace into collective projects that were fulfilling, antipatriarchal, and anticapitalist. This is principally told through the histories of two projects that emanated from the Furies Collective: Olivia Records and Diana Press.Finally, Canaday takes the reader into the neoliberal age, one defined especially in post-Fordist terms. She begins by centering the history of AIDS and how it reformed LGBTQ experiences at work. Some of these changes were cultural, as with Canaday's powerful retelling of how lesbian and gay nurses took greater license at work by doing away with visitors’ hours or decorating patients’ rooms. AIDS also led to a distinct need for gay lawyers and gay law theory. Lesbian and gay lawyers contributed important arguments that made their way into new laws and policies, including the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. Canaday then argues that corporations like Bell Labs and Lotus became important allies to LGBTQ workers. She notes that tech companies were better positioned for this kind of allyship, as workers had more sophisticated access to email and other such services that allowed for greater discretion among workers seeking protections. These companies offered their employees new benefits, such as domestic partnerships. Canaday acknowledges that it also made good business sense for them to do so. It also happened to take place during a time when workers had decreasing access to collective bargaining and social welfare.The book has several other strengths too, including its commitment to creating new archives and recovering women's voices. Canaday conducted 156 interviews for this book. That helped her recreate some of the intimate experiences at the job that few research depositories would have otherwise saved. Oral histories allowed her to critically integrate the experiences of lesbians and place them as the central actors they were in this history. In this way, her oral histories helped combat some of the archive's unevenness caused by its inherent sexism and tell other stories beyond those the traditional archives had been designed to preserve.The book is less successful in other areas, with noticeable blind spots in its regional coverage and skirting of sectors of the economy. The stories Canaday weaves in this book are heavily urban, often concentrated in New York, California, and Washington, DC. Greater attention to other regions of the United States, such as the South, would further illuminate how the Lavender Scare could play out differently across space and time. As historians such as Stacey Braukman and Jeff Woods have shown, McCarthyism in the South—with its shades of red and lavender—was distinctly linked to undoing advances made in Black civil rights.3 For southern workers, this was an inseparable part of the equation. What did that bargain look like? The book makes major claims about LGBTQ experiences in the workplace but pays minimal attention to large swaths or sectors of the economy, perhaps especially agriculture, but also illicit economies, such as sex work.Even more palpable is how the book's general arc and narrative largely yields insight into the lives and experiences of white LGBTQ workers. The unevenness of the archives as it relates to LGBTQ people of color is largely left intact. Rather than seeking to flatten some of that unevenness, one that tilts toward white experiences, the oral histories help reify and perhaps even amplify the disparity. Only 10 percent of the oral histories Canaday conducted for this book were with people of color. Although people of color intermittently appear in the text, the analysis is largely anchored in workers’ experiences that are dictated as much by their whiteness as by their sexuality or gender expression. Then, too, the limited queer of color voices are subsequently tasked with speaking on behalf of entire communities and experiences.These and other misgivings leave some of the book's arguments, and even some of its seminal bookends, in question, as they implicitly assume that sexual (and, to a much lesser extent, gender) identity are the primary markers or lived experiences for all LGBTQ workers. Indicative of this, Canaday invokes the analogy of LGBTQ people as akin to immigrants, and even unauthorized immigrants, even noting that they could be “deported” if out of line (72). Certainly, even in the most precarious of moments, the experience of LGBTQ workers, in this book largely understood as white, is not comparable to that of undocumented immigrants in the United States. They are not criminalized or surveilled in the same way. This analogy, like other aspects of the book, operates in support of—or in spite of—the book's default whiteness. To largely situate the Civil Rights Act as an important, if delayed, LGBTQ victory primarily after 2020 similarly serves to erase the experiences of Black workers and others—including transgender people—and how the legislation impacted them decades before. Just the same, while the chapter on Kameny emphasizes his state of constant precarity, it generally elides how the power of whiteness, with its greater access to property and resources, helped canonize this dominant thread in LGBTQ history. In Kwame Holmes's work on Black queer erasure and marginalization, one that posits new methods for historical recovery in the form of experiential archives that resist institutionalization, he specifically contextualizes Kameny's extensive archive and its subsequent preservation as a product of “urban privilege in the neoliberal city.”4 To put it another way, despite Kameny's precarity he was able to maintain his residence in Washington, DC, one that housed his voluminous collection of LGBTQ history that can be found today in the Library of Congress, just as Black queer spaces were being pushed out of the neighborhood. Of course, Kameny's story is vital. But so too are the stories of LGBTQ workers whose precarity was not dulled by their whiteness, and thus learning how they navigated the workplace is not likely to be found in the finding aids available at places like the Library of Congress. It requires intentional and even creative historical recovery work. For example, we stand to learn much more about lesbian collectivism by centering the experiences of Black and other women of color lesbians and womanists and how they traversed the workplace or formed alternative economies and modes of living. The Combahee River Collective is just one example, and its history could have offered the book alternative trajectories and experiences that were indeed less shaped by whiteness.Canaday's Queer Career offers up a multitude of opportunities for scholars to build on her ideas and contributions. Future works should especially center the experiences of LGBTQ people of color and how their intersectional realities found them navigating the workforce, unions and representation, upper management, and peers. Similarly, new works should also more intentionally look at how transgender people experienced the workplace, exploring how their stories could overlap or depart from that of lesbians, gays, and bisexuals. Several scholars are already undertaking important new projects on LGBTQ people and the workplace.5 With Queer Career and both past and new research that investigate the intersections of work, class, and queerness, we are well on our way to better understanding not just where we've been as LGBTQ people but also where we still have left to go.